Board of Education Regular Meeting - Nov 20, 2025

001The meeting of the Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools Board of Education will come to order. The chair requests a motion to approve the agenda. So moved. Second. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion carries. The chair requests the motion to move into closed session for the reasons stated on the agenda. So moved. Second. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor say aye. Aye. Thank you. The motion carries. And we'll return from closed session as close as possible to 6pm make that 7pm. [ CLOSED SESSION ] The meeting is now back in open session. Our first order of business tonight I say with a degree of sadness is to recognize and say goodbye to one of our board members. Mike Sharp is finishing up his four years as a school

002board board member and we wanted to take a minute to recognize his service. Thank him for that. Mike, we have in just a minute here a little token of our appreciation that I want to give you. But before we do that just want to tell a little story about how I met first met Mike and it was about five years ago and Reza, Mike and myself had filed to run for school board. So it was in the summer of 21 and we didn't. I didn't know anybody else who was running and we had a forum and I started listening to the candidates answering things And I thought, I know who I'm going to vote for. One was Mike. I was like, okay, that's really cool. That narrows it down. And then the other one was

003Risa. And for some reason, we all got elected at the same time. And you sort of. You form a bond when you do that together. And we didn't know each other, but then we were like, at all these events. And you could start finishing sentences of your friends here because you hear like, I knew exactly Reza's platform. I knew what she'd say. I knew Mike knew exactly what he'd say. And that was actually a pleasure. And so that's how we first met. And over the years, it's. It's actually hard to believe four years went by, because when you're new to it, it's like, wow, four years is forever. And then you realize it just goes so fast. But it's certainly in good service. So, Mike, I just remember that. And as I think about you,

004Mike's had the most quiet committee job of everybody on the board. We have committees, committee, finance, facilities, operations. Reza Vicki, head of Student Success Committee. And Mike has been on our policy committee for all four years of his service here and has served as chair of that committee for two years. And believe me, it's in the policy committee where we're always sending back to you guys, sort this out for us and bring us some clarity, bring us a recommendation. So a lot of the work is done out of the public eye, but it's important, vital work. And I always knew, as I would look to my left, be like Mike, anything from policy committee, and he would be on top of it. And so that's not your only contribution for sure, Mike. But that's the

005way I see you as our quiet policy guy. I don't know where we're going after you leave with policy, but we'll sort it all out down the road. So I want to give other board members or anybody here a chance if they'd like to say something. And then we do have a little token for you that I'll present to you then. Any board members or staff that are here that wanted to say something about Mike or to Mike, this is your chance. Reza. Michael, thank you so much for serving with us. And like George said, it was great getting to know you. During the campaign. It was quite different than this go round. When we ran, we had a pretty contested race. It was quite interesting, but it was just great getting to know you,

006hear about you. And like George, I actually heard about you after you filed. Because then I started reaching out and people were like, yeah, I know Mike. He's a teacher over at Colbrorth and he's been teaching the district forever. But he left to run. He told everybody he was leaving the district so he could run for the school school board. And I was like, that's really wonderful. And everyone just kept saying, he's a really great guy. You're going to love it when you guys get elected. And I've loved all four years. Thank you so much for your commitment to the board, to our district, but even to the education profession. As being a longtime educator, I really appreciate you and your perspective that you bring as a board member. We'll make. I've known you since

007the mid-2000s, I guess, as the fourth grade teacher that everybody might not have wanted to get because you were known to be the hardest fourth grade teacher on the hall. But as a fourth grade teacher, that if you had a parent that went through your class, you were thankful that they got you. As a fourth grade teacher, from playing the guitar or rocking in the rocking chair to making sure that lessons were on point, that your classroom was a safe, open space, space for everybody. That needed to be done no matter what it was for them to achieve. I can say as a parent that was from here, I was very thankful that my daughter came through your class. So as we fast forwarded and we found out that you were going to be leaving

008the district to run, we weren't surprised, but yet we were enthused by it. So I do appreciate it because I've been able to see you on both sides. So I have to say thank you very much from all the different hats that, that we have to wear. Yeah. I've thought the whole time I've been serving with you, I don't know how you do this job because we'll stay here till 10 and I can roll out of bed with my flexible schedule and you have to get up and go teach. And I just. This job requires so much during the day and I've always just thought it's amazing that you're able to have all the energy to do this. The things that you say are uniquely yours because you're, you have a voice of an educator.

009And many, many times during discussions I've like, I would not have thought of that. I just wouldn't have thought of that. And the reason, you know, it's who you are. And lastly, I mean, I said this in the policy committee. I mean your clarity of thought, you're Such a good writer. Also a grammar nerd. Really a lot of attention to detail. I mean, that stuff really matters and it's how the meetings move smoothly and how we get good work done. So thank you so Much. Meredith. Yeah, I just want to say it's been a real pleasure being your seatmate here on the board for these last two years. And I just really enjoyed hearing your perspective as an educator, but even more importantly as a compassionate person. And I think your love and care for

010our students really comes through in all of what you say and do. And I have just really learned a lot from you and hearing your perspective over the past few years, two years. So I genuinely appreciate that. And I also think that, you know, I hope that our teachers throughout the district have felt somewhat represented having a current teacher on the board. I think that you really provide unique insights in the fact that you are currently doing this work and have been a really valuable voice on the board. So thanks, Mike. And I'll take some time. Yeah. So as someone who's spent hours and hours and hours presenting and sharing with the policy committee, I mean, I've had the chance to see you operate and I think I've shared in the policy committee. It has

011been tremendously helpful to have a current teacher on the policy committee. Not to only center what's right for students, but you always ask, how does this impact teachers in the teaching profession? You forced us to think more deeply. Of course you corrected our grade and all those things as well. We can never get anything past you, but it's just been an honor particularly coming into the superintendency. You know, it can be kind of nerve wracking and it's just good to see that someone, you know, has served and is really invested in, you know, the success of not only our district. But also staff as well. So appreciate you. Thank you, sir. Anybody else? Mike, I'm going to talk real quick here because I have a mic and then I want to stand up and bring

012you this token of appreciation. And you know, there's nothing we can say that hasn't already been said, but how much we appreciate what you've done for us. So you will be missed. Can I take you? No. Yes, of course. I appreciate all of the. Open up your gift. Okay. But I appreciate all of, of what you've said. I was actually just talking to Brian. Link before we started the meeting about having teacher representation and how important that is when I'm gone, then I'll task you with stopping every once in a while to think. Well, what would Mike have said about. This, if that makes sense? Also, I've never been described before as being the quiet one. I don't know where that came from. I don't know where that came from. But I've so appreciated working

013with all of you and I know that you guys are going to keep up the great work that we've already been doing for so long. Thank you. Okay, Continue. Yeah. So it's a plaque that says Michael Mike Sharp. We know him as Mike. In grateful appreciation for your service as a board member. 2021-2025, Chapel Hill, Carrboro City Schools Board of Education. You're going to be missed. Thank you. Thank you. We can do anywhere that you want, [ PICTURE TAKING ] Our next order of business is consent agenda. No, it's not public. Oh, sorry about that. I went right past it. How could I miss that? Public comment is next. Is public comment. So, Layla, you're shaking your head. Nobody has signed up. Is there anybody in the audience besides Mr. Link who plans to speak

014tonight? Just so I can keep organized, Mr. Link, why don't you come forward then and I'll dispense with the normal introductory, since you've been here before. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair. Madam Vice Chair. Members of the school board are esteemed superintendent, members of cabinet and the public. My name is Brian Link and I am still the president of the Chapel Hill Carrboro association of Educators. And in honor of Mike, I know he would appreciate this. I'm going to get to my other remarks first about the business that's on tonight's meeting so that I can save the remainder of my time to thank and honor you. So first, I would like to give a shout out to the public school foundation and our HR team for an excellent event at the Novice Teacher T. When

015our state superintendent talks about revering public educators, there's no one in this business who does it better than the public school foundation and our HR department. Dr. Harris, to you and your team, thank you so much for all that you do all the time to make our educators feel welcome. Speaking of which, this is a meeting before Thanksgiving, so we've got lots of thanks to pass out. I want to thank Dr. Stewart for his excellent work both on the calendar committee, which has just gotten started. Right. I don't think there's a process that's run better anywhere in the state, but also right every five years. And this is one of the items that is on the agenda for this evening. We have a food contract coming up, and you're going to be asked to look

016at a series of questions that are there. And of course, Dr. Stewart's always careful to ensure that the voice of educators is heard. And even though perhaps our food contractors may not be actual employees of the district, I would note that question number one on the survey is asking, are we going to ensure that those individuals receive living wage? And question number two is, are we going to try to ensure that our students are given food without cost? And while that's a heavy ask and one that should be borne by states, and there are many other states out there that already do this, and we would encourage the state of North Carolina to return and pass a budget that includes providing free breakfast and lunch for all. It's great that we can at least get

017feedback from our community around that. I'd also like to thank Mr. Scott. We're glad to see him back, of course, for again creating a district that is financially sound. It sounds like we're going to have a great audit report this evening, though. I don't mean to steal any thunder and to thank you for even if the state can't meet their obligations, that right here in this district, we're going to have finally a budget that is approved for this year. And so with my remaining amount of time, I am entirely grateful to you, Mr. Michael Sharp, for your service these past four years. Our organization certainly has. There's a lot that we can do from the outside, but it really makes a difference when someone's in the room. And to be willing to do what I

018have up on my board in my room. Democracy is not a spectator sport. To be willing to give up your position to go to another district to run that is something that is not common and in fact, can't happen. You can't be employed and serve on a school board. And with all the great champions of public education up on this board, and I appreciate you all and our organization does. There's something about having an educator in the room that can really help shape that because we know if our educators are taken well, our students are taken well. And as a point of personal privilege, as my time draws near, as I also want to say thank you for being a heck of a gifted teacher, you and Mr. Mason have done remarkable for my daughter.

019And I salute you both for your service right to this community and to the service to the students there. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Happy Thanksgiving to one and all. Thank you, Mr. Link. Appreciate that. And then that does bring us to consent agenda item 5. The chair would request a motion to approve the consent agenda. Second. It's been moved and seconded. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you. That brings us to discussion in action, which is the recommendation for approval of the financial audit for the fiscal year ended June, June 30, 2025. Scott. Thank you. Dr. Griffin. Good evening. Good evening, board members, Dr. Trice, members of cabinet and members of the public. So this evening, the first of two items we have for you is the approval of the independent

020auditor's financial audit for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025. As you mentioned, we have Mr. Dale Smith with independent audit firm Anderson Smith and Wyke that the board contracts with every year to provide an independent review of our financials and compliance matters. Just to remind everyone, Mr. Smith works for the board, so he'll be available after brief covers, a brief presentation to answer any questions you may have as an independent third party reviewer of our financials. Mr. Smith. Welcome. Good evening, Mr. Chairman, board members, good to see you all again. If everyone's doing well. Does everyone have a copy of the audit report? I think one was uploaded for you all. We do. Okay, what we're going to be going over this evening is the shorter version. There's a condensed 11 page summary that

021you also should have. I believe it's titled 99 Chccs FS Summary. Does everyone see that? Okay. And you'll probably also notice that it's still labeled draft and that's due to the federal government. They're extremely late this year with releasing the federal compliance supplement. That's about a 2,000 page document that covers every department in the US government and it has various compliance steps. The main ones that apply to you guys would be Title 1 and EC. They did release a draft of this document in August and we were told that it shouldn't change. And we've reviewed that document, made sure that everything's been tested that needs to be tested. But in any event, CPA firms are not allowed to release their audit reports until the final copy of that document gets released. And at this point

022we have no idea when that will be. So what we've been doing is reviewing draft copies of audit reports with board so far this year. But Again, we feel confident that nothing's going to change in the report once the supplement is released. I'll go over this 11 page document. And the audit covers two primary areas. You've got a financial section and a compliance section. And there's four opinion letters that we issue that relate to these two sections. And if you go to page one, we'll talk about these four letters. Those are all summarized at this page. And the first letter is the report on the financial statements. And for the financial statements section, we perform an audit of the actual finances of the district. And that includes all of the amounts and the disclosures that

023you see in the financial statements. And this report is a clean and modified opinion. That's exactly what the board wants to receive. And it basically means that we feel as though all of those amounts and disclosures are accurate, reliable and free from any sort of material misstatement or errors. Now, the next three reports that you see here, the report on internal control and compliance, the report on major federal programs and major state programs, they all are what we consider the compliance section of the audit. And the first of these letters is the internal control and compliance letter. And we don't issue an opinion on internal control, but we do test the district's internal controls and report any significant deficiencies or material weaknesses that are noted in our testing. And we're happy to report that there

024were no material weaknesses or significant deficiencies reported in this letter. And this would also include items like overspending of the budget or any violations of the school budget and fiscal control act, like purchasing type issues, not complying with purchase orders, being done as they should. So again, there were no kind of issues noted like that in our audit. The last two reports are the reports on major federal and state programs. The district is for state and federal grants and we're required by those funding agencies to perform compliance audits to ensure those funds are being expended in accordance with the various compliance requirements. And again, we're happy to report that we issue clean and modified opinion on both of those letters as well. So overall, the compliance testing went well. We do pick a large number

025of payroll and general disbursement transactions, test all those transactions, get backup documentation, make sure that everything is being done properly, approvals are in accordance with how the board wants them done, as far as contracts and things of that nature. And again, we were happy with what we saw. There were no issues noted as far as the testing went. So, any questions on this page? All right. And page two shows a three year summary of findings and question costs. And you can see in the highlighted shaded column for 6-30-25, there were no findings reported in this year's audit report. In the previous year, we did report one finding, and that finding related to the Title I program. And there's a requirement that the board can't spend more than 12% of its yearly Title 1 allotment for

026administration and supervision of the Title I program. And so we reported a finding last year for that. So we're required this year to test for that again. And we're happy to report that this year y' all were in compliance with that requirement. So in the thicker audit report, that finding is shown as having been corrected in that document. So any questions on this page? Okay, if we go over to page three, we've got a three year summary of the district's general fund. And up at the top we have the balance sheet of the general fund. So this is like a snapshot at the the top of balances as of June 30, 2025. And the bottom section is the activity for the year ended 6-30-25. So it shows all of the revenues and the expenditures that

027came in during the year ended June 30, 2025. So we'll be focusing right now on the far right shaded column for 2025. And there at the top, the program or the general fund had cash balances of 2,694,717. And that comprises the majority of the fund's assets of 3,368,049. And if you take total assets minus liabilities, which are the next number below that of 2,975,992, you get the fund's fund balance at June 30, which is 392,500. Does everyone see that number? Okay. And if you look at the very bottom of the page in that shaded column, that's the change for the year in fund balance. The fund balance went up last year, 360,425. Okay. Now if you look just to the left of that 364.25, you see what fund balance did the two previous years. It

028had decreased 5 million 486 in the 2024 year, and it had decreased 6 million 488 in the June 30, 2023 year. So it had gone down about 12 million leading into this year. So y' all were your fund balance had dropped to about 31,000 or so at June 30, 2024, so y' all were basically in a situation where, you know, y' all had to make cuts, had to not use fund balance because you didn't have any that you could use. And happy to say that y' all did that. Y', all, you know, reduced that spending of fund balance, actually increased it this year by 360,425. So you do have a positive total fund balance. But if you look back there at the top, you've got a line that says unassigned fund balance. Okay? It's still

029a negative 294,028. And that's because the state is very strict in allowing you to appropriate fund balance. They only let you budget fund balance that's actually in the form of cash in the bank at year end. So Y' all had 656,717 that was restricted, and that's comprised of receivables and outstanding encumbrances at June 30, 2025. So, you know, you still have a negative unassigned fund balance, or you're still in a situation where y' all don't have any fund balance that can be budgeted. And there's a separate letter that we issued. I think it's on page seven. And there's no need to turn there now because it basically goes over what I'm talking about with you now that y' all are still in a situation where we would like to see y' all increase your fund

030balance, try to get it up to a, you know, a good level where y' all have got funds to meet cash flow needs of the district. You've got some money, you know, set aside for emergency needs that may come up. You know, as far as a number that you would need to have, you know, I'd throw out 8 or 10 million would be nice to have in fund balance. And y' all were at that level, you know, just a few years ago. And, you know, for a district this size with over a $200 million budget, you know, you need a little bit there just for cash flow needs and emergency needs that may come up. But again, in talking with management, I think y' all have taken steps to address the situation, and hopefully fund

031balance will go up here in the near future. Anyone have any questions about the general fund before we move on? Okay, so I'm stuck on. We don't have an opinion on internal control. Okay. Because you gave an opinion about it. I thought, well, it's not really an opinion. It's a report that there were no significant deficiencies or material weaknesses noted in the testing that we performed. We're required to perform testing of controls. We get what the controls and procedures are. We perform testing of those controls. But saying that an opinion's been issued is a whole different in accounting terms, that's a whole different level of testing that we're not required to do as part of your external audit. But we do perform testing, but just not at the level that would allow us to issue

032an opinion. And again, it's not required for what we do. The wording that we use is standard wording for, you know, all the leas that we audit across the state. So you can have an internal control audit, but like I said, it's a whole separate engagement. Okay, so the recommendation about the fund balances is an opinion, it's just not an internal control opinion. That's right, yeah. It's just more or less our opinion that, you know, fund balance needs to be higher. You need, you know, that the district needs to have some cash available to pay the bills for an emergency if it comes up, you know. And as far as an amount you have to have, I threw out 8 or 10 million. There's no requirement. There is nothing you'll find in state law that

033says how much fund balance that a school system has to have. Thank you. There is a county policy on a suggested minimum fund balance that sometimes gets confused as a maximum fund balance. But there is a county policy that is suggested. Yeah, like five and a half percent. Five and a half percent, yeah. Any more questions? All right, if you go to the next page, page four. And this is a three year summary of the capital outlay fund. And again focusing on the June 30, 2025 column. If you look down next to last number, ending fund balance, the fund had ending fund balance of 1,073,386. And the number right above that is the change for the year. So it reported a decrease of 780,060 for the year. And most of the funding that the district

034receives for capital outlay does come through the county. And all of that ending fund balance is restricted for capital outlay purposes. So any questions on this page? Alright, let's move over to page five and talk about the school food service fund. And it is set up with the balance sheet at the top and the revenues and expenses in the lower section. And if you look at the bottom, net income loss, non GAAP. And for the 2025 year, you can see that the fund reported a loss of 431,594 in 2025, compared to a loss of 359,565 in the 2024 year and actually had a profit in the 2023 year of 253,076. And overall, the revenues and expenditures in this fund declined comparably when compared in 2025 and 2024. Revenues from federal reimbursements declined about 408,000. And

035that was offset by similar decline in expenses of somewhere around 400,000 as well. And most of the districts that we audit have experienced declines in their child nutrition program profitability the last couple of years. So you all aren't any different. And you know, even with the net loss that was reported last year, if you look up at the very top cash and cash equivalents, the fund still has a million 303. So 693 of cash in the bank at June 30, which is that's a good level for you all to have. But the thing to keep in mind is if you spend 431,000 of your cash every year, three or four years, the cash would be gone. So I would just recommend that you look at the program. I'm sure you've already done that. But just

036to evaluate how can you get it closer to a break even point. Because if you do spend all the cash, you'd get to where the district would have to subsidize child nutrition from local funds at some point in the future if that happened. Any questions on child nutrition? Okay, page six is a three year summary of the child care program. And this does also include facilities rental and looking at the 2025 year. And we'll look down at the bottom line, the net income loss. And the fund had a loss for the year of $630,346. And in the previous year the loss was $265,651. And you actually had a profit in the 2023 year of 912,678. And the 2023 year was a bit of an out. You actually had some COVID 19 revenue that year of

037about 984,000. There's a note B that addresses that. But in any event, the loss for this year of 630,000 also includes indirect cost that was paid of 316,223. That indirect cost revenue does go straight from the child care program into the district's local bank account. So that's basically one pocket of the district to another pocket. So had that not been paid, the loss would have been about half of that 630,000, around 314,000. So if you look at the top, it had cash of 505,998 at year end. So you can't afford to spend the 630,000 again or you would run out of cash. So similar situation to what we've been talking about with the general fund. But in any event, I know from talking to management steps have been taken to hopefully address this and get

038the program closer to a break even point. And again, you can always just not charge indirect cost if the program's about to run out of cash. So did anyone have any questions about the child care fund? Okay. All right. Now as I mentioned earlier on pages seven and eight, this is just a letter that we issue pertaining to the load fund balance in your general fund. We just wanted to highlight this and be sure you are all aware of it and just give you our recommendations on the need to try to replenish that fund balance to a higher level if at all possible. Okay. And on pages 9 through 11 is what we call a required communications letter. And this letter details specific audit items and areas that we're required to communicate with the board

039about. And this letter, basically a clean report, has boilerplate language and it specifies that there were no difficulties or disagreements encountered in dealing with management during the audit. That there were no uncorrected misstatements noted in the audit. That there were no significant reportable issues noted in the audit. Now it does discuss a new accounting standard that had to be implemented as part of the audit. GASB101 had to be implemented this past year. And that standard requires the board to start recording a liability for estimated sick leave balances that are expected to be used for sick leave. Now that the recording of that liability did not impact the fund statements of the district. And we just talked about the fund statements y' all budget at the fund level. This liability had to be recorded in the

040government wide statements which are more like a for profit business. So yalls statements actually have two parts to them and one part is the business part. And we don't usually talk about that because it's not really relevant to what y' all are doing. Y' all budget on the. It's more of a cash basis. I call it a modified accrual basis. And this liability did not have to be recorded on the modified accrual basis. So anyway, you know, y' all have Got a lot of liabilities at the. At the full accrual level that we don't talk about. The pension liabilities, the OPEB liabilities. You've got fixed assets, depreciation, those kind of things. And that's more of, again, how a for profit company evaluates themselves. Y' all don't do that. Y' all are looking at cash basis.

041And again, that's why this recording of this liability really does not impact y'all. And I wouldn't be concerned about it if I were y', all, but I did want to point that out to you. We also perform detailed testing of receipts and disbursements at the individual schools. There were no significant issues noted in that testing. We always note minor areas for improvement. We provide Mr. Scott a detailed list of those items that he can share with the bookkeepers and principals. But again, there were no significant issues noted in that testing. And that was pretty much all I planned to go over. Was there anything that I didn't touch on that someone had a question about? I have a question, but I don't think it was because you didn't touch on it. Okay. So I always

042read these with interest. I think everybody does, with seriousness of purpose and interest. And as I was tracking it the other day, it's like you laid out, this is what we do, this is how we do it. And I was like, that looks good. It sounds good to us. I'm always reassured. My question is, you work with a number of school systems. How, to the extent you can, how often do you run into problems? Because with audits in school districts, like, is it 10% of them? Is it 1%? How are we doing compared to our peers? 10% would be fair. And to say that y' all have problems, I mean, your fund balance is low, but correct. It's not like I come in here and just told you about that. Y' all knew that this

043fund balance had gone down. I know Mr. Scott's been informing y' all of that. Y' all are fully aware of it. Y' all have been taking steps to address it, right? We've got some where they're not aware of it. You know, when we show up, you know, perform the audit, we're. We're finding things. You know, as a matter of fact, we got a couple of districts right now where we were in there in the past couple of weeks, and we found major things wrong that are going to cost the districts, you know, half a million dollars. And they're. They're a lot smaller than y' all are. So, yeah, I would say probably 10% of the districts every year seem to have problems. And it's typically related to new finance officers that don't have experience and

044school system, North Carolina school system in particular. Finance is very complicated. Most people don't realize that, but an inexperienced finance officer can cost a district millions of dollars. I mean, we've seen it firsthand. Y' all been reading about Winston Salem. You know, everybody knows about them. I mean, it can happen just by the nature of the way the money's allotted to school systems. You know, it's. Sadly, it can happen, and it usually happens in the districts with the very inexperienced finance officers that don't know what they're doing and they don't get proper help. Thank you. Appreciate that. Anybody else? Well, we appreciate your report. It's always good to see you. Yeah, good to see y', all, too. And again, I'd like to thank Mr. Scott and his staff. They really do a good job again.

045I know they're keeping y' all well informed. And the fact we don't have budget violations lets you know that, you know, we're not coming in as part of the audit and finding things that have to be recorded that make y' all go over budget. And again, that. That's some of the things we see in other districts. We come in to do the audit. There's. There's issues, there's things that aren't recorded that should have been recorded, and that throws you over budget. But, you know, y' all aren't having those kind of problems. I think they're doing a good job of managing the finances here, so appreciate that. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Mr. Scott, I believe you're still on. And up next, you got a what? Oh, we do. Okay, thank you. Reza's reminding me that

046we need a motion to appro. Approve the report. So. Moved. Second. It's been moved. And seconded. All in favor say aye. Opposed? Motion passes unanimously. Thank you, Ms. Jenkins. You're welcome. Mr. Scott, this is the seeking approval of the budget resolution for 2526. Yes, sir. Good evening again. So I believe two weeks ago at the last board meeting, Mr. Kaiser presented. Presented a fairly in depth buzzer presentation with an intent to seek approval for the board to adopt the 2526 budget at this meeting. Just a couple brief highlights. We're now at the end of November still, as everyone's aware, we don't have a budget from the General Assembly. Now being told it could be spring of next year before we get that. So it's kind of moved us to the position where we'd like to

047go ahead and adopt a budget still with some things in question as far as state mandated raises and salary increases for employees. At this time, though, we did build a budget to incorporate a 3% salary reserve. So in the, in the event that the board of or the state does take action in the spring, we'll have an adequate reserve to meet to meet any anticipated raises the state may have. So I'd be happy to go in any detail if there's specific questions about the budget adoption. I will say that for the first time in several years as we were laying out this budget, we were able to see a little daylight as opposed to previous years. It was really, really tight to try and get it to work. So this is the first time in

048several years where, you know, as we put it together, we felt a little more comfortable putting it together. I am. I wouldn't want to go on record to say how much we should net at the end, but there will be some pretty significant savings with the reductions from third tier of the rif. So just say anecdotally, you know, we do feel a lot better about this budget than we have in the last couple years and again, happy to answer any additional questions the board may have. So I recall from Mr. Kaiser's presentation that he said that the structural deficit we had was mitigated by our Tier one and Tier two strategies that we started two years ago and that our fund balance surplus projection was related to the reduction in force. That's correct. Can you

049just restate that again? Because everybody, at least I do, I always get a little nervous around our fund balance discussion every year. Okay. Because we all know we want to rebuild it, right? And please understand that all of this is estimates. We broke even this year, as Mr. Smith just said. So that brings me a lot of confidence. And our estimates are pretty close because we're projecting a break even. But tier one and two were always designed throughout the course of this fiscal year to bring us to a point where we could break even this fiscal year and at the same time to try and respect our employees to the maximum extent that we could, giving plenty of time to try and capture positions through attrition and such. Tier 3 of the reduction in force

050did not take effect until July of 2025. So we did lose through attrition some of those Tier 3 positions over the course of 2025. But as of July 1, 2025, those positions no longer existed in the budget. Right. So most of our employees were in different positions and our effective FTEs across the district were reduced in accordance with what that reduction enforces. At the time that we put tier, at the time we put Tier three in place, we were estimating between four and five million dollars worth of savings. That was a year ago. We now know that we, we have had some declining enrollment and our state funding is dropping. I think we lost 25 or so children in state funding over the course of that year. So we need to account for that. We

051need to also account for some reduced local revenues, which is in this budget to bring those revenues to actual. We want to make sure that we're not over budgeting revenues. If anything, we want to under budget revenues. So out of that 5 million, we've kind of dialed that back. But we feel pretty confident that even if the state gives the raises from those reductions, we should expect to net about $3 million. So is that what you're alluding to? Yes. I appreciate that. Thank you for that. I'm hopeful we're going to bring, as soon as we pass the budget and can get it together, the first quarter results. I can tell you that as you look at the percentage of budget and you look at the percentage of exposure expenditures from last year to this year,

052the data is indicating that we're spending less. So that's also positive. It is kind of trending towards that $3 million mark. I don't want to get pinned down to that, you know, six months before year end, but I can definitely see trends in the data where we are spending less money. So I'm encouraged by that. Of course, Dr. Trice has been traveling around warning of the dangers of a reduction in ADM over the course of the last few weeks. I will caution everyone that as that ADM erodes, those reduction in funds on the state side is going to begin to erode some of those savings. So this year is probably the only year guaranteed where we have some of that built in. So we're going to really have to think strategically as we move forward.

053But that's kind of the gist of what we're talking about with Tier three. Thank you. Yes, sir. Barb, I have a question on about page 32 of the executive summary. I don't know if there's no presentation. I don't have one, but. Oh, okay. So I asked this last year too, but. So there's a, that's changes in personnel recently, allocations, and there's a category called officials, administrators and managers. There were 35 in 2022 and there are 39 proposed in 2026. And so that brings the total number of administrators from 80 to 84 and every single other category, the numbers are going down. And I just don't understand A what officials administrators are managers refers to and B, why that number is still this high given the declining enrollment. Right. So this is really kind of a

054difficult question for me to answer. I think we've talked about it before. This data comes directly from the report that we file with the Department of public instruction, the SS2, SS300, 200, which is the full time equivalency report that we're required to file every year. So we basically, when we put the budget together, this is a supporting document that's required for the budget award. And there's a lot of nuance to how those positions are classified within the HR system. A manager could be anywhere from Dr. Stewart, a supervisor manager could be anywhere from Dr. Stewart to my payroll benefits manager. Right. And it's just not the way. There's not enough classification of employees within the choices to really derive any real, you know, solid idea of what those employees are. We could certainly drill it

055further and give you 20 classifications that would go further. But you know, based on the way the DPI collects the data, it's really hard to, you know, hard to define that. So to help with that, we can provide for the board somewhat of a side by side look from last year to this year so that you'll be able to see that I do believe. That we, we provided that last year. Or something similar to it. And I think that would help answer your question. And also mention that we are now required by law to post all central office positions and salaries. So anyone in the public that's interested, every position in central office is required to be posted when the position was created, how much it's paid, who it reports to. So there's a lot

056of transparency around that. Other places that you could go to get that data and we'd be happy to forward it to you too. Barb, if I could ask you because I think where you're going with this is how this. Are we top heavy into management or administration? How does it look? There's a public narrative often in everywhere I've ever worked, but it's here too that we're, you know, we're top heavy and you could reduce your administration to save funding. Is that. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is that kind of why you're asking? Yeah, but I also, I Mean, we have really good organizational charts with names of people in positions. And I just. I can't figure out how the org charts map onto this. So it is a. It is

057a question about clarity, but also. Yeah, it's a substantive question about why those numbers are going up. Right. Yeah, right. Because, I mean, as I was listening, I was thinking, yeah, this is that area where we all. I'm not suggesting there's any issue, but we could use some clarity as we try and explain it to the public. Who are these positions? Who are these positions? Not necessarily by name, but what is in this category? Because people use all kinds of sources to get categories of employees. And I think if we could get anything you could do, Dr. Harris, Mr. Scott, to get us real clear on some common language as we move forward, that'd be really helpful. Absolutely. We'll provide that for you. And it may be that we move away from the chart as

058we present it. I mean, we present the SS300 data just because it's a very easy place for us to go get the data. It checks a box in the requirement to get the budget award. But there's nothing to say we couldn't present the data more the way we're presenting it on the webpage, you know, with more detail. I think anything that would make it understandable. So when we are having discussions about all this, people are using the same common language, and that would be helpful. Thanks. Anybody else kind of jumped in there? Yes, go ahead. Can I just also request that you add information about the assistant principals number as well? I know that we reduced assistant principals as part of the RRIF, but I'm seeing that back in 2022, which was just a few

059years ago, we only had 24. Then it went up to 30, and then now it's back down, but we're still above where we were in 22. The number of schools hasn't changed since then. So it was just a. But just wanted clarity on how that worked. And so what we'll do to make. It easier, the majority of that, all of the administrators and managers of that SS200, we will create that side by side so that you can compare year to year. Because that report is very difficult to understand, even for us. I will say that it's not clear because it only gives you a number. So we'll be sure to give you more information and more detail for that. Is that helpful? Okay. Anybody else? Okay. We need a motion to approve the budget resolution

060for fiscal year ending June 30th as presented tonight. And in June 30th, 2026, as presented tonight. So moved. Second. It's been moved. And seconded. All in favor say aye. Opposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you very much, Mr. Scott. Thank you, sir. This brings us to food service management RFP and goals for 2526. Dr. Stewart. Welcome, sir. Good evening, sir. Thank you. To Chair Griffin and Vice Chair Jenkins, to all the board members, Dr. Trice, colleagues, to all of the public, I'm before you tonight to seek the board's approval for the committee goals for the food Service management contract. And I'm going to go through some information and for the public, starting with the process and what we do. Excuse me. In CHCCS over the last several decades, we have outsourced our food service management. We partner

061with DPI to make sure that we're in compliance with all federal and state guidelines. And then as a district, we have developed a policy of how we get to the rfp. So the administration has convened a district committee to look at some draft goals and to develop the draft goals. We then held a public forum for our parents to be able to add input. And then we had a student survey, student public survey that we actually placed out as well. This, I have to reiterate this point and really hammer it home. This is not an evaluation of our current vendor as much as this is a belief statement of what we as a district would like to have in this contract moving forward. So in speaking of the process, and I hyperlinked in here the

062complete process, which is 12 pages from DPI, which was revised in September of this year. The RFP was actually just released in October. So we have been waiting to get to this point that we could present to the board and get the. The process started. I wanted to highlight a few things and I apologize for the size of this, but I need to get it on one slide. Wanted to highlight exactly where we are in the process and what we're doing. So this process starts by the district actually notifying DPI of your intent to contract for a food service vendor. That initial contract is one year and it will allow you up to four months, one year renewals for a total of five years. Once you have your goals in place, your board approves your

063goals. The approved goals are then added to the RFP contract. Excuse me, RFP template that is released by dpi. DPI then has to approve it. And once you have approved goals and an RFP together, you can then advertise for a minimum of two weeks at, at which time, once you have Finished advertising. You can then come back and you have to have what is known, excuse me, as a approval portion for all of the vendors that are interested. So you bring them on site, you take them into your cafeterias, you let them know the scope of the work that you're actually putting out a bid for. Once that occurs, they have six weeks, a minimum us six weeks to submit their proposals. The district will then put together a committee, and it has specific roles

064and members on that committee, which includes. We have to have a board member on that evaluation committee. We have a DPI Rubik and criteria that we will have to go through in order to approve a vendor. Once that has taken place, the goals that we have that we're seeking approval for tonight will become a part of the contract. It is the basis of our next contract. And from that point, we will send it to dpi, we will go back and forth, and they will approve it. Once we have an approved vendor, we have an approved contract, we will bring it to the board for final approval. So that is kind of spelled out throughout this process that I have listed here on this slide. So we wanted to get to amplify voice, and the greatest

065voice that we really wanted to amplify in this process was the voice of the students, because they are the consumers of the food. So we wanted to find out what they thought and let those ideas really form our process, inform our goals. So we were able to survey, and this was totally voluntarily, over 1400 students throughout the district. We had great secondary participation in the survey. We attempted to send this out through the communications division, through News and Notes. We sent it out through the principal Update. We sent it out through Dr. Bales and his team. We're grateful that they released this during flex time at our high school. So we tried to get it out as much as possible. You can see from this first slide of the over 1400 responses that over 97%

066were students. When we actually looked at it and we broke it down, we saw that our middle and high schools really dominated. The 37% was McDougal Middle School. We had Colbert Middle School at 6%, Phillips Middle School 12%, Smith at 9%, Chapel Hill High at 4. 14% responses, Eastchapel Hill at 15% and Carrboro High School at 5%. In looking in and really teasing out the numbers, we did have representation from most of our elementary schools as well, but the numbers were a lot lower. We asked some simple questions that we wanted to find out. Did our students participate in the meal service program? Because that's something that's really important to us. We need to figure out ways that our students want to eat what we're offering. And what we found is that of our respondents,

067about half of them said, yes, we do, and no, we do not. So that's an issue. And that raised a red flag for us. And that'll come up again as we show you the draft goals. We asked our students, do you bring meals from home or do you eat meals here from school? And you can see as we go through this data and we really dive into it, you will find that it's really on in the middle. A lot of our students are like 50, 50 on what they bring from home. They they rather eat from home versus eating at school five days. Do we have enough vegan and vegetarian options then? This is something that has come up over and over, over. It came up in the committees. And so this has to be

068a point of emphasis as we build the draft goals that we need more vegan and vegetarian options for our students. Do you eat breakfast? Do you eat lunch? Both or neither? So you can see very few students eat only breakfast. The majority of our students eat lunch only, but only 21% eat both. So we want to raise those numbers where our students are eating both breakfast and lunch. And it is not just through the survey. We've learned it is not just food choice, but it is also efficiency within our lines. One of the more positive things that we found out is our students are aware of the composting efforts that we have going on, and about 65% of them said that they take part in those efforts. So we still want to raise this percentage

069a little higher. But we were happy to see that this is one of the more positive things in the survey. When we looked at the meal prep, we found that students once again were bunched in the middle on their satisfaction. We found numbers high and low, but the majority of them were right in the middle as far as where they were, were satisfied with the lunch options. And some of the most telling data that we were able to gather. Our students want more options. Our students want the ability to get through the lines faster, and they want some grab and go options. Those were the things that we really found out in this survey. So in moving forward in talking with the adults to draft goals, we were able to come up with three major

070portions in the draft goals. First were meal options. The second was participation in efficiencies. The third came down to sustainability that we wanted to have throughout the goal. So when we looked at our Meal options. One of the things that we wanted to talk about was the fact that with students and our menu options, we as a district must be able to to have what is called a reimbursable meal. So I'll take a little time to try to educate the public on what a reimbursable meal is. So breakfast meals have four components. Those components are grains, milk, fruit, meat or a meat alternative. In order for a meal to be reimbursable, a student must select three of the four. And that what that basically means is that it is recorded in the cafeteria and at

071the end of the month our office here at Lincoln center can actually put in for the state to be paid for that meal. That's the easiest way that I can say it. The simplest way. Lunch options are slightly different. You must select three of the five components. The five components are meat or meat alternative, a grain, a fruit, a vegetable and a milk. So we want to make sure that we're offering our students reimbursable meals so that the district is not losing money. We also want to offer our students meals that they actually want to consume. So within our meals goal, you will see that we also place the vegan and vegetarian option here. That has to become very important because our students said it over and over again. They want more choices, they want

072different offerings. So this has to be a part of our goals and it has to be important to us as adults. Second was participation. And you could see that it was 50, 50 in the student survey. So we want to be able to raise over the next five years by year. We want to be able to raise student and adult participation by 3%. We also want to be more efficient by adding lines, more grab and go options, things that students actually want and will, things that will entice them to eat our food. Finally, we wanted to look at sustainability and in looking at sustainability, we want to make sure that we are reducing our single use products. We also wanted to make sure that we eliminate styrofoam plastics, non reusable straws. We want to strengthen

073our local alliances and this is on the next page. Strengthen our local alliances with our local vendors and our purchasing partners. We want to utilize better energy management within our cafeterias and we want to make sure that we increase our health standards throughout in the products that we use. We had strong goals for the 1920 process as well. And some of the major things that we wanted to highlight was we were able to elevate that vegan and vegetarian option. We wanted to make sure that was in Goal one under the menu. And it was a strong focus of ours. We eliminated the meatless Monday portion of that because we want vegan and vegetarian options every day for our students. Also, we reviewed the goals and we went through kind of with a fine tooth comb

074to eliminate things that could cost the district more money. We wanted to be fiscally responsible. And I will pause there for a second and get extremely granular. What we looked at was there were portions, and in our committee, we went back and forth over things like having forks and spoons and bowls that were reusable. And one of the things that we talked about was not just the purchase of those items, but the state guidelines that we have to go through in order to maintain those items. They cannot just be put through a dishwasher, washer and then used. They must be sanitized. They must be air dried. And really what we came up with was there has to be a FTE that is dedicated just to that purpose. So if I could indulge the board for

075a second, if we were to have an $18 an hour position in the cafeteria that was responsible for sanitizing, that was responsible for taking care of all of those reusable items, I've learned from my HR partners that the way we calculate salary on those things, where we will multiply $18 an hour by 2080, which would come up to be just over $37,000, we would then have to add benefits to that of about $20,000, and then we would have to multiply it by 18 positions to take care of the district. If my math serves me correctly, that's. That's over $1 million. If we were to add that into the contract, it would still be over $600,000. So the committee went back and forth on some things that we had to weigh out what was really important.

076And we did not want to put the district in a position that the school nutrition program was costing more money instead of breaking even. One of the other things that I would like for the board to understand is we technically, at this point point, only have four school nutrition employees on the district side. As employees retire as they separate from the district, what happens is those positions then revert to the contract. So at this point, we have four employees for the district. Our contract at this point last year cost us about $3.3 million. To be transparent with the board, finally tonight, we wanted to look at eliminating ways to slow participation. So we want to make sure that we, as I said previously, that we increased serving lines, we increased grab and go Options and

077we eliminated barriers that kept our students from eating. And I feel like I've been talking 100 miles an hour. I will take any questions from the board at this time. Thank you. Dr. Stewart. Thank you so much for this presentation. Obviously, child nutrition is really important to me. You know, get the kids to school. We need to make sure they're fed because if they're hungry, they aren't going to pay attention to anything that we teach them. I'm curious about the vegetarian meal options. That's been a concern. After I had. Obviously, I'm moving towards being more vegetarian, but I remember from community members many moons ago when I would work with them delivering meals during COVID that that was a concern. So how are we ensuring that the vegetarian meals are actually appealing and also have

078a substantial portion of protein? Option salad is not the only thing that vegetarians eat. Right. So I'm just curious about how we can kind of make that goal a lot more clear for anyone who gets this food nutrition contract that they need to be just as thoughtful as those delicious tacos that the kids may eat. Who eat meat, too. Like, what's a comparable version from a vegetarian standpoint? So part of the process that I talked about was that we will bring intended vendors on site, we will take them around, we will explain the scope of work to them. Our goals will become our contract. So we will spell out exactly what we're looking for. So the things that you're bringing up, Ms. Jenkins, are things that we'll actually put in writing. We have been told

079that when we meet with contractors on site, all questions, all things have to be placed in writing and then posted for them to be able to build their proposal over the six weeks. So the things that you're referring to will be put in writing to them at that time. Okay. Another question is milk. How are we defining milk? Is that just cow based or are we also thinking soy, almond, oat? I mean, it can go on and on as well. So in speaking with our team, it is all. All types of. Of milk? Yes, Ma'am. Okay, good. And another thing I've heard from the kids, because my kids are in high school now, is there a differentiation between the meal size for elementary, middle, and high school? A complaint that I've heard is, like, at

080the high school level, we're trying to feed some of these children who eat my entire refrigerator empty the same size food that they ate when they. Were five years old. So, yes, the contract states that there are portion size differences from primary and secondary. What we May need to look at is what those actual portion sizes are. Okay. All right. And then you. Thank you for explaining the reimbursable kind of the metric for it. I am worried, like, with the grab and go, that we may not meet the requirement for that. So I don't know if there is a way that if we do that option that we. We entice them to say the grab and go. You grab three things. Right. Or something. Because I don't want the grab and go. Because I guess

081then they give their student number. Yes. And then that means, like, if they just grab a sandwich, that's not real reimbursable. That is correct. So cashiers and staff are trained to. We cannot tell students what to take, but we try to encourage them to make sure they have enough options that it can be a reimbursable meal. Okay. All right. I think that's it. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I want to play devil's advocate for. For a moment, as we're trying to increase participation in the program, but we're also having to look at the amount of time we have in an instructional day. What happens if every single student says, I want to eat lunch in the cafeteria today. Where are we with that? Because we know it would break the system, but what

082would we have to do to then see how to prevent that from ever happening? Because. But that would give you what you want in terms of participation, but that would then show what we're not prepared to do. So how do we balance that? I could look at this from two sides, Ms. Feaster. Forinville, one. As Mr. Link said, we had a wonderful calendar meeting last night. One of the things that we do in calendar is we talk about the instructional day and what we report to the state. All of our high school. Excuse me. As a district, we report six instructional hours per day to the state. We multiply the number of days, and that's how we get our hours. So this year, we're at 174 days at six hours a day. That is 1044

083hours. That's 19 hours over the required 1025 hours that we have to have, which gives us our three days of inclement weather that we will have. I'm sorry. You can tell I lost love. Calendar. I'm a nerd. Yes, Ma'am. So I said all that to bring me to this point. If we needed to lengthen high school lunch periods, we have a little bit of wiggle room in the instructional day. But I wanted to give you this entire Barn before I got to that small portion of it, we could do those types of things and be able to feed just like we do in our primary schools. I appreciate that. And we just saw a absolutely magnificent school in which they had opportunities for our. For students to eat in different spaces where they had cafe

084style. And. And then if you think about the way some of our restaurants and cafeterias now are, if we're looking at reimbursable meals, if they can have grab and go, but the grab is the meal then and they have different choices, you think of like a value meal. And that's what they're enticed towards to get them the nutritional value, the cost savings. And that helps the district, that helps both sides, but that lets our students have some autonomy of what they have, but it also gives them the nutrition that they need so they can stay awake for that next block or that next part of school. So, yes, I definitely appreciate it. And being able to have those opportunities, opportunities for different meals and different places as we're envisioning more futuristic type schools that we

085need now, those are things we have to be looking at outside the box. And some things go full circle. I can remember being in high school in this district where we had hot items cooked to order for certain people so that they could eat because there were certain students, we know that we'd only eat certain things and those options were available all the time. And it was, it was quick, but it was reimbursable meals. So I appreciate where you're going with it. I just wanted to say thank you. Yes, ma'. Am. And I would say also that I had the privilege of visiting one of our middle schools. I was invited by a group of black and brown young men to come and share with them. And at the end of our talk, we started

086talking about this and some of the things that they. Their desires of what they would like the meal service program to look like. So they gave me some good ideas on, from a student's perspective of what they would like and the types of options and variety that they would like. So I think that's where we're going and that's what we're attempting to do with this cycle, is to take it to the people who matter most in this process, which is the students. I just. I just wanted to reiterate that I thank you very much for the explanation for the reimbursable because I definitely did not fully appreciate that. So that was useful. I definitely had the same idea. I was thinking about protein boxes, something you might pick up that would have the components already

087in it and they could be configured in a few different ways so that people could still have a choice. But that would solve the problem of the reimbursable. Rather than picking up an orange and a carton of milk and something else you could pair them. But I was wondering overall if you could maybe step back and I don't know if this is outside of the scope of this particular presentation but just I'd like to understand a little bit more about the selection process and then what happens once these goals are finalized sort of how it works because one thing that the reason what I'm getting at here in a very unarmed and. Their ideas are in innovation on how to deliver some of these goals. Yes. Okay. So that's the ultimate goal is for us

088to be able to take our vision of what we want food service to look like and take it to them to say how will you fulfill the this how will you fulfill a share table for students who they're not full when they eat that first meal? How do we go about making sure those students are well fed and they can concentrate in class because they're not hungry? How do we do those types of things? I know what the law says and I fully understand and I appreciate it. However, being a former school principal and teacher, hungry children don't learn. So how will you as a vendor work with me? And I'm not asking you to violate the law but I am asking you to make sure my children are fed. I don't see any any

089other hands. You wanted a motion. The chair would request the motion to approve the draft goals for the food service management contract. Is what it says in front of me. Is that adequate? Yes, sir. Motion to that effect. Second? No, it's been moved and seconded. All in favor say aye Opposed Carries unanimously. Thank you. Feel like I should get to do all. That Brings us to the modified board leadership process. I guess that's me, since I'm the one who sent it in. So I want to do what. If. It turns out to be necessary, I'd be happy to. Yeah. So we have an annual leadership meet organizational meeting in December of each year, and that's coming up next month. And we elect a chair and a vice chair for the following year, for the year.

090And our current process involves people being nominated from the floor. And if there's more than one person nominated for, say, let's just say for chair, the way that we've been doing it in the last number of years is that person gets voted on up or down by the board, and the second person who was nominated may or may not be considered by the board, depending on how the vote turned out. So if the vote was four or more for candidate number one, then it's over. And that always struck me as sort of a. Hmm. You know, that doesn't really give the second nominee just because they were nominated second the same opportunity. So I would. I was going to. I started working with Eve a little bit to, well, how do other school boards do

091this? Could we do some kind of written ballot, not secret, according to our policy? And so I made two proposals for us to do that, but I'm not wedded to anything. And we have a third proposal which was don't change anything. We could just not do anything. But, you know, one was to do nominations, option one here, and then use a written ballot so that there's no peer. I guess I can't think of a better word than sort of pressure. You're sort of here and you hear how your colleagues are voting and you go, whatever. So a written ballot can kind of take that away. The other one was to not do nominations at all and use a written ballot. Just have everybody's name on the ballot and do that. So there's two proposals here

092tonight, two separate threads. One of them is to change that process. The other one was to institute, regardless of what we do, an opportunity for anybody who wants to be in a leadership role to take up to x minutes. 3 minutes is proposed here to present why they're interested in that role, or perhaps a little bit about what they're thinking, and to give board members a chance to do a quick Q and A before we did any voting. And we don't do that right now. So I think we could consider any changes tonight. It would be applicable for a year, is my understanding. And we could then go back in the next 12 months if we liked it or wanted to, and put it in policy, which would then make it where we don't have

093to do this every year, set the rules every year. But so there we're not doing a policy change tonight. According to this proposal. It's just to get us to December 4, 2025, with a slight change. So that's kind of what's in front of us tonight. And I'd like to start with what I think is the easy one. Could we, like, agree that we're going to have some sort of Q and A session regardless of how we vote, and that way it won't get mixed up with how are we going to vote part of it? Would people be comfortable just saying, yeah, let's put a. Even if we don't change anything, let's at least add that so we can have a minute to talk about people's interests and know who's interested. Or perhaps somebody isn't interested

094and wants to say that. Can I just head nods. Can I ask just a little bit more about the Q and A part of it? I don't exactly understand. Like, I get the idea that we would have somebody, you know, would say, I'm definitely interested in being the chair of policy or whatever, you know, but then other people are going to ask questions to find out whether I'd be good at that. That's the part I don't. I was thinking, supposing you said I wanted to be chair and then you stopped talking and I would say, well, tell me what your thinking is about issues or what's motivating you or something like that. Right. That's my thought. Okay. You know, it was like. Or you just said a minute ago, you're interested in this. Tell them.

095Tell me more about what that means or something like that. But it doesn't have to be. Yeah, okay. I'm not wedded to anything. I just wanted us to get a little different considerations. Sure. I guess my thought is I'd be happy for somebody to, like, for example, I'm stepping down from policy, and I'd be happy for somebody to say, oh, yeah, I would be interested in doing that. And to me, that's sufficient. And I don't really want to ask them why exactly or why do you. Think you'd be good at it? And I think somebody might even be reluctant to step up if they feel. Like they have to justify it in that way. That's just my thought. Any other thoughts? Yeah. Ronnie? Yeah, George, I'm very appreciative of you raising this topic, I think

096when I first joined the board, I also did not have great appreciation for why we did that selection process in the way we did. So I'm very happy to see that for discussion for consideration for the board. I also like the idea and I kind of thinking about Mike's question, about the questions, but I love the idea of like having folks who are interested in being board chair or vice chair have 90 seconds to sort of present their platform. Like what do you want to see the board do in the next year? Kind of. What do you think the priorities are? I do think we should be pretty tight about it in terms of how long the speech and the question process is allowed if we do the question process part of it. But I

097think it will be helpful for both the board and the community to hear from potential leaders how we might go forward. Yeah, I think it would be helpful for just people to articulate things. It also might help the public understand the work of the chair and the vice chair. It's a lot of work. I know Ronnie's done it a number of times, George has done it, I've done it. It's a lot of work. And sometimes we might have more than just one new board member. Like we did the last cycle. We had three. So it might be helpful for board members to hear why somebody who they're just meeting maybe sometimes for the first time, like why do you want to be chair? I don't know. You, you know, I mean, we've taken the time

098to get to know like when you guys got elected, we all reached out and spoke to you guys. But not everyone will do that. So it might be helpful for new board members to hear just a little bit about who they might be voting for. So they're not just like, like you said, well, everybody else is voting for for them. So I might as well. So. But time limit. So I would say 90 seconds and maybe, I don't know, three to five. Minutes for questions we would be asking the superintendent, I think to enforce the time limits. So I'm just give you A Heads up, Dr. Dr, this is you. Since you're actually would be running the election that, I mean, maybe as a starter we just say let's say 90 seconds and let's just

099do a presentation. Do we want, without the Q and A, just to let somebody share their thoughts on why they want to be chaired. Do you want a Q and a in that 20, 90 seconds as well? I mean, I would say if we want a Q and A, it's got to be longer than the 90 seconds. So I'd like to think about the 90 seconds as kind of the introduction and the vision for the. For the candidate. And then maybe there's, you know, I don't know, five minutes for each board member to ask, you know, total for each board member to ask a question. Five minutes. So we do a Q and A with a presentation and up to five minutes total with the 90 seconds. And then a time is. Let's be clear.

100We are in a district of overachievers. When we say presentation, you guys are not gonna come with PowerPoints and handouts and campaign buttons and cookies. Yeah, I'm looking for the campaign buttons. But, I mean, verbal presentation. We set expectations because we might have some overachievers come with cookies that say, vote for Ronnie. Right? Absolutely not. I definitely want to not lose Mike's point, which is like, we also don't want to make this feel inaccessible for, you know, for board members. And so I'd keep it as simple as possible, and I don't want it to feel like an onerous kind of a task. I think especially I'm worried about new. Board members feeling that way. This is only for chair and vice chair. It's not for committees. It's only for the two. That's correct. Okay. Yeah.

101Yeah. The committee chair appointments go. It's a whole different process. Yeah, this was just. And again, a reminder this. We're going to try it out. If we want to modify it again, we can. So are we. I've seen head nods. We're saying five minutes and a little presentation and then a Q and A. And for each candidate, for both, Think, to be extremely clear, we're saying 90 seconds of a presentation and then five minutes of combined Q&A. Six and a half minutes. Thank you. Is it six and a half minutes total? Yes. Okay, so what we've got then is 90 seconds for a presentation, and then an additional five minutes for a Q and A if the person wants to. If it needs to run that long. And we'll do the same for process for

102both chairs. Okay, great. Now the next question is our voting procedure itself. Rather than do. Rather than do the way we do it now, which is just, you know, first up gets voted on, first nominated gets voted on. Could we move to some kind of written ballot and that Some kind could be. All our names are on it. Other districts just have a blank ballot, and you write in your names. And Eva has pointed out you can write in anybody if we have a blank ballot, regardless of whether they were nominated or not. If you want to. Eva, do you want to. Some of the little nuances of. Yes. So Roberts rules does say. Sorry, Roberts rules does say that if you're using written ballots that people can vote for any member. But. And so

103you might. You can still have nominations or the way you're discussing where people are throwing their hat in the ring, maybe you don't need nominations because you know who's interested. I know the way Orange county does it, they have written ballots. They actually have every name already on there. But then they let people say, please don't, I don't want to be chair. And people, you know, generally respect that. So, you know, either way, I think I don't see that there would be a big issue of like voting for people who hadn't put their hat in the ring. That seems unlikely. But the ballots. So either way, if you're using written ballots, you know, we would write your vote, you would send it down and if it was me and I would take a minute, count

104them, say the count. You do have to sign your ballot. I'm not going to read everybody's name. But after the meeting, the ballots are available for public inspection and they become part of the minutes. So yeah. Ronnie. Yeah. I wonder just from a process perspective. Perspective like the nominations might make sense. So then we sort of are able to sort out who is interested before we all vote and then we could do the presentation, I'm calling them vision statements. And then we can vote. So to do the nomination process so we'll know who's interested. And to be clear. But of course nomination is not who's interested, but who someone else is is interested in nominating. Well, you could self nominate, so it could be. Let's clarify that. You can self nominate, which really is another

105way of saying if you're interested. Right. Raise your hand. You can make that clear. So I think, I think I would really like to have just self nominations. Like if you're interested, say why just say so. Yeah. Then it, it eliminates the like click. You don't have to have somebody nominating something else. And I suppose if you come to a year where no one self nominates, then you can decide to move to nominations. It's going to be a long meeting at that point. So self nomination or self interest in it. We won't have a you nominate somebody else process. So Dr. Trice, you're going to be running this ultimately as superintendent and we can write it out, but you would just be asking is anyone interested in being the chair, please say so. And then

106at that point, they'll have their six and a half minutes. Each person, whoever. If there's more than one. I could not have been more.90 seconds to do a presentation. Fine. For Q and A. I know what you meant. All right. You guys are tough. So that's going to be our process then for December 5th. And after that, next year we can evaluate, if you like, fourth. December 4th. Thank you. Whatever. I nominate mine. Okay. So do we. Do we need a resolution? I think a majority should vote to adopt the written ballot method for this year's organizational meeting. All in favor, say Aye. Opposed? It was unanimous. Thank you all. And, George, can we just, you know, all agree to have a limited scope on the type of questions that may be asked during the

107Q and A. I think our fellow board members would appreciate that. Too soon. All right, can we move on? Yes, Ronnie. Thank you. So that takes us to the superintendent's information items, which is our sustainability update. Mr. Shirogi. Welcome, sir. Yes. So, good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the board, Dr. Trice, staff and guests, it is my pleasure to present to you this evening the annual sustainability update. And I will tell you that what I'm presenting tonight is the culmination of a work from a lot of people in our school district. Our facilities team plays a big part in managing and facilitating a lot of the contracts and the management. But is our folks that are out in the schools that are making this happen on a daily basis, and that includes all of our

108staff members. But I want to be able to tonight, to be able to go over. A lot of. It is a review of what you see on an annual basis. I try to make this very consistent so that you can kind of track it over time. Because aside from energy, we talk a lot about diversion of materials, and you really don't track diversion because it just depends upon what type of quantities you might have each year. But our energy is where I'm very. I'm most proud this evening to share with you. But we'll talk about some trends, some projects, grants that we're currently under, and then obviously, just future opportunities, knowing that there's a smorgasbord of things and a lot of it is situational, as grant funding allows. There we go. So, first of all,

109I just want to start off with saying why sustainability? You know, you as a board, have a policy that is a unique, very unique policy that really presses the district very hard to move forward and being sure that we reduce waste, we continually monitor Energy and water consumption. We do anything we can to mitigate water pollution, stormwater runoff on our school school sites. Doing ultimately for a global is to improve overall health within our schools and our community, but also to slow down any type of climate change. Knowing that we're just one small slither of that, but knowing that we have buildings that house thousands of students, that is impactful. And it's something that, you know, we want to be able to serve as guides and benchmarks for our children that we are educating of

110how they need to be able to manage their own homes and their business businesses in the future. So the policy I refer to as Policy 1810 under Sustainability, and there are major portions here that you guys focus on. The first is sustainability management. And this is how we demonstrate by purchasing sustainable products, reducing our energy, reducing waste and then lessening overall impact. But we also provide educational components where we do everything we can to encourage curriculums and work with the state to align with their standards and ensure that our teachers are able to integrate sustainability activities where it's deemed appropriate. But we also want to promote these activities and again to develop, working with our schools, just a better understanding of the local, regional, global impacts of our activities. You know, knowing that when we

111save electricity, what is the ultimate impact to the carbon footprint and how that just adds up when you multiply that by other schools in the country as an example. And then obviously we support the integration of any curricula that promotes sustainability. And last year I kind of told you, you know, sustainability has really matured in years to where it has become inculcated within a lot of instructional materials. You really don't need to have a sustainability, I'll call it a sustainability coach or advocate out in the schools because it has caught up and it's what we do on a daily basis. What we have to do is we have to be able to monitor and ensure that staff and students have the resources to be able to continue it. But it's there and we want to

112be able to support that as much as possible. But it allows us to get back to what I'm going to focus on this evening. And that is where it gets into the outside of the sustainable savings that you get. It's the fiscal savings that you can achieve as a district when it comes to really energy and utility consumption. And then the last thing is just an overall fostering of health and well being. And tonight, as I did last year, I'm going to show you about how sustainability has really grown into alternative forms of transportation, carbon footprint where we do a lot of outdoor healthy activities and working with our students to promote healthy lifestyles, but it also has an impact on the environment. And this piece has really morphed into something I never would have

113imagined when the policy was created by you just given a lot of the health grants that exist today. So in demonstrating through continual improvement, you know, we want to be able to expand and improve ways to create restorative futures when it comes to designing construction of our new facilities. And I'm very pleased to say that with the start of the replacement of Carrboro elementary, when we work with the designer, ultimately we're going to be looking at that because technologies and trends change and we're going to make sure that we incorporate into that school's design time tested sustainable strategies that will allow our district to be able to save the money to be sustainable, but also to have equipment and materials that are viable and can last a full life cycle. We also want to increase

114our parent student community engagement within that decision making process. And we do that by having public meetings and having design charrettes and have opportunities where parents and students can contribute to that. So with resources that we provide within our department, we talk about recycling, energy conservation. Composting is going to be a piece that I'm going to talk about tonight where we've had some tremendous growth since this past year. We still focus on plantings and natural areas. We try to minimize how much grass cutting we have to do. If we have areas that are not used by the school for health and PE or for school activities that we can allow to go natural, we do promote that with local native plantings. And we also work with our schools for school grant opportunities as they arise,

115as well as assisting teachers with any activities and ideas and pointing them to a lot of the resources that our state provides to all public educators. So the first one I wanted to talk about, and I'm going to run through these, but our Safe Routes to Schools grant that we have, where we have partnered with state and federal grant monies that come to the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. We have been meeting on a monthly basis and looking at ways in which we can one, increase accessibility to our schools by vehicle, walking, biking, rolling, you name it. But at the same time, we've been looking at ways to educate students on alternative transportation lifestyles. It means knowing that they can do that at a young age and they can carry forward. So we've done

116a lot with promoting that. And are you guys, are you changing that? Kathleen? I think the. Okay I think the battery might be dead, so I just want to highlight some of those. Good. So the first thing that we had, and I always go from last spring, we have the Bike and Roll to School day, which was back in May. And we had about five to six schools that participated in this. And what we're finding is that the schools that participate in the Walk to School or Bike and Roll to School Day, they rotate throughout the year for the ones that are there. So you'll find that there's a variety. But this is a great opportunity for our towns to be able to partner with our schools to educate students on the trails, the walkways,

117the park system, and ways in which students can safely get to their school. So then we had our second annual Safe Routes to School Schools Day, which occurred right at the start of the school. And you know, this is one where a lot of emphasis is put on entry level biking skills as alternative forms. Knowing that a lot of kids have bikes that they've received over the summer and they've been riding it, and we work with them and their parents to look at traffic safety. But also, you know, how do you safely get to and from your school and where is it appropriate and not. And how do you cross where we have crossing guards at the elementary level. It's just that education piece which has been a new component. Here's an example of a

118grant, and this is a student health grant that we have partnered where the town of Chapel Hill is actually the sponsor. It's called the Wheels of Wellness Grant. And it's a grant where the town and we supported them in their submission for this. They received bikes and they received biking equipment and they're able to do pop ups where they have come to several of our schools, but also within the community where young children are able to come and they have the bikes that are used for preschoolers as well as some students who have not learned to ride a bike until possibly second, third or fourth grade. But it's really teaching them how to use the bikes and how to be able to effectively traverse on a lot of the public trails that we have here

119within our community. But at the same time, there's a very strong relation for many of the schools, schools where biking is very accessible, where these children actually pick this up and their parents may ride with them on a daily basis. So this has been a pretty good one. We also had back on October 8, our walk and Roll to school day. And this is the big one that we have each year. We kind of do this in alignment with our school crossing guard awareness because it's that time of year, this is the one where we have the, I call them almost the bike buses coming down the streets. We within many of our communities. And this has really morphed to where we're having to work with local law enforcement as far as safety and management

120because of the number of students and parents that are walking on these days to where schools are more than likely in future years. We may do it on the traditional day, but we may do it through the entire week so that there could be that support. Because if, you know, if you witness what happens, say at Rascus Elementary School, you know, it's a very hefty crowd of people that are walking down the street heading to the school. So the police and public safety, it's just morphed into something that's pretty phenomenal. But we need to space that out. So I think we're going to see next year that it's going to be spaced more so that they can provide the support that they need too. And then last we had our second Ruby Bridges walk to

121school day, which was just last week with Northside Elementary. And this is an example where we are promoting for of a lot, lot of students that many times live in communities where they're in their homes for a good portion while their parents are working and they're being supervised. And in Northside, what's unique about that is it's really a block type system environment. So what we do is they have really taken on this initiative of being able to get their kids to be able to walk and experience that in a controlled way. But they're also adding in social activism within this program and it's really tied to the curriculum. So the kids have really taken to this and we believe that we may have one to two more schools that may pick up on this event

122as well. This is a good balance between sustainable activities and integrating it within an existing curriculum. So here's where we get to the, I'll call it the meat and the potatoes of what we do in sustainability. And that's with our environmental and economic components. And I just want to talk a little bit about our district energy use. This is a chart that you have seen where it shows our electrical, natural gas, water usage for an entire year. And then what you see is for FY25, you see boxes at the bottom. The larger the box, the greater the consumer of utilities. So clearly when you look at this, you see our high schools and our McDougal campus, which is an elementary and middle school combined as the largest consumers. And then you'll see pretty much the

123rest of the portfolio to the right. So for the most part, 45% of our portfolio are those four schools that are on the left when it comes to energy usage. So logically, when you look at where is the low hanging fruit, where is where the schools that you need to focus on is the schools that consume the most energy. So you will see in all of our reports, we are always tracking our largest consumers almost daily to ensure that there are not blips or any type of energy waste that's occurring to the best of our ability, as we can notice that. But this is one where I'm very pleased to say that from last year to this year we have seen with electricity about 11.6% reduction in usage. And I want to use the word

124here, usage, not cost. I try not to get involved in cost in a public presentation because the charge for gallons of water, kilowatt hours of energy, it changes. So what I'm showing you is the reductions is allowing us to keep pace with the inflationary measures of energy. That's really where we are. But again, almost 11.5% with electricity, 12% reduction with natural gas. We did see an uptick with water. And when we get to the water slide, I'll be able to explain a reason why that has had a slight uptick this past year. So in doing so, under the electrical usage, you will see that since 2015 we kind of went to the pandemic where energy. Can I ask a question? On the previous slide, I'm looking at Harboro High School and they're at almost 20,000

125MMBTU compared to Chapel Hill. Can you talk about why that might be with their much smaller space? I can. The biggest reason is that Carrboro High School, if you remember from when Wilpert did its assessment, Carrboro High School had a very high facility condition index because of roofing and air conditioning, the inefficiencies that come from that. So when you look at that school and you compare it to a chapel hill where 70% of the school was replaced and the rest was not, you have more energy efficient roofing and air conditioning and technologies that are within that building. So there's a big piece. So hence you will see that this year Dr. Stewart and the team are working on H vac as well as roof replacements at those schools. But that's the biggest difference because you're

126spot on. Carrboro is half the size when it comes to students of square footage and that's that level of inefficiency. When we talk about our mechanical systems, that's a great example because the school is, it's not in the category of being 40, 50 years of age, but that mechanical system has reached its estimate of life. So thank you. I noticed that too. But can, can you comment? I noticed in the consent agenda we approved some roof replacements for Carboro and East. So can one then extrapolate that the efficiency will increase due to the new roof tech, whatever technology gets utilized for the roofing, Obviously that's only one piece. But yes, we should definitely see a downward trend with the replacements of those two roofs. While they're phased, the replacements are phased in. You know, you

127go with a roof that has less, has insulation that's added, you have less heat transfer coming from the building and coming outside. But you also, you will have materials that will allow reflectivity so that the sun is reflecting off the roof more, you know, versus a dark roof. It might be a medium to a light roof. And you should see that. I will say this though. Carrboro, we should see a market difference. East is a big school. We'll see a difference. But that's a school that is used from a facility use perspective, especially the hours of usage is just going to add to that even more. But there should be a change as well. And again, that that's a positive. That's the reason why, you know, you guys have been supporting, supporting, not just replacing

128schools, but ensuring that we have funds to continue with the mechanical, the maintenance, because those are inefficiencies. But by no means is Carrboro High School a school that we would ever consider closing. Right. It's just not at that age. But you do have life cycles that are key components there. Yep. So with electrical usage, I just wanted to show the trend. And you're going to see this with gas as well. If you look at the top middle, you see where it says post pandemic. Before we had the pandemic, I should remind everybody, we were following ASHRAE standards. But with the pandemic, you know, new standards were developed about increasing air refresh rates, where you're cycling more air to get germs, impurities and stuff out of the buildings, just as we experienced with COVID Well, obviously

129that's a good thing for overall health. It's not just for Covid. And those standards have changed. So we are running our systems more. So that requires more energy use. So I would say look to the right of post pandemic because we were very high in the very beginning, because we were running our buildings continually. And I'm going to talk a little bit just about the efforts that we are continuing to take. And you're seeing that these efforts that we're taking to reduce energy consumption is allowing us to reduce. Reduce our usage, which again is reducing cost overall. So when you look at natural gas, you see the same. Just go back. One more. There you go. So when you look at gas, it parallels gas though, is generally used more so in heating seasons, whereas

130we have more electric being used in cooling seasons. So you'll see kind of an off on with the cycles of the usage. But again, this is a very positive trend as you separate out our high school, elementary and middle schools primarily. So it's a good trend. And then we go into water on the next slide. And water is one where I will say that if you look at 24, we believe that that usage of 24 is really where we're going to land in 25. Though we did have an undetected water leak that was not visible. That did cause us to have a slight uptick. It took about 30 some days for that to be identified because it was in ground and we had to wait for the meters to be able to demonstrate that. And

131working with OASA as well as with our H Vac folks. But we do know that our ads at our schools are irrigating at a far greater percentage when it comes to injury and concussion management and ensuring that the fields are not hard and that they're watering and they're maintaining their fields at a greater level than they have in years past. It's just we're in that situation. So we know that water for the most part, aside from irrigation and from water that's used for H Vac cooling, you know, washing hands and flushing toilets and kitchens, that that type of usage really hasn't changed much with its use. Though we will say that what you will see potentially as we do redistricting and our schools become better balanced, you will see a school that maybe has 250

132students in it today, maybe it has 400 students. After it's redistricted, the usage of that school will go up because you're going to have far more occupants. But what you'll be able to look at in totality is that the other schools that may not have as many students, they're going to go down. It's going to be a balance of. So individually, schools may look like they're costing more, but from a totality it will still be less. So that's something that we will, we can anticipate because the more bodies you have in a building when it's hot outside, you have greater heat load that you have to cool. When you have less bodies, you don't have to use as much energy to heat or cool. So this is where I really want to get into the

133focus. After just showing you the trends and it's really talking about what, what have we implemented to be able to have that continued reduction in sustainable strategies. And the biggest piece is that our district continues to work with an energy consultant who we pay to be able to meet with on a monthly basis where we review our meters, we review the energy use, we look for trends and outliers. We basically use this energy consultant to handle all of the analytics for us with the tools tool that they provide. But it's really having that person who is energy certified to be able to work with our facilities team and then troubleshoot ways in which you could identify. So we have been auditing our meter locations and matching them with utility billings to ensure that we know

134where everything is located, Measure those and to ensure where you have energy loss. We've also been conducting on site energy audits during and after hours. And that's one where we know for water consumption we're going to need to pick that up for after hours so that if there's water running in the middle of the night, you know, our heating and cooling systems do use water, but we have some schools that do not have heat, Heat source heating and cooling. And those are schools where you should have very minimal meter movement in the evenings. And we know that we've got to step that up. And ultimately there are building automation controls that you could add to your water systems that can help in that. And we hope to integrate that over time. But the biggest piece

135is the accuracy of your building automation controls and the timing of your automation controls when you turn the heat on and off, the air on and off, and ensuring that it's being turned on at an optimal energy cost time, but that the schools are at the temperature when the students are in it and when the students or the occupants are not in it, that you're running it at what we call a minimum setback. And that setback is to prevent the schools from having mold or indoor air quality issues. But in the winter is to prevent pipes from freezing. So it's usually around in the winter it might be around 60, 62 degrees is what you may drop down to on the weekends when the building's not being used but that is energy, that if you're

136not doing that, you're just wasting it. And we found that few years ago we had a lot of that going on and we've been working continually to fine tune our facilities because that's just energy just, just being wasted and costing taxpayers additional money and it causes us to be able to put less money into instruction. So we're very proud of these efforts that has taken place from our, primarily our H Vac teams. On the next slide, I wanted to highlight just the capital assessment, investment and this is where we work with our energy consultant to really look at the most inefficient energy units that we have to be able to help us prioritize which ones we need to replace and when. You know, we may have a piece of equipment that is older, but we

137know that it's not going to break down. But if it, but if it's only cooling 5,000 square feet, but we have another unit that maybe is a little more efficient, but it's costing much more money because it's cooling, say 20,000 square feet, the energy consultant will do the calculations. Say you really need to focus on the, the larger one, not the smaller one. But in some cases it may be you should focus on the smaller one because you're, you're burning a lot of energy per kilowatt hour. So it's just working with them to be able to diagnose that because we know that we don't have enough money to replace everything at once and we've got to make the best informed decisions and at the same time ensure that our students are not in buildings that

138do not have adequate heating cooling. So this is another graphical depiction and we kind of talked about being a, a grammar nerd and our energy consultant is a data nerd. And we try to get, provide graphics that can tell a story. But this is, again, this is a trend where if you look at each of these dots, the larger the dot, the larger the building, right? So those purplish color dots, the large ones, those are high schools. And then you've got the bluish ones that are mill middle schools and all the green are elementary. What you'll see is that this is a comparison of gas and electric usage. So you want to move the less the usage, the more to the left and down that you should move, right? So if you look at these,

139you'll see that you've got kind of like the planet with the, with the tail. You start on the far right with the line and you work your way to the planet. So you see that everything is moving in a down, downward left trend. That is a good thing, that is that you are reducing electric and gas. So this parallels the first slide that I showed you, but it's a graphical way for you to see that. Notice that the ones that have the greatest savings are the biggest schools. And then you see your elementary schools, they're all moving, but they're not moving at the greatest length. This is just again, another graphical depiction. Just one year. This is a two year comparison. So this shows you the progress of doing energy auditing and monitoring the equipment.

140Because you see that these schools, where they were two years ago, where the line started and then where they've landed on the, on the bottom left. Again, it's just a graphical depiction. And of course, if you have one school where there's an energy, a mechanical problem that you don't catch in time, you might see an upward trend possibly. But for the most part, all of our schools have moved in a downward trend. And that's really by building automation and controlling your heating and cooling. So the next slide. So again, I just want to give you an overview because I will talk about money in the slide after this. This is just an example of schools that we focused on from East Chapel Hill to McDougal, Carrboro High, Northside Smith. And you see the reduction in

141energy usage ranging from 33% to 29% to 35, 21%. It just shows you that from year to year, over two years, these are the reductions. So if you move to the next slide, we take the same things and we kind of break that into if you were paying 8 cents per kilowatt hour, this is really financially, this is an estimate of what we are saving by reducing that. So you see from 43,000 to 86,000, 44,000, those are annual savings by literally, in many cases, just tweaking the operating times of your systems and running them at temperatures that are acceptable where you're not over cooling and overheating. Next slide. So another graphical depiction. And this is just to kind of show you the complexity of what we do with our energy consultant. This is Northside elementary

142and it's a two year comparison. The first year are the blue dots and the second year are the orange dots. This current year. And what you see is obviously the higher and to the right is the greater the amount of usage. And what you see is it's moved down over two years. So in the middle of this graph, you see where there's two lines that kind of show you where the energy savings is. But this is an example where you've been using a lot of electricity and gas and you've been able to reduce it to where that graph, you've taken all the points and you've dropped it down for less usage over time. Again on the far right, this is bottling over a 12 month period where you show your low and your high points

143for energy usage within a building, in this case electricity. And you can see that in the middle where you see the slump, where it goes down. That's the summertime because at Northside the school is not used at, in the summer at the level that it's used during the school year. Can't say that for all of our schools, but for this one. But you'd be able to look at the modeling and you could see that from two years ago to this year. What you see is that the base level, if you notice the one on the right, is very even on the bottom. So we're very consistent and we have less, higher spikes of energy usage on the top. This is where you just take modeling where there are Data points, points 24 hours a day,

144365 days a year and you can drill down right down to the minute in the building with the, with the analytics that we have based upon the metering that Duke Energy provides to us for this school. Next slide. So environmental projects. Next slide. LED conversions. This will be probably the last year that I will be talking about LED conversations convergence because we finished our last two schools, one of which was part of the Orange County Climate grant at Northside Elementary. As I told you in the past, you know, Northside is one of our newest schools. But when the school was built, fluorescent was still cheaper than LED at the time of design and then it flipped. So we came in and we actually replaced all of the fluorescence with LED as well as the Lawler

145building over at Seoul. We were able to replace that as well. So this Basically we are 100% complete in using LED in our school facilities. So I won't have any more projects to be able to show you. So we're very proud of that. Next slide. And last but not least for this is my fourth presentation I think and I have talked about the solar grant for four years and I'm very pleased to say that we were able to successfully you awarded a grant for just under $300,000 late spring and we were able to install the solar panels on the roof at Northside. This was funded through the Orange County Community Climate Action grant. And we, we believe that over 25 years we're going to have about a $650,000 savings in utilities at this school. But

146what's crazy about this, and this is because there were governmental incentives for this grant, that we have a three year return on investment on that, on that solar, which is just unbelievable. If without a grant, it's not a three year return. If you have to pay full for the solar panels and the installation, your return on investment increases. And I know that Ms. Jenkins would be able to speak to this. It, it doubles. It may even be greater than, than that. But it's every bit of six to eight years on return on investment without the subsidies. So we are very pleased that we were able to get that. This is one where, and we will do this with our new schools. The school was designed to be able to have solar panels put on there

147and we will do the same. Right now, unfortunately, there is not much federal funding that is coming out for any type of sustainable activities. And with that being said, we will have to do the cost analysis as we replace our, our elementary schools. Do we want to have the ballast that are there to allow them or is it really cost effective to be able to put them in on the front end or do we have them solar panel or array ready when the time comes and there may be either incentives or the cost goes down. It's no different than with electric buses. You know, the grants that were out there for electric buses, given the cost of, of an electric bus is double. It's not advantageous for us to buy an electric bus right now

148because there's, there are no financial incentives and your return on investment when you could buy two buses for the price of one electric. We just can't do that when funds are so limited. And that's across the country. It's not just indicative of us. Next slide. All right, so I'm going to roll through the next. And that's waste diversion because this is just showing you our commitment to diverting waste from our public landfill. And I show that, you know, We've had over 65 tons of aluminum, plastic, glass and paper, 33 tons of metal, just under a half a ton of toner cartridges, believe it or not, 14 tons of vegetative grass and leaves waste, 10 tons of E waste as we sell in surplus. A lot of our technology and equipment. There's. You're able to sell

149and get some profit from that. But you're also what they're not selling, they're able to dispose of. So we're not putting these things into the landfill. As well as over 100 pounds of lithium ion lead batteries. Next. So I'm very pleased to be able to talk about this year. Orange County Solid Waste came to us with a program where they said that they would be willing to fully subsidize the cost of composting within our schools. And so this year we are currently in our kitchens, which is about 60% of the vegetative or the compost waste that comes out of the school comes out of the kitchen itself. We are composting in all of our kitchens this year. And I can tell you that the numbers are just crazy with the amount of tons of garbage

150that we are diverting from the Orange county solid waste going into, into the landfill. Next slide. We have right now we have primarily four schools that are participating where students are contributing to the composting program, meeting with their food. If we have the online paper trays which Chartwells provides, they're able to put those into the composting containers. And I could tell you McDougall Elementary Element Middle School is just blowing it out of the water as far as the amount of tons that they are doing. But as I've told you before, the kitchen staff can manage this and they can ensure that nothing inappropriate gets put into the compost because that's the big piece. You put a piece of plastic in there, the company, you get the nasty gram from the company, and they're basically saying,

151you got to cease and desist because we can't use this product if it's contaminated. So the schools that you see here, the high schools mainly are being managed by environmental clubs that are at the school, they're helping facilitate that. But at the elementary level, there are. The PTAs have embraced it at McDougall elementary to Middle, as well as Frank, Porter Graham. And our goal is to organically allow that grow as schools have the bandwidth, if you want to call it the manpower to be able to help facilitate that for the kids. Because it is labor intensive. And I know, but the two schools, FPG and McDougall, have made tremendous strides. They've got some very strong programs that I think will continue for at least a few years. But they know that that's a challenge as

152well. But we're definitely reaping the benefits of that. What the savings is for this, if we have to pay for composting in years past. So we would pay 3,250 per school, $3,250 per school per year to compost so what we've been able to do is we're saving just under $62,000 or actually just not spending $62,000. But that's a tremendous savings for us because. Next slide. Because by reducing the compost, our facilities team was able to work with our waste contractors to reevaluate our trash contract. If you have more food going, compost going into those containers, you have less containers that are needed at your school for garbage. So in doing so, you'll see here that last year we spent about $170,000 in trash collection. What they do is they do not charge by the pound,

153they charge by the pickup. So you're really saving by the number of containers and the pickup rates that you have. It's not about the weight, but Orange County Solid Waste is very concerned about the weight because they have a landfill that they're trying to get to to last for many, many years, and they don't want it filled with organic material. So we assessed our garbage use, we rebid the vendor contract, and we determined the pickup days and where they needed to be. And we anticipate that this year we'll spend about 127,000. So we've saved about $42,000 just right off the bat by doing that. So that's just good fiscal sense has really nothing to do with sustainability, but it's a benefit of being sustainable and where you can get some savings. It would still be

154a cost, obviously, if we were paying to compost, but this is where that savings, where Orange county solid waste is very appreciative because they're actually saving more by not filling the landfill. Next slide. Again, chemical disposal, which is a very big topic that we have because this is the stuff that can get into the ground, get into stormwater, ultimately get into our waterways. About 33 gallons of oils, 3 gallons of aerosols, 221 gallons of expired chemicals. Some of that could be hand sanitizer that's still lasting from the pandemic, or it could be science chemicals, where we work with the schools each spring to be able for them to organize. And we collect with a contractor so that those items are removed and disposed of properly. So it's about 269 gallons of waste that we are

155ensuring that it's not getting into our waste stream. Thank you. Next slide. This will be the last time I talk about recycling of bulb fluorescent bulbs. We only had 129. This is because all of our schools are now led, so I don't believe we're going to track this one anymore. And that's pretty exciting because that is a hazardous material given the volume of fluorescence that we did have in our schools of what we were contributing to potentially landfills before we started recycling. So we're pretty excited about that. But pretty much there's like onesie twosies that are out there, ones that we just haven't collected that are sitting in a storage area and we'll continue to dispose of those. But I'm not going to come back and have a slide next year for that next one.

156So last but not least, just future opportunities as we work with sustainability is the inclusion of sustainability with all of our school replacements. We want to do everything we can to expand energy modeling. We want to continue with campus audits. We want to expand with our building automation controls and setup. We're still looking when we have to buy a vehicle vehicle electric vehicle prices, they have and are continuing to go down. So we do believe that for vehicles where we can benefit, where they're being driven daily and they could be charged nightly, then we're going to continue to be able to purchase electric vehicles in that component. We're going to continue to pursue and evaluate solar electric bus grants and then we're to going. We want to strive this year to, to expand the student

157composting where schools are, are, are ready to take that on. So with all that being said, I know it's just a lot of data. I'm just very pleased to be able to show you that we're continuing to move in a very positive direction and that through your policy that our schools are be able to respond to that accordingly and we'll be able to make that positive impact to our community. Thank you, sir. Well, thank you so much. This is really one of my favorite topics and I appreciate the expansiveness of it. And one of my thoughts as you were talking is the thoughtfulness of partnerships as a way to expand our impact. And so I'd be interested in more on this in the next presentation. Like how are we engaging with the towns of Chapel

158Hill and Carrboro and you and the and Orange county and ways that can expand what we can do around sustainability. So thank you. And then the second thought is just the power of empowering our students in these early, you know, at their early ages, like engaging them to embed sustainability in their lives. So I love that approach and the walking and the composting and those other activities. And then I would just encourage us to continue to think about solar in our future construction, even if we don't have the tax credits. I think this is a really good opportunity for us to embed our commitment to, you know, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels at every opportunity that we have. Yeah. What I will add for our new construction, you know, in our policy, at minimum

159we evaluate for the viability, then obviously we would come back to you as a board to be able to weigh in if, if it does cost additional money or we do with, given our budget, do we want to do that? But we also do geothermal evaluation as well, knowing that we do not have geothermal, but we do make that a priority. And that has been a partnership with Orange county that actually has that in their policy where they evaluate that. And we want to do the same as well. Because if geothermal, if they're, if the site doesn't have the amount of rock that would preclude you from doing that, to be able to put the wells in the ground is by far stronger return on investment and far more sustainable when it comes to your

160impact on carbon footprint. So we definitely want to continue to do that. And I'd be happy to be able to talk about a lot of the partnerships and really conversations that we have more so with both towns and Orange county and less so with unc. But I do think that with, I will say with the coal powered plan and a lot of discussions that they've been having, I think that there's going to be some really good opportunities for us to be able to become engaged in working with them as they're taking on some pretty tremendous tasks. So. Absolutely. For next year. Thank you. Thank you so much for this presentation. Like Ronnie, this is obviously one of my favorite presentations. I work in the energy space and so I love seeing the trends that we're

161making in terms of shifting our energy consumption. Obviously it's a pretty technical thing to do. So I'm glad you're working with an outside consultant because it's really coming down to the numbers as we look at our budget. You know, this is something we don't have a lot to say. And I just pulled up an article in the Business North Carolina that was published today. And so Duke Energy is seeking to increase electricity rates. And so, you know, whatever we can do. It makes a huge difference when we're talking about operating these large facilities that are running. I mean, we're sitting in Lincoln center right now. It's 9:30 at night. Right. With lights on. So I think if we can continue to think about ways to reduce our energy, which could very well mean New Roos,

162new H Vac, because we can only build but so many schools at a time right now. So I like that we're looking at it and also getting this information out there to the public. Because if we think about if our home electric bills are going up, can you imagine our massive schools that hold anywhere from 500 to 1600 kids? I'm going to ask this question I asked. I think I ask it all the time when we do this. I love, you know, that we are utilizing some students in some of our, you know, some of the initiatives we do, whether it's composting or the gardening. But I want us to challenge us as we think about the education piece for our students that we actually formalize this with our CTE programs. And I know talking

163about, you know, what our district looks like over the next coming months and programs and things like that at our retreat, but, you know, I just really want to challenge us to do it. I was at the recent STEAM Fair this weekend doing a presentation, and I did want to share that the Bureau of Labor Statistics just posted that the top, the two, top 22 of the top 20 occupations, occupations that have the highest percentage of change between 2024 and 2034, this is what's projected are in renewable energy. And I kept pushing that when I was at the Steamboat Fair to remind people that's wind turbine technicians. And no, we do not have wind turbines here, but solar installers. So solar installers. And that goes with the technicians do it because if we're increasing installers,

164we need technicians. And so the fact that we have continued to increase our solar footprint and you and I have talked about evaluating because we've got these one off solar panels all over the district that continue to baffle me, like what's going on with them. I just want us to think about that. That's another opportunity to engage with students from the elementary level all the way to the high school level, where they will have job opportunities at graduation from high school if they learn some of these critical skills. So I just want us to make sure we aren't missing that opportunity. And I hope you've got that dashboard tracking the solar and how it's doing every day, because I think that's a critical learning piece that I spend a lot of time training new employees

165on. So thank you. Elle, do we have any? As I was listening, I thought, boy, the public needs a condensed version of how this works. The county commissioners need to understand at some point from us, maybe as a future agenda item and a Presentation at a joint meeting or something. Do you have some thoughts about or maybe Mr. Jenks and like video? Yeah. So this is amazing information and yet it's also a lot of information. So it's like there's cost savings. There's also just the whole concept of sustainability and what that means. And I think it's phenomenal what you guys do. And I think everybody's saying that. So how can we tell this story without them having to watch us sit here at night and hear it? I definitely think for our folks to work

166with the communications team with Mr. Jenks to be able just to brainstorm audience delivery and maybe some snippets to be able to focus on, we can at least brainstorm about that. But I'll let Mr. Jinx way in, knowing that's his area. You need a captive audience to get the full impact. You're not gonna tell that story in a 40 second clip? We can, but I don't know that it'll be all that impactful. It's really impactful to sit through it. Here in this room. Now, the video of this discussion might not be the most compelling thing we've ever produced, but to go out and cover what's happening in our schools is so we can produce that and show it in captive rooms and audiences that are interested in that kind of thing. Absolutely. I think there's

167a lot of tremendous stories to tell. The example I would use is if we were to highlight our facility folks who are doing things behind the scenes after hours, checking meters, even during the school day. And what are the things? What are the look for? So what are the telltale signs? And then I even throw in, you know, because we get a lot of communication from our students and our users in our buildings. What are ways in which they can communicate to other. When they observe something that shouldn't be happening. Right. I mean, they do it, but it could be kind of tying in to where, you know, our energy folks would be pretty excited to, you know, if we were to create a hotline or an email. But generally we get it through the

168principals. I mean, the kids communicate, the schools communicate, and we get it. But yeah, definitely. I think we could come up with something. But I tend to agree. You know, I think you got to break it into snippets because it's pretty inclusive. But. But it's. But I don't think people understand what goes on in a building and what's behind the walls and all the things that it takes just to operate, to get a room to temperature when it's such a large scale, 200,000 square foot space in comparison to a 1800 square foot home. It's done totally differently. Well, I appreciate that. I mean I didn't, I sit here going, wow, I didn't know that to a lot of the things you shared. Yeah. The one thing I failed to mention and don't want to end

169on a sad note, but the Orange county climate grant last year was the last year for that grant for schools to participate. So for Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange county, we will no longer be participating in that and the county will be providing that to organizations and citizens. I think their thought is with the Capitol work that we're incorporating sustainability that that money could go to the citizens and the money that's being used for the schools. But so you won't see anything new with the climate action. But we have definitely, we're very appreciative of the commissioners and the money that they have appropriated that and the uses because we've all used it to improve our schools but to also save money. And we've purposely done that to where it's a one, two punch when we've

170done roofing, air conditioning and even the solar arrays. So just wanted to put that out there. So your hopes aren't up that that's another grant fund that's kind of dried up. That's not how you're supposed to close a presentation. Thank you. Appreciate it. That brings us to sharing, which is committee reports and then to sharing if people want to finance facility out. Yes. Our last meeting was on the 10th of this month and we heard basically our biggest presentation. Just as a reminder, the finance facility and operations committee serves as the board's audit committee. And so we received the presentation from the auditors. We also did, we were given a heads up the potential risk with the pre K grant with the government shutdown. But obviously that wasn't a thing. So we, our last agenda

171item was just highlighting the facility's H VAC team. So just hearing the wonderful work and correct me if I'm wrong, because we have such wonderful highly trained staff, we've seen some savings there as well. Correct, Dr. Stewart? Yeah. So I think the savings continue as we hear about the things that the facility teams has done to bring in some of the services that we might have been outsourcing to other people as we increase some of the trades and staffing that we have internally with facilities. Our next meeting is going to be on January 13, 2026, 5:30 virtual meeting. And the agenda will be Posted as we get closer to the meeting day. Thank you Reza. And one last time, policy Mike. Thanks. We met two nights ago and went over quite a few policies that'll

172be. Headed your way soon, mostly on consent. There were some minor changes to a lot of policies that were based on recommendations from the school board association. And then the next meeting will be in January on January 20th at 5:30. Thank you, appreciate that. And Vicki, student success. We have not met since we last had a board meeting. Our last meeting was the fourth Tuesday. That was in October and we will not be meeting again until January due to the way our schedule is following. But most of the updates we got in full board meetings with the way block is going and we had some presentations on from SNAP and a few other organizations. So it was pretty good. I invite everyone to go back and look at the film of it. Thanks. Thanks Vicki.

173And then are there any board liaison committee reports and or individual sharing people could do that now? Ronnie yes. So I have a couple items. One is I missed Mike. I came late to the meeting so I wanted to say a few words as we send you off to be free from Thursday night meetings and all of our other committees and board responsibilities. Just a deep appreciation Mike, for the expertise you've brought both as a human being and as a teacher and as a parent. I have observed your willingness to use your influence to benefit others and I think that shows up in the way that you serve on the board. And so I have so much gratitude for the fact that we got to cross paths in this work and I just hope to

174continue to, you know, get time with you as you step off of the board. On a more somber note, I wanted to recognize as this has been a really heavy week for a lot of people with reports of ICE and the Border Patrol in our local areas. And it's really created a lot of anxiety for our students, our families, our teachers. It's left our community members afraid to leave their homes, afraid to go to school. And it's disrupted education even for the students who were able to attend. And so these are dark times when our government can send masked agents to our communities against our will and disappear people with no due process. So I want our Latinx community members and folks across all of our community to know that you are part of this

175community, you belong and you are supported. I really want to thank the over 100 North Carolina leaders who signed a joint statement supporting immigrant families. And thank you to teachers and school staff who kept and continue to keep our students safe when they Come. In this moment of darkness, our communities this week got to honor three individuals who remind us that the moral arc of the universe does bend toward the truth, however slowly. On Monday, Mrs. Lillian and Howard Lee received the Order of the Longleaf Pine. And just a little context about this award. It's one of the highest. It is the highest state recognition and since nineteen nineteen six three North Carolina governors have reserved this highest honor for people who have made significant contributions to the state and their communities through their exemplary

176service and exceptional accomplishments. These two individuals served with distinction. In 1965 1965, Mrs. Lee co founded the UNC Hospital School which today stands as an institution institution that provides year round Pre K through 12 educational services to school age patients and enables students to continue their study with as little interruption as possible as they receive medical treatment. Students come from across North Carolina, from all over the US and from other countries to be at this school. For many years Mrs. Lee served as a beloved counselor and administrator in the Chapel Hill Carrboro City School system, leaving a legacy of compassion and actively working to improve the lives of her community members. She's also a longtime leader of the MLK University Community Memorial Banquet, the preeminent local celebration of Dr. King's birthday which has given more

177than 300 scholarships to students. Mr. Howard Lee was the first black mayor elected in Chapel Hill. He served from 1969 to 1975. He served as Chair of the State Board of Education in North Carolina, as a member of the North Carolina Senate, as the Secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and again, I want to offer a huge congratulations to Mrs. Lillian and Howard Lee and thank them for their service to the State of North Carolina and beyond. Tonight, Braxton Fuchsi also was honored with the North Carolina Order of the Land Longleaf Pine. For many decades, Braxton has demonstrated a deep commitment to improving life for the people in the community. He began in the 1960s advocating for fair wages and participating in integrating local businesses. In 1969 he was elected as the

178first black member of the Carrboro Board of aldermen. Serving until 1981, he played a key role in the building of of the Hank Anderson park and establishing the Carmill Mall. Huge thanks to Representative Ellen Boinsy for his leadership in making these recognitions happen. These individuals bear witness to the impacts that individuals can have in changing the world for the better and bring us hope that the darkness of today won't last forever. Thank you Ronnie. I just have a few things Tuesday afternoon. Myself, Vicki and Meredith all attended the Novice Teachers Tea that was hosted by the Public School Foundation. This was a gathering with some of our newest teachers within our district. And it was wonderful to hear stories that former students all the way to longtime staff who had served as TAs or a

179substitute, join this wonderful profession and be a teacher. It's just great that we have partners like the Public School Foundation. Also, they were giving out grants and recognizing some of our veteran teachers as well. So thank you again to the Public School foundation for their partnership and to these new teachers in our district also. I know George, Vicki and I attended the School Board association conference, and obviously you guys can. Can chime in, but I attended some presentations on career and technical education programs that other districts are doing. It was really great to see how they're tackling those and looking at them. And also some things that we're talking about, artificial intelligence. So that was just really interesting to see what the discussion is around the state. And then we had the privilege to attend

180an event with the Innovation Project where we visited Peck Expeditionary Learning School, the former Peck Elementary School. And it was great to see all the possibilities for some of our newest schools that are going to be built in our district for our students, staff and community. It really opened up my eyes to see how a new and revitalized learning space really can help change learning and how students learn, even eating in the school. So it's just really great to be able to do that and also see other great school districts thinking about these things, too. I don't know. George and Vicki, if you have anything to add. Thank you, Reza. Anybody else? Vicki, go ahead to piggyback about the presentation that we saw at the wonderful pec. They had a sign there that said, all

181are welcome. You have to have the. The right attitude. The school was so inviting. The students and the community have grasped a hold to it and have come into that space. And it has led me to want to say, as board member Ronnie Dossey has said, that this has been a heavy week. And in that, I just wanted to make sure that someone had asked me my opinion on that. And I have wanted to. To just repeat what my opinion is on that in that saying that I'm so sorry that things have come to this in our community or anywhere, really. These are trying times. If there was ever a time for us to look out for our community members, to time us now, be vigilant and pay attention to your surroundings. This is our

182community. We have to be committed to doing our best to care for each other. We're a community of People from all over the place, the world, and we're welcoming all. All means all. All means all. Capital A, capital L. Capital L. If you don't understand it, pick up a dictionary. All means all. We're better together. Black, brown, white, yellow, green, orange, blue, purple, green, light blue, red. All means all. And any other hue in the Corolla and the Crayola box of ethnic melanated colors. All means all. And Howard Lee bought transit to Chapel Hills. Thank you. Thank you, Vicki. Anybody else? Before we close, I want to piggyback on what the two of you said. And Dr. Trice, I'm giving you a heads up. I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit.

183The Innovation Process Project. You're now on the board of directors and that was an amazing school that we got to tour. As Vicki was describing. Can you give a short version of. I think it's 22 school districts and I think it's an exciting group. Yeah. So the Innovation project is a conglomeration of 22 school districts in North Carolina where we get together to just think outside of the box. You know, what are the possibilities in terms of what schools can be? Our board and our administration talks a lot about innovation and how we can do things differently. This is like an incubator really for just putting ideas on the table, having neighboring districts or sister districts really help you think through some of the innovation. But at the end of the day. What they really

184want to see is employment implementation. And so the leadership there does a great job of helping you think and act differently like our strategic plan suggests. But they're really thought partners and they will help you implement the ideas that. You come up with. And so we really look forward to. Using that organization to do some of our innovative thinking around some of the issues that know we're talking about as a district currently. But yeah, thank you. Appreciate that. Anybody else? Okay. Hearing none, seeing none. The meeting is adjourned.