001Hi, good evening. I'd like to call this special meeting to order and note that all board members are present. We are joined by Superintendent Dr. Patrick as well as members of his administrative cabinet. Welcome to all those in the audience this evening or joining us from the live stream or Zoom. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Patrick. Thank you very much, Susie. I appreciate it. It's a special meeting for a special purpose tonight to start out. So I'll begin by saying for those of us who participated in it, the Scarsdale interview process can be, well, daunting. Finalist Day in particular is a uniquely grueling experience. However, the benefits to the eventual candidate and to the stakeholders involved are numerous. We get to know the candidates well, and the consensus reached
002creates a network to support the success of the candidate upon entry. I'm delighted for the students, parents, faculty, and staff of Greenacres Elementary School that Trish Asello will serve as their next principal. She is a talented and empathetic empathetic student and family centered educator and leader she's also a trusted and valued colleague as is evidenced by all of those who've turned out tonight to support her and with that I will turn it over to Megan So good evening and thank you for giving me the opportunity to introduce the next principal of Greenacres Elementary School, Ms. Trish Iosello. Trish is a familiar face, currently serving as the assistant principal of the Fox Meadow Elementary School. And before her role at Fox Meadow, she was a long-time elementary teacher at Quaker Ridge. Ms. Iosello holds an educational
003leadership advanced certificate from LIU, an MS in special education from Mount St. Mary College, and a BA in elementary education from Clemson. In addition, she's the parent of three children who've all gone through the Scarsdale school system. When looking at the leadership profile, it is clear that Trish holds so many of the characteristics and qualities we were looking for in the next principal of Green Acres. She is an individual with a deep knowledge base and understanding of child development, curriculum, and instruction. She's someone who learns alongside her teachers and is a clear communicator who fosters warmth, clarity, and trust with parents, faculty, staff, and students. Trish is approachable, she's compassionate, kind, and empathetic, which helps her build real and authentic relationships with all of her stakeholders. All of this will set her up for success
004and Greenacres up for success in the future. The Greenacres community is a wonderful school with talented faculty and staff and supportive parents, and I appreciated having learned so much about them and from them through the process, and I look forward to seeing the next phase of Greenacres with the leadership of Trish. While Trish does not officially begin at Green Acres until July 1st, there will be opportunities for all to get to know Trish in the upcoming months, and this will let her hit the ground running in July. So I invite Trish up to the microphone. Thank you all. Thank you. Wow. I'm just so honored and excited for this opportunity. And I just want to thank the entire Scarsdale community for all the well wishes and congratulations and support that I've received over the years.
005This is now my 26th year in Scarsdale, and I'm just so happy to still be here a part of the Scarsdale family. And I really am looking forward to meeting the Greenacre students. We have a few here tonight, and the families, and the staff, and the faculty. And I'm ready for this next chapter in our journey together. Thank you. One important step still to happen. The board has to take action. I believe this item is Ron's. Thank you, Susie. I move the following. Be it resolved that the board approve the recommendation of the superintendent to appoint Ms. Trish Isello to the position of principal of Greenacres Elementary School, effective July 1, 2025, for a three-year probationary period ending June 30, 2028. Thank you, Ron. Is there a second? Thank you, Leah. Any discussion? All those
006in favor, please say aye. Aye. Ayes have it, and the motion carries. Congratulations, Ms. Isaiah. Thank you so much. I'd like to extend my congratulations, and we do look forward to seeing you at Green Acres next year and seeing what you're going to be doing. Free free sass. Thank you. Good evening. I call this third budget study session to order and note that all board members are present along with Dr. Patrick and members of his cabinet. Welcome to all those who have joined us this evening either in the audience or tuning in on our live stream or via Zoom. For tonight's session as we did for the last budget study session, we have added a public comment opportunity at the end of the budget study session before we adjourn and move into our business meeting.
007There will also be, as usual, two public comment sessions during the business meeting. Anyone who wishes can also email the board at boardofed.scarsdaleschools.org. The board welcomes your feedback throughout this budget process. And at this time... Okay, great. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I add my welcome to everyone who is tuning in or is in person. And so tonight we're going to review a quick review of the budget development process in case anyone's tuning in for the first time. I'll turn it over to Andrew to review fund balance history. We will then review the draft budget plan. talk about budget accomplishments and then take your direction through questions and discussion in terms of next steps before public comment. Okay so in terms of the budget development process again I know these slides start to
008become a little bit redundant for those who sit around this table but it is important to remember the school budget provides the necessary financial resources to operate the school district to help achieve the goals and objectives of our school district for students You will recall we've developed a new vision statement last year as part of our strategic planning process to complement our mission statement. And together these are the highest level things we're trying to achieve with and for our students. And again, here's the view of our three major areas of the strategic plan, learning, living, and leading, where we envision a collaborative future-oriented academic culture, educational environments that promote well-being, belonging, and resilience, and a commitment to inquiry, interdependence, and innovation. Though complicated, we've shared this model at our budget study sessions to help provide
009a bird's eye view of the sort of essential work in the organizational structure of our school district. The three circles communicate the critical functions of our work with students and student learning situated at the center of it all. Our budget is structured to support all three areas of the organization with teaching and learning held up by the operational and student support functions. Of course, the Board of Education and our community express provide input and guidance for all of the work through governance and budgetary support. finally this slide we have talked in the past about the remarkable commitments our community has made Scarsdale community has made over time to establish and maintain an instructional program that meets the needs of our students at each level our elementary middle and high school the design of the instructional
010program reflects community values these structures foster favorable student to teacher ratios create smaller learning communities within the larger school setting, and allow our students to express agency over their course of study. I won't repeat that discussion in its entirety, but I'll reiterate that the resources directed toward this organization of our schools creates the strong foundation that allows us to focus on the whole child while pursuing innovation and thoughtful adaptations to meet the needs of our learners. With that, I will turn it over to Andrew to discuss fund balance history. So I will start with the fund balance history, which is a slide that you're familiar with from prior presentations. This slide has been updated slightly from the February 3rd presentation, but reflects the same numbers that we discussed last week, where there's an additional $90,900
011reflected on the assigned fund balance, which is to address those one-time capital expenses we expect to include in a future bond proposition. The adjustment to unassigned fund balance is the offset of that, so the total fund balance of $20 million. 830,421 is our projected fund balance for the end of this fiscal year. The next two slides are, three slides, excuse me, are some new slides that we haven't presented in the past, but we thought based on some of the feedback we've been getting that they might be helpful to better understand how we've seen fund balance change over the time. This first one goes back to the 15-16 school year and reflects the total fund balance and reserves at that fiscal year end. The year-to-year change from the prior fiscal year to the year listed. And
012then the percentage that that fund balance and reserve total represents as opposed to the subsequent year's budget. So that will tell you kind of in relation to as our budget grows over time, how much is our fund balance kind of in line with that. And I think it stems from a question that Ron actually posed as some of the questions around the fund balance and reserve plan that I did back in the fall. So you can see here that each year the fund balance does change. However, over the last few years, we've had a steady trend of fund balance decline as we came out of the pandemic and continue to see some of our budget lines get tighter and our revenue sources get tighter as well. So currently, again, the projection for the end of
013the fiscal year this year is $20,834,021, or essentially 11% of next year's proposed budget. The next slide is breaking out these numbers so that by color you can see how the fund balance is made up over time. The unassigned fund balance is at the base, the lighter blue color. This is the most flexible fund balance we have. It can be used for any purpose that the Board wishes. Above that is our subsequent year appropriations, the amount of money we've set aside to balance the subsequent year's budget. I'll go up a little bit higher in the The magenta color there is our tax cert reserve to pay for refund of property taxes based on tax certiorari proceedings. And then I'll jump again up to the top and just talk about the health reserve for our self-funded
014health plan, which is at the top, a darker bluish gray color there. So each of these you can see change over time based on different decisions the board has made over the years. The next slide. shows each of those categories as a percentage of the overall fund balance. Just to get a sense of when we do have money in our reserve and fund balance, where are we allocating it each year as a percentage. I'll pause there for a second just so people can see it. So then this next slide, we've just broken out the health reserve, health insurance reserve history, because you can see it has fluctuated over time. Certainly we built it up to a substantial level in 16-17, and then again in the 18-19 school year that stayed flat for quite some time.
015But as our health insurance costs have kind of gone up the last few years and the budget has not been able to keep pace, we've appropriated more and more of that reserve to balance the budget. or to deal with expenses that have been incurred above the budget in the current fiscal year that we need to fund. We'll talk about our draft budget plan. So in each of my colleagues' presentations, as well as my own and Dr. Patrick's the last few weeks, we've gone through each of these categories kind of in some more detail. Our school budget is broken up into various categories, general support, instruction, transportation, community services, and then the undesignated section, which includes employee benefits, debt service, and then our transfer to other funds. You can see here the increases are in the
016budget-to-budget variance column, the second from the right. And we've left for reference sake the proposed budget versus our budget study session one, which is the budget we presented that had a $2 million budget gap. categories of spending we've reduced from budget study session one. General support and instruction, general support is going up year to year by about 1.72 percent. Instruction by 1.76 percent. Transportation by just over 1 percent. Community services is .34. And then our undistributed expenses are going up 7.96. That includes 9.12% for our employee benefits category, which is the significant driver in this year's budget, as we've talked about. So as a review, this slide looks familiar. Let's take a look at the summary of the proposed staffing changes. The proposed budget additions include the two special class positions, one at the middle
017school and one at the high school, as well as one contingency position that we've returned to the budget since February 3rd. This would allow for us to maintain our current approach to elementary class sizes. And as the board has seen, we have some elementary sections where enrollment is close to the maximum. So that contingency could come into play there. You also remember that we added a teaching assistant to support ICT at Heathcote after the budget was voted on this year. And that position remains in the budget, but would be associated with the 812 class moving to the middle school. We're also proposing the elimination of some teaching positions. First is the remaining contingency position, a 1.0 elementary position, which is related to lower enrollment and section projections, a 1.0 elementary coordinator, so we would not
018hire for a vacancy associated with one of our retirements. We would reduce K-12 art by 0.4 and achieve this with scheduling efficiencies, a 0.6 secondary world language. by looking at enrollment and adjustments to schedules, .5 high school math, a 1.0 high school technology support, which is through attrition. As you recall, Meredith Dutra is leaving Scarsdale. And then two additional positions that we're still finalizing at this point. So the staffing reductions would also impact our database manager, which is currently an unfilled civil service position, and about $226,000 in teacher aid time, which is about a 10% time reduction. This is back to me. As we spoke about last week in detail both in the budget study session as well as in the business meeting with our presentation from Highland Fleets, this budget includes a six-month cost
019for an eight-year capital and services agreement with Highland Electric Fleets to implement our charging infrastructure at the bus compound. This will give us the power and infrastructure needed to charge our four electric vehicles that we intend to have by the end of next fiscal year. Over the eight-year period, the anticipated cost is approximately $1.14 million of this agreement with Highland, and we will anticipate approximately $171,000 in state aid to be returned back on that cost. The agreement will cover all the steps of infrastructure build out, planning and implementation, as well as the chargers, the charging software, and the electricity to power our electric buses. It will be all wrapped into that agreement, as will training of our district staff on how to operate and maintain electric vehicles. So it will be an important agreement that
020does not include the bus itself, but has all the surrounding infrastructure. This is an important slide from a transparency perspective because this is an eight-year services agreement, right? There's been a lot of discussion between myself, our district's legal counsel, the State Education Department, and Highland on making sure that everything is handled properly to ensure that we receive that state aid. I'm happy to report that as of last week, I have in writing a commitment from the State Education Department that this contract will be aided as long as the detail in our budget book will include this information. that I've listed on that slide. So we're excited to move forward with Highland in this next year's budget. So in summary, the draft budget plan, year over year, our budget is going up $6.5 million, or 3.55%.
021Our other revenue sources come in about $702,500, or 5.61%. Our signed fund balance is increasing by that $90,900 I mentioned earlier for the capital work that we're going to be doing that we hope to, if a bond is successful, return that to the fund balance. And our property tax levy is going up exactly at the cap, is $5,777,308, or 3.4% year-to-year. And again, our total budget is $191,504,833. The next slide just shows that tax cap calculation. I went through this last week, so I won't go into much detail, but you can follow from our starting point of current year school levy at the top left, following through all the prior year adjustments, and then CPI at the bottom left, which is capped at 2%. And then we add back our capital exclusions on the right-hand
022side to come up with our new tax levy limit for the fiscal year 2025-2026. This chart reflects that tax levy cap number as our levy assumption. And then you can see all of the revenue categories that make up our budget, offsetting our property taxes below that line. Included in here is the assumed fund balance usage and appropriation of reserves to balance our budget at $191,504,833 on the bottom right, second column from the right. Okay, so I'll pick it up from here. So here's a shorter version of two slides ago or three slides ago again just to state it our proposed revised proposed budget the same budget we proposed on March 3rd is one hundred ninety one million five hundred and four thousand eight hundred and thirty three dollars a six million five hundred and seventy
023thousand seven hundred and eight dollar budget to budget increase five million seven hundred seventy seven thousand three hundred and eight dollar increase to the tax levy The limit, tax levy limit, as Andrew just discussed, $175,813,222, which is at the tax cap, and that would result in a tax rate increase of 1.77% for residents of Scarsdale and a tax rate decrease of minus 0.23% for the residents in the Mamaroneck Strip. And as we've done in recent years, and this was updated, a slight change from what was there earlier today, using the median assessed home values to show a representative tax bill change. Obviously, every individual is different. using the 1.32 million dollar median assessed value for Scarsdale that would be a 415 dollar increase over their current year taxes and using the median value from a
024Mimernick of 1.971 million would result in a 62 dollar decrease taxes okay and finally this just shows a multi-year look of the budget to budget change and the tax levy change from 2014-15 right up through to the proposed 2025-2026 school year budget and with that we will talk about some of the things we think this budget if adopted and and approved would would accomplish and we'll start with Edgar Thanks Drew. I'm happy to share with you a summary of what this budget provides through the lens of learning. A budget focused on cultivating a vibrant academic culture where critical and creative thinking flourish. Our commitment begins with funding instruction and structures tailored for each educational level. At the elementary stage, we are prioritizing small class sizes to ensure more personalized attention. As students progress to middle
025school, the house and team structure will provide a supportive and collaborative environment. Meanwhile, our high school students will benefit from a dynamic and enriched program of study. All this is supported by staffing levels that align with the high expectations of our community and district. We are also expanding our special class programs with the 8-1-2 structure for the middle school and the 12-1 ratio for high school, ensuring that students with diverse and unique needs can continue their education within our district. Our commitment to excellence extends to elementary math program which will receive ongoing attention to drive continuous improvement. Additionally, we are developing performance based assessments that align with our strategic plan priorities, ensuring that our students are well prepared for future success in knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Importantly, we are opening doors to the world by
026providing students with authentic global opportunities and partnerships through organizations like GEBG and Round Square. These experiences will be complemented by implementation of sustainability projects created in collaboration with our community and schools. This budget allows us to continue to nurture an academic environment where every student can thrive. And now I will pass this slide on to Eric to discuss living. Thank you, Edgar. Our living part of the strategic plan supports students' development of the dispositions necessary to live well-balanced lives and meaning. This budget continues to promote our well-being and belonging work through enriching curriculum and expanding responsive classroom. There's plans to construct a new synthetic turf practice field at Scarsdale High School supporting hundreds of athletes. Initiating a co-designed and multi-year plan to replace elementary school playgrounds and continuing investment in our social worker supports across
027K-12. and finally maintaining our annual investments in instructional technology while expanding our deployment of door jar and cameras across the district. And I'll close this section with the area of leading. The budget promotes continuous educational capital and process improvements through inquiry and innovation by funding our pre-referendum architectural engineering construction management costs that are associated with the development of a new multi-year capital project plan that will be guided by a district-wide capital project steering committee. the acquisition and deployment of four electric school buses to initiate the long-term migration from fossil fuel powered vehicles to zero emission vehicles consistent with New York State law and our sustainability goals and finally flexible and needs-based partnerships with educational institutions trainers and expert organizations to provide exemplary professional learning for educators support for innovation through the community of inquiry and
028innovation and just as a reminder we are currently in our fifth budget related meeting for this school year and the next meeting will occur two weeks from tonight on March 24th where we will give a full review of the budget and hold the second community budget forum the first one being back in November at the beginning of the process then at the April 7th board business meeting we'll ask the board to adopt a proposed budget for voter consideration and again that timing is so we can meet the statutory requirements of notice and communication about the budget prior to the budget vote and election on May 20th at Scarsdale Middle School and with that we'll turn it over to the board questions and feedback and discussion about the fund balance slides I know I asked this
029a few meetings ago I just want to make sure since I know we're going out to bond planning for that will our reserve levels now and next year as we see it as it's you know going affect our ability to go out to bond at all, like affect our ratings. It is a possibility, but at the current levels, I don't believe so. I think one of the biggest things that New York State municipalities, including school districts, have is supportive tax base. And the fact that we've got a significant amount of property wealth in Scarsdale, I think that they take that into consideration when they do their ratings reviews. In fact, Moody's most recently reaffirmed our credit rating based on the current market conditions and our existing debt that's outstanding. They reaffirmed it at a AAA
030rating. And I was looking on, you know, the graphs with the different reserves, and, you know, isn't there a New York State, like, maximum amount? or is it unassigned fund balance as a percentage of the budget? So the light blue at the very bottom base of this chart is the unassigned fund balance. That figure is capped at 4% of the subsequent year's budget. Okay. And where are we with that exactly? I believe we're projected to be at 3.7% at the end of this fiscal year. If we were above that number, we would likely come to the board making a recommendation to move some of those funds into one of these other reserves. most likely the health reserve and the tax cert reserve I know we kind of built it up and it's around the four
031million do you like it at that number or is that something where you would ever would you ever be able to transfer for example you know if we needed to to the encumbrances or a different you know reserve if needed yeah so there's room to grow that reserve believe it or not but but I think it's it's at a good point right now based on the tax cert activity in the community I think as as property taxes go up and tax-referred proceedings perhaps happen, we should make sure that we've got a good handle on our exposure there. Each fiscal year, we present to our auditors a list of all the petitions that are outstanding and the requested reductions, and the auditors actually ensure that our reserve is not overstated based on that, and we've never
032been in that position. And I know, you know, from the trends and from the graphs... and from just watching the board process throughout the years um you know we've been pulling a certain amount as i know covid was covid but since covid you know toward the budget And is that really it feels like it's going that that number that we're pulling from the fund balance is going towards recurring expenses Every year and not just going to a one-time expense that you know, you don't need it again the next year With the exception of the $90,000 I pointed out earlier I think I think that's unfortunately starting to be the norm and I think as budgets are getting tighter and our revenue sources are not really growing consistently, we are starting to rely on that fund
033balance to balance the budget. I think that's some of the concern I shared in the long range financial plan as well. Otherwise, I'm okay. Just, you know, another comment generally, just, you know, which I know we know, but to always be aware of what our decisions, like the impact we'll have on the immediate future budget cycle. And I appreciate all the work that's gone into this budget. I know it's very complex and creative things that have been thought about and done. And just in terms of curriculum and special education and moving forward, just to be thoughtful about constantly. I still think parent input and feedback and some sort of mechanism and awareness of what that experience is because it often does relate to the child experience at home. If there's a way to facilitate that
034as part of the process for evaluating and assessing and understanding and constantly improving. So I just wanted to say that again. Thank you. I'm sorry. Just quickly, Eric, with respect to you made a comment about the door jar sensors and cameras. I recall last year we struck some of those items from the budget, especially the cameras. I think the agreement to go forth may be fewer door jar sensors than had been originally the case. How does what you were referring to... is that stuff that we didn't do last year that we're doing this year or what so we have just recently received the quotes for adding door jar sensors in the building I'm meeting with day in the next week or so to kind of discuss it you know it In order to move forward,
035we need to put in a piece of hardware in each of our seven buildings that manages those door jar sensors on however many doors that we pick to use. So we are waiting to see what installing that on all buildings are, what that will leave. We have about $88,000. in the budget earmarked for those types of improvements so we have to kind of break down that they gave us the quotes for all of the priority doors plus this that we we were plus the piece of equipment we were looking to put in so we need to sit down with them and kind of break that out into if we start with putting in the essentially the the controlling hardware in all of the buildings how many doors can we do this year and the next
036year's appropriation under ssem would allow for us to add doors to that already existing hardware does that make sense it does but I guess my question then would be since we had numbers in the budget for last year for this is this a carry forward of what no so that we are going to use what we had budgeted for cameras I'm sorry for a door jar sensors this year this year it just took a little while for them to come in and do the quoting so we expect that to happen this year the work may happen in the summer But next year we have an appropriation at SSEM similar to the one that was there this year to continue on that expansion. Okay. Thanks for this update. Andrew, can you just help me understand a
037little bit the math on slide 22, how we get from a 3.4% tax levy increase, but then only a 1.7% tax rate increase for Scarsdale when Mamaronex also had a reduction? So the information I use to calculate this is the assessed values from the assessor's office at both Maranick and Scarsdale. The Scarsdale assessment has gone up significantly this year. Part of that I'm... Believe is related to the pilot agreement that's no longer in place So now that that property is back on the tax rolls as well as improvements throughout the community in the properties So the assessed values have no risen the rise in assessed value in Scarsdale In relation to the assessed value in the Marin act when you convert it to full market value Shifts that tax burden between the two municipalities slightly
038more onto the Scarsdale side Okay, appreciate that. Eric, at the last meeting, we talked about we are reducing 150,000 related services from next year's budget. So compared to this year's budget is related services budgeted flat, increasing but just not as much or decreasing? Increasing but not as much. And do you know how much we're increasing it? So later in this meeting, for everybody that will stay, we are being asked to transfer $250,000 into related services for special ed. So those two things felt at odds from the last meeting. About $150,000. I can go back and get the exact number, but that's right in the ballpark. But we do have some students graduating who have significant. related services in the behavioral realm. What we are seeing is a reduction in outside tuition. We planned for an
039unknown tuition. We haven't used that. And we've seen an increase in some students that needed behavioral supports and speech specifically. Appreciate that. It's just, it is, it feels like an area where we could be over budget next year. Seeing a budget transfer of that size come to us today in light of the fact that we reduce it and if that's the plan to reduce it, I think we should all be prepared. Our ability to absorb expenses that come in over budget is being diminished by our reduction in fund balance. Edgar, I had a quick question about the slides. curriculum so I heard the the learning living in leading I totally understand how all of these bullets translate into the budget we've been discussing except for one I I understand what it is I'd still understand
040the relation to the budget and that was the development of performance based assessments I don't remember talking about that is something we're putting money into The development of performance-based assessment really relates to the types of assessments that go beyond assessing just knowledge and skills, but also dispositions and practices that students are developing. And as we look at the strategic plan at the areas of learning, living, and leading, we know that we need to start treasuring what we measure and measuring what we treasure. performance assessments are a way to get to that also they rely on students to demonstrate their learning across different disciplines in an integrated way I think and the financial piece of it I can it's really a prioritization of funds that exist for summer program yeah sorry that's where it would be
041spent for a better term My suggestion is as we especially as we start appropriating funds I I do not think students and parents have a good sense of what this is all about and where this is going and if it is going somewhere for all the district wide my suggestion to you would be to get ahead of that I Just my sense is people don't even know what that term means. Okay, you know what? I appreciate that feedback On the 24th, when we do the math presentation, we're going to be defining performance assessments in a variety of different ways, and I hope that helps. Thank you. And then my last is just a comment. I just want to reiterate my concern about balancing this budget on fund balance. Lee asked a good question about using
042one-time funding sources for recurring expenses. I just want... This board, to understand what next year's board is going to deal with, if health care comes in at budget next year, so everything works out perfectly next year to our budget, you will be in a $1 million hole. You will start in a $1 million hole because of the use of fund balance. It is not sustainable, and I have yet to hear a plan that talks about how we deal with that next year. And it's very, to me it is very concerning because it both is not sustainable, but it also, if I think about risk appetite, which I can't speak for the community, and risk mitigation, the reduction of fund balance. inhibits our ability, in my opinion, to do those things. Like things that three years
043ago we would have been okay taking some risk because we have this cushion is going away. I think it's very troubling and I want to reiterate that. And I want to just say one comment about the sports and I think it's five sports that are on the board for either being cut or expenses being cut and asked to be fundraised. I personally don't think the approach has been fair. If we're going to do that, then I think we should do it across all sports. I really appreciate the data on the winter sports. It was very helpful. I don't have it for spring and fall. There is a wide dispersion of how much we spend on sports. In fairness, if we're going to look for expense reductions, I think it should be everywhere, not just five
044sports. And I think we should start with the sports that, per cost player, there are some that are outliers. If that I don't actually agree with doing that I think we should find the reductions elsewhere but if that's the approach that others want to do I I think that would be the fair approach not just to differentiate between a sanctioned and unsanctioned sport that is not I don't believe in line with how we do things in this district with lots of other aspects just based on what an outside entity deems as whether it's sports or other activities that are sort of quote sanctioned. So those are my comments. If no one else has a question, I have a quick question actually for Andrew. For the Highland slide 18, for the net cost of let's say
045a million dollars for the eight year lease, does that get us to full electrification? I know the deadline's a little bit past that, right? So what this gets us is the four charges we need to charge the four buses. However, what it also gets us is the first investment on utility to expand upon as we continue to roll out the EV buses. So on the right-hand side of the slide, you see the little dark black box around four vehicles. The green vehicles there that are adjacent to it is kind of the phase one infrastructure rollout. This installation will kind of get us enough power to continue that rollout of the Phase I set of chargers. If you recall, I think there was four phases of rollout that Highland kind of laid out for us over
046the next 12 years or so. This will get us closer to Phase I. So for a full electrification fleet, we're looking at a big number. Sorry, yes. That's why we thought that this was a prudent approach for just the first four. We could see how this works out and either expand upon it with a much smaller incremental amount for the remaining vehicles in that phase one if we stay with Highland, or we could choose to go our own route and include the infrastructure costs for the next phase at a later budget cycle. You talked before about... For the unassigned fund balance of a percentage, I guess it was 4% that is sort of a state criteria of a max, are there similar benchmarks for the other categories or for it as a whole? Because obviously
047fund balance is made up of all of these components and to some degree they are, correct me if I'm wrong, you know, fungible in the sense that they could be moved around somewhat. And I'm just curious, we seem to be focusing on the unassigned, but what about... fund balance as a total are there Maximums or minimums that the state makes us be aware of there are Back up might be the easiest way to talk through it So slide 10 is where we itemized out our history of different reserves So I mentioned a moment ago that our auditors look at our exposure on tax cert reserves. They they need to ensure that that's a reasonable value based on the exposure. So that's annually audited by our auditors. Okay. The health insurance reserve, we've talked about that
048in prior presentations even before I got here, with some justification in comparable plans on what an appropriate level of the health reserve would be. So there is kind of an upper range for that as well. I don't have it off memory, but we could find that in the documents and share it with you. The debt service reserve is directly related to funds that were obtained through debt but that were not expended because the projects came in under budget. So we're obligated based on whatever that final number was to use that to offset future debt payments. So that's kind of a fixed number. The retirement system reserve again typically around three years worth of your ERS. budget so that's a again it's a general practice and then the reserve for encumbrances are directly related to purchase
049orders that have not been the goods or services have not been received at June 30th so they're tied to actual purchase orders so there's a fixed number that that can be at the end of the year I think at least for myself sometimes it's helpful to step back and look at the Scarsdale financial profile in relationship to other districts other counties so that we sort of know where we stand because I think sometimes it feels like it's a very personal Scarsdale issue as opposed to a broader economic issue or or issue within the state so I'm just curious if we were to investigate or maybe through your conversations with similar districts you know, whether our percentage is typical, is it high, is it low. You know, if I were to go, which I try to
050do, not very successfully, to go into different districts to see what their fund balances are so that we can have some sort of a sense of perspective about the situation globally, globally in the sense of the state. I mean, do we know, for example, whether when you get together with other districts, is everybody struggling with a similar tension within their budget, or is it a unique? Scarsdale I'd say similar but but but each district is unique I mean certainly our issue with our health reserve is unique to Scarsdale so each district has their own things I can think of a colleague who's dealing with a power plant issue where you know their tax cert reserve needs to be much higher so like each one is a bit specific but the data does exist out there
051where we're you know either through the property tax report card or or through financial statements online we could probably see what many districts Yeah, I'm not saying we need to go overboard. I'm just curious. You know, I think it's interesting or comforting to know what the context is compared to peer districts so that we understand, you know, what we're dealing with, whether we're an outlier or not. That's the only reason I'm asking. One of the things we can start doing, this past Friday was the first weekly collection through West Putt These factors for each of the participating districts We submitted ours and we get a spreadsheet Eventually, they'll share a spreadsheet of where now that's not the long-term picture That's this year as they as districts are planning for next year We can certainly share
052that with you share that with the full board so that they everybody has an understanding of kind of where our region is Bob, I'll go back to your first question. I think the fund balance and reserve plan that I presented in the fall, it kind of tried to articulate some of those upper-lower boundaries, so maybe help you there. When we're done with this budget process, the intention is to take our most recent data, update that fund balance reserve plan for the financials as well as the feedback I got in November, and we'll reissue that document, and it might be a helpful resource to the board. probably be a rhythm we get into is twice a year to present that in before the budget process and after the budget process Thank You Susie this isn't really
053a question but I just wanted to follow up on Leah's point about sort of the recurring expenses that we're using reserves for and Ron's comments about you know this not really being a very sustainable path forward I do have concerns as well I'm not sure how to solve them but I do think as a board we need to be keeping an eye on this very closely you know i i just don't see us being able to continue down this path i think i think we it's our fiduciary duty to continue to look at what we're doing and i know it's been a tough year this year so i appreciate the work of all the cabinet members and my fellow board members but i just i am concerned i think we need to continue to watch
054this closely because We can't keep doing this. This isn't sustainable. When you look at the numbers on slide 11, ever since COVID, we've been almost taking over a million dollars every year. We haven't put anything back. I don't know what it looked like before that, if it fluctuated more, but I think we need to have a serious look at our spending. So you say we should look at our spending. No one's saying we should go over to the tax cap, though. I mean, I have to ask the question. To be clear, I'm not saying we should go over the tax cap. I agree. I don't think we should go over the tax cap. I do think that for next year's budget, we need to look closely at that 1.1 maybe not being something that we
055do every year or a way to cut that number down. And I think we have to every year reconsider what we're going to do with the health care plan because we are running out of money. Ron was very clear. That's gonna happen at the rate we're going and if it continues to go then I don't know If it continues to be this volatile, I don't know how much longer we can afford to keep doing this So I think that's another thing we're gonna have to keep on the list of things to consider Possibly in the future. I'm trying to assess kind of what people are saying. I mean We are expected to approve this budget Soon so if anyone has serious reservations like not ready to move forward. Because I hear people close to saying
056that, but I don't know if we need to make more reductions, we should say so as a group. Well, I mean, putting aside what I think maybe Ron would feel differently, but I don't hear anyone saying this is the year that we have to, you know... Do an austerity budget to make up a million dollar or eleven one point one million dollar cap I'm thinking about the you know, the drawdown of one point one specifically I Mean, you know, I think there will come a time when we do have to say that and do that and it will have Significant repercussions I believe in our community when we say and do that. I don't think that I'm hearing This is the year we do that But I think that will have to happen probably next
057year when I'm president. That's a very self-centered comment. But I mean, it will have to happen, I think, relatively soon. I just can't imagine that it won't. I don't disagree. I guess I was just asking the group if it's this year. And I agree it's not necessarily this year. I mean, you're asking. I just want to be clear. I think I've been quite clear at this table. Yeah, I do have serious reservations about this budget. about this budget I've heard elsewhere next year potentially if I'm wrong I think also next year is where I'm looking thank you for the clarification yeah I mean I'm it's very it is very concerning to be pulling that amount and we know it's not sustainable and we know kind of where we're going and we know we have all
058these factors kind of pushing on us right and they're uncertain so I don't know. I mean, I'm going to be on the ward next year, so it's very concerning for all of us in our district. I don't know that this is the year to go for the cap, though. I think, you know, we went over the cap last year, and, you know, that wasn't easy for the community to do, and they paid very high taxes and fiduciaries, and we're in a very complex, you know, situation. So, you know, I wouldn't want to go for the cap this year. And I know that you looked hard at this budget to figure out what could be reduced, and I believe you reduced what you could. So I kind of feel like this is where we are right
059now, but there should be a lot of kind of warning lights going for us to think about what's going to end up happening for everyone next year. There are a lot of tough questions ahead. Thank you. Yeah, I think... Nobody loves the situation we're in, but I agree. I don't think we can go over the tax cap this year. And I agree that we're looking maybe next year. Okay, going on to the next item, if no one else has any other comments, would be the public comment session. To correct an earlier statement I misspoke, there will be this public comment session and there will be one other during the business meeting. Okay, I will read the preamble to the public comment. Members of the public are cordially invited to speak on district related items or
060other non-personnel related matters during two separate public comment periods. When it is your turn to speak, please state your name, address, and if you are speaking on behalf of an organization. For those commenting remotely, please mute the live stream voice, turn on your camera, and then unmute yourself. Speakers will be asked to conclude their remarks after four minutes and will be given a verbal cue at the three minute mark. If at this point a speaker has additional comments, they may send them in writing to the board via email at boardofed.scarsdaleschools.org. The public comment period is reserved for comments only. The board will not engage in dialogue. The board reserves the right to respond to comments and questions at its discretion, either during response to public comment or at a later time and place. Response to
061public comment will take place after the first and second public comment periods. And with that, I'd like to ask if anybody in the audience would like to make a public comment. Zoom? Oh, you do. Okay, sorry. Yeah, please. I didn't know you were getting something to come speak. Please. I just wanted to say I'm a 35-year resident here, and I've been sitting in the building longer than all of you. Oh, I'm sorry. Could you give your name and address, please? Oh, of course. Sorry. And is there a button to push? No, I don't believe so. I was Joanne Wallenstein 13 Colvin Road and also the publisher of Scorza 1583 so what I'm trying to say is that I've been following these budgets for many many years and One number that you know, I always looked
062at was What are our reserves and how many employees do we have? And, you know, I'm a big supporter of schools. I just really want to say that. And I really think that every kid should have what they need. I mean, that's really what I believe. I don't have any kids in the school now, so, you know, you can understand. But I am concerned. I don't know if this is still the fact. Andrew had given a slide in November that showed we were going to run out of reserves next. 2627 altogether now what the slide you just showed tonight doesn't show that so if that's not the case good that's great but if it is we're going to have a problem because we can't raise taxes, we can't do like the national government and just
063raise the debt limit. We're going to have to balance the budget, which is going to be very uncomfortable. I kind of disagree. I mean, I don't know. Since we're sitting here right now, maybe we should be thinking about what we can do now so we're not all in this completely stressed-out situation next year and have to make more cuts. The thing I notice the most is that... In the last 10 years, we increased our headcount by 70 employees, full-time employees. And if you had a business that the revenue was flat and you increased the full-time headcount by 70, no wonder we're breaking here because the health costs and the pensions are, you know, more than this constant budget can sustain. I would think carefully about increasing headcount again. That's just going to make it even
064harder, you know, if we are. Maybe the new slide kind of showed that we're cutting some positions and adding some, so maybe we're keeping it constant. I can't tell from the slides that you guys are presenting. But, you know, as a board member, I would be really scared to move ahead only because I wouldn't want to put our whole, like, district in jeopardy, which is really. Could be a crisis, but I don't know maybe I'm just being an alarmist. So, you know, that's that's what I'm looking at. Thank you. Thank you Would anybody else in the audience like to make a public comment? Hello. My name is Brian Zao. I live at 3 Tyler Road I'm here to speak in support of the multivariable calculus class This year I was disheartened to learn that the
065planned removal of the multivariable calculus class By offering this course, you offer an easily accessible step that students can take in order to further their mathematical pursuits. The alternative being CTY classes, which can cost up to $3,000 for each student to get a fraction of what the actual school class would offer. And beyond just myself, this class represents a growing wave of students in our district. A few years ago, one or two students might have taken this path. Now there are over 10 students in my year alone. This is not an outlier. This is a trend. It's a signal that more students are rising to meet this challenge and want to go even further. Removing this class right now at the exact moment when interest is climbing would be like building a ladder halfway up
066and then telling students that they cannot climb higher, not because they're unprepared, but because the next rung just isn't there. From a practical standpoint, this is one of the most cost-effective high-level courses we offer. We already have the teacher, the classroom, and the students. Running one section of multivariable calculus is a relatively low cost for the school, but the return on that investment in student growth, engagement, and achievement is enormous. It also creates something more than just a course. It builds a culture. Students in this class often become mentors, tutors, and leaders in the school's academic community. They share ideas, help underclassmen, and contribute to a school environment where it's cool to be curious, where a passion for learning isn't just allowed, but celebrated. At its core, this is what it's really about. While not
067every student takes multivariable calculus, that's okay. Not every student plays a varsity sport or performs in the school musical either. But for the students who do love math, who wake up excited to solve a new problem, who stay after class to explore a concept just a little further. This course is a lifeline. It tells them that their passion matters and their school believes in pushing boundaries and there will always be a next step for those who want to take it. Let's not take that message away. Thank you. Is there anybody else who would like to make a public comment? Hello. My name is Kevin Dong. I'm from 15 Elm Road. And I would like to also speak in support of the multivariable calculus class while making a few separate points. I understand and deeply respect
068the concerns raised about accessibility, the requiring students to skip a math level to reach multivariable calc can create barriers. But removing the class altogether doesn't solve the equality issue. In fact, it risks making it worse. The proposed alternative requiring around $1,500 to $3,000 at CTY is just simply not an accessible solution. Right now the class is a rigorous in-person teacher guided class that's offered free by our district It's a pathway for students who are passionate about stem and from speaking with the teacher himself It's clear that the emphasis on in-person is important because not only are we allowing people to collaborate and grow together It also turns something that could be monotonous or possibly even boring into a fun experience after all That's why our school has a math team. That's why our school holds
069math contests. And that's why we are hoping to nurture these abilities instead of simply trying to put them down and hide them away. It's also worth noting that we already have courses in our school, such as advanced history or honors tracks that require tests or certain prerequisites. We haven't removed those classes because not everyone can take them. Instead, we've kept them. Why should math be any different? Thank you for your time. Would anybody else like to make a public comment? I'm also a junior at SHS and I live at 32 Stonehouse Road and I'm also here to support the continuation of multivariable calculus class at SHS. I've always had a strong passion for math and I love how rigorous and fulfilling our current math courses are. The challenges and depth in these classes push us
070to think critically and grow intellectually. Offering the multivariable calculus class would continue that path of academic rigor for me over all four years of high school. It would allow me and nine other confirmed students to explore advanced topics and develop a deeper understanding of mathematics. In addition to the many issues with alternative online courses that Kevin outlined, I want to bring attention to one other important detail. I find the math teachers at SHS extremely passionate and knowledgeable, and I often go to them for extra help to get a better understanding of the material. Many times I've gone to teachers to discuss how to apply the math we learn to other subjects or hobbies of mine, such as robotics. This outside of class help isn't something that is as easily available if we were to take
071an online course. In addition, there's a certain level of collaboration with peers that is hard to replicate in an online setting. Being able to work through challenging problems together, bounce ideas off each other, and build a deeper understanding through discussion is invaluable. I believe our school should continue fostering an explorative environment by keeping multivariable calculus available to students. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Chen Lei. I'm currently a junior at SHS and I live at 100 Potter Road. Thank you for the opportunity for letting me speak for the continuation of the multivariable calculus course. I've developed a strong passion for math since second grade and the rigorous, comprehensive, and engaging curriculum for math here at Scarstow really helped me to pursue further in this area that I love. As I go into
072my fourth year of high school, I really want to continue this path of academic rigor that will allow me and nine other equally passionate students to dive deeper into this advanced topic and develop a deeper understanding of math. And we think that multivariable calculus class here at SHS will be a perfect fit. In addition to Ada's comment, I will also want to emphasize that one of the most exciting things about math class is the opportunity for discussion and in-person engagement. And that's a huge part of why I love math, because I get to collaborate with others, develop teamwork and problem-solving skills, and work through challenges together. The close relations with teachers here at SHS are also a fundamental thing that I value in my process of learning, as they're extremely accessible and helpful whenever I
073have any questions. And I always find it easier to develop personal bonds with them, and I think it's very meaningful. However, the online course would simply fail to offer any of those. I also have many friends who have taken the course this year, just to point out a few names, Noah, Om, Neil, Daniel, Thomas. Unfortunately, they're unable to come today due to conflict, but I would also like to emphasize how much they found the course to be engaging and helpful, and that they're also in support of the continuation of this class. Finally, I would like to note that this class isn't just for me or for the class of 2026, but in the future, it will also serve many more passionate SHS students who want to dive deeper into math. I'm a part of the
074Scarceston math team, and I'm already seeing many honored classmen who would actively engage in math and will also be in the same position as us a few years later. I think that the continuation of the multivariable class shouldn't be seen as a privilege to a certain group of people, but rather it fosters the diversity of Scarce because it shows that we care about every student who's interested in math and is willing to provide the opportunity to let their passion grow, just like we do for any other subject or sport. Thank you. Thank you. Would anybody else like to speak that's in the audience? Hi, my name is Claudine Giesel and I live at 10 Kent Road. I just want to support the students that came here just now to talk about the math. I would
075like to share some things that happen when you go and visit colleges with your students. What you discover is that some engineering programs think that there's a poor job being done in the math area. Now my husband, who's from New York, I'm from Boston. went to Cornell, so of course we had to go to Cornell because he loved his school. And we took our son there, and then we had the engineering presentation, which 1,000 people went to, and I saw 20 people from Scarsdale there that I knew. That was so nice. And the head of the engineering department was practically yelling, and I was horrified. And the reason that he was yelling is because he said practically, quote, I'm sick and tired of these kids coming here, and they don't know how to do math.
076And I'm really sick of it. And I'm horrified. And my son was horrified, too. And then he went on to say, from now on, the new requirements in this engineering program, and this is only like a year or two ago, is that I want all the students to submit a recommendation from their calculus teachers. And that has to be one of the two recommendations. And fast forward to today where my son's in a different engineering program, and we ask him how he's doing because it's a trimester and everything's really fast, and we want to make sure that his mental health is good. when he's with just engineering people all the time and he has shared with us that it was great that Scarsdale you know gave him a good physics background and he would help
077some of the other kids who also were accepted but had a harder time and the math it you know he has to take six calculus classes because he wants to build physical structures so the point is This is out there as an issue. I'm just sharing it because I didn't see anybody here in that room of a thousand people. But it's a thing and not everyone's going to do it. But if you're doing something else that's smaller, which Scarsdale does, and I know our family benefited from. I think this is something to be taken seriously. P.S. even though my son's a student, because there's a shortage of engineers, he has a summer job where they save all the work, set up a whole space in a conference room to make a little kid an office.
078pile up the work and just tell him to work as many hours as he can. And then they keep the office there and pile up more and pay him and then tell him to come back at Christmas. And then they pile up more and tell him to come back next summer and they'll give him a raise. And he's like 20. He didn't even finish the program. So this is what's out there. I just want to share it because I didn't see anybody in the room at Cornell. Thank you. Thank you. Would anybody else in the audience like to speak? Seeing there's no one in the audience left to speak, go to Zoom. There are no attendees on Zoom. Okay. Thank you, Jim. We'll give it a few seconds. Still no attendees on Zoom. Okay. Thank
079you. And with that, we will close the public comment session and move on to Item 5, follow-up to public comment. Thank you as always for the public comment we'd like to hear from especially our students definitely appreciate that just to clarify For those who might not have been part of last year's multivariable calculus conversation we did budget to add teaching support to a course that has long been offered at Scarstown High School but through an independent study. This is the first and only year we've done the assigned teacher and specific instructional time to the multivariable calculus and in our proposed budget we are proposing to move back to what we had done for a long time which is the independent course. That's where that particular course stands. We will continue to offer the four AT
080math courses, the stats, BCAB, and linear algebra. Those remain as the, right, I got those, Ken? Those remain the AT courses at Scarsdale High School. like to ask if anybody would like to make a motion to adjourn this budget study session sorry I also just wanted that we are overall reducing our headcount we're gonna have the budget book out later this week do you have the 7.5 district-wide staffing so we're not at a static thank you no thank you for clarifying that would anybody like to make a motion to adjourn this budget study session Thank you, Leah. Is there a second? Thank you, Bob. Any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Ayes have it and motion carries. Would we like to take a break at this point? Yeah, thank you. All right.
081Thank you. Good evening. I'd like to call this meeting to order and note that all board members are present. We are joined by Superintendent Dr. Patrick and members of his administrative cabinet. Welcome to those joining us this evening either in the audience or tuning in on the live stream or via Zoom. Earlier this evening, after an executive session, the board held two special meetings. The first was a special meeting where the board took action to appoint Ms. Trish Aizelo to be the next principal of Green Acres Elementary School. The second was our third and final budget study session before the forum. I'd like to thank those who have provided feedback so far on the budget process. We are truly appreciative of the community's engagement. I'd also like to highlight for those who want to review
082the budget documents that they are on Board Docs this year. You go to Board Docs and then the Library tab. You can find them there. Thank you again for your engagement. And with that, I'll... pass it on to dr patrick thank you very much good evening and i add my welcome to everyone um given that it's a relatively short meeting tonight i'm going to keep my remarks brief but i do want to congratulate trisha ayasello on her appointment as green acre's principal earlier this evening effective july 1st and then i also want to thank the 22 individuals who applied to be part of the capital project steering committee uh tomorrow susie andrew nick ferraro and i are going to meet to review the applications and the resumes and and make some decisions on participation there.
083Our first meeting of that committee will take place on March 20th. And in the meantime, architect Kevin Walsh from BBS and two of his colleagues have completed visits of all seven of our buildings at this point. They toured each school, had thoughtful conversations with our principals and building leadership. And they've also met with Jeannie Crowley, Director of Technology, and with the Athletic Director, Cindy Parrott. So the next immediate step is for us to begin to prepare for that meeting on the 20th, and we'll keep the board updated on the timeline. I'll turn it back to you. Thank you. Given that we just met last week, I don't necessarily expect any board updates, but do we have any board updates? Okay, with that, then we will move on to the next item. I'm going to go
084back to you, Drew. Everything's a little messed up today. Okay, I will read the preamble to the consent agenda. The board may conduct some of its business using a consent agenda in an effort to achieve greater efficiency at board meetings. A consent agenda condenses some of the routine business of the board of education into a single motion. The consent agenda is prepared by the superintendent of schools in consultation with the president and or the vice president of the board. Items are selected for the consent agenda when the officers of the board and the superintendent believe there is no controversy regarding them. The items on the consent agenda will have the same background material as ordinary items on the board agenda. If any member of the board feels that any item on the consent agenda requires
085discussion prior to action, that board member may remove that item from the consent agenda merely by requesting same at the meeting. The exempted item then moves to the regular agenda. However, all non-exempted items would be moved, seconded, and voted upon without discussion in order to provide greater efficiency to conducting the routine items of business of the school district. At this time, I'd like to ask if anybody on the board would like to remove an item from the consent agenda. No? Then we will move to the consent agenda, and I believe this is Amber. No. I am so sorry. Thank you. I'm looking over there. Yes, short consent agenda this week. There are three items on it. 8.01, personnel certified. Item 8.02, personnel non-certified. Item 8.03, the minutes, business meeting budget study session number two, March
0863rd, 2025. I'd like to recommend that the board accept the consent agenda as presented. Thank you, Bob. Is there a second? Thank you, Colleen. Would anybody like to have a discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Ayes have it and motion carries. Next item on the agenda would be budget transfers. I think I'm going to pinch hit for Lisa on this one. She's not here tonight. There are two budget transfers on the agenda this evening, both of them related to special education-related services. The first is for behavioral specialists for some of our students in the ICT and LRC classes, and the second is our speech therapy line for some additional services required there. These transfers are coming from our tuition lines, public and private school tuition lines, to cover those expenses that we
087project for now to the end of this fiscal year. Just you know, I know Ron brought this up earlier and I had you know, just wanted to clarify when I originally read it I thought it was kind of from tuition We were receiving for the services But it's from something that was earmarked for under tuition services that is being moved over to cover these Yeah, this is we we do budget a certain amount of funds for unknown Tuition expensive students need to move out of district. We have not had those expenses this year So but we have had more students needing behavioral intervention and speech So that is where we've taken that from the revenue for tuition from the student Who's currently here from Yonkers and the one that's going to start later this month
088is not involved in this and these are kind of consultant push-in specialists that work with students So yes, so the payment is to behavioral consultants and speech and language therapists that we use in addition to our in-building. Thank you. Any other questions? Then we'll move on to item 9.02, the Scarsdale Schools Health Plan. Okay, thank you very much, Susie. I'll welcome Pat Calborn, who's in the audience tonight. He's our longtime health consultant. He's with One Digital. But first, Megan is going to give more of a broad overview of the self-insured health plan, self-funded health plan, before turning it over to Pat, who will talk about claims projections that we're using for the 2025-26 budget, and then we'll open it up to questions. Thank you for taking time to have this important conversation about our health
089plan. We know that it's a major component of our budget, especially this year as we've had a negative performance in the plan. And it's also important because it's a major part of our employees' lives and their benefits. And so I thought it would be helpful to provide some context before diving in. So as we've shared, the Scarsdale Health Plan is a self-insured plan and not a fully funded plan. So I thought it would be helpful to outline the differences between the two types of plans. With a self-insured plan, the employer, in our case Scarsdale, has more flexibility to design benefits to meet the needs of employees and the needs of the overall plan. we can make more adjustments midstream. With a fully funded plan, the insurance company dictates coverage. So as an example, many larger
090insurance companies cover some of the rather expensive weight loss drugs. The Scarsdale plan does not cover these drugs, and we're able to make that decision because we are self-insured, but we would be unable to make that decision if we were fully funded, and the plan dictated that. So as we're feeling this year in a self-insured plan, the employer takes on the risk and pays for claims directly. So this means that costs can fluctuate and higher claims mean higher costs. The flip side would also be true in that lower claims would mean lower costs. We use stop-loss insurance to limit the potential costs, which means when a claimant hits a high dollar amount, in our case $300,000 in claims, our stop insurance kicks in. In a fully funded plan, the insurance company takes on the risk
091and costs are predictable year to year, although, as is the case, always rising, and there's no benefit to the district in the low claim years. In a consortium, which a number of schools are part of, if another member district has higher claims, we would be then responsible for paying those claims through a variety of ways. A self-insured plan has lower administrative costs than a third-party administrator. So in our case, it's UMR. They manage the plan and we work closely with them. And for fully funded plans, the insurance company manages the plan and there are typically higher administrative costs. Next slide. The management of the plan is a collaborative effort with a health advisory committee. So this committee meets four times throughout the year to review the plan, which includes looking at claims, costs, and possible
092challenges. The committee is consistently asking, is this plan the best path forward? Should we look at a fully funded insurance plan? We receive advice and recommendations from our health care consultant and discuss what's in the best interest of the district. The committee is made up of representatives from each bargaining unit, superintendent, myself, the superintendent for business, retiree representatives, UMR representatives, and Pat. Moving forward, we would make a recommendation to include a board of education member on this committee so that they're privy to the rich discussions that take place as well as some of the challenges that the plan faces. There are a number of ways that we pay for the plan. So members contribute through premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. Obviously, the district pays through the budget process, stop-loss insurance, and all of our retirees older
093than 65 are on Medicare as their primary and the Scarsdale plan as their secondary. Over the years, we've made a number of changes to the plan to respond to rising costs. In 2017, Medicare retirees were moved to an employee group waiver plan called EGWIP for prescription drugs. The EGWIP is structured to take advantage of Medicare rates and operates on a per-member premium rather than a self-insurance model. So this resulted in significant cost stabilization for that particular group. And in 2018, retirees began contributing to the health care plan in retirement. This was a change that had not been done previously. Recently, after negotiations, we made changes to upfront contributions, moving to 11% for our teachers, which is our largest group. And we've also looked to new programs to limit costs, especially around prescription drugs and, you
094know, KenaRx, Amwins, et cetera. In the last negotiations, we started a healthcare stabilization rate, which will help us maintain that 20-80% contribution. And, Andrew, I don't know if you want to speak briefly to that. So the health reserve stabilization component of our health plan that we negotiated with our unions last summer or last spring was to account for a three-year average of our health budget performance. And if that budget performance on average over that rolling three-year period is negative, we then will take that negative number and add it to the premium costs for our plan to kind of share the impact of that with our. premium contribution paying employees. So an employee who contributes 11% of the health premium would basically take 11% of that three-year running average deficit. And it spread over time. It
095certainly does not make up the deficit, but it certainly helps to fill that gap. Thanks, Andrew. And then more recently in January, we made changes to deductibles, including higher in and out of network deductibles and changes to prescription drug costs. so now i'll invite pat up to talk more specifically about our plan good evening thank you megan dr patrick ford for the privilege to come and talk to you today about the claims and where we've seen them and where we see them going in the future there's been some concern with the growth that we've had over the last particularly 12 months I mean cost and how it's affected our budget so I'm gonna go through basically the claim projection analysis and the reason we focus on claims as Megan had pointed out is claims are
09695% of our costs from a health insurance standpoint if we were to purchase insurance through a commercial carrier that number would be closer to 85 so significant savings is achieved through self insurance from an administrative part only but again today we're going to focus on claims My first slide basically is just an overview of the information we use to project claims moving forward, what we gather from paid claims, treasurer's report, rebates, so forth, what goes into the... Cost of claims and then we run them through several different methods with regard to projecting them into the future whether it's Generally, it's 18 months and six months out when we're looking at the budget from that standpoint we're going to look at you know, what's what's been causing the increases and Look at where we're seeing the
097claims going to go and then I've got some comparison information at the end of some alternatives that are available To this district from a larger consortium basis So the first slide is basically looking at where our projection was and where we see it going now. So when we sat here last year, at this point, we were projecting claims out six months and then 18 months to the end of this particular year. And since then, we've seen claims increase at about 14% higher than... we had seen in historical trends. So, and we'll talk, we'll break down what's causing that increase and where we're seeing it. But, you know, one of the overlying factors we'll see as we go through this, we're seeing higher costs on individual claimants. So larger dollar costs and really paying more for
098fewer people. But at the end of the day, that is really the purpose for having health insurance, to cover those catastrophic costs. So we saw about a 14% increase in projection after looking at an additional 12 months' worth of claims and the increases we've seen over those years. So from a budgetary standpoint, we anticipated not generating enough premium through the premium equivalents. Again, as Megan had mentioned, adjustments will be made moving forward to help recapture some of that cost share from an employee standpoint. You know, we do also maintain reserves, and we're happy to share that reserve presentation. I think we did it two years ago as to where we come up with the amounts we should have in reserve. And it's flexible. Some of it's not. We have to pay for claims that have
099been incurred but not reported. So if the plan were to end today, there's claims that are out there that we would have to pay that were incurred prior to the end of the plan. And then there's the rate stabilization, which is a little more flexible, and some of the money that we've been able to. to use to offset some of these extraordinary cost increases. The next slide just takes a look at what's gone on over the last three years. And you can see, I guess I focus on the bottom chart. There's a lot of volatility to the claims on a monthly basis. If I go back to July of 2022, we had three patients in that period. over anywhere from April to August or July that exceeded a million dollars in claim cost. Two at
1001.7 million and then one was a little bit less and we'll see that a little bit later. So we've had a significantly higher cost come in for that particular July. Protections are in place and I'll talk about stop loss as Megan had mentioned with regard to the protections you as a district have with regard to those large dollar claims. But you can see a lot of these spikes where they're claims are spiking generally we can point back to individual claimants who had particularly high claims. The unfortunate thing that we're seeing if you go to the right side of that chart in the last several months is that it's been a steady higher cost and it's not necessarily due to individuals it's due to, and we'll see, it's due to more people using higher cost services
101on an ongoing basis or during this particular period. so as i go to the next chart this is you know these are information we share with the benefit we share with the benefits committee and you can see the breakdown of cost and and this is information through seven months um with the data so that that july 2022 is certainly affecting it but uh hospital inpatient costs aren't the driver at this point generally they are when we see a significant increase in cost Trends over the last 20 years are probably in the 6% to 7% range. You see costs are up 14% for this year. It's really being driven by the medical side of the claims, and I'll break down that utilization on the next slide with regard to where we're seeing those costs, where those
102costs are coming from, and how, I guess, out of the ordinary they are. So they're not areas we generally see the increases from an annual basis. The next chart is the utilization analysis. And again, the top part is the hospital admissions. We do see this is six months' worth of data when we had the comparison from UMR. Not a big increase from an overall standpoint. Similar number of people. being admitted, the number of days is a little less, the cost is a little bit higher, so more severe cases that are being treated in that particular area. I did highlight those changes that increased more than double digit, 10%. We saw a significant increase in ER visits, so people going to the emergency room. Emergency room costs generally run $15,000 to $2,000 on average and are
103very expensive when we compare them to, let's say, urgent care, which we see in the next set. So urgent care costs are up. We'd like to see urgent care costs up. They generally run in the $150 range. So if someone has an emergent or urgent care, we want to see them. go to that type of level, which is good news. But on the outpatient side, 17, almost 18% of those emergency room visits were avoidable, meaning that someone might have went in with an ear infection or a chest congestion, something along that line. Could have been, though, where someone went in with chest pain that turned out to be... you know, just gas at the end of the day. So it could have been avoidable, but at the time the person didn't know. Or if you
104have a baby that's screaming in the middle of the night, pulling on their ear, you don't know exactly what's going on. So we're going to have cases where they could have been avoidable from the standpoint of this metric, but we did see quite an increase with regard to that. And then the average cost of the ER visit is up over 16%. So we are seeing inflation hit the medical claims. And particularly, I know a few years ago, we went through the exercise where Montefiore left the network. We're seeing more and more of those negotiations pushing higher because of inflation over the last several years. So the cost of providing Medicare or medical care is becoming higher. And that's being... we're seeing kind of an effect with regard to cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. So as
105we see these cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, the providers who rely greatly on those particular programs are looking to shift those costs to the non-Medicare Medicaid plan. So we are seeing some of that from a physician. standpoint. So several factors going into the reason why we're seeing increases in those costs. Outpatient surgeries, again, up almost 20%, the amount almost 10. So we have more people going at a higher cost. So again, this is a non-impatient cost where we're seeing costs that are being transferred over to surgeons and anesthesiologists and so forth that are really pushing that medical side of the cost higher. Office visits, really not a lot of concern. We want to see people go to the office, particularly for preventative services. So increases there are good news. Again, inflation hitting a little bit
106from a cost per standpoint. Telehealth visits are those visits where you can have a, you know, you don't have to go face-to-face with your doctor. They really became more prominent. with COVID when the offices were closed. It was a benefit that became available. We didn't have telehealth benefits prior to that. So those continue to diminish as providers have more availability for in-person. But the last set of ones are the ones that are driving the cost the most. The patient's over $100,000. We went from 8 to 14, and this is just for the first six months, and that's a 75% increase. So even though it's fewer patients, these are the ones that are affecting the plan from a cost standpoint the most. Paid per member is up 86%. Again, more serious. conditions are being treated inflation
107we have an aging population population so there's several factors that are going into pushing that particular cost up and then is is where I guess the good news in all this or what gets a little hope that this is an anomaly is that generally we do see these hundred thousand dollar patients running about 15 percent of our cost through the first six months are up over 22% so there's a unexpected increase in the number of people who are being treated now it's not it's not scientific but we are seeing similar trends across the state with the school districts that we work with and you know I think I attribute it to Based on what I'm seeing is that there could still be some long-term COVID effect where patients didn't get treated earlier when they could
108have in early 2020s and now are finding disease states that are further along costing more for treatment. So I am seeing it's not, these numbers aren't unique to Scarsdale. They are similar to what we see across the state. Not that it's much of an issue, but I did want to point out a few things. So prescription drug plans, and we have a lot of programs in place with regard to utilization, prior authorization, step therapies that oversee the prescription drug program. But a few things in here are alarming. Good news is generic, 86% of your prescriptions are generic-based, 11,000 prescriptions we're talking about in this particular case. However, the bad news is it only represents about 7.5% of your costs. Those are the low-costing drugs. What's really driving your costs are these specialty medications. And specialty
109medications are often biological-based instead of chemically-based, so they're much more expensive. We do have higher co-pays for that, and I'll show you when we get to the benefit comparison. But less than 4% of the people using the drugs are accounting for 69% of the cost. So that's really where we're seeing the cost drivers in the specialty. And again, that's probably a little bit higher than we've seen from a comparison standpoint. Five years ago, that number was probably 20% of our cost because the specialty medications really treated specialty conditions, multiple sclerosis. Now it treats psoriasis. It treats cancers. It treats other... disease states that weren't necessary specialty but the medications have come out to treat that. For example, from a cancer standpoint, generally you would go and have chemotherapy radiation and then you would be done.
110Some of these specialty medications coming out now are more maintenance style drugs where when someone gets on them they're going to continue on them. These drugs can cost two, three thousand dollars a month. So we're seeing costs as high as I had one prescription. Drug injection was 2.1 million dollars to treat a specialty disease. It's been only one in all that we've seen, but we are seeing the trend towards these higher drugs. So we've put more, I don't want to say controls, but again, prior authorizations to make sure that they're being utilized. But it is really a cost driver that we're keeping an eye on, and it's affecting not just your plan, but it's affecting all plans. The next chart really focuses on the large dollar people, and we're looking at claimants for the period
111of the first six months of this year. The green bars represent medical costs. The yellow portion of those bars represent prescription drug costs. So we looked at some of those top prescription drug costs, sickle cell, cancer, Crohn's disease. I think there was a – I'm trying to think what the last one was. I'm sorry? Growth hormone so some of these are hitting our higher dollar claims exceeding a hundred thousand dollars in addition The red diamonds represent what their costs were last year, so if we look at just patient number one there at You know 1.3 million dollars worth of claims over the last 18 months So, again, we have protection on that with stop loss, and I'll show you that on the next chart. But it's individual patients. These represent a small percentage of your
112overall population, but it is the individual patients that are showing the increases in cost. Now, with the seven individuals who have ongoing care, you know, we calculate that. Good news is the other 13 generally are kind of one-time shots where they had a surgery or a treatment, and it... you know, it treats whatever disease state they might have had and then they can go on maybe at a lower maintenance cost. But, you know, these are some of the items that we take into consideration when we're looking at projecting our costs into the future. Of these seven, I did put it in here, nine were incurred by employees, eight by spouses, and three by children. So it isn't just one set of covered members that are in the plan that are addressing these costs. The next
113chart looks at stop-loss claims, and Megan had mentioned that to this extent that as a self-insured plan, we're only responsible for the first $300,000 of a particular claimant's claims. And you can see over the last 10 years... It varies from year to year. So we've had as few as two patients and as many as six patients. And when we look at coming up in the next couple of slides, you know, years that we've seen spikes, we can come back to this chart and see where those spikes occurred. It's primarily with these large dollar claims from a standpoint of, you know, annual changes year to year. Again, this year we're seeing a lot more lower-costing members, so they're not hitting the stop loss. But, again, this is September. This starts in September as opposed to July.
114So this goes September to August. Our plan year is July to June. The reason this is off a little bit was from a timing standpoint of getting this coverage in place to make sure that we're particularly covered. So we do have protection from an individual claimant standpoint for some of these large-dollar claims. And, again, I mentioned in 21-22 we had two claims that exceeded $1.7 million and another one that exceeded $1.2 million. So 10 years ago I might have seen a $1 million claim amongst all our clients, so they're becoming more common. The next chart, kind of similar to what we saw. would Andrew provide it. We're looking at the separation of the costs over the last 24 years, 27 years, and the different colors represent inpatient, outpatient, major medical, and drug. And on the
115lower chart, I wanted to show what percentage of the costs those particular items were making up. And again, when we look at the top chart, those years that spiked, 2009-10, 12-13. 17, 18, 20, 21. When we compare those to the bottom, we can see higher percentages of inpatient claims in those particular years. So those tend to be the drivers. But you can see there is volatility on an annual basis, a little bit more on a monthly basis, but there is volatility on an annual basis. And it's, you know, self-insurance, whether it's with a group or an individual employer, is a long-term solution. We're going to see the highs. We're going to see the lows. And when we have good years, we're able to recoup some of that. reserve that we use when we have the
116bad years and and I've been here with this district probably for all of those pictures on that wall over there so it's it's been it's been quite a been quite a time with the boards so we've seen good years and we've seen bad years you know this year we're seeing those increases but again we're able to pinpoint where those are coming from from that standpoint The next chart is just looking at the average cost. And, again, it's not really different. We have seen increases in census over the years because, again, you bring in new employees, but your retirees tend to stay on the plan after their retirement. So we've seen about a half to a percent growth probably over this period on an annual basis. But, again, you can see from an average standpoint the
117jumps in those particular years that we had talked about from an average cost standpoint. And then the jump this year, I think that's going to come down as the rest of the year comes in. We're going to see, I know I've already seen February's claims and they were a little bit lower than the projected amount. So we're seeing that settle down a little bit from that standpoint. But again, you could see kind of the volatility, good years, bad years. COVID's in there where it dropped to the 1,228 per member per contract on a monthly basis. So again, there's going to be volatility during looking back over the years. So when we talk about projecting claims into the future, we look at several models, but I wanted to start with the... the linear model which looks
118back and based on old information is going to reject where claims are going. And again, when I talked about the trend being around 6 to 7 percent, that's over a longer period of time. So in the upper chart we look back 10 years to project moving forward. So it's a simple Excel sheet with the added trend line on there, linear progression, showing where the claims. where expects claims to go so about twenty one thousand dollars next year twenty one thousand five hundred twenty one million five hundred thousand sorry um when i look at the shorter trends and what's happening with what particularly what happened with claims this year and the end of last year That's pushing the trend up closer to 25 million. So we've got to do a balance of where we think those
119claims are going, why the trend has been higher in the last few years, what kind of emphasis do we put on the long-term trends versus the shorter-term trends. And to do that, and this gets a little bit into it, and it's not the nicest-looking charts, but we do run it through several different statistical models. And the statistical models from the linear basically looks at kind of an expected trend. When we get into some of the variables, it looks at highs and lows and tries to smooth those out. So where there's been more of an erratic claim change, it smooths them out a little bit more to project future costs. So using these models, we saw increases anywhere from $23 million to $20 to $30 million. Again, can't say really haven't been that erratic when we
120look back at the other at the previous chart over the last few years we have seen growth. We saw those claims jump a little after COVID from a standpoint as they dropped because of COVID. We had some administrative. inconsistencies when we made changes from UMR to AmeriBend back to UMR. So there were some hiccups from an administrative standpoint that affected those costs from a paid standpoint. So when we looked at projecting claims, we did look at kind of a combination between the linear, which is pushing it up a little bit higher than we saw on the Excel sheet. It takes a little bit more information. And I'm looking back 48 months, so almost four years. or four years were the claims. And we did combine that with a little bit of fluctuation, so using the
121exponential, the quadratic trend model that does that. So for next year's budget, again, we're looking to fund the claims as we see them moving forward at about $23.8 million. And from a budgetary standpoint, there's other items that are going to come into play with regard to that. Again, rebates and stop-loss recoveries and so forth. So that's where we see the claims going. So it is a little bit higher than we've seen in the past. We are keeping an eye on it. As Megan, you know, the committee is addressing these increases in costs, and they take into consideration some of the changes that we made or that your employees made with regard to cost shares. I think we had an estimated savings from those changes on a benefit standpoint of about a little over $250,000. on
122an annual basis. So we're going to continue to monitor that as it goes forward. Some of it started in July. Some more started in January with regard to some of the cost shares. Any questions on projections and where we see claims going, concerns? I have a question. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to make sure I understand these numbers for a second. We're proposing in this budget $23.8 million, which if I do the math correctly is 5.86% over our projected amount this year. Our projected amount, though, from the year before was 10.5% increase. And then I go to your slide 12, and I see, right, long-term you're saying it's 4.8, shorter-term it's 9.2. The way I'm thinking about it is whether we're right or wrong, I understand it's projection, but it doesn't feel like we are
123budgeting a lot of wiggle room to be wrong. Well part of that wiggle room is is built into the reserves that we have in a claim stabilization So are you talking about our fund balance that we talked about before which are or a different number? It's a non. I don't know. It's the term that you use it's So it's kind it's a combination of the fund balance reserve and the incurred but not reported accrual that we do at the end of the fiscal year for the claims that are paying Next year for the prior year I just want to be clear. So part of what you're talking about is the number that we're all worried is going down very quickly, getting to a quite low level. I believe that it is. Quickly is relative, but
124let me just go. If we look at this page, you can see where, from a trend standpoint, the cost for this year, what we're projecting for the end of the year based on what we've seen happen in the first half, is above, the amount is above trend. So we would anticipate the claims to come. Of the 10-year trend. Of the 10-year trend, right. The three-year trend, it's not, it's the one year affects it, you know, more severely. So it's going to push the claims up because of that. But you can see on the historic where we've seen, you know, these jumps in claims, we've seen costs come down afterwards. So when we're able to provide, when we're able to see what's causing those increases. and, you know, correlate those with what we've seen historically. Again,
12522% of our costs this year so far are because of large dollar. Normally they're 15. I just want to highlight, I hear what you're saying. Yep. But if I look back to the last drop, that's COVID. COVID is the one year is COVID. Right. I'm just, I guess my real question, right, so one is my comment, which I think I've confirmed, which is, you know, we are. assuming a major reversion to the mean next year. That's one way to do it. My question though, and maybe you want to pause and get through the whole presentation, but is are all these slides showing structural changes to the cost of health care? Right, so there are more biologics. They are covering more things. unless those costs come down dramatically because you know the R&D is getting amortized
126over more people you would expect us to see a more large dollar claimants because there's great medicine out there just happens to cost a lot of money right and we have protections on those from the stop-loss I think one of one of the credits and I talk about this across the state is that You know, you've set up a, from a patient or an employee district standpoint, a cost share amount being 20%. When we look at that 20%, we're looking at benefits and we're looking at premium. And then adjustments are made every, you know, three to five years based on, and even more, I think in our last negotiations, we're looking at it annually now to make some of those adjustments. So during this last negotiation, we did make an adjustment to kind of keep
127that cost share similar to what it was. I think the benefit cost share is around 10% to 12%. And it diminishes. If we look at over a three-year period, if we don't make changes, it diminishes because costs are going up, cost shares are staying the same. But then we look at those, how are they compared to what else is available, and I'll show you that in a little bit. So we do, you know, the goal is to maintain that 80% and make adjustments as we're doing from a standpoint, or as the district is doing from a standpoint of premium equivalence. and recapturing some of the money that was not shared in some of these years where we had a greater expense than we anticipated when we set the rates in the prior year. Does that
128help? I mean, the question, right, to me is, you know, first of all, I think this is very valuable data, so thank you. If I look at it from a technical analysis of just looking at graphs and historical and trends, I understand what you're saying. Where I don't have the expertise, but where I'm not, and maybe you just know this just from your experience, but I'm not hearing it expressed, is if you lift the hood and look underneath of what drives this stuff. Are there changes where the past performance will no longer be indicative of the future? And I think that's where we're at now is trying to figure that out. So we're looking at higher increases from a trend standpoint, overall trend standpoint. And, you know, we still have forces that we don't know
129what's going to happen with regard to tariffs and cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. So, you know, again, maintaining a reserve, we're able to. be pro we don't have to react to those so if this was an insurance company they would be looking at that 30 million dollar number they're gonna go as high as they possibly can and then if they don't meet that they keep the difference between what the costs are and what they in what they aren't so if we go back to 1718 where we saw that significant increase in insurance standpoint They would have increased claims 20 to 30 percent and then they would have stayed there for the you know the next several years Where the cost actually dropped after that and then one two three? Almost four years in the next
130three years costs were actually from an average standpoint from an overall standpoint Yeah, the next three years. They're a little bit less four years overall so again, we're able to when we have those good years we're able to to Fund that reserve when we have the the not so good years. We need to lean on it a little bit more So it's not I don't want to be an alarmist to the standpoint is to give you always the highest number But I can say in the last two years my number wasn't high enough So we were leaning on a little bit larger trend going into next year that helps sure sure Thank you for this and for all this data. But based on just the comment you made, so you're saying that based on all
131of the statistical models on slide 13, your 25-26 projection ranged from $23 million to $30 million, but you're projecting closer to $23. Right. And you're doing that because of fund balance that you think could make up the cost. We continue to state how concerned we are because we are running out of fund balance. Yeah, no, it's not based on fund balance. We're not looking for fund balance to cover those costs. I'm just wondering, why are you projecting a lower number given... the past few years? Part of it has to do with the stop-loss coverage. So if we're having more individuals with higher costs, we're going to pay a little bit more in stop-loss, but the amounts we're receiving are greater. You're assuming that the majority of these claims will be above $300,000 mark? I'm saying
132what we've seen over the last 12 months is that a larger number of the, what's driving the cost are those large dollar claimants. Right. I guess I'm just wondering why are we not projecting maybe a little bit more in the middle of that range given what we've been seeing over the past few years? Just because of what we've seen over a little bit longer period of time. So, again, the linear trend was closer to 21. When I apply some of the other statistical, it brought it up to 23. And that's, we were comfortable with projecting that amount. Do you, this is just more of a stats question. Do you, you know, the dip from the pandemic in 2020. Yep. If you were to take that one dip out, do you think the number would be
133different? Not necessarily because we saw increases after that dip. So we saw claims catch up a little bit. And I think we're still seeing a little bit of that at this point. When you're doing, I perhaps missed it but I don't think so. When you're doing the analysis, is there or can you describe some correlation between the ages of the population that you're serving and the cost of care? In other words, as older people, I would think What portion of our staff are retiring versus what age are they? We have people that stick around for a long time, which is great in some ways, I guess, in most ways. So I'm trying to understand how the age factor is into it. I would think an older population, maybe I'm wrong, but an older population might
134incur a higher. You're not wrong. In which case, you could look, I mean, we know people's ages, right? We know that the age of people coming in are probably younger, for the most part. So it seems that that should be part of the way we massage the data. Yeah, so a number, so I think, I don't know if we're, not quite half of our population is retired. Half of your population, probably a little bit less than that. But retirement's not the factor, it's the age. I didn't mean retirement, I meant the age. They're going to be the 55-year-old and older. But we do have protections with regard to those who go on Medicare because Medicare is going to be the primary payer. None of these large-dollar cases are Medicare cases because Medicare pays the bulk
135of those costs. So when we move someone to that, you know, that... That demographic is generally lower cost because of Medicare payments, and so it's a more stable risk. We don't have to worry about the highs and the lows with that demographic. The prescription drugs do affect that, but we've addressed that through the EGWIP, the Employee Group Waiver Plan, where I think in the last, since we've gone into that plan. I think overall our rates might be up 10% over the last 10 years or eight years that we've been in it. But correct me if I'm wrong, Medicare also, the age keeps going up. That's Social Security. So Medicare is 65. Okay, and it always is. It hasn't gone up yet, but if you listen to the news, that could be something. I'm just trying
136to see if there's a way that one could start to kind of get more nuance into, well, if, you know, 5% of our. The cohort that's at the highest cost. I don't mean, like over Medicare, I guess we get a pass on, but there is that period before Medicare where one could kind of get a sense of the... Yeah, and I think during certain periods of time when we look back, a lot of the times those who retired were replaced, but that's not necessarily true anymore. So we do see a little bit larger. But that is built into the trend information. That they are getting older. It's gonna push the claims up a little bit higher. Okay, I just Know I'm just really kind of understand whether you know, this could be a year with
137that effects number of people Retire that what the impact might be so that we yeah, so it's again. It's not the fact that retire. It's the factor 55 to 60 well, yeah, I don't mean no no that's all right. I just want to be typically I think correct me if I'm wrong people people aren't retiring necessarily as much or as frequently at a young age or are they maybe I'm wrong I mean it's a mix I think in terms of age but I think you know I in terms of the age of the individuals it's a range right in terms of chronic conditions those can be that can be a child and so it's not necessarily always just our older population I think you know we've seen a variety of things the 40 to 50
138year olds and right some of these disease states. So we see costs are going up. I appreciate your concerns that maybe we're being a little bit less conservative than we have been in the past, but we've gone both ways with regard to that projection. So we did push them up a little bit higher than maybe we would have using a longer-term trend to look at the cost moving forward. But the other question is then, if we didn't do this, if you weren't self-funded or self-insured on your own, what are your alternatives? What could you could buy insurance and we've gone out and we've we've asked for quotes So how much would insurance company charge us? We haven't gotten those back yet, but I could tell you if I look at the marketplace which which ensures
139Individuals It's significantly higher and when I get to the rates I can share that with you but the one item that we look at is the NYSHIP or the Empire plan and this is a plan that's provided to and you most likely have seen this this graph in one form or another we look at We look at the statewide plan to see how are we performing? versus then and in this particular chart we're looking at the actual amount that was paid by the district including the the member cost share versus what you would have paid in premiums to the Empire Plan. And you can see a couple, you know, again, 17-18 is kind of an outlier. We were close. And if I go back another 10 years, there were years that we paid more than
140the Empire Plan would have been. But in the long run, if we look at this 10-year period, it's $23 million more we would have paid to the Empire Plan. for the same, to cover the same illnesses and the same people. So it is something we do look at. It's something that we drill down a little bit closer to, particularly when we're talking about negotiations. But we do monitor, you know, I do provide this particular graph on an annual basis. I'm guessing this year it's going to be closer for 24, 25. You know, the delta between the two plans is going to be a little bit closer. But again, I think we're still below what we would have paid them. addition to the Empire plan and with information and I provided a kind of a comparison
141of what does what does a Scarsdale plan look like to some of the alternatives that are available so the alternatives we're looking at is the Putnam Northern Westchester health benefit consortium out of Putnam Northern Westchester that's an article 47 self-insured municipal cooperative which is a standard that we use when we're setting our our reserves so we look at that law And I can't remember how many districts but I think it's up towards 20 districts that participate in that And these are the benefits that are available through them as a component district You have one vote with regard to any changes that are made so you don't have the cooperation or the Investment I guess from the employees that you do in this particular district, and you can see Swiss chip is the southern is the
142statewide schools Consortium health plan it started as a Southwestchester County Schools Health Plan so they're out of the southern area southern part of the county again made up of component school district primarily with that BOCES and then the Empire plan here and we look at the benefit structure in network deductible one of the changes that we made this year is we put an in network deductible in place so the first hundred dollars of anybody services not including preventative sick services is a patient responsibility none of the other plans have that As far as out-of-network deductible, we don't see that utilized as much. I think your members use network providers 92% of the time. So if they don't go to a network provider, they're going to be subject to that out-of-network. But yours is a little
143bit better. But, again, we don't see that. that hit very often. And then the inpatient and hospital emergency outpatient co-payments, generally the same for the inpatient and outpatient where we do see the increase is primary care physicians, specialists. One of the items that we've looked at over the years is with regard to those particular co-payments. And again, we use them to offset that 20% goal in how we got there. I think we backed off a little bit on this year to get some other... some other decreases where we see cost share hit the most and again I use the term 11,000 prescription drugs is on the prescription drug side and your members pay significantly higher than most of the plans on a retail basis is a 20% coinsurance now with in a minimum of $30
144for generic. Now, most of our generics are less than $30 for a 30-day supply, so your members are paying 100% of that cost in most cases, where there's, you know, a $750 or $5 copayment for the other three plans. Same is true for the brand. $70 minimum, 20%. So anywhere between $70 and $185, which is the maximum that anybody would have to pay for that, and believe me, we hit that maximum quite often, that copayment is significantly higher from a cost share standpoint than the $35s and the $50s or $60s that we're seeing with the other plans. So the benefits are richer in the other plans, but as we move down, so are the premiums. And you could see Putnam Northern Westchester is probably the closest that we have from a premium standpoint. Their individual
145is a little bit less, but their family is more. It makes up the difference. And the concern I have with premium comparison is... especially with these larger consortiums is they also build reserves and can use them to offset changes in premiums so they could set a premium that's using a certain percentage of the reserve to offset whatever increase they had in that i don't see that in southern westchester or statewide plan we know they had a nine percent increase going into next year so their costs are going up pretty significantly but when we compare what our alternatives are we still have the lower costing plan to those. And in these consortiums, either, you know, ideally you're paying your costs, but because they're cooperative in community, you're either paying for someone else's costs or someone else
146is paying for your costs in a particular year. So that could change year to year. And again, it's important that we look at these alternatives. Also, with regard to looking at these alternatives, I know Putnam, I think, same with statewide. is there's a fee to get in these plans. So they're maintaining a reserve. They have to maintain a reserve according to the law. And if a new group wants to come in, they have to contribute their portion of that reserve. So there's an upfront fee. Probably, I mean, if the reserves are 30%, 20% to 30%, that's a $5 million to $6 million entry fee just to get in the plan. And then your premiums are set by that. There's very little input you have with regard to where those costs are going to go. So
147I think when we look at this, just kind of in conclusion, we are recognizing costs are going up pretty significant over the last couple of years. We're addressing some of that through benefit changes, which have been put in place most recently. And we're addressing it through premium costs here, which is being adjusted based on some of the losses that we've seen. But when we look at what our alternatives are, we're still below the cost of those alternatives. And if we get to a point where our costs are not, and I have been in a position where I've said it's time to get out of self-insurance and join a bigger group, then that's when we look at that more seriously and address the benefit concerns that might be in place with regard to those other options.
148So we're not married to you guys being on your own, but it certainly has been successful over the years. Thank you. I think Amber has a question. I do. I have a few questions. Thank you for your presentation. Sure. A couple of my questions are clarifying questions, but if we could start back on slide five, and it's sort of repeated again in slide ten. You've got drug costs, inpatient, outpatient, and medical. And later on slide ten, you refer to it as major medical. What exactly is that? Major medical and medical will be your physician charges or your... Okay. So the other ones are hospital... Are hospital and patient. Okay. All right. Great. Thank you. And there's a little difference in the numbers because one is seven months and one is six months, depending on what
149was reported. Okay. And then inside six, this utilization analysis... Yes. The 23-24 numbers are full-year numbers. And are 24-25 numbers? No, it's six months and six months. Okay, it is the same comparison. Okay, it wasn't clear to me from the text. No, geez, if those were full-year numbers, we're in real trouble. Okay, yeah, that's why I was really worried all of a sudden. In slide eight, the top large dollar claimants. Yes. So you had said that nine of the top 20 were employees, eight are spouses, three are children. So does that mean that there could be other top large dollar claimants, but they're covered by Medicare? They could either be covered by Medicare or you do have a provision in your plan that states that any spouse who has coverage through their employer has to
150take that coverage. There's some other limitations with regard to that. They could still have coverage under this plan, but we want to make sure their employer is primary for those costs. So there could be spouses that have expensive disease states. We're just not paying for them at this point. Okay. And then with regard to the stop loss insurance coverage, I saw at one point we had maybe $250,000 in coverage, and we increased it to $300,000. Yeah. I assume that was because our costs were high and that was I guess the decision I feel like I remember us making but yeah so it's a premium cost wait yeah it's a balance between premium and in what we're seeing getting back for that premium okay risk versus cost assessment so it is something we could look at
151adjusting I mean if we wanted to if we wanted to it's hard to go backwards because the cost becomes you know exponentially more The reason that we're able to take a little bit more risk is because of the reserves that we maintain. Okay. And then on slide 15, I mean, I'm just going to provide commentary, but I do feel like these... our deductible numbers and some of our co-pays are pretty low. That's just an opinion I have compared to what I currently pay. But these are sort of the employee cost share comparison. Do you have data on what the district would pay in these types of situations? The premium shares? Yeah. I don't. I think we've been trying to get that together. But the last time we studied it, I think we're still from a
152district. Your members are paying more in benefits and less in premium share. So I think we're seeing statewide that number being 15% to 20% where you guys are 10% to 15%, I think, at this point. Okay. Or even higher. Depends on the negotiating. And there was no member cost share, I believe, prior to 2014. Yeah. Which was much later than many other school districts. Right, right. You started later. It's all a function of collective bargaining. Got it. Okay, and I guess just my last question or point is, you know, you used the word No, sorry, it's not. I'm going to do one more question before that. So I think Ron had mentioned the specialty medications. It was something that jumped out at me as well, too. And I think you said it's gone from about
15320% of our drug costs to 69% of our drug costs. Was that accurate? Yes. And so is that because there are new drugs on the market? Because there's new drugs. And is this something we should expect next year as well? I mean, it's going to get to a saturation point. But it is where. We're seeing, you know, the research is all in the specialty medications because of the amount they can get back on those from a profit standpoint. But right now, your percentage is a little bit higher, but that's based on the drugs that the people are taking. So the growth hormones are pretty expensive. We don't see that as often. The sickle cell drug is pretty expensive. When we get into the anemia drugs, they generally be higher. So you have a member on
154that. I'm not sure if they're still taking it. I'd have to go back and look. So we've been as high, my recollection is we've been as high as 73% of cost. So it's fluctuated based on. Attributed to special. But the good news is most of your people are taking generics, which is where we've been pushing over the last several years. It's just, again, these specialty medications, we have very little control over the cost of those. So, but it does sound like it's reasonable to assume that those costs will continue. to be high numbers? They'll continue to be a large percent of your costs, but again, we're only seeing a 4, less than 5% increase in those costs year to year. Okay. Although it's still quite high, right? I mean, that's... I mean, I've got... So
155going back to page 5, you know, 25% to 27% of your costs, I've seen them in smaller districts be, you know, 30% to 40% of the cost, or 40. 40 to 45 percent of the cost depending on one particular small district has two individuals on a cystic fibrosis drug that costs $500,000 a year. So that's a million dollars on a you know four million dollar budget. Okay, so then I guess I will get to my last question or sort of point. I heard you say the word volatility quite a bit, and that's, I think, where I really have my concerns. It does seem like we always hope for a good year, but there's a lot of volatility between whether we have a good year or a bad year. And what I'd like to understand is
156with these other plans, so we've talked about some of the benefits, but, you know, when you look at these. other plans is there's not the same volatility right we can budget to what we we know we're going to pay for a year i mean they've they've seen some of the volatility again swiss chip is going up nine percent i forgot what they went up this last year it was a lower number but what you need to take into account is if we were charging a lot more there'd be less volatility so Because they charge more, their premiums are higher, the ups and the downs are smoothed out because of that. And so by charging more, do you mean our 80-20 cost share? Our premium equivalent or projecting higher costs, yeah. So if we projected higher
157costs, we could charge more. So by projecting 23.8 million, we charge less. than if we projected 24.8 million. Is that right? That's what you're saying? And then we have to make up for it. There'd be less cost share, but we're making adjustments to that. the future so this last year there was an adjustment made because of the loss in the prior year next year from a premium equivalents standpoint so what the member cost share is there's an adjustment there to try to recapture I think Andrew said it was a two million dollar Delta over the last three years so yes so I just to bring it back to the conversation to give you some context so when we increase these budgeted health expenses right there at the expense of something else in our our general
158fund budget I think we know that intrinsically but what would the health stabilization reserve adjustment that we negotiated does is it increases the employee cost share on the premium equivalent but not with a corresponding budget increase in the budget so the two million dollars that we talked about which is a three-year average point one I think it is you know that gets added to the premium but not to our school budget as a way to help the employee share grow without negatively impacting the school budget. So the premium share is calculated on a higher, temporarily higher premium amount. For next year. For next year. To cover this year, basically. Not to cover. It doesn't cover the full thing. It doesn't cover the full gap. But it is a mechanism to retroactively, essentially, gain a higher
159employee cost share because of the experience of the prior year. or multiple years because it works on a three-year average. It's used to really balance that 80-20 split in cost. Pat mentioned earlier how we have a general agreement that 20% is going to be employee share, but as the labor agreements kind of go on, that 20% degrades over time, right? This is a way for us to help kind of gain that back. Potentially every year to have an adjustment. Whereas we might have had to wait four years. Because we have, okay. Does it ever go the other direction? Like where we? Our agreement does not do the opposite. Okay. That would be the year that we would attempt to replenish fund balance. Any other questions? One clarifying question. Thank you for your questions. Thank you
160for all your work. It's very helpful. So just clarifying. So the process to determine or tweak some of the numbers like copay, deductibles, are those set by the committee that oversees? It's a mandatory subject of collective bargaining. It's all collective bargaining. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I have a few more questions. Can you talk about ER visits for a second? So let's just use this as an example. Do we have a sense, is this just noise in the data? Like a 27% increase, remember, over, our census is like over 1,000 people per current plus retirees. It just, I'm trying to understand, like, is there something structural going on that drives that? And have we looked into that? Ron, I just want to clarify, we have over 2,500 covered lives. Oh, that includes spouses and children.
161Eligible spouses and children, yes. Sorry, I just wanted to get that number out there. So I think the 25, the percentage is higher. The number of actual visits is less significant because it's a low number to start with. But it's something we keep an eye on, and we did make, I believe we made a change from a benefit standpoint to increase that cost share. for the emergency room so people have a more financial incentive to consider the urgent care or the office visit. Okay. That's fair, right? So, I mean, a lot of our costs are coming from the high-cost claimants. I think it's worth pointing out to the rest of the board, though, that if you go to that slide with the 20 high-cost claimants, I mean, part of the issue just from a budget
162standpoint is... most of them aren't getting to stop loss, right? They're spread over. Correct. In the past, we had a fewer number that were very big and we got covered. It's actually financially an issue for us if it's spread out over many under that $300,000. Yeah, so I think that, so what we're seeing now is we're having more people fall under that. We're having more people fall on that $100,000 to $300,000. Which is. problematic area in this particular year if we looked at prior years it would be a different metric yeah so that's so that was my follow-up question like again do we do we have an understanding it's very possible this is uh I'm trying to understand if these are one-off it's just it's just a bad year or if there are structural changes
163so for example one two three four five or prescription drugs right yeah I don't know what the data was year before, two years, three, five, if that's a new category that's leading to large dollar claimants. It's definitely, so the reason that they separated it out is it's something we hadn't seen in the past. So five of the top 20 being prescription drug driven is a concern, and we're addressing that through programs that we put in place with regard to. especially medications, prior authorizations, to make sure that they're being used properly by the members. Causes a little bit of noise. You know, Megan usually goes through her office and... Carolyn but you know we feel it's an important and and again it's you know one of the one of the nice things with regard to this
164plan is the the employer buy-in to it so they're seeing these numbers so it's not just us saying you know your costs are going up they see why they're going up and they're given the options to address the increases in those costs no I agree with that and I think tonight I don't you know we're not so much talking about The coverage and all the benefits just, we're in budget season. I understand. We're thinking about the budget. Can you help me understand, I think it's on one of the last slides, what is the math behind calculating our premium equivalent? So how do you get $12,000 for us and $29,000 for families? So what we do is a budget is prepared. We take into consider claims and we take into consideration Rebates we get rebates on
165the drugs and and how much is it going to cost a district including? The employee share because their employee share is gonna be based on that premium And then it's just a metric of you know, how many individual? Contracts do we have and then looking at the number of families and their dependents generally is about 2.5 times the one and we have to make sure that those Rates based on your census equal that final number. I mean, it's 23 plus It's gonna be a little bit different on the final budget, but that 23 million dollars So we got to make sure that those premiums are generating enough money and also included in that is is the The amount that's paid for the Medicare Part B Premium that is something that the district has always provided
166and is a requirement By the Empire plan comes out of the old Empire plan So there's other factors that are going into those premium equivalents. But it's the amount of money we would have. If we charge the premium, that's the premium we have to charge to meet our budgetary projections. I appreciate that. Said it another way, it's the total budget, not including the employee cost share, divided by the individual and family enrollment census. And my only other comment, I think Amber may have mentioned it already. I just think we should all recognize, I appreciate you mentioned the fund balance being a reason we can weather or we can do something or wait. And I just put back to my board members, we're looking to drop healthcare fund balance another million dollars. And then you've got
167to, next year's board has to find that million dollars. You will be in a million dollar hole to start. So we do get a lot of value out of having that reserve. As we drop it, it's not good for us. I don't think it's good for the members either. It's not good for anybody. Yeah. I mean, the health care costs, we have very little control over who gets sick when. What we do have control over is the funding. And if we do get to that point, and I've been here, I've been dealing with this group over 25 years, so in this position. And I've seen that fund rise and drop. And we can look at the year. I think in the early 2000s we spent most of it, but then things got better. And I
168don't budget on hope. But we were able to bring it back. And, you know, we were able to grow that fund, particularly during the COVID, when the costs were significantly less than we anticipated because of the shutdowns. So the money kind of filtered back into that. I think we got to a point where we were afraid we had too much money in that. And that's, you know, I'm always brought here when we're hitting the extreme. So two years ago, we're not having this conversation because we didn't have many sick people. That was actually six years ago. Well, the COVID. Can you believe it? Oh, when I did that? Oh, okay, six years ago. So we had to justify why we had that money. So it's kind of ebbed and flowed. It's flowed a little bit
169more over the last two years. So that's why we're looking at it. That's why you guys are looking at it a little bit closer. But, again, if we continue to see this trend, then we seriously have to look at alternatives, which right now are more expensive. but maybe less volatile. But they still have this volatility too. Again, we're seeing double-digit increases in costs across the state. I just want to go back to one other thing because I just am very concerned about the numbers on slide 13. I think a lot of the things that you have, you know... statistical analysis or budget analysis that you have validated with this fund balance that you that you keep referring to um that keeps getting lower and lower and lower as ron and my other board members have
170said and so i'm i'm still kind of concerned about the 23 million year you are projecting for next year i don't know when you guys finalize that number but i have a concern about that being your projection just given current situation I just want to make sure that who's ever finalizing these numbers is aware of how low our fund balance is right now and we could and the possibility that we could be in a hole next year if we do not budget correctly or project more accurately yeah I appreciate that you've been here for a long time and no no no no thank you but yeah You know, the higher numbers are really leaning more on the recent changes in cost. So, again, from a historic standpoint, we've seen those level off. You know, we
171don't see those double-digit increases occurring year after year. They kind of, especially when we can point to what's causing them, you know, they tend to settle. We're still funded. We're still well-funded, but, I mean, the point is valid. to offset cost increase, once that money is gone, we have to make up that amount also. Right. And my other question, you mentioned the stop loss deductible, that that change was made because of the reserve funding. and that it would be much more challenging now to go back to the $250,000? That was a factor. What we look at is what the premium cost is versus what the potential recovery is. Any insurance is in the business to make money. So the less we have to rely on an insurance company, the better. So stop-loss insurance primarily is
172a budgetary tool. If we look over a long period of time of what we paid in premium versus what we received back, we probably received 60 cents on the dollar. But if I go to any of these years, we received $1.20 on the dollar that we spent. So it's a budgetary tool, and there's greater flexibility if we're able to offset some of that cost in premium with some reserve that we have. Right, I understand that. So we can lose a little bit more money. The reserve is not really. . . Temporarily. And maybe we need to do the reserve. I mean, here's a really, like, we could lower the health budget next year by the amount that stop loss costs and, like, theoretically put that back into the health reserve. Which I think is about
173$1.2 million. It's a choice we've taken. But because of your size, we don't want to get caught in 2017-18. in 2021-22 where we have $3 million, $5 million in extra costs that we weren't anticipating. I'm sorry. Can I ask a question? Yeah, of course. I'm just wondering, because I wasn't sure if you were going to speak or you wanted to talk. Oh, I'm waiting to ask my question. Okay. I just want to, again, on the recommendation that you're proposing, the 23-846-157 on slide 13, I just want to make sure I understand. So obviously there's a range of what could be the number. You're proposing a number on the lower end of the range, obviously, not in the middle or at the high end of the range. I gather that in your professional opinion you believe
174that it's justifiable and not just justifiable but reasonable to make an assumption that the appropriate number to budget is towards the lower end of the range notwithstanding last year's experience because you're imposing on last year's experience linear and other types of views of a longer period of time. That we've where we've seen health costs and how we've seen health costs either go up or down right I mean so you're looking you're imposing on last year's experience of you over a longer period of time is that that's correct, right and And you think and you know, you're at the professional you think that that is a reasonable thing to do in this circumstance rather than look at last year's experience and say Let's assume that our experience next year is going to be more like last
175year's experience. An increase of that? Correct. That's what I'm saying. Based on your view of how health costs have impacted the district over time. Yes. I mean, I have no incentive to project lower or higher. It doesn't affect me. You know, often I've been accused of being too conservative with regard to that, which leads to positive fund balances and having too much money in reserves. And we think positive fund balances are a good thing, but we're in a very tight budget year. Depends on what that number is. I mean, I've got some school district consortiums that have balances of 50% to 60%, which is too much money. They need to find a way to spend that money. because they've had more good years than bad years. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you coming here
176today and making this presentation. I appreciate everybody's comments as well. I'm also pretty concerned about some of these numbers. I guess we've been talking about volatility of claims, trying to forecast future claims, talking about fund balances being a cushion or something to go to if things don't go as predicted. We're also talking about stop loss. My question or concern also is there's a lot of volatility with stop loss insurance as well. And it's going to work against us if we have a bad year. So if we have, as we do this year, a bad year, what do you expect our stop loss insurance costs to look like next year? It's not going to be the same as this year, right? And is it like a one-year term kind of thing? also less predictable or less
177budgetable too, you know what I mean? Yeah, no, that's an excellent point. And we do have some protections, and as large as they appear, you know, if we go back to 21-22 where we had those three claimants over a million dollars, two over a million and a half, our agreement states that they cannot increase it by more than 50%. And after that year, we had a 47% increase in our stop loss because they paid two to three times more out than we paid in. And so that adjustment gets made every year. Now, looking at the stop-loss experience since then, it hasn't been too severe. So we've seen, I think, less than double-digit increases in the stop-loss insurance. But, again, they have the ability to underwrite their costs. So if they know someone's going to be
178more expensive, they're going to write that into what the premium increase is going to be based on their diagnosis or their treatment that they're receiving. They're going to pass on those costs. They're in the business to make money. Yes, exactly. I just wanted to make sure. Excellent point. Okay, thank you. I hope not to have to talk to you guys like this because things are probably good. I don't have to come down, but we are keeping an eye on it. Again, we're looking at the alternatives. We're having those discussions with the committees. And if it's not the best way to provide health insurance, then we certainly will look at those other options more. Thank you. Seriously. I'm sorry, I have one more question. How often do we kind of audit or reconcile, you know, our
179claims versus kind of where we are in the budget? Do we do that monthly? We look at that monthly. We do that monthly. Right. So the treasurer has a report. She has it, you know, shared with Andrew and Dr. Patrick and Megan. And, you know, we're looking at that. that on a monthly basis. Some of it's, you know, like rebates come in quarterly, so we're going to see some adjustments on a quarterly basis on that. Okay. Which is one of the reasons why we're looking at a loss going into next year. We've seen what's happened in the first six months. Claims have settled down, I think, over the last couple months. Not necessarily what you paid, but what's been processed. What's coming back. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. I also wanted
180to express a thank you to Megan. You said that a board member would be invited to be on the committee. I really appreciate that. We welcome. It could be more than one, if you like. It's a well-informed group, and we want to keep it that way. When would that happen, that a board member would be? I think we have one more for this or two more for the school year so we can I think it changed I think COVID kind of changed that we historically have had a board member on the committee so with the changes of COVID not in my time no no that's what I'm saying nine years but right okay well thank you thank you so much just just for like this is just stating the the fact budget to budget we
181are the recommend the recommended 23.8 million is a 17% budget to budget increase just want to be clear about that yes it's only a 6% estimated actual to budget increase just a lot so people it's most most of that five plus million in added tax and we're happy to provide any additional information that you might have if you get that to dr. Patrick we can get more data for you Thank you so much. All right. Thank you. Good luck. Thank you. Safe travels. Next item on the agenda would be 9.03, a board discussion of the ex officio student member of the Board of Education. So on September 12th, Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law a bill that will require every school district and BOCES board in the state to have at least one ex-officio non-voting
182student representative effective July 1st of this year. As it is the mission of the Scarsdale Public Schools to sponsor each student's full of development, enabling our youth to be effective and independent contributors in a democratic society and an interdependent world. The New York State law to appoint a student or students to serve as ex officio members of the board is viewed as an opportunity not only to inform and enrich discussions at the board table, but to foster civic engagement among students by involving them directly in educational policy discussions. The law allows for a great deal of local determination on both the role and selection process of that student board member or members. Selection practices can range from a student selected by the student or principal to selected by the majority of the board with many
183options in between. Tonight, the board will discuss how in Scarsdale we may want to define the role and how the student or students may be selected. A subgroup of board members, Jim, Colleen, and myself. Also speaking with Dr. Patrick and Principal Bonamo has considered a possible proposal for this role that we'd like to share with the rest of the board tonight. In our approach, we are striving to be as student focused as possible. The board extends an invitation to all interested students to apply for this role. In our proposal, the goal is to have two students, one in 11th grade and the other in 12th grade, who serve as the student representatives on the board. A draft, a very preliminary draft of a proposal was shared with the board on a basic outline of which
184describes the responsibilities of the role as well as the application, the nominating and election process to share with everybody else out there. The responsibilities of the position include attending board of education meetings and schools government meetings. Students holding this position will be expected to attend BOE meetings and student government meetings such that there is always at least one student board member at each such meeting to facilitate communication and act as a liaison between student government and the board. Student members will be asked to attend the opening segment of board meetings to report on student activities at the high school and will be invited at an appropriate point at each meeting to remain for as long as they like. or to be excused so that their service does not interfere with other obligations such as homework
185assignments or extracurricular or family activities. So to share in very broad strokes what this might look like, the proposal is based kind of on the SB&C model here in Scarsdale, where duly elected representatives serve as a vetting committee of applicants who then go out to a general election. In this case, the nominating committee would be the whole of the student government, as these students are themselves elected by their peers. Qualified applicants must have good academic standing, good citizenship, the recommendation of their dean, enrollment in the school for at least a year, that's actually a part of the law, and residency in the Scarsdale School District. Students seeking to apply for the student ex officio board member position will be asked to fill out an application drafted by the board. We'll also receive copies of the
186completed applications. Student candidates will make presentations to and be interviewed by the nominating committee with oversight by the principal, assistant principal for student life and student government faculty advisors. A departure from the SBNC model would be that for this student ex officio board member role, there would be a minimum of two candidates per position proposed with a flexible cap of four candidates per position that the committee can also choose to exceed. This group of student candidates would then go out to a general election of students for an election in grades 9 through 11. So maybe before we get into a deeper conversation, I'll take a pause and ask for board input as to the general idea of this proposal. Actually, could I just ask a question first? Yeah, of course. So in the application process,
187you said... residency in the Scarsdale School District does this mean that like teachers children would not be eligible for this I believe that's correct we could discuss any of this is discussable okay yeah I think that's something I'd probably want to discuss well there are two reasons usually we do the election would be like in May or something like that and most of the seniors would be on their senior options also they wouldn't be represented by those student ex officio board members in the fall because they'll be in college Who would be represented. Yeah. But we can discuss that too. Yes, Leah. I really, really like your process that you've drafted. So thank you, the three of you, because I think it's, and everyone you liaised with, I think it's very thorough. And I really
188like the idea that there will be an election in the school and that it will hopefully coincide with like a Board of Education timing public budget election so that. We're all kind of on the same timeline. Anyway, I just want to thank you for your work. I think it's a great proposal. Thank you. Thanks for putting this together. I have a quick question about sort of the thought process. You referenced the SBNC. major difference from what you're proposing then from our elections is that while there is a nominating committee which I personally think is a good idea anybody can run outside of that yes and so you know there is so that's one the second is that the nominating committee the SBC that is was and is developed Outside of this board, it is the
189community that decided and decides how to change it and goes to the community. So is there any thought about suggesting it, but ultimately allowing the students to decide, do you want a nominating committee? If so, what does that look like? Do you want... political parties. I mean, I'm just saying, like, we've chosen to do, our community has chosen to do something here, but that was a collective choice, whereas this process determines that for the students and also does not give an avenue for a student who does not follow this process to run. I appreciate the thinking behind any of that. Well, I mean, I could just... With respect to the idea of any student who wants to being able to run I do think there is Significant value in having a vetting process simply because
190we are talking about high school students and my personal Experiences there's a wide range in terms of high school students with respect to their maturity some of them have behavioral and other kinds of issues which you know might make it problematic if they were to run and be elected. I'm not saying that to be funny or snarky or dismissive. I'm saying it because I think it's true that there are students in high school who do have issues which could create problems if they were to become or to gain access to a school-wide platform. And I just think that's where the recommendation of the dean comes in. I don't think that necessarily means that there has to be, you know, the student government who's voting on who the applicants should be. I do think the student
191government voting on who the applicants should be is a process that's outside of the board. I mean, that's the student government elected by the students. So I think that that is a way for, you know, that nominating process to exist outside the board. And I think it's important. that the nominating process exists outside the board i don't think the board should be you know influencing who gets nominated risk you know in terms of the the identity of the students or who the the student government wants to to support in that regard but i do think there has to be and i think it's important that there be some some vetting process i think it would be just potentially problematic if anyone any student who wanted to run could I just think that could be an
192issue. Yeah, if I could just jump in here. I think the reason why we want to have this vetting process and have a dean recommendation is more to protect the child, right? Like this person is a child, that they are... in a position to make such a commitment. We don't want a student to get in over their head with their schoolwork or that kind of thing. Even to run for a high school student office, they get a recommendation by their dean. We're kind of following that. I would hate for a child to get themselves into a situation that's not good for them. I think that's... you know first and foremost why they would need it can i jump into because all the questions are good ones um i think we looked at the way other
193districts were doing it and we felt very strongly that students should have Number one any student who would like to take on this opportunity should have the option to do that We felt that that would require any student considering taking on this role to reflect and really About what this role would be to them and why they want to take it So that was when we came up with an application similar and then I just lost my thought. So then we wanted to make sure that that student ultimately was chosen by the students, but we felt there needed to be some guidelines. So we weren't doing exactly as SBNC does, but we kind of used that as a structure to say, okay, well, their student government is elected by the students. They make a lot
194of decisions about what happens. for students in the high school that would maybe be a possibility to try this year and see how it works we didn't want them to solely pick the person so we thought we would vet allow them to vet it with the help of the administration and then slate a number of students to then be chosen by the student body because we don't know everything that goes on with a student as well as their dean does which is why we added in the dean recommendation some schools are just having administrators pick the students but we felt very strongly that we wanted the students to be involved in this process so that we can continue to strengthen the student board of ed relationship but we felt we needed to put some structures
195in place yeah can i ask a follow-up so In terms of the dean recommendation, who's reading that? Are you thinking the student government kids are going to read the dean's recommendation about their peers and make a decision? Is that what I just... Well, I think they wouldn't get to the student government. Yeah, it's either yes or no. They're not, like, making a full recommendation. Like, you know, this person's... They're just basically giving a green light. You know, yes, I have no problem with your writing. Okay, okay. It's a pretty low bar. Maybe recommendation is that. Maybe like they need dean support as part of it. It's not a psychological profile or even like a narrative. It's not a narrative. Well, I was just thinking there's a letter that they provide for college. No, it's a
196check mark, basically. Okay, got it. Not that we should necessarily follow what other districts do, but this is the most student-inclusive proposal that I have seen. I've done a lot of research on this. I'll say certain other groups would say outright, you do not put this to a general election at all. I like being as student inclusive as we can be. But most of the other districts, it's either the student body president or somebody picked. by the principal. That's what we see mostly. But again, we're Scarsdale, we're gonna do what we think is best for our board. I just wanna say, I think it's important that there's more than one candidate. you know for each for the positions because I think that then you know the students need to have a choice but there's no
197and I don't know if there we didn't I don't know if we want this or not there's no board member sitting ex officio on that nominating committee to see the process so then maybe post process or post at some point next year just a recap to understand how did the process work was it Was it as effective as we had hoped? Yeah, you know, we should do a review. Especially if this is a new thing. hopefully will work but it's a pilot program it's yes it's a pilot program and I'm sure there will be you know things that we haven't thought of or improvements that could make it could be made you know I didn't go through all the details you know but as I don't think necessarily there should be a board member on
198that committee you know one of the questions that we're going to be discussing is you know should a board members you know student you know child be able to you know run personally don't think so I think that's also part of the reason why you can say that the person should be a resident you know like that kind of removing two stakeholders I guess I I view them slightly differently and I don't know if we can jump into talking about that or you want to finish oh did anybody else want to say anything about yeah It's kind of fun to have these conversations developing a plan I think this is really and I appreciate the time that all of you spent on this so I sort of have two different views I feel like every
199student should be able to participate and to me that includes teacher students because they're students here fully just like any and perhaps there's a child who's paying to be in district I don't think we should stop anyone from running that said I do have a little bit of concern about family members of board members being on this board. I think there's a law that says like your spouse can't be on the board with you or I'm not sure but maybe somebody knows. Voting member. I mean this would not be a voting member so I don't think. Yeah I still have a concern. I still have a concern about how that might be perceived by the community that Susie Hahn is board president and her son is the one of the two board selected even though
200it's student selected even though you're not involved in the process I I just have I have concerns about that but I do feel again that a teacher student is a full student and There's an a paying student is a full student. I don't see any reason to exclude them from the process So I realize there's a little bit of disconnect between the two, but that's just my viewpoint No I agree I don't think we should have any of our any board of family members be allowed to be student members I mean we have a limited number of board seats right there's seven of us at a given time and the two students and I think diversity of view and you know I mean I appreciate my children advocating but I don't you know they know
201how I feel I know how they feel you know so I think it's good to have a mix of people on here what about former board members children of former board members I assume that's okay yeah former board member children I'm okay with I think it's more current that's where I would draw the line yeah I agree with that I think that's fine you know in general I guess I should take a step back and say in general for me like I view the student board member more aligned with how a Board of Education member is brought onto this board. So I do think they should be a resident. I think they'll be sitting at this board table during budget discussions. They could have an impact. I think we, in many, many aspects within the
202schools, correct, a faculty or staff member's child is treated just the same. They could run for student government. They can participate in any activity. This board of education, to me, sits outside. the schools. We are an oversight body. We do not sit within the construct of the high school, which is also why I have a different view of the election process, just to be clear. That is where my mindset is, and that's how I view these students. I don't know where the majority of us feel on this. I'm sorry, on what? Well, we have two questions the residency requirement and the school board Student or child thing. I think for the school board child. I count one two three That's off the table on the resident residency requirement we have one I don't know. I
203mean I am torn with that one, but I'm tending to lean towards Requiring residency Yeah, I'm kind of leaning against it. I'm happy to go with wherever the majority winds up, but I kind of don't think that, I mean, the student board member won't be voting on a budget. I mean, won't be, you know, sort of having the ability to weigh in, like, you know, in terms of what we do as board members that impact the, you know, the sort of finances of those who reside in the district. I think a student who is the son or daughter of a faculty member. I mean, I don't think they're more likely than not to sort of give us irrelevant input because their mother or father won't have to pay the tax bill that comes out of
204whatever we talk about as a result of our budgeting discussions. I think their mother and father are very much going to be impacted by whatever comes out of our budgeting discussions because they're working for the district. So, I mean, I don't think that there's going to be a real meaningful... sort of reason, in my view, to distinguish between students who are here at Scarsdale as students and faculty members and those who are not. I think the thing that should be the most important thing to decide is the value they can bring, period, and whether their peers voted for them. I think picking up on the perspective that Susie talked about about ensuring that we're not putting any students in inappropriate situations. We could, it seems to me, be at a point where we're talking about
205reducing staff where a child could have a conflict of interest because if we were going to cut out multivariable... calculus and that child's parent taught multivariable calculus, I suppose that would be an awkward situation. I'm just thinking about where I don't personally feel concerned about the issue of taxes and impact on the community, but we are talking and I think we will increasingly be talking about the tension of what we keep and what we don't keep and what is in and what is out. I mean, maybe that's not a big deal at the end of the day, but I could imagine it could be theoretically awkward for a child. I mean, I think the reason to consider it was... I thought the role of these student board members would be to continue to share openly
206their experiences in the high school and what's going on in the high school and feel comfortable doing that. I'm assuming it wouldn't, maybe it wouldn't matter if your parent. taught here or not. I don't know if that would make them feel uncomfortable, to be honest. Maybe it wouldn't. I know my kids have no problem speaking against me to anyone who will listen. So I'm assuming, you know, the other thing is maybe we can leave it up to the students to decide if they think it's a conflict of interest. I don't know. That was the only, I think when we were talking about it, that was one of our concerns. I think I would not feel right going to a bunch of students and saying, all of you can run for this. This is a really
207inclusive process. This is your voice, and we're not going to include these 81 children. I mean, I guess it's not 81 in the high school. These 20 children in the high school or whatever it is, they're not eligible to run because their parents work here. To me, we're creating... they're not voting on the budget they are just providing the student perspective the student experience there could be an awkward situation at some point in time I would hope we'd have some kind of buddy mentor to kind of support them ahead of time to say hey you know let me help you with this situation I just I would not feel comfortable going to these students and saying we're giving you this great opportunity but we're excluding a handful of you it just it doesn't it doesn't
208feel right to me Can I ask a quick question in the document What does good citizenship mean? And is that a requirement of the state or was that written by us? That was not written by the state, as far as I know. But I do think it's in most of the other student ex officio policies that I've looked at. I think it's somebody who, you know. is going to go along with the code of conduct. I think it's going to be somebody who... Oh, sorry. Let me rephrase my question. Does this mean a U.S. citizen? Oh. That's not how I understand it. No. Because we have to be citizens to run on the board. I wasn't sure if that's what that was referring to. No. That was shorthand for in good standing code of conduct,
209I think. Yeah. That's how I understood. Got it. Sorry, I don't want to digress, but while we're there, like, is there a definition of good academic standing? Is that like a certain GPA? Do you have 3.0? 3.0. I'm just acknowledging that there are things in here that exclude kids. Like, if you don't have a, I understand the code of conduct. I know and actually I kind of I mean I also felt the academic I had a little bit of unease with that as well because I think you're going to the Dean and the Dean is giving I mean I there's there's a little bit of putting the Dean in an awkward position because if a child who doesn't qualify for some reason comes to them and says I really want to run for this position
210now the Dean kind of has to be like I don't think you're you're Got the right standing for whatever reason. I don't know I mean, I think part of it was if a child is struggling academically. This is a big I agree and the Dean makes the decision as opposed to the Academics standing. I don't know. I mean it that's the requirement that we want I don't know about the phrase per se you know I agree you don't want it to be too prescriptive but I do think Colleen's point is important this is a big you know whatever role whoever's into this role it's a big time commitment it's a big responsibility so they can't you know we if someone's struggling so much in their classes then they may not have the time to devote
211to it limitation on who could serve if we adopt it the academic standing or good citizenship however you want to put it is different in nature than your mother and father happen to be a teacher here because you could be brilliant and extremely public interest oriented and you know just the next JFK and your mother and teacher happen to teach here. I just feel like it's like basically telling somebody no matter how good you are, no matter how gifted you are, the answer is no. You just can't do it. You're in the wrong category. Sorry. As opposed to, well, frankly, you're struggling academically or frankly, you just spent six months in a juvenile delinquent facility or whatever the other limitations are. Seem to be different in nature than your mother and father happen to be
212a teacher here. Do we have these requirements? Do you have to have a 3-0 to play sport in Scarsdale? I don't believe it's a 3-0. So, I mean, if you play varsity sport in Scarsdale and you practice five days a week, many hours, like we keep talking about this. I keep hearing this is some crazy thing that we're asking the kids of. I do think it's a real time commitment. I know the time. We all know the time commitment. But I don't know that it's any different than what many students take on. I'm just... I find it curious why we're doing certain gatekeeping here. I don't think it was gatekeeping. I think we're just trying. I mean, it can be 2.5. We're not set on a 3.0. I think we were trying to make sure
213that kids who wanted to do this could do it successfully and it wouldn't negatively impact their academic growth and success. That was the total umbrella that we did for this entire. draft so you know we didn't discuss a specific gpa we can or we don't have to and we can leave it to their deans to have that conversation with them about their academic goals and what might this might impact um but maybe it's part of your job description right so that way there's a little bit of self-selection right like you know i assume there's some kind of posting that's going to come out that's going to say this is a time commitment that requires this you know you should make sure that you're comfortable with know keeping up with your schoolwork it doesn't necessarily have
214to be to your point prescriptive of you must have a 3.0 GPA but you know you must follow the code of conduct we don't have to say you know necessarily good citizenship or language that makes it clear there's an expectation of how you will behave and comport yourself when you're here I like that idea Yeah, I agree. I mean, the number, I was not even aware of that there is a number. So I wouldn't necessarily want it to be prescriptive. It's more, yes, can the student dedicate themselves to this role and still succeed in school? That's basically the bottom line. Okay. I don't know if there were other points that were brought up that other people might want to take up. You know, the Ron had a point. I think we need to make sure
215that everyone is, like, if we're going to move forward, is everyone okay with there being an application that we devise that the student, I think we should go through it step by step and confirm everyone is okay with what our plan is. So we, right? Okay. Yes, that there would be an application drafted by the board, that every applicant would fill it out. The board would get copies of it, not to weigh in on, but just to see. They would also go to this nominating committee. Obviously, anybody in student government who would be running would have to recuse themselves from the process. and that they would be, you know, and I think we didn't fill out every detail, but that there would be some kind of, you know, presentation or interview, you know, to the
216vetting committee, and that they would discuss among themselves, you know, how many students they would want to put up for a general election with there being at least two. Is there any part of that that people don't agree with? I guess I personally just want to think about it some more. Like, I guess I'm coming into this discussion just, I think the difference for me is I'm thinking about the position differently than others. I'm thinking about it more as a board member. Just happens to be a student. So that's where my head's at. Like I said, this board sits outside of the organization. I get a little... I think there are so many opportunities within the organization. There's student government, all this stuff where you have to go through the administration and the process. I
217guess it's just my general view that should be an election and if the students want to create a nominating committee, I would recommend it to them, but I think it should be up to them. I mean I just think when trying to implement anything in a high school you just need some structure it would be great to put this on them but it's a little ambiguous it's something we've never done before I think we're trying to give them as much voice as possible with a little bit of structure because they're 14 to 17 I think by having the student government play a role in this, we're allowing them. That was the government they chose to help them run the school. I see your point about us being outside of the institution, but I think this
218is also a way for us to maybe strengthen the connection with the institution. I think it's an opportunity for students to have a voice and maybe have a little bit more investment back in the board. Every meeting we see some students, but I think this is actually a chance for students to really advocate for themselves, and hopefully this will bring more students to the board meeting and give us more perspective. And I think trialing it this way for the year and see how it goes, for me personally, I feel like we've tried to create as much student voice with a little bit of structure so that they feel comfortable giving their student voice. I think that we need to set this up for success I mean frankly I'm a little concerned I don't really know
219what it means to let leave it all up to the high school students I mean does they're gonna like naturally form a nominee committee or you're gonna decide they're gonna decide that not to do that I mean who knows should we care I kind of do care I mean I'm a little concerned if we totally leave it up to the high school students what we're gonna wind up with is some small subset of the student government being elected by the student government to do this because if I were I don't know who else would decide to take charge of it I mean which some group naturally coalesce within the high school and natural leaders would emerge outside the student government to sort of you know forge the effort and come up with all the processes
220and do all of that while everyone just sort of doesn't do anything but watch them and see what comes out of it I mean that doesn't seem to me like to be a way to set this up for success that seems to be possibly setting up for like spiraling somewhere that doesn't necessarily wind up in a good place. I think setting up the structure makes perfect sense. Letting the students inhabit the structure and make decisions within it also makes sense and maybe change things as a result of what we see coming out of that to make it better if there are things that don't work. But I think we've got to give it some structure. I agree on the structure point. Also, like, you know, if this is going to be something that, you know,
221every student body is going to, you know, decide on, are we going to have a, you know, completely different structure every year? Are we going to start from zero, you know, every year? I just don't think that's practical. I think we have to have some structure that we can have some consistency. Obviously there can be improvements and there can be changes, but year to year, one year we have a completely like a popularity contest, and the next year they might design something else. I think there has to be some structure and consistency to this project. And when we tried to come up with a structure, we did try to make it as inclusive and representative as possible. Can I ask, in your thoughts about the student government sort of serving as a vetting committee, were
222you thinking that the 12th grade student government students would participate, or would that also only be 9th, 10th, and 11th? I don't personally have a strong opinion on that. You can make an argument that it should be 9 through 11. Personally, I wouldn't mind it being 9 through 12. I think the more students who are involved could be more representative. Thank you. Thank you, Ken, also for being here tonight. Actually, maybe this is a question for Ken. Sorry, but are there any restrictions on who can run for student government? Can anybody run for student government? Students typically also need to have dean review for disciplinary. And then the class offices, some of the positions have a previous service requirement as you get further along. So the different offices do have different requirements for running, but
223they're usually very minimal just to make sure that it's not someone who's looking not to do the work that's required of the position. Great. Thank you. Yes, Bob. I mean one of the things in terms of the selection of this board, I'm just, I guess my only concern, and I don't know how you avoid this. It's not like I'm imagining, I'm hoping it's not going to be someone's going to have a platform. Like, I'm going to get on the board and I'm going to advocate for, in other words, they're going to have things that they're going to, there's going to be two schools of thought. We're going to advocate, I'm going to advocate for A, B, and C. This is my platform. I don't, well, I don't see us. having done I certainly know I
224didn't do that I was very and I am very neutral about agenda so to speak so I mean maybe that's just the nature of and we can't avoid it but I don't want to see people having different platforms that are you know radically different from each other and that they're ending up picking people because of their opinion on whether we should have Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. You know, I'm going to make sure we have, you know, no phones. Right. You know, I'm going to fight phones. I'm going to be the no, no, we're going to keep phones. The no, no phones. You know, platform. I don't know. No, that's a good point. I think, and correct me, Ken, if I'm wrong, the guidance around, you know, some of these elections at the high school is
225kind of. don't make promises that you can't necessarily keep. So if somebody's promising that everyone's going to be able to have phones whenever they want, if that's not a realistic promise, they shouldn't be out there making that claim that they're going to be able to achieve that. But they could. Obviously they can't promise anything since they're not even going to have a vote in that regard. But they could be advocating and be. you know a consistent voice for something based they could be selected because they promised they're gonna end school at 2 o'clock you know I'm gonna make sure that they hear that message we are putting our faith in our student nominating committee well that they would not choose somebody who would have like an agenda you know I gotta say I mean I
226hear what you're saying about but at the other hand I mean we do have this process that we are thinking about putting it to a student vote there's going to be communication by these those chosen you know to the students to get them to vote and I don't know if you ever walked around the high school when it's voting season for student government, but they're promising all kinds of ridiculous things. And they're putting them in posters. They're practically promising that they can change the course of the United States government. I mean, they're promising lots of things. And of course, I don't think anyone believes that they can deliver on any of those things because they're just going to be in student government and it scars the high school. They're not going to be like the
227lord of the world. But they run as if they can do many things that they can't do. I don't know. I think that's just an inevitable part of how these kids communicate with each other. I don't know that we're going to be able to get in there and say, say. Well, and this is part of the reason why a lot of school districts don't do what we're talking about doing, right? I want to think that our students would make wise decisions. We are kind of, you know, giving the students, empowering them as much as, you know, we are. And if, you know, if it's terrible, we're going to have to change it, you know. I just wanted to say I'm very uncomfortable with the process that you've outlined and I think it would be good
228you know nice as I said earlier to just revisit it in post process make sure you know we didn't want to make any tweaks I think three of you spoke very eloquently about all of your thought you know about your thought process in this I don't think we can control anything necessarily other than what we have in here and you know I look forward to hearing more direct student voice at the board table thank you could I ask one more question this is more of just a practical question is there time to run something like this this year because it does seem like there's a fairly extensive process in terms of education for students about what's involved and then applications and then vetting and then interviews and then selections and then another process. And we
229appreciate all of the high school administration staff that will help make this happen because it is a lot, and we appreciate that. That goes to actually one of the questions on this sheet. If there are more than 10 submitted applications, it's not like they're going to necessarily be able to interview them all. The question of how will we call. I personally, you know, I don't like lotteries. You know, that's just my feeling. Although I appreciate that that would help, you know, cull the number. You know, they could maybe do some kind of rounds, you know, like looking at just the applications. You know, hopefully we make the applications, you know, thoughtful enough, thoughtfully enough that, you know, seeing the responses would guide, you know, kind of. how the committee goes, you know, that's just my,
230you know, first idea on that. Because, yeah, they can't interview 50 people, you know, so, or whatever. But I don't know how other people feel. There was a suggestion of maybe a lottery, you know. And I think we didn't really talk specifically about terms either, but, you know, we could have it be just, you know, rising juniors and it would be a two-year term that would make a... a condensed process. We were talking about maybe having it such that it's a two year term but the person has the option to kind of step down after a year if they don't feel like it's, if we bore them to death so much and they can't do it anymore. And then you would also have then a rising senior election but there's obviously the pros and cons
231of continuity. There's a learning curve. would you want a student who would want to do it for two years? The thing is we don't want to intimidate kids either and potentially have students say, oh, that's a big commitment and I don't want to do that. So we were thinking of it being two years, but they haven't out. Other thoughts? I don't know that it needs to be two years. I mean, I think it's nice to have a junior and a senior. And it's nice to have the option to cut out. after a year if they, you know, I don't know, but that's just my view. I mean, I like when, you know, I don't mind when new voices come on and people, years are different in high school, right? There's a different level of their
232own work, things they have to do, you know, versus in a junior and senior year, things like that. I sort of, I'm not sure how I feel about the two years, just from what I've seen. that kids are doing in a different year something could happen you know or maybe your senior college applications process can get overwhelming you know I like the idea of continuity but I also think hey diverse voices like if we have a new voice at the table I don't you know they're not having to run the meetings or you know vote or anything so their role is fairly representative in terms of speaking on things I'm okay with one-year term. Yeah, I think we discussed one-year term, but if they wanted to submit an application again, they have the option. Yeah,
233I think that seems like a reasonable... I'm good with that. Okay, great. Have any of the schools tried to incorporate the selection into, like, a government-related course where someone who's really... I remember there was one kid a year ago who was really just interested in government and wanted to do public service and government and was really interested in participating. That seems to be another avenue to get someone who maybe gets some credit for it as part of their... workload I mean so that it's you know they it gets incorporated into their class work that they there's some noting that they're doing this showing up there looping the class into it as part of a you know not yeah I don't know if this qualifies for that you know there might be a law about that
234I'm not I don't know no I don't know and that might be up to Ken senior option credit It could be a senior option credit. That wouldn't cover all of the service, but a piece of the service. It's an idea. Did I leave out any questions? The voting, yeah. There was a question, should we do the election by plurality vote, which is the current method of the student elections, or ranked choice voting? There's a rationale. If there's a rationale for why you do it a certain way in the high school, share it. people may need to know what that means do you mean that for example if four people are running and we want to have two people you know two seats to fill that the highest two voter votes is that what you mean
235by plural well we would have an election for each grade so it that wouldn't be the issue but um uh you know i guess ranked choice if you have four and you you do like you know one, two, three, four, and then they tabulate all the different, you know, rankings. Does that make sense? Or is it just, you know, basically who wins? It's a way to effectively get a majority. So if you have four candidates and you take after the first round, let's say two candidates get 30% each and two candidates get 20% each, drop the 20s. Right. And then you look at the... know the next row of voting to see those first two candidates how many second place votes they got basically it's just a helpful if you have a lot of candidates
236I think there is a possibility though if you're considering having one-year terms then everyone who's applying would be on one ballot And so then it might recommend that you just do plurality and the top two vote getters get the positions. It's not a, it's lower, it's when you only have one position coming out of it, the rank choice, there's more incentive to do a rank choice, more of a rationale. But now if you're doing one year term, and I'm assuming we would still allow rising 11 and 12s to apply for it, then I think you would just do the top two from one ballot. That's for your consideration. Sounds good to me. Wait, sorry. I thought we were doing. just 11th and 12th but one seats for an 11th grader and one seats for a
23712th grader yes so so yeah it's not yeah it wouldn't be right yeah then you I think that's different than what Ken was talking about so I think you would do yeah yeah well we don't have to rank choice right do we want an 11th grade and 12th grade I personally do so Yeah, that was what we put forward and it would be the top 11th grader and the top 12th grader So there would be a ballot for 12th graders and a ballot for 11th graders top 11th top 12th They would serve one year term and the 11th grader should they want to run again and sit for their 12th grade year? They could go through the process again. I think that's what we were thinking Thank you all for the discussion. Is there anything
238and so we'll do the popular vote. Is that yeah? seniors get to vote twice I think there's gonna be a lot of education required on our part here I'm not sure that we want to introduce ranked choice voting to our i mean not that i don't think we should introduce it to them but if it's not the way they vote for student government i feel like then we're taking on another um it's not super complicated but i don't know maybe for the first year we've this is this is a little more complicated process than you know the idea of just letting them vote for anybody who wants to run um but isn't this vetting committee gonna bring it down to a handful We talked about telling them we want to fewer than two. Yeah, they're
239going to decide. So I think it depends on the pool that they get. If they get a lot of qualified applicants that they want to bring back to interview, that's their choice. If, you know, they're really only two candidates that, you know, they feel can do the job, that's what they're going to put forward, you know. I very much appreciate the enthusiasm that you think there's going to be 50 students applying to be on the board of ed so I suppose that's a possibility that we could address perhaps perhaps we don't have yeah maybe maybe I mean what if they only have one candidate who applies and they can only put one candidate forward right like you know there's there's gonna be Okay. All right. Should we move on to the next item? All right.
240Thank you all for the discussion. To action items, budget transfers, and I believe this is Amber. I move that the board accept the following. Resolve that the Board of Education approves the attached budget transfers in excess of $25,000 as presented. Thank you, Amber. Is there a second? Thank you, Leah. Any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Ayes have it, and the motion carries. Okay, next we will be going to our public comment session. I read the same preamble before. It's here in the agenda. If there's anybody in the audience who would like to make a public comment, please come to the podium. Okay, thank you. Next, Zoom. We do have an attendee in Zoom now with their hand raised, so I will promote them to panelists, which I have just done. And
241just we need to have the video on. Bye. This is Deborah Skolnick from 11 Oaks Twain Road. I've been listening with great interest to your discussion about a possible student board member. I just wanted to put in my two cents if that's okay. I didn't hear anybody, and forgive me, I had to drop out for a minute there, talk about parental buy-in. I heard you guys talking about, you know, that a dean might give you a note that the child is able. and would be a good candidate. But I work with kids a lot and it's so often that I hear either kids say, yes, I can do that, and the parents saying no, or the parents saying, yes, you should do that, and the kids saying, no, I don't have time. So I was
242wondering if there was going to be any parental input into the process, because you don't want to find out late in the game that the parents think the child is simply not up to the task. And even just from the most practical standpoints of a kid who's too young to get themselves to the Board of Ed late at night and also for a parent to pick them up. Those might be concerns. And another thing that I was thinking about is you were saying that one of the functions of the student BOE member would be to share with you things that are going on at the school. Is there going to be any sort of set protocol for gathering information? Or are you, if not, you run the risk of just having the child say what's
243going on with them and their friends and not give you a more full school report? And likewise, are there going to be any rules about what the student needs to bring back to the student body in terms of information? So I just see so many facets of this, and I wanted to just raise those couple of ideas to you. Thank you. Thank you. Is there anybody else on Zoom, Jim? I'll give it a couple seconds. No. Next, we'll be going to follow up to public comment. My follow-up would be those are very good questions. Thank you. And if there isn't anything else, we'll go to wrap-up items. Meeting dates for the coming month, Jim? Thank you, Susie. So over the coming month, Monday, March 24th, there will be a special meeting slash executive session at
244530 here at the high school in room 172. Then there will be a budget forum business meeting at 630 here in this room. Monday, April 7th, 2025, there will be a meeting with a designated group at 5 p.m. in Learning Commons in the high school. There will then be a special meeting slash executive session, if needed, at 6 p.m. in this room an education report slash business meeting slash we really hope the board will adopt a budget at this time at 6 30 p.m in this room um tuesday april 22nd 2025 there'll be a special meeting which we all love at 9 00 a.m in this room for the sw posse's vote that's always a special meeting that happens every year at the convenient time of 9 00 a.m on tuesday april 22nd um monday
245april 24th 2025 there'll be a board community coffee at 10 a.m to 11 a.m here in this room monday april 28th 2025 special meeting slash executive session if needed 6 30 in this room wednesday april 30th 2025 board community coffee 7 pm to 8 pm in this room thank you jim and with that would someone like to make a motion to adjourn this meeting thank you amber is there a second Thank you, Bob. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. The ayes have it. Motion carries. Have a good night, everyone.