BOE Business Meeting/Budget Study Session #1 2024-2-5

001Good evening. I call this meeting to order, note that all board members are present and we expect Jessica to join us shortly remotely. We are also joined by Dr. Patrick and the administrative cabinet. Thank you to those in the audience or watching the live stream for joining us this evening. Tonight, we continue our budget development process for the 2024-2025 budget. At our last meeting, on January 22nd, the administration presented their staffing recommendations for next year and the programmatic impact of those recommendations. Tonight, we begin the financial review of those staffing recommendations as well as a review of the overall draft budget and a deeper dive into several budget areas. Before getting into the budget presentation, I'd first like to thank Jeannie and the entire IT and data services team for their leadership and support enrolling

002out the district's new financial software program, Envision. This new software system provides a more integrated solution with all of our systems and allows for more thorough planning and analysis, both this year as the first year that we're using this system for our budget and even more so going forward, as you'll see in the presentation as it gets integrated throughout the district. Thank you also to Drew, Andrew, and Lisa and the business office for the significant amount of work to transition our financials to this new software as part of developing next year's budget. This has been a monumental task for everyone involved during an already busy time of year. And lastly, I'd also like to note, for anyone that is watching or in the audience who wishes to comment about the presentation, may do so during

003the two public comment periods in the business meeting that will follow the budget presentation. And with that, I will hand it over to Drew. Okay, thank you. And lemme just get our slides up here. Okay. Jessica says she's logged in but she can't see having it started. Waiting for the host, she must have the wrong link. (member faintly speaking) Alright, can you email her the link? Thanks Amber. Okay, ready? Yep. Alright, well good evening and welcome everybody to Budget Study session number one. Before getting started, I would also like to pause and thank our entire administrative team and department heads for all of their work leading up to tonight's presentation. This year, not only have we followed our normal collaborative and iterative budget development process, but we've involved those responsible for fashioning building and department

004based budgets in the process of learning to use Envision that Ron just mentioned. It's our new financial management software. I'd also like to echo Ron's comments and extend my gratitude to Jeannie Crowley for her incredible project management skills and to Lisa Zareski and Andrew Lennon for their tireless work to get this preliminary budget built in a totally new system. This is required a herculean effort, but that effort and the lift still to come ahead of us will translate into long-term benefits for the district, both this year and going into the future. So thank you. Okay, tonight, we will work to outline the why, how, and what of our budget. We will present the overall preliminary budget draft, discuss the key budget components and drivers, and we will discuss four key budget areas, transportation, facilities and

005capital projects, debt service and benefits. We look forward to robust discussion once we've shared this information with the Board, As I've done in the past, I'll share some familiar slides that will help set the stage for what's to come tonight. Above all, we think about the budget as a means to an end. Our budget plan outlines the resources necessary to operate the district and our programs in order to achieve the goals and objectives that are connected to our mission and vision. In the broadest terms, the essential work of our schools is to provide a world class education, ensuring our students are well-prepared for their next level of education. We understand that to accomplish this, we must create an environment of belonging where student wellbeing is a key focus and students have opportunities to flourish both

006inside and outside of the classroom. Thus, we hold as a core value the concept of educating the whole child. Together these broad objectives serve as an important decision making lens, especially with respect to our financial resources. As we've seen before, this model provides a bit of a bird's eye view of the essential work and organizational structure of our school district. The three spheres communicate the critical functions of our work with students and student learning situated at the center of it all. Importantly, 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 community provide input and guidance for all of this work through governance and budgetary support. Tonight, we will provide detail about four

007areas of district operations and these are the four that appear in the blue box here in the lower left. At our last meeting on January 22nd, I spent several minutes discussing the remarkable commitments this community has made over time to establish an instructional program to meet the needs of our students. At each level, elementary, middle, and high school, the design of the instructional program reflects long held community values. These structures foster favorable student-teacher ratios, create smaller learning communities within a larger school setting and allow students to express agency over their course of study. For the sake of time, I won't repeat that discussion, but I will reiterate that the resources directed toward this fundamental organization of our schools creates a strong foundation that allows us to focus on the whole child while pursuing innovation and

008thoughtful adaptations to meet the needs of every learner. Beyond these core program drivers, we've begun a strategic planning process that will point the way toward important priorities moving into the future. As I've said, this process will extend beyond this particular budget development timeframe, but we are working hard on a number of priorities right now and that will require resources to continue and we look forward to talking with you during the ongoing budget discussions to discuss these. In the meantime, the strategic planning work continues and if we are successful in our timeline, we'll be able to align our future budget items to these strategic priorities. Okay, so in terms of school budget development, we've certainly shared this before, but budget initiatives only appear in the draft budget after thoughtful consideration, deliberation, and discussion with our cabinet,

009principals, administrative council members and recommendations come forward following guiding principles that I'll share in a moment. And our non-instructional requests come through conversations between Andrew and our business office and our non-instructional department leadership. We analyze those requests based on our priorities, strategic plans, goals, operational standards, best practices, and our kind of historic spending norms and efficiencies. And as I just mentioned, these guiding principles are really what operate behind the scenes and in the back of our minds and in the front of our minds as we go through these decision making processes. Okay, and as a reminder, this is our budget calendar. We are in budget study session number one, kind of our third benchmark in this process, and we're gonna jump in. So over the next 45 minutes or so, maybe a little bit longer,

010we'll spend time discussing the key components of the budget, including current and projected expenditures and revenues, our fund balance position and the tax levy. And each of these components is part of a larger picture and some of the information here we sort of visit or revisit annually. And it's important I think to take the time. So I know Andrew's gonna spend a little bit of time reminding us about the tax cap, how that works, about fund balance, how that works, and of course go through our projected revenues and expected expenditures. Okay, so with that I'm gonna turn it over to Andrew. Thank you, Drew. I didn't realize I had a time limit this evening, so I'll get moving. And at the risk of being redundant, I do wanna talk a little bit about the software

011implementation that we're going through at the moment because it's very important in terms of the budget process. So over the last year, we've been speaking about the planned migration to a new software platform for the district's finance, accounting, and HR functions. The first of three major milestones in that migration is the budget development process. This slide provides visual update on where we are in that migration, but what it fails to do is display the tremendous amount of work being done behind the scenes to translate historical information into the new system. The staff involved in the budget development process, have been asked to live in two worlds. Budget with the new system and the changes we are making while also using the current system on a day to day basis so that we can understand both

012the history and inform our budget development process. So I echo the thoughts earlier about Jeannie Crowley, the data services team, as well as Lisa Zareski. It's been a huge amount of work to do amongst them and we appreciate it greatly. On the next slide, what does it mean really to the budget development process? So first and foremost, we are working to reduce the need for manual manipulation of information via spreadsheets and so forth so that we can more reliably produce reports and make meaningful decisions with data directly out of our accounting system. We've been spending the last two years methodically adjusting our account structure to better align with the New York State Comptroller defined chart of accounts. Some of these adjustments were included in the current year budget and several more have been discussed at

013board meetings during reports by our district treasurer pertaining to budget transfers. This year's proposed budget will show even more adjustments of this nature as we've worked hard to start our use of the new system with all the numbers where they should be to the best extent possible. Due to this, some historical comparisons will need to be viewed and compared at an aggregate level. Just one example of this will be the uncoupling of BOCES expenditures from other contractual expenses in various areas of the budget. Whenever possible, wherever possible, we will do our best to highlight to the Board and the community any key variances that are decision driven additions to or reductions from the budget versus those that are accounting based. Of course, where more information is necessary, we'll certainly respond accordingly with more research and

014follow up to your questions. Now with that background set, I'll speak to the current proposed budget. The current proposed budget includes a total expenditures of $186,800,653. To budget increase is just over 9 million or 5.08%. We are projecting a small decline in other revenue sources and proposing that the use of fund balance and reserves remain flat year to year, this would result in a total tax levy increase of $9,116,857 or 5.6% increase year to year. It should be noted that this budget reflects all the recommended staffing presented at the board meeting in January, and I will discuss the projected resources available to fund this budget now. So projected fund balance, the first slide shows anticipated fund balance and reserve balances at the end of the current fiscal year. We started the year with $28.3 million

015total fund balance and we are forecasting expenses to exceed revenue by approximately $4 million in the current year, resulting in an ending fund balance number of 19.8 million. This number indicates the various reserves established by the Board. It results in an unassigned fund balance of just over 7.2 million or 3.94% of the proposed budget. Please note that on this and subsequent slides, we have reflected a reduction in the reserve balances based upon our recommended use of those reserves, reserves to balance the proposed budget. We will continue to revise this projection throughout the budget process and highlight any adjustments accordingly. This next slide displays the actual and projected fund balance history over time. As you can see, our total fund balance has declined over time, most notably in the reserve for health insurance. As mentioned earlier,

016we are currently proposing a budget that maintains the current level of fund balance and reserves to balance next year's budget. All else being equal, the fund balance would continue to decline in subsequent years without new sources of revenue or cost savings that would reduce the reliance on this fund balance. Again, we'll be revisiting the projected column throughout the process and highlight any changes. So now I'll talk about the property tax cap. Forgive me for a little history lesson here, but the property tax levy limit or tax cap as it's commonly known, is not actually a cap, but a calculation that determines the level of voter support needed to pass a school budget. A budget below the levy limit requires a simple majority, 50% of the voters plus one. However, a budget above the figure calculated

017in the cap calculation would require a 60% majority to pass. The calculation has many factors, which I will go over in just a moment. But they include an inflation factor, a measure of community growth or development and specific exclusions that can raise or lower the allowable levy limit. Within the calculation, the inflation factor is the consumer price index issued by the federal government and it is capped at 2%. This is where the 2% tax cap gets its common though overly simplistic name. The upper left corner of this slide has a summary of the most important data points for this year. Inflation rose at 4.12% in the year measured for this year's calculation. It's more than double the amount permitted in the capped calculation of 2%. This is the third year in a row in which

018the CPI is above that 2% cap. The tax-based growth factor or a measure of community development and growth provides 1.12% reflecting the building that's been happening in our community. We have $8 million in capital exclusions this year and payments in lieu of taxes or pilots are just over $420,000. When added to the calculation, these inputs result in an allowable levee growth of $5,886,856 or 3.62% growth. This next slide is the full calculation and I won't read the full calculation in detail, but you start with the current year levy. We apply the growth factor, we add back the pilot payments from the current school year, remove the capital exclusions from the current school year, apply 2%, remove the new pilots, and then finally, add back the exclusions. As I said earlier, when you go through this

019calculation, you arrive at the tax levy limit of $168,672,441. A proposed levy above this number would require 60% majority, or in other words a tax cap override. Note that I stepped over some of the items that do not apply to the formula this year. So having talked about fund balance and the tax cap, let me talk about our revenue picture in total. This slide depicts the historical and proposed revenue assumptions for this year. I'll go over some of the variances. In property taxes, we reflected in this chart, the property tax cap number that I just went over. It increases the revenue by 5.8 million. Pilots, we have a small increase projected in the pilot line. State aid reflects the governor's proposed budget amounts, including the decrease in foundation aid of $559,000. We've made some adjustments

020to the expense based aids that increase the projected a slightly over the governor's projected base budget. Based on our own knowledge of expenses and the governor's commitment to fully fund the expense based AIDS. Interest earnings, we continue to see positive current year and projected interest income. So we have increased that line by 596,000. And then all other revenue, this is the largest, excuse me, the largest factor for the decrease in the all other revenue categories. One that is an accounting treatment item, I talked about earlier. This one pertains to the Scarsdale Teachers Institute. We have set up the STI as its own fund on our books going forward. All revenue and expenses pertaining to the Scarsdale Teachers Institute will reside there and not be commingled with the district's general fund like it currently is. The

021only remaining expenses that will be in our general fund budget will be our contractual obligations noted in the Scarsdale Teachers Association contract. So this change though it is a reduction in revenue, is a tax neutral impact because there are corresponding expenses that will not be in the budget going forward. So what I did not touch on in this slide, which forgive me, you can see at the bottom of the slide, I've included the appropriation of fund balance as well as the use of the health and the retirement reserves in the overall available funds for this year's budget. Okay, so this slide shows the historical and proposed budget in terms of major functional areas in the budget. These are aligned with the comptroller's chart of accounts that I mentioned earlier. General includes things like the Board

022of Education, the budget, the Board vote and election, central administration, business, HR, legal and audit services, operations and maintenance, security and data services among other things. The next section is instruction, which includes all things teaching and learning including regular and special education. Our curriculum office as well as athletics and student activities. Transportation includes transportation for both our in-district and our out of district either privately or CSE place students. Community services is our census and our community expenses related to to those programs. And then undistributed reflects employee benefits and debt service. I've noted here as a separate line transfers to other funds, which is inclusive of our capital projects and as well as the summer special education program general fund support as well as the STI and the SDA contractual obligations that I mentioned earlier. The

023latter two were actually in instructional codes in budgets prior to this year. And this chart is a high level kind of summary of the changes year to year to provide the Board with kind of a broad brush overview of the key drivers that are showing an increase in our budget this year. At the most basic level, it shows the increases driven by two primary categories, salaries and benefits, including the retirement contributions, social security and health benefits. We'll cover other drivers at future meetings, but they do include technology, classroom library furniture, insurance premium increases from our insurance carrier, security equipment, and contracted athletic transportation expenses. To varying degrees, several of these items reflect the return of items removed or omitted from the current year budget that warranted inclusion in the budget discussion, if not in the

024budget itself. Okay. This is you. So we're returning to this slide, which is a slide we presented on January 22nd to talk about the staffing recommendations for this proposed '24-'25 draft budget. The only change to this particular slide is the yellow highlighted area of potential inclusion of a high school dean. So included in the $4.5 million increase in salaries that Andrew just showed as a budget to budget variance are 8.9 added positions as reflected in this slide. And that 8.9 positions accounts for approximately $1.1 million of that $4.5 million variance. Not included in that number is the tier two proposal to add that dean position to the Scarsdale High School Guidance Department. And just as a reminder to those watching, Dean is a term we use to describe our guidance counselors at the high school

025level. High school Principal Ken Bonamo is here and has done a lot of thinking and met with us last week to kind of talk through some of your questions from our last meeting about how an additional dean could potentially be added to the staff at the high school without the full request, which was a 3.0 FTE asked to add a social studies and English teacher as well to form a new freshman Civ Ed team. Ken, do you mind coming to the podium and sharing what you you worked on? And thank you very much for being here tonight. We really appreciate it. Yes, so as you've alluded to, all of our current deans are paired with an English and social studies teachers, so that there are eight teams in the freshman year, even though we have

026nine teams. Oren Iosepovici is the director, he has a reduced caseload, and Ava Laera is a school dean. So she has a reduced caseload of freshmen. So together, they take care of one of the eight teams. If we were to add another dean, dean without a team, the way we would do that primarily would be to have that dean responsible for all of our new enrollees for the year who are normally distributed among the existing counselors. So that usually is about 40 to 50 students a year. And that new team would also take on 40 new freshmen who would be on, would have their English and social studies classes with other teams. So they would be evenly distributed among the existing English and social classes in the ninth grade, but they would have a dean

027assignment that was not connected to that team. Probably in the freshman seminar program because of the Civ ED, there's more of an intensive teaming structure that meets more frequently. We would have to work out those details so that person would likely start out with a reduced caseload and then take on students as the years went on, when they brought their caseload forward with them. We would not want to, our preference would be to not reassign current or next year's 10th, 11th and 12th graders to a different dean given the four year relationship that we really emphasize and especially given, I think there would be an unpleasant experience for the students and parents, especially in the 11th and 12th grade. So I think just to round out Ken's comments, I think to frame the sort of

028the guiding principles or most important considerations that the high school takes into account, they're trying to preserve the idea of a small community for ninth graders as they enter. And that's why the freshman team process exists, helps that transition for students. It's one of those things I talked about earlier that is part of the Scarsdale program that's really special and that this community has supported. So obviously that is why the original ask was for 3.0 would be to have that increase in Civ Ed opportunity and then reduced counselor caseload. That's the most comprehensive way to preserve that ninth grade small team transition approach. And then the second most important thing I think, I'm not trying to put words in Ken's mouth, but is that four year relationship with the dean that that is cherished and

029sacred and is a really important part of that program. So I think when I was listening to Ken and Oren and trying to understand this unusual shift, that's what they would be trying to preserve. So not disrupting a caseload or individual student and counselor relationship. The proposal doesn't result in the immediately most efficient staffing arrangement, but it gets there over time. Yeah, over time. And I think you would see it obviously mostly it would have the biggest impact in the freshman caseload which are currently around 50 to 53 students that would go down to 40 to 42 students per counselor. But because we would not reassign upperclassmen, the upper class loads would remain the same and they would again through the four year evolution, they would reduce over time. Well, the drawback of not introducing

030a team at the outset, of course, would be that while the caseload mitigation is the primary objective of adding the team, the secondary objective would be to add a Civ Ed team which would more closely align with the proportion of requests we get for Civ Ed to freshman seminar. Those numbers would remain stagnant without the addition of a team. If the ads were in future years, we would ultimately get there. And I understand this would be a phasing, but it should be noted at the outset that that would be a disadvantage. So this might be a good point to pause and see if there are follow up questions from the Board while we have Ken at the podium. Question from the Board? I have a quick question. So in years one, two, and three before

031this dean is fully staffed up with students, can you talk a little bit about what activities this person would do and if there's ways they can help with sort of the overall maybe college admissions process? Sure, that's a great question. One of the main responsibilities of the office is hosting college representatives and that responsibility is shared among the nine deans as well as our volunteers for the college and career center. If this person would to have a reduced load for the first year or two, three, we would have them take the primary responsibility for hosting those visits and we would look to other programming that they might take a lead role in, understanding though of course that in general we tried to mentor a new person and not overload them with new and important responsibilities

032in their first year. It would depend also on their experience level, whether it was someone new to profession or someone who had experienced elsewhere. But even in those cases, our onboarding is gradual and as gentle as we can make it. And I will say there is a nine bullet list of activities and responsibilities that this new dean would possibly take on. That's helpful. I mean what I'm hearing a little bit of is that even though that we wouldn't necessarily be able to reduce the caseload for other deans day one, we might be able to reduce some of their workload from other items, which lets them focus on those 50 to 52 kids. Correct, so there would be an indirect benefit in that way with that a specific reduction in overall caseload in the 10 to

03312, that's right. Okay, I think Amber's got a question. I did, thank you, Ron. I did have a question, excuse me. But I wanted to say thank you Ken because I had a lot of questions last week about in general how we might incorporate one dean, and I really appreciate that you went back and Oren went back and so thank you for that analysis. I have one other question. If we did a phase in approach with a dean in one year with the idea to get to a full team, does the phase in have to be English and social studies together in one year or can it be phased over? Like we wouldn't get to Civ Ed that way either, but could we do that or would have to be? Yes. We certainly have I

034think the numbers in our social studies courses, both electives and in the grade level courses that would merit bringing in our social studies person to alleviate some of those concerns. And then the third year would be the English person because the class sizes there are not that much of an issue and we would use that person permanently for the team and potentially to expand course offerings to English beyond what we currently have. Okay, great. Any other questions from the Board? Yeah, I was just curious, clearly we've seen that there seems to be a higher demand for the Civ Ed than their slots. So that which is part of our motivation here. I'm just curious, are there any stepping back, are there any courses within the high school that have, we've seen perhaps a reduction in

035demand which could allow a shifting of assignments, do you know what I mean? No, it's- Because we're not changing the number of kids, but we're just changing the importance of certain opportunities. So I was just curious, are there reduction in some classes that very few people are, you know- Yeah. Today interested in? That's a great question. So I'll just clarify and say that when you're adding a team for the freshmen, you would be splitting the same number of students over just one more team. So you'd be driving down those class sizes a little bit, but adding a team, so you wouldn't be closing classes. If you were to add electives in any subject, but for example, in English and Social Studies, you would see kids come out perhaps of other choices across the school. We

036have added electives, for example, our STEAM program and we've added some new Math classes in the recent past. But what we have seen over time is that instead of making choices, kids are just adding so many more of our, which is not necessarily a good thing, but many more of our students have fuller programs than they did five or 10 years ago. We did a study, I believe seven years ago that showed that the average, I don't wanna get the numbers wrong 'cause I'm from memory, but I think the average enrolled periods had gone from 26 to 28 over the preceding four years out of our 32 period schedule, or 34 period schedule. So we see kids taking more, and then the other piece of that is, we may have gotten a little bit lighter

037in world language. So we used to see, I would say pre-STEAM, you would see a lot higher numbers of students taking multiple languages. They would maybe be accelerated already in their Middle School language and then pick up one that they hadn't studied before. We don't see that, but it hasn't been enough just to find a program or a level or a language to close. The enrollments have remained relatively strong, 'cause even those numbers, we're really talking about single digits or maybe, maybe 10 kids but they're so scattered that it's hard to like find that one or two sections that you can close. Any other questions or comments from the Board? I just have one. It's more of a financial question. How does this adding this dean affect the numbers? Like the salary? Yeah, it's about

038115. It's a guess of who we would hire. But it's about a hundred and, probably about $130,000 plus benefits. So that we would need to find in the budget. Right, yep. Thank you, thanks. Okay, any other final questions or comments? Okay, thanks so much Ken for being here. Sure. Thank you, Ken. Appreciate it. Okay, so that brings us back to just a high level overview of the budget plan that Andrew outlined at the beginning of this. We'd be looking at a preliminary budget of $186,800,653, which is a 5.08% budget to budget increase of 5.6% tax levy increase. Again, the projected tax levy limit is 3.61% and the amount above that limit is $3,230,001. We have not quite ready to project tax rate increases. I know Andrew and Lisa are working on that, but certainly next

039time, we'll have the estimate of those tax rate increases with our update. Ready? Okay, so we're gonna move into the first of our function areas here and we're gonna start with transportation And I'll continue to try to hit the high points, but certainly if there's any questions, I'll be able to answer those. So the transportation budget here is going up by $498,000 and it's largely driven by three contractual related expenses. The first being $72,000 is included for the rental or subscription for a fully digital radio system for our entire bus fleet. Our existing system is an antiquated system beyond repair, we're having trouble finding replacement parts and some buses are not able to be repaired for the radio system. So communication is a challenge. This system would provide us with direct communication to our bus

040in a reliable fashion, which is a challenge I witnessed firsthand in September. The next one is an increase in $176,000 for maintenance expenses covered by our agreement with the village. We're finding significant increases in costs related to repair and maintenance of our aging fleet. So this increase is in line with the actual projected expenses for this year and the need for us to continue to maintain and keep our our vehicles on the road and past DOT inspection. The last of the three is $156,000 increase in the continued reliance on charter buses for our away games that are particularly an hour away or more. And also for the occasions though rare when our school buses are unavailable to provide transportation, we use a contract vendor for sports transportation. This budget reflects maintenance of our existing number

041of, sorry, the continuation of the number of drivers we currently have and includes an increase for school bus purchase to replace our oldest vehicles and the rising costs associated with those purchases. We've seen significant increases in the purchase price for our, even our small buses over the last few years. We're hoping to order at least one large and one small bus with this budget. It would be great to be able to get two for that dollar amount, two small buses for that dollar amount. I just wanna note that the bus purchase is an exclusion into the tax cap and a reduction in this area. Specifically the purchase of buses would not provide any room under the cap for other purposes. I wanna stop here and provide a brief update regarding the transportation study that was

042funded in the current year's budget. Since my arrival in July, Dr. Patrick and I have spoken at length about the various directions this study could be focused such as fleet electrification, routing efficiency, maintenance, and safety of the fleet, et cetera, all of which are important. The zero emissions bus mandate is a looming concern and this work seemed most pressing to us. Research firms capable of helping us through that process. Highland Fleet emerged as a possible partner in the work and we talked briefly about this at a previous board meeting. Free of charge, Highland Fleet has offered to assist us with the identification of a path forward and to submit grants to the EPA in NYSERDA for the purchase of four buses and the related infrastructure build out necessary to support that fleet. So we've recently

043signed those grant applications and we're submitting those in the next few days. Additionally, Dr. Patrick and I, we are recommending that the Board consider our new internal auditors Nawrocki Smith look more closely at the operational needs of the department, including processes, procedures, recordkeeping as part of the overall state mandated internal audit function. We felt that this was an effective use of funds that were in the budget anyway and could be applied to this purpose. It's our expectation that the culmination of both of these activities will provide us with sufficient insight and to more effectively use the $45,000 budgeted in this year's budget. The study remains, reflected in our projected costs for this year and we anticipate releasing RFP later this spring. Okay, okay. I'll move to facilities and operations. So this slide reflects the operation

044and maintenance budget. The operations budget is increasing overall by $68,000 while the maintenance and grounds budget is increasing by 290,000. Inflation has hit this department particularly hard in the cost of supplies and materials. You will note, however, a swing in our budget between utilities and contractual expenditures in the custodial side of the budget operations side. This reflects the contract with Cenergistics and we've offset the cost of that contract with utility savings we're beginning to see through the program's efforts. The next slide is, oh, sorry, is just a highlight of the previous one. We have over one million square feet of buildings and 118 acres to maintain. We regularly conduct air and water quality testing through our partners at BOCES, which you'll see an increase in the budget around the BOCES line pertaining to that. It's

045consistent with the actual expenditures we've seen in recent years. We have 60 FTE and plus 4 1/2 staff in our Facilities Director's Office that support them from a leadership perspective. And I noted that the Cenergistics contract is included in the budget and this is year two, we're gonna be factoring into this budget. In terms of operations, this is the capital projects with this year's transfer to capital. We've included several different projects that have not been necessarily a priority in recent years, but we wanted to bring them forward. The first being related to climate mitigation. The Brewster Stream Hill Rehabilitation project would be essentially dredging and maintaining the stream watercourse outside of the high school. We have received a quote related to dredging that project, but we also have been provided with additional recommendations that may

046be able to more effectively use these dollars. We would be including this $450,000, the use of a engineering firm, specifically related to storm water expertise that would help us kind of plan that project and accomplish as much as possible to protect the high school facility from the Brewster Stream. Related to that as well is we have an investment that you all know well about the auditorium project. There are groundwater pumps, basically some pumps below the orchestra pit and the seats in the auditorium. We felt it was important to address those pumps to make sure that the work that we plan to do in that space does not get damaged through continued groundwater infiltration underneath the building. And this is really to deal with groundwater coming up from the bottom side, not necessarily flood waters from

047the stream. We believe both of these projects are coupled though because the water we pump out ends up in the storm water system outside of our school building, which essentially is that stream. The plant envelope, there are significant numbers of smaller projects across our buildings, including brick work, mason repair, foundation repair, some windows and doors protecting of our eaves. We felt that there was enough scope of work here across all of our school buildings that it would make sense to do this as one project with the state and have the architects help us through that project and try to get efficiencies of scale through a bid process. Protecting the outside of our building is certainly important for the inside to that. From a sustainability perspective, we talked about Cenergistics briefly, but Fox Meadow and the

048age of Fox Meadow and the age system there has been quite a challenge with us trying to regulate heat in an effective way that would help us save energy. So we wanted to include in this transfer to capital line funds to address some of the steam traps that need to be replaced there that will help us better regulate classroom temperatures across the whole building and in an efficient energy conservation way. And I'll just jump in there, we do expect in March to have a report from Cenergistic so you can hear about our year one work and one of the things we'll ask them to talk about is how they modify their account. Andrew will say it better than I can say it, but how they modify their accounting to take into account changes that we

049make in the system. They're not going to take credit for things that we, you know, decide to do and pay for that are above and beyond something like this. Yeah, and I've actually, I mapped out in our cabinet updates, I have a few comments about a Cenergistic training that John Antonicelli and I participated in. So the last item, excuse me, on the transfer to capital list is the potable water filtration system at Scarsdale Middle School. We spend quite a bit of time and water flushing that system on a regular basis. This would be an important disinfection system that would help us maintain the water quality level at the Middle School in a more effective way. And we would hope that that project, and or the sustainability, the Fox Meadow project would be issued to the

050state as an individual project in which, it's less than a $100,000, and we'd be able to get building aid on that project the very following year, as opposed to being spread out over several years. So the next slide is the debt service and lease purchases. So we've highlighted here in three different categories are our schedule of payments for the debts related to capital improvement projects. The EPC project, which was done several years ago and is now falling off. So you'll see a decrease there of $621,000. And then our technology leases including our district-wide xerox copier lease. As you can see overall, there's a decrease of $590,000 in this category. The lease pertaining to the, sorry, the debt pertaining to the bond and the EPC lease are both part of the capital exclusion I talked about

051earlier for the tax cap. So there is a decrease in the copier lease for some lease that has kind of expired over their five year period. We are including a kind of renewal of that lease in this budget for approximately a million dollars worth of technology purchases. And we're gonna refine that number based on an update from our fiscal advisor in the coming weeks. Included also in this is an $8,000 interest payment as was projected as part of the auditorium bond proposition. That $8,000 interest only payment would be related to a bond anticipation note that we anticipate issuing next year as the bonds, sorry, at the end of this year as the work related to planning that bond and perhaps some of the first contracts get awarded over the summer. This is a visual depiction

052of the debt service. And as you can see, the auditorium bond is at the very, very top on the 2026 bar. But our 2025 years is the debt that we are forecasting as part of this budget. And you point out there that $8,000 Sits on top of that. It sits on top of there, you can't see it. It's a very thin sliver of a line. 2025. But it is also important to note that as we try to plan kind of for stability around the property tax cap, there is a decrease here in debt service that we are showing as an increase in the transfer to capital line to try to keep things a little bit more smooth. Although there is an increase overall in the capital exclusion. Now one of the big numbers, employee benefits.

053Employee benefits covers a wide variety of employee benefits including retirement, system payments, social security, workers' compensation, life insurance, but certainly health insurance is a big part of that as well. This year, the projected increases related to the pension systems, social security, and health insurance are driving this budget significantly. You can see here that we've got nearly $1.6 million increase in pension system contributions this year. These are driven by the salaries of covered employees as well as the pension rate percentage contributions that we are mandated by law to fund. In the health insurance category, we do see about 6.5% claims growth from year over year and it is anticipated however that we'll see some adjustments to that number downward based on some anticipated changes in cost share between the covered members and the district. This next

054slide is a kind of historical perspective of the retirement system contribution rates. Again, these are the rates that the district is required to contribute. We do not have an option to not fund these. In fact, our TRS contributions are deducted directly from our state aid. So it's not even an actual payment. It is sent right to the retirement system. And you can see these are protected increases year over year in the far right column And over to Drew. Okay, so back to our budget timeline. We've just completed those component areas and as we look toward budget study session number two, we will come forward with the instruction budget with Edgar, the special education budget with Eric and also with Eric's safety security emergency management items, technology with Jeannie and William, and then the athletics budget

055as well. So that's what's coming up and we thought we'd end with this slide, which recaps the budget plan that we presented at the top imposes sort of a starting point for consideration. Some thoughts we had about this, knowing the total size of the budget to budget increase. Now that we've got all the budget lines entered very meticulously into Envision, obviously, we're gonna continue to scrutinize those and take another pass through. We would do that anyway, but it's nice having all of that in Envision to be able to dissect and run reports and so forth. Of course, we will continue to think about and be in dialogue with you about our staffing, thinking about those new proposals and their costs. Looking to see if some of those proposals are based on enrollment projections that can

056continue to change. School doesn't open for next year, doesn't open for eight more months as Andrew reminded me today. So things do change. Of course, we've budgeted some contingency positions. Those are absolutely nice to have, but they're contingency positions. We always think about what are the things that we might consider delaying or postponing. Is it essential? Is it really, really would love to have like to have, be nice to have those types of things. And then, of course, we always have, for lack of a better term, the lever of reserves, how much to use the reserves for what purposes and under what rationale. And there are more things but we thought we'd just pose those as items that we continue to think about it and I'm sure you are too. Well, thank you, Drew, Andrew,

057Lisa, and all of the administration and building teams have put a lot of work into bringing this budget to the Board. With that, I will open it up to board members for questions, comments, and thoughts. Yeah, thank you for the presentation and all the work that goes into it. It's very thoughtful. I actually had some questions about some of the earlier slides that we looked at. In particular the reserves, and in particular the self-insured health insurance reserve. I guess to start, because there is at least to my way of looking at it, a pretty big delta between what was presented for fiscal year 2023 versus projected fiscal year 2024. You have a number of years where reserve kind of seemed to be extremely steady, almost the exact number, then in fiscal year 2023, decreased significantly

058I would say. And then the projected fiscal year 2024 is another significant decrease. So I'm wondering what experience is informing this projection in terms of why it should be decreased to this extent? Yeah, so there's one piece of it that's an accounting piece, but the other thing is actually kind of experience, right? So last year, the plan had a really difficult year and I believe my understanding is that decrease that you see between 2022 and 2023 was to address claims in the 2022, 2023 school year. Additionally, at this time last year, a million dollars of that reserve was slated to balance this year's budget 'cause there was an anticipation that that was gonna be necessary. What did not happen at the end of the year, and there's debate about whether it should have or should

059have between the accounting firms we talked to and some of my colleagues that million dollars associated for this year really should have, in my opinion, been taken off of the 3.8 million so that drop would've been actually a year earlier. So we've reflected both the million dollars for this year's budget and the million dollars we're proposing to use for next year as a decline between fiscal year 2023 and 2024 on this slide. We're gonna firm up whether or not that's how we should show it, but I think to be fiscally and to provide you all with the most important information, we wanted to make sure we represent that if the decision is made to take that million dollars for next year, that that really 1.9 million for the health reserve is really what we should

060anticipate that number to be. Whether it's at July 1st, 2024 or June 30th, 2025. And that million is like an inter balance shifting? It's essentially taking money from your savings account to cover the expenses. So it's sitting in our, I don't like the word surplus 'cause it has a connotation to it, but it's an accounting term, surplus. It's in our current surplus. It is specifically dedicated. We're one of the few districts in the state who has a health insurance reserve. It's in legislation that Scarsdale is named. We've been able to put it there. So it's not part of our 4% limit into unassigned fund balance, but yeah, that's what it is. How comfortable would we feel that 1.9 based on past experiences, inadequate reserve that will cover us so that we don't wind up scrambling

061to meet the obligations? I'm looking that way because I have less experience here in Scarsdale on the health plan, but I've experienced other places where it is concerning when health insurance is kind of volatile, especially in a self-funded plan like us. Right, and given you know, that we have had bad years not too long ago. Yeah, which is why that's been drawn down. Yeah. Yep. And so we would hope at some point if the year comes when we have, we underspend our budget that we would ask the Board to put some money back into the health reserve, that year could come next year. We don't know. It could come two years from now or three years from now, but that is the sort of live and die by on a self-insured plan. But in the

062end, knowing you're saving, you're saving serious money by maintaining the self-insured plan versus a premium based plan. Thank you. And oh, I'm sorry. Can I ask to follow up on that question? Sure. Is there a certain number of years at which we do reevaluate having a self-insured health insurance plan where we continue to see these big expenses? At what point do we do that? Yeah, so we do it informally annually in the health advisory committee. We do quarterly reports where we're assessing the viability of the plan, frankly, can we continue to operate it? But when we renew our, or go into negotiations on our contract, that's when we take a really hard look and the very first talking point at that subcommittee related to negotiations of the health insurance plan. We ask, is this still

063a viable plan with our consultant, with our partners from each of the unions at the table? And we say yes or no, and we're about to have that conversation. Okay, thank you. Sorry, Jim. No, that's a good question. No, I didn't wanna take up, you know, I didn't wanna monopolize but I did have another reserve question, which is reserve for encumbrances 'cause there is a big delta there and I'm wondering what accounts for that delta? So let me explain what that is. So that's not like the other reserves. So the reserve for encumbrances is an accounting function where at the end of the fiscal year, if you have goods or services that have been ordered but not received, that purchase order gets carried over. But that shouldn't burden the following year's budget. So what the

064accounting transaction is, it creates a reserve for encumbrances and then the following year, the voter approved budget is actually increased by that number to cover the funding for those reserves. So that will fluctuate. You'll see that we did aggressively reduce that this year. It's our intention and our hope that because of the financial software transition to have as few purchase orders outstanding at the end of the fiscal year as possible because the payment of those will be a challenge in the new system. So we've reduced it to $500,000. The offset of that is, those purchase orders are reflected as projected expenses in the budget elsewhere for the current year. Right, and that number, I guess it's not knowable until the number of purchase orders they're gonna be carried over is knowable. Correct, correct, so I

065guess I'm gonna read into your question just a little bit. You could somewhat negate that reserve from this chart altogether because it is more of an accounting treatment than it is a fund balance or reserve conversation. Thank you. You're welcome. I saw Amber's hand up. Thanks Ron. Thank you for this presentation. Actually I'm gonna start by thanking you for a couple particular slides because they were so great. I had noted them, so I really appreciated the tax cap calculation that you broke out, especially the line items that are not included this year in case they come up in the future. So thank you for that. And what else did I like? Oh, I really appreciated on slide 34 actually that you included as an option for consideration the parking lot and high school flooding. I

066appreciated seeing that in there as a high school parent and anyone who goes, lives in this area. I appreciated that thinking. I did have a couple questions and comments about transportation, slide 29, I sit on the safety committee and I think we've included those radios for buses as a transportation issue, but I also think it's very much a safety issue. So I kind of wanted to highlight that from my fellow board members. In terms of the fleet maintenance, that number that's highlighted, I don't remember which one. Oh, so where it says, so we've got equipment, that's all equipment, there's no labor in there, that's just equipment? That's correct, and that variance includes two things. It's a decrease in equipment that we would fund as part of the transportation garage year over year and an increase

067for the bus purchases that I noted. Okay, alright, great. And then you talked about sort of the increase in, I guess the coach buses for athletics events that are over an hour away. Are we scheduling more games that are further away? I mean, maybe this isn't quite a question for you, it's probably for Ray, but I'm just wondering why those costs are going up so much. So we haven't done a trip by trip analysis yet (chuckles) at this point. The key things are we've had more postseason play that is a factor. The cost of contracted transportation has gone up. There is not enough available in the region and they've been able to raise prices significantly. The vendors and providers. And we want reliable and safe carriers when we do select, so we're potentially not necessarily

068choosing from every available vendor, but ones that we can live with and feel like it's safe. And your point at more contests. Yeah. We don't, So one of the advocacy points that Ray has had with the section is to, where feasible and possible to align leagues geographically closer. That has not been the trend within the section. So the section is placed a priority on aligning size of school as the very first priority for the most part. And that sometimes means we're traveling to Arlington and places like that. Great, that's actually very helpful. Yeah. Thank you. I'll just add to to Drew's comment that during the pandemic a lot of the poorer quality charter bus companies went outta business. We didn't use those but they helped to keep the market pricing much lower. There's now less

069drivers, there's less companies. So it's been more expensive to get those charter buses. Okay, great, thank you. Those were all my questions. Thank you. Other questions? Suzie? I just have a couple quick clarifying questions for the state aid line. The expense base aid is in there, and what we call hold harmless. We are assuming we're not gonna get any, what's in that calculation? Yeah, so I guess we should spend a few minutes just talking about hold harmless and what happened. So since the inception of the tax, sorry, since the inception of foundation aid, I believe the second year it was in for Scarsdale has been one of the districts that has been held harmless. So essentially every year, despite maybe the formula showing we would be due less money, we got a minimum increase throughout

070the time of the formula's existence. That has grown to the point of about 1.1, $1.2 million. Now it's overfunded in the formula but we don't get a ton of state aid compared to other districts. In the governor's proposal, she's proposed reducing that overfunding by 50% for Scarsdale. So that 50% reduction in the foundation aid is reflected in these numbers. Separate and apart from that there are expense based aid calculations. So some based on student enrollment numbers like textbooks and library materials, others are on private and public school placements for special education students. And then obviously transportation, building aid and the like. And so all of those numbers we've looked at closely to make sure that they are appropriate based on the expense projections we've submitted to the state and things that we're purchasing since then.

071And so we've made some tweaks to that. So that's why the number there is is slightly less than the $560,000 that the governor has withheld from foundation aid. Thank you. My other hopefully quick question. The transportation slide showing the purchase of two buses, will they be like two additional buses to our fleet or are they replacing old buses? They're definitely replacing old buses. Okay, so our overall fleet is not getting bigger. Correct. Okay, thank you. Other questions or comments from the Board? Jessica is online just in case we- Thank you. She was online a while ago but I don't know if she has any questions. Wait, is she hearing me on a delay I think. Hello. Yes. Hello, can you hear me? Yeah. Great. I have been on the whole meeting, Honore helped very quickly.

072I was waiting for the host but there was no host to wait for, it was wrong. I did something wrong, so Honore fixed it. Thank you. I think I'm okay in terms of questions. My only question that I had written in the notes and tried to raise my hand on, but I don't think I was successful, it was back to the dean issue and the one question I have was on a new dean getting a caseload that's primarily new students who are entering the system in terms of students from the upper grades. And I do wonder if that would have a outsized impact on reducing the caseload for other deans. I was curious anecdotally whether there's a sense that a new student generally absorbs more time just because of inherent needs and integrating into the

073system. I think that was my one point from that system from that discussion earlier. Thanks. Were you able to hear that question? The question was, Jessica, just let me know if I get this right. When deans that take on new students, new entrants to the school system, is there a sense that that takes a, you know, disproportionate amount of time or does it have a larger than a sort of typical student impact on a dean's caseload? Did I get that roughly right? That was right. Thank you, Drew. Okay. Yeah. I would say, if we have nine counselors in about 40 to 50, that's five or six per dean, I don't know. It depends on the complexity of the case, the level of difficulty the child is having transitioning to the new community, the new school,

074previous school setting. There's a number of variables there. Sometimes it's an international student, sometimes there's limited English proficiency there. You could have someone who was in the area but went to a private school and that was coming to us, that would count as a new entrant just as someone who doesn't speak English from another continent and doesn't even understand the educational system. So it's hard to generalize in that way. I would say it averages out to probably maybe a little bit more than obviously someone that you've known for a year or two, but it could be an order of magnitude higher depending on the complexity. Thank you. That's very helpful. Thanks Ken, and thank you, Drew. Okay, I have a few questions. Let me start with like budget specific questions and then I have a

075few process questions when we get to the end. Can you talk about, you mentioned Drew, so I just a question for you or for Andrew that I think of the salary increases 1.1 million is due to the new staffing that were proposed. What about the TRS and other end benefit contributions? Because I assume that there's also a piece there. Do you have a general sense of what amounts come from the new staffing? So we would apply the same percentages. So in this process what we've done is we've added all salaries that we've budgeted together and projected what those contribution amounts would be. But you could apply tho those rates on slide. Lemme just move forward a little bit. Slide 40, 10.02 is the projected TRS contribution rate for next year. So we would apply that

076to the teaching staff and then social security is 7.65% up to a certain- 116. A hundred and yeah, so 116,000 or so that would be the additional cost. Okay, I was just, I mean I guess I haven't done all the math. I was just surprised by the magnitude of the increase because the rate of increase, so the TRS rate is only going from 9.76% to 10.02, but the nominal dollar amount is 700,000 increase. I guess maybe I just need to do the math. It just seemed like the dollar amount was going up faster than the rate. And we are gonna look closer at that as well as the ERS contribution rate 'cause there may be some salaries that we're factoring in that are not pensionable or that sort of thing. So I think we will

077certainly sharpen our pencil there. I don't know how much we'll gain out of that projection, but it's something we already have started to work on. Okay, I think when we get to the discussion about all the staffing and the context of the budget, that would be helpful to have those numbers as well. Both for the benefit piece and then this piece just so we can see all those levers. Yeah, one other thing that I just wanna highlight is, is this transition that we're going through. Some of the assumptions made previously we're trying to figure out, so some of them have really good rationale grounded in them and we just need to find what that rationale was so we can make different determinations ourselves. In other cases, it may have been a miss and we're trying

078to sort through all of that. So in an area like this where you may see a disproportional increase, it maybe because maybe the starting point was not exactly what it should have been. Right, appreciate that, that's helpful to know. Okay, regarding the auditorium pumps, do you have a sense, how old they are? Like is this a concern because of age and wear and tear or is this a concern now just because we're putting a lot of money into the auditorium so we wanna make sure we don't have any issues? So I can't give you a specific age, but I think that they're not 50 years old, so there's something less than that. What I can tell you though is that we have every time there's a major rain event, we pre-station emergency backup pumps in

079the auditorium or nearby so that we have to regularly check them and see if they are keeping up with the groundwater that's coming up. And on occasions we've had to use those emergency pumps to help support that. If those pumps fail, the ones down by the orchestra pit and the water does get into the seating area, there's a secondary backup pump somewhere further up the aisle. So you'd still have water in the basement. So our hope is that this project would slightly increase the volume of water that they can pump out and also ensure their reliability through either some sort of a backup power system or through an alarm system that would allow the custodial staff to know immediately if they're not pumping when they should be. And that's something that we'd have to have

080designed, but that's the intention of this item. Thank you. I have a question about the computer leases but I can hold that till I think 'cause Jeannie presents technology at the next meeting, so I'll hold that to when Jeannie here at the next presentation. Do you wanna pose it just so we can think about it? That would be helpful actually, yeah. Sure, I mean it gets to sort of a broader, I'll just, let me back up for a second to a broader comment, I mean, first of all, I personally really appreciate the budget process that we're taking now, which is look at programmatic, items, look at staffing, figure out kind of what the schools want for our students. Then come back and start to look at okay, what do the numbers look like? What are

081we seeing? I personally, when I see a five handle on the tax increase and the budget increase, I start to think about what we did last year, which was present opportunities to the Board and the community of how to bring that number down and that will get, was going into sort of my process question. So a lot of my questions I'm holding a little bit 'cause they get to that point, but the computer lease one was specifically was starting to think about, we've talked a lot about one-to-one in the past. We've made a lot of changes due to the pandemic all around our district, one of them being around technology. Some of those changes I think we expect to keep for going forward. Sometimes Zoom meetings are okay. I wonder about if we have different

082thoughts on one-to-one from a programmatic standpoint. And the second piece to that is, or at certain ages, certain years like K to two, for example, or I don't remember if we talked about bringing it to the high school and then what does that mean financially in terms of our lease? Are we able to do anything in the short term with our leases? I just don't know the answer to that. So I've had several discussions with Jeannie about her technology needs going forward. So what I'll share now is 'cause I don't want it to be, seem to be staged. So Jeannie has concerns about more fundamental technology purchases such as our district infrastructure, right, which is not just a three or four year purchase. It's probably an eight or 10 year kind of look. So she'll

083talk more about that I'm sure when she presents. We also have looked closely at some of our previous lease terms and the useful life of the devices that we are purchasing with that and do they align? Is a device good for three years but we're leasing it for five? Well then what does that do to years four and five purchasing power to replace those devices? So Jeannie has been looking at all of those items, but I'm sure that the one-to-one is something that she can speak to more articulately. Thank you. Just on the buses, you don't have to answer this now, but unless you're prepared to, otherwise it'd be helpful the next one, would be helpful for me to understand what are the implications if we don't buy any buses this year. So I mean

084we have the EV transition and we have a transportation study, possibly we'll have some, maybe there could be route efficiencies. I don't know, it seems like from a financial standpoint, something we'd want to defer, but I don't know the operational impact. It is absolutely a struggle I'm dealing with and where I'm most concerned about is if you look at the fleet maintenance costs that we're seeing, this is not a one year thing. This has been growing over time, and now we are spending a significant amount of time and money, even just making sure that our vehicles that are 10, 15, 20 years old in some cases pass DOT inspection, right? So allow us to carry students. So I have no doubt that there's an immediate need. We've also had the unfortunate kind of consequence of

085some of our newer vehicles for different reasons are no longer on the road. So we're relying even more on some of the older vehicles. So the maintenance cost just keeps kind of churning. Old model bus parts are becoming more and more expensive. So there's an immediacy from a reliability perspective that I think we do need to do this purchase, but what is that vehicle? Is it a gas or diesel bus or is it something that through the work with Highland Fleet, we're able to identify no, no, no, what we can do is quickly get an EV vehicle in here and here's how, and then we would kind of shift according to that. I've seen the struggle on our transportation department's leadership to deal with some of the bus issues. And I've heard firsthand from the

086village mechanic about the frustrations he's having trying to just keep our buses on the road and it's real. Thank you. I had a comment just to one of Suzie's points about state aid. I do just wanna highlight for the rest of the Board and the community, we probably won't know that final state aid number till at best April 1st. If the budget is on, the state budget is on time, the likelihood of that is up to the state. It was not on time last year. As a reminder, Suzie and I are working on an advocacy letter for the community to know, and we have met with our legislators multiple times now and have additional meetings. I know Drew and I are gonna meetings, Andrew had a meeting. So I just want the community to know

087that we are on it from an advocacy standpoint to try to bring back as much of the state aid that we are set to lose this year. As Andrew mentioned, we are a district with means, but we don't get much state aid to start with. Many other districts get a significant amount of state aid. We get a very small amount, as you saw on that slide of we need to fund our budget with 92% or so of taxes. So just want the community to be aware of that. Let me shift to more process questions, and I don't know if other members of the Board have any questions around this. So we will have additional updates from a number of other areas next meeting in March. Do people like we did last year, do board members

088want to see proposals around what it would take to bring down the tax levy increase? And as Drew and Andrew, how you felt about that process that we went through last year that you found that to be productive? I wasn't there. No. Right? (members laughs) Sorry, it all blurs. (laughs) I think we tried to scrutinize and communicate value or values around areas of expenditure that kind of either were really critically important, absolutely can't, you know, these are all, I'm just kind of saying these phrases as, everything's important, but things that we would say, no, we really wouldn't wanna open school without that. Here's something we could delay on doing and so forth. I think that process was as difficult as it was, I think it was transparent and it was, we tried to be as

089clear as possible about what those things would be or could be. So I'm supportive of kind of following a similar path. Yeah, I would be supportive of that. I think as stewards of the public fisk as it were, it's our responsibility to be stewards and to consider responsible increases, which may not be the increases we'd want, but maybe the increases that are necessary that may not be as much as is currently being considered. So hopefully the Envision system makes it easier to make comparisons and make decisions then, it was last year, last year I know it was very time intensive and it was a good process. I'm sure it'll be time intensive to do something like that now, but I hope not as time intensive with the new software. Bob. Yeah, I would also support

090the process we used last year. I found that particularly helpful and I think as we step back and see what the challenge will be to get the numbers within our comfort zone. I think step one is, I think at least I'll speak for myself, I'm still navigating what that comfort zone is. One minute it's a little higher than another and I'm kind of going back and forth. So I think seeing the priorities, I will find helpful so that we can really as a team debate, what the proposal is, because obviously we want it to be successful. So it's important that we figure out what we believe to be that cutoff. Thanks Bob. Other comments or thoughts from the Board? Amber. Thanks Ron. Oh, you know, I think, I appreciate the process that happened last year.

091I think that it would have to be approached slightly differently. Obviously, we can't look at things that are not discretionary. This is a lot that we have to look at in general. So I would ask the Drew and the cabinet to go back and really say, it's helpful for us to understand what you think is critical. When Andrew talked about those buses, that was a compelling comment right there, for something that I had thought too, oh, is this something that we really need to address right now. So it might be a slightly different process, I think for you to look at, but I think the idea to Jim's point about being thoughtful about each of the items is what we should work towards. Thanks. Any other comments? Just to echo what's been said, I appreciated

092the process last year. The level of transparency, the discussion I think, for the community was helpful as well to educate, not just us at the Board table, but everybody, when we defer something, this is something that the district would want but isn't feasible, we have to realize what we are deferring, so it's good to see those and have that discussion in public. Yeah, thanks Suzie. I feel like I should talk now, (member laughs) but I'm not gonna waste a lot of time because this was a very long presentation, but I did wanna just thank you everyone who participated in creating the budget so far and the work you're going to do for our community. It's a tireless process, but I know we all appreciate it, and I'm just echoing what my fellow board members said

093with the process moving forward. But I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your work and I hope you can get some sleep tonight. (members laughs) I'll just agree. I think ultimately the decisions before us and then the voters is the trade off between services for our schools and our students and the cost of those. And I think by talking about it transparently at the table, at this Board table, the community can be aware of what those are. There's no right or wrong answers on, to Bob's point on what the tax levy change is, you know, it's a really question of what we believe students and families, our faculty, our staff, every member of the school community is getting for those changes. So I appreciate coming back with some, but we have

094to recognize when that this is a larger increase and we've seen in the last few years. I think it's important to be open about that. I think for me, one thing that would also be helpful given that a lot of the increase is related to proposed new staffing would be, I think we heard a really compelling reasons why there are tier one, which is why at the last board meeting I think we heard the Board say, "Yes, bring these forward in the budget." Now we are bumping up to fiscal realities and might have to make some tough decisions For me, it would be also helpful to understand what does it look like in the schools or for a student or for a faculty member if we don't do a particular item. So, for example, we

095talked about rolling ICT into seventh grade next year, it's currently in sixth grade. What would that mean if we don't do that, if we defer that for a year or if we do that, but defer an administrative special ed position? Now to Suzie's point, we deferred a number of those last year. There were needs obviously, they're back. I don't think we're saying any of these needs are going away. And so if we don't address them in this budget, I think we and the community should expect to hear about them in a future budget along with other needs that come up. So that's what would be helpful to me. Let me pause there, and see if you feel like you have what you need. Yeah, I think so. I think it might be helpful to just

096take a look at that staffing slide again, just as a reminder bear with me. Sorry, yeah, thank you. Yellow line. Yeah, sorry about that. 26. Thank you. I have it up here. So at the very bottom, the 2.0 elementary, just as a reminder that would be to run our elementary program because we're projecting two more sections. Now that's a projection. We don't know whether that would come, definitely or not. But that's what it looks like to keep our class sizes under the same guiding principles that we've held. The 2.2 secondary staff that follows immediately after they are already here working. So those are contingent positions that we added after the budget was finalized and so we can very much tell you what that would look like 'cause those programs are underway, just as an example.

097That would be helpful. You make a really good point. I think it's valuable to, I just wanna articulate another piece of it for the community, which is that, for example, is 2.0 elementary or to maintain our class sizes, which this community has voiced a strong support for for a long time, but they are projections. But I wanna link it to something that Jim did say earlier, which is as we've seen our fun balance decrease over the few years. Our ability to absorb unknowns get strained as that continues to happen. So it's just something for us to be cognizant of. And I just wanna articulate one other thing for the Board and the community. Right now our schedule is we meet on March 4th, but we meet very quickly then thereafter on March 11th. So we'll

098be hearing all the other detailed areas on March 4th. And I just wanna make sure for Drew and Andrew, Lisa and team that sort of the conversation you're feeling what we're asking for, that timeline. We'll then have another discussion on the fourth with maybe some more questions Comfortable with that, okay. Any other questions? Oh, sorry, yeah, thank you. Jessica. Just wanna make sure, sorry, Jessica, we keep putting up the budget slides on the top of the screen and I keep looking up at the top. You know what? It's okay, I have them on my second screen and so probably it looks like I'm looking off into the distance, but I'm looking at my own set of budget slides so it's fine. So thank you for assembling the budget, Drew and Andrew and the whole team.

099I look forward to the next steps on this and I think I echo the thanks that other members have given, but also am looking forward to the opportunity to delve into it and do the kind of review maybe in a little bit more of a straightforward way than we did last year given the new software. Hopefully, it will be easier on all of you to look through the priorities and be able to assess where things stand and how we can try to maintain the things that are of greatest importance including class size as we move forward. And that's all. Thank you. Good night. Okay, so we've been going for an hour and a half. Usually we wait till two hours although this is, do people wanna keep going for another half an hour or do

100people want a quick break? I'm good to keep going if others are. Okay, give me one second to shift. We're gonna be going into our business meeting. Okay, for those that maybe are just joining us now in our business meeting. This meeting began with Budget Study Session number one. Thank you again to Dr. Patrick, Andrew, Lisa and everybody in the administration and building teams for your work to prepare this budget information for the board. We will continue our budget development process at the next board meeting. Just one other quick item, I would just also like to note that on tonight's agenda is the proposed calendar for the 2024-2025 school year. And I would like to reiterate our thanks to all those that have taken the time to share their perspective with the Board on this

101item. That's all I have this evening. Drew. Thank you. I'm gonna just start with thanks to Michelle in the back with a few pictures from around the district and a few slides here. So first, we see Scarsdale Middle School seventh graders and joined a visit with author, Ellen Oh. She spoke about her writing process, her drive to ensure her books show representation from a wide range of characters and the importance of revision, revision, and revision. She also spoke about her fight against trend of book banning why books are sometimes targeted and what students can do to help to ensure that they are well-informed. Piggybacking off the popularity of escape rooms. Our Middle School foreign language and technology teachers teamed up to create a series of break in box activities where each team was given a

102box with a variety of locks attached to it. Students had to decipher clues in Spanish, including reading maps to navigate a Spanish city in order to discern each locks combination. It drew the students together as they raced to open their boxes first and inside they had prizes, a plane ticket for their next lesson and some sweet treats to go with that as well. And this last series of three slides, choice students participated in a pretty cool interdisciplinary activity, started with a field trip to the Morgan Library and Museum where they saw exhibits including these detailed Persian and Arabic manuscripts. They learned about ancient printing and art techniques, how various pigments and dyes are made. And back at school they wrote their own stories and through trial and error, learned how to make their own papers

103inks and dyes. And as part of the finale, the student books were displayed for all to see. And then Scarsdale High School students completed another residency with our friends from Alvin Ailey Arts in Education program. They learned not just how to dance, but also the historical context of various songs, movements and traditions. So it's always nice to see those cool activities in our schools. A few upcoming dates, February 1st, which just passed, it was National Freedom Day and of course, February marks Black History Month. February 10th will mark Lunar New Year, the 19th President's Day, the first day of a week of school recess and February 24th Lantern Festival. So we look forward to those holidays. Okay, thanks Drew. I know we have a number of board member reports tonight. Who would like to kick

104it off? Colleen. Thank you. On Friday, February 2nd, I attended the NSMA 2024 Capital Conference. This four hour virtual workshop was an educational program to gain perspective on the proposed legislation and spending priorities of the state. The agenda included an in-depth review of the executive budget proposal, discussions with legislators and state policy makers and NSMA staff members. All of this helping to prepare us to advocate on behalf of our school community. It was a very insightful morning and I would like to thank everyone that participated and worked so hard to prepare this resource for us. Thanks Colleen. I saw Bob's hand up, okay. Sure. I'm the liaison to say which is Scarsdale Action for Youth formerly Drug and Alcohol. (member faintly speaking) It is. The board meets once a month to talk about campaigns and

105whatnot that are coming up. And just two takeaways that I wanna share with the community. One is that a parent campaign is in the process of being planned and ultimately rolled out this year to create, I would say a community and parent support group regarding the drug and alcohol social environment within our community so that parents have an ability to connect with one another to help each other in terms of navigating that. And I just wanted to mention that on February 12th, which is coming up pretty soon, they say has invited along with the Middle School, Steven Hill will be here at 7:30 in the Middle School auditorium. And for those who didn't have a chance to see him last year, he's just a very engaging speaker. He comes with his dad who also speaks.

106I was fortunate enough to see it last year and I'm really pleased they brought him back because it's really riveting to hear his story. It's very appropriate for Scarsdale and for our students. It's for parents and kids to come together to create an opportunity to talk about making choices and smart decisions about drugs and alcohol. So I encourage everyone to try and attend if they can. Thanks Bob. Amber. Thanks Ron. On Friday, Ron, Suzie and I, along with Drew and several members of his cabinet had the pleasure of attending the PTC Legislative Breakfast held at Green Acres. I would like to thank the PTC for continuing to organize this important and informative event with our elected officials, which was focused on relevant topics to our school community. I would also like to extend a special

107thank you to this year's PTC legislative advocacy chairs, Rachana Singh and Joshua Mitts. Ms. Singh and Mr. Mitts introduced a new format to the legislative breakfast were all questions to our elected officials were presented by SHS government students. This creative and thoughtful structure was a delight to see an action and created a unique learning opportunity for our students. Thanks Amber. And Suzie. Yeah, thank you, Ron. I'm gonna go in chronological order here, I have a couple. On January 23rd, I attended a PTC Child Joint Speaker event at the Middle School. Scarsdale technology teachers, Jennifer Cronk and Meredith Dutra held an informative session on digital parenting tips and triage. I appreciated that this discussion provided real life practical strategies for guiding student online activities as well as presented relevant data from our own technology survey conducted

108last spring. Slides of the presentation can be found in a link in this past Sunday's PTA school e-blast with advice and resources to help empower parents to more effectively manage and protect their children in this age of social media. Thank you to the PT Council programming chairs, Wendy MacMillan and Emily Hira, and of course, Ms. Cronk and Ms. Dutra for this eyeopening presentation. On January 25th, Dr. Patrick, Ms. Resnick-Ault and I attended a community partners meeting of the Scarsdale Community Youth Services Project along with Deputy Mayor Randall Whitestone, acting Village Manager Alexandra Marshall, SFCS Executive Director Jay Genova and Assistant Director Maria Vilanova and SFCS Board President Janice Starr. This mid-year meeting provided an update on school-based services, which showed a growth in the number of students being supported by SFCS counselors as well as

109a review of leadership initiatives, parents support groups, Scarsdale Action for Youth or SAY, and Safe Coalition. We also reviewed the 2024-25 SFCS budget proposal. Especially with mental health continuing to be such an issue for our teens today. I'm grateful for this longstanding resource and partnership with SFCS and the Village. Lastly, on February 1st, Dr. Patrick, Ron and I attended the annual legislative forum hosted by Westchester Putnam School Board Association and the Chief School Administrators or CSA of Putnam Northern Westchester as well as the CSA of Southern Westchester. In attendance were five local state senators and nine local assemblymembers including Shelley Mayer, Amy Paulin, and Steven Otis to discuss legislative advocacy issues for this budget season. With over 63% of Westport School districts now looking at a reduction in state aid, including us of course, much

110of the discussion centered around how best to advocate for the return of safe, harmless and true accounting for the rise in inflation in the calculation of foundation aid. Possible tax cap provisions were also discussed. Beyond advocacy around funding, the forum also discussed many educational and operational issues including those related to curriculum, mental health, safety and security, climate change, the EV buses mandate staffing and special services. Thank you, Suzie. And now we'll move to cabinet updates. Thank you. And we'll start with Meghan with a couple of HR updates. Sure, thank you. I have two updates this evening. The first is the announcement of our faculty who are retiring and are found later in the consent agenda. I'd like to share that we have had 12 faculty members give us their early retirement notification this past month.

111And while we're certainly happy for these dedicated members of our faculty, we will miss them as they head into their new phase of life. The following have announced their retirement effective at the end of the '23-'24 school year. So a number of retirements at Fox Meadow, Jen Batterman has announced her retirement as school psychologist. Peter McKenna will be retiring as computer teacher. Barbara Laman will retire as music teacher, and Beth Kaplan has announced her retirement as a classroom teacher. At Green Acres, Connie Leviatin will retire as music teacher and at Heathcote music teacher Katherine Bescherer will be retiring at the end of the school year. At the Middle School, we announced the retirement of Lisa Bryan as English teacher, Adam Nichols as social studies teacher, Andy Verboys as technology teacher, and Yurry Buckler as special

112education teacher. And finally, at Scarsdale High School, Sheilah Chason will retire as math teacher, and Joe DeCrescenzo will retire as special education teacher. So I wish them a very early congratulations and we look forward to celebrating their contributions to the Scarsdale community in the months ahead. It's exciting. The second update includes two MOAs, I'd like to share with you today. The first is a stipulation agreement between the district and the STA for the added athletic positions of dance head coach and dance assistant coach. This change reflects the growing involvement and growing time commitment on the part of the athletes and their coaches. And the second MOA is an MOA between the STA and the district and is an extension of an MOA signed last year which created the positions of mental health department chair and

113high school section 504 chair. Both of these positions are located at Scarsdale High School and support the current system we have in place. Those are my two updates. Thank you, Meghan. And Andrew. I know it says one but I've got two updates so I'll start with the one that's not there. Cenergistics. So on January 25th, assistant director of facilities, John Antonicelli and I attended the Cenergistics program liaison forum as part of the district's obligation under the Cenergistics contract. John and I were given access to and training on some of the software tools implemented by Cenergistics to track our energy efficiency and our utilities usage. Having this access gives us the ability to proactively identify any building system issues and also monitor the energy usage to make sure we meet the Cenergistic benchmarks that we've kind

114of reviewed and set for ourselves. During the trip, we also built relationships with the Cenergistic's senior leadership including their Founder and CEO, Dr. William Spears, Chief Engineer Jack Bullock, and Chief Engineer Jack Bullock, who helped us better understand the company's offerings and identify value added kind of services that they have for us that we can put to good use as we try to look at our building service improvements, including some cost benefits analysis and engineering, drawing reviews. So we're looking forward to kind of growing that relationship with Cenergistic. I'm a convert, we'll just put it that way. My other update is related to purchasing agent. So in December, the Board approved the promotion of Cherie Luiso to the title assistant business manager due to the internal controls conflicts with her previous position. And this new

115one, her formal appointment as the district's purchasing agent was postponed, a total replacement could be identified. I'm happy to report that we've adjusted the responsibilities of her former position internally and are now ready to formally appoint, Cherie, as the purchasing agent as you will see in resolution 8.05 on the consent agenda. While I've benefited from the knowledge of purchasing activity gathered while acting as a purchasing agent on a daily basis since August, passing this responsibility to its rightful owner is a welcome relief. I know Cherie will do a great job. I will however continue to support the district as the deputy purchasing agent in Cherie's absence as per the same resolution and Board policy. So I'm excited to have Cherie take the helm of purchasing. Thank you, that's it. Thank you, Meghan and Andrew, for

116those updates. We will move to item four Hearing From Those Present, I will begin with the preamble. Members of the public are cordially invited to speak on district related items or other 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, and now is a good time to log onto Zoom, if you would like to comment remotely. Please mute the live stream voice, turn on your camera and then unmute yourself. Speakers will be asked to conclude the 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

117via email at [email protected]. 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 Public Comment will take place after the first and second public comment periods and this is the same preamble for both public comment periods. With that, is there anybody in the audience that would like to make a public comment? Okay, seeing nobody in the room, we'll turn to Zoom. There are no attendees on Zoom. Okay, we'll just give everybody a second. Again, if you aren't able to make it to this, or ready to speak now there is a second public comment period later in the meeting. Any hands

118now? Okay, well, we will close the first public comment period. There is a second opportunity later in the meeting. And item five is follow up to public comment. We will move past that since there was no public comment tonight. And we'll move to item six, Written Communication. Suzie. Thank you, Ron. First, I'll read also the preamble. To written communications, please note that the Board of Education email is also viewed by the superintendent and district clerk. Open Meetings Law requires all Board deliberations which may lead to action or policy changes to occur in public; therefore, your written communications and e-mails will be reported at an upcoming public Board meeting. A Board member will respond at their earliest convenience. And since, we last met, there have been 50 emails received by the Board on district matters and

119one in communication was received by the Board regarding Board meeting highlights, Board invitations or correspondence. Thank you, Suzie. We will move to the consent agenda. I will begin with the preamble. The full preamble is available on the meeting agenda on BoardDocs. Briefly, a consent agenda condenses some of the routine business of the Board of Education into a single motion. The items on the consent agenda will have the same background material as ordinary items on the Board agenda. Would any Board member like to move an item off of the consent agenda to its own action item? While I ask that, could we also put Jessica up just 'cause for voting she needs to be on the screen. Okay, seeing none, I believe Amber has the consent agenda tonight. I do. Thanks Ron. There are nine items

120on the consent agenda this evening. 8.01 Minutes, Business Meeting, January 22nd, 2024. 8.02 Personnel Certified. 8.03 Personnel Non-certified. 8.04 Stipulation of Settlement. 8.05 Appointment of District Officers and Personnel for the 2023-2024 school year. 8.06 Quarterly Reports, Student Activities Fund. 8.07 Stipulation of Settlement STA Athletic Stipend. 8.08 Memorandum of Agreement STA Amended Contract. 8.09 Consent Agenda. I move we accept the consent agenda as presented. Thank you, Amber. Is there a second. Jim. All those in favor? Aye. And I see, just confirming that Jessica said aye, we can visually see her. Any opposed? No, okay, the motion carries. Thank you all. We will move to item nine, Information and Discussion Items and then I will pass them all over to Drew. Very good. The first one is the demographic study and enrollment projections. This is periodically, we

121do engage an outside demographer to come in and evaluate, the data apply their techniques. We've worked for the last several years with Richard Grip, statistical forecasting, LLC. He's been here to present before COVID I believe, but he was here to present in person. And we long time ago used to do this every year. But our ability to kind of track students as they go through doesn't necessarily require it. But given the sort of disruption of COVID and some of the trends that occurred during them, we thought it would be a good idea. And Meghan being new to the role, thought it would be a good idea to reengage in this year. Also, he does the housing study piece of it too. So I'll turn it over to Meghan who just share a couple of the-

122Sure. The highlights. Yeah, so just a point of note as I speak and share a few of the highlights. We're provided with two separate projection calculations for enrollment. And so the numbers I share just exemplify those are examples of those two different models. So in general in the projection shared, enrollments are projected to increase through the projection period, which is from the '24-'25 school year through the '28-'29 school year in one projection overall enrollment K12 is projected to increase by 143 students and another reflects an increase of 186 students. Overall at the elementary level, enrollments are projected to increase for the next four years before reversing trend. At the Middle School, enrollments are expected to decline in the '24-'25 school year before reversing and increasing thereafter. And in '28-'29 the Middle School is projected to

123have 79 increased students or 76, or the two different projections. And at the high school, enrollments are expected to decline through the '27-'28 school year before increasing in '28-'29. Overall projected enrollment at the end of that period shows a decline of 53 or 63 students. But again, knowing that our elementary numbers are increasing, they'll all be coming up to the high school at some point. And just a few highlights at the elementary level. There's some projected numbers at Edgewood to have an enrollment increase of 67 or 83 numbers by '28-'29 Fox Meadow's also showing a projected increase of 50 or 71 students by that same time period. Green Acres a little bit smaller, projected enrollment increase of 31 or 41 students. One projection model shows Heathcote declining in that same period of time by 16

124students while another shows an increase of 15. And finally, a Quaker Ridge one model shows a decline of 41 and another a decline of 11. So you can see some variance obviously in the two different projections. I think it's important to note there are these fluctuations with some of these projections. But the numbers give us a starting point, a conversation put on your radar sort of conversation as we consider our planning. And I think just in general overall what we see are students are coming back to Scarsdale post-COVID. After the COVID pandemic, we did have some students a slight decline in enrollment at that time and those students are definitely returning. The demographer also looks at new housing developments as of now. We don't see any new housing or he does not see any new

125housing developments that are imminent. Therefore, not having a tremendous impact on enrollment. Again in the information that we have at this moment. So I look forward to at a later date, sharing some more details about it as we dig into those numbers. But just wanted to give you some of those highlights tonight. Thank you so much, Meghan. And I would just add, we know of course there's been discussion over the last several years about the freight way, possible development there, and I think we're certainly poised and ready to engage if and when a discussion needs to happen around that with the village to assess any potential impact on the schools. And a report, like having a report like this in hand is certainly helpful in any kind of discussion like that. Any questions from the

126Board? Amber. Thanks Ron. Meghan, thank you. I really enjoyed this report. I found it so interesting and I had asked a clarifying question but I think it was maybe misunderstood what my question was. So I just wanna ask it here. So with the CSR and the four and the five year, look back into the schools, the way we've had the ICT program up until recently, it was spread by grade, right? So there was an ICT class and maybe one in Heathcote, and maybe two or three grades in Quaker Ridge and now we've got sort of a different model. But as I understood the demographer's report, he's looking back on the historical numbers with the CSR four and five. Correct. So did he take into account that our model has shifted for those classes or is

127he just looking at our old model? That was what I was trying to ask him my question before. Got it. Yeah. That makes more sense. Yeah, I'd say probably not in the same detail. I mean those are follow up questions that we can have for Richard and share that information, but probably not in the depth as the program is evolving. That would be helpful for him to share. I think one of the questions was about Edgewood with that rising, and remember Edgewood currently doesn't have any ICT classrooms so that wouldn't impact that. And Fox Meadow had more ICT classes than perhaps it might or more the grades before it might be spread out differently now, I wonder- We have two grades there now. Two grades. Going to three. Oh, yeah. Okay, so yeah, I think-

128That would've been captured in the more recent data- Right. And not in the five years ago data. Right. Interesting. So maybe we'll run this report again in a few years or whenever it makes sense. It may fun, it may fun. Yeah, I think that at Fox Meadow that will sort of capture that- It may not be as dramatic as it seems like it would be or could be- Could be- More dramatic. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Okay. We'll move to the next three. Thank you, Meghan. We'll move to the next three information items all related to policy updates. Thank you. So 9.02 is the Policy Update, Second Reading 0110 Policy Against Discrimination and Harassment. And we've discussed this previously and there were some minor revisions from the first reading and it's being presented for the

129second reading tonight. Along with that is an exhibit 9.03 is the second reading of Exhibit 0110E, discrimination and harassment complaint form. And then the third item 9.04, second reading Policy 0110.2, Title IX Staff, which is a new policy. And again, minor revisions from the previous meeting on January 22nd. And if there are no additional revisions to it, this would come forward in the action items this evening for adoption. Great. Any questions or discussion from the Board? Again, this is the second read, just minor revisions from the first read, which we discussed at a previous meeting. Okay, thank you again to District Clerk Honore for all of your work on all of these policy updates. Thank you. We will move to one second please to item 10. Action items 10.01, I believe is Colleen. Okay, be

130it resolved at the board. I can just read that part, right? I don't have to read the whole? Just that- Right. The resolve part. Be it resolved at the Board of Education, adopt the following resolution as presented. Thanks Colleen. Is there a second? Amber. Any discussion? Oh, wait, can we put Jessica up on the screen? Just wanna make sure I can see her. Okay, any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion carries. We'll move to 10.02. This is Amber. Thanks Ron. Be it resolved that the Board adopt the resolution as presented in the agenda for the senior citizens and persons with disabilities tax exemption income definition. Thanks Amber. Is there a second? Colleen. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. The motion carries. We'll move to 10.03. Bob.

131Yes, be it resolved that the Board adopt the attached calendars for the 2024-'25 school year as presented. Thanks, Bob. Is there a second? Colleen. All those, sorry. Any discussion? Yes, Amber. I just like to thank the community for all the input that they provided and Drew again, for providing us with options for discussion. So I appreciated that, thank you. Yeah, I'll echo that sentiment both for the community and for the administration and the transparent process, which the calendars come together in the last couple years. Yeah, and if I could just add a comment, thanks again for the efforts here to put this together in a thoughtful way. I know the community is not all of one mind with respect to the desirability of the calendar that we're going to, I believe adopt today. I spend

132some time agonizing over it myself because I did hear, and the voices of those who, this might impose some hardship too. I think there were voices all around that had to be considered, probably, the majority in favor of what we're about to adopt. I do hope that those who are disappointed in what we're doing, recognize that the pluses and the trade-offs and the minuses that are involved and that it was with due consideration that we move forward to adopt this calendar. Thanks Jim. And I just want to add one point to what you were saying that if there's something that you were advocating for that you don't necessarily see in the calendar before us for next school year, that feedback is still in all of our minds in future years as future calendars get developed.

133The calendar changes every year on what it's gonna look like, depending on when holidays fall, when the State lets us end our school a year. Again, we do not determine the last day of school here. The State determines that for us. So there's a lot of moving parts and so that feedback, even if not necessarily incorporated this year is very helpful to everybody. So thank you to the community. Any other comments or questions? Okay, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, the motion carries. We will move to item 10.04. Colleen. Be it resolved that the Board approve the attached list of proposed textbooks as presented. Thanks Colleen. Second, Jim. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries, thank you. We will move to item 10.05, Jim. (Jim faintly speaking) Just

134make sure your mic is on. Thanks. Resolved the Board adopt revised Policy 0110 Scarsdale Union Free School Districts Policy Against Discrimination and Harassment as presented. Thanks, Jim. Is there a second? Colleen. All those, sorry, any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Jessica got our hand up right? Alright, thank you so much. Sorry, I was looking around the table. That's on me and I didn't look up into the TV in the corner. Thanks Jessica. Any opposed? I also, if you can maybe on a lag. No, no, I- Thank you for bearing with me. No, thank you. Any opposed? Okay, the motion carries. We'll move to item 10.06. This is Colleen. Be it resolved that that the Board adopt Exhibit 0110-E Discrimination and Harassment Complaint Form as presented. Thank you, Colleen. Is there a second? Bob. Any

135discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, the motion carries and we move to the last action item for tonight 10.07, Amber. Thank you, Ron. I move that the Board adopt new policy 0110.2 Title IX Staff as presented. Thanks Amber. Is there a second? Jim. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, the motion carries. Those are all the action items for this evening. We will move to item 11. This is the second public comment period with the same preamble from the first. I will open it up to those in the audience. Is there anybody in the audience that would like to comment tonight? I did get an email from someone saying they tried to raise their hand but we're not seeing attendees. Yes, I think it's this person who's just coming

136on. Okay. Okay, there we go. Seeing nobody in the audience. We will turn to Zoom. Suzie. Thank you. There are a couple attendees on Zoom. Myra, I am promoting you to panelists, so if you could turn your camera on. There we go. Okay, great, thank you. Hi, thank you so much. Good evening. Thank you very much for the budget study session. Very informative. I personally would find it a little bit helpful to get a bit more context for the budget. We haven't seen the new strategic vision obviously, because Dr. Patrick and cabinet are still working on it. But absent a strategic vision and also absent a long-term financial plan, something that as you all know have been recommending for a decade, it makes it hard to then try to forecast whether this is the type

137of budget that we should be expecting going forward with these kinds of significant increases or might there be some big changes coming up in either way. Also, of course, thank you very much for proposing a course on financial literacy. This is a course that's critical for any student globally. This is something that a number of Scarsdale residents have been asking for many, many years. For example, when I was co-chair of the Scarsdale Forums Education Committee, we ran a parent survey that showed great interest in having a financial literacy course as well as wanting a financial plan, and parents also wanted Mandarin in the Middle School. So hopefully, at least we can get one outta three. Special education is incredibly important in our district. It strikes me that that number of FTEs all in one year

138strikes me as quite large. I think it would be really helpful to see the metrics so that we understand what existing special ed teachers have achieved and how would we then try to see what these new FTEs would achieve, what does that mean in terms of usage of our tax dollars? The proposed budget is very significantly above the tax cap. I appreciate it's difficult to take all of the important factors into consideration. The Village Board of course will also be above the tax cap. So I think it's important to look at both of these and the effect on taxpayers. I'd be curious how the building moratorium is going to affect enrollment. Also, it's important to remind everybody I often hear from multiple parents, especially those who have students in the high school, just the staggering

139amounts of money that people in Scarsdale pay on tutoring, college coaches and enrichment classes very conservatively. That amount ranges between 15 to $20,000 per academic year. That excludes, in other words, it doesn't even include summer camps. So by my conservative calculations, this means that parents collectively spends $70.5 million in a nine month academic year. So when we talk about a school budget of $186 million, which is about $39,000 per student. In reality, we should be talking about 257.3 million to educate our students the 186 million in the budget plus the 70.5 in addition. So that's really $54,000 per students. So I think we really need to look at all of that and what it really means. Lastly, I can't help but wonder that if the financial literacy course that you're proposing in part it is

140to teach about the importance of budgets and living within a budget. What kind of example are we sending the district or dare I say, what kind of example is the district giving our students if our budget keeps growing every year and it shows that we may not be living within our means. Thank you very much for your time and your efforts. Thank you. Myra, for the record, could you state your address? Yes, sorry about that. Mayra Kirkendall-Rodriguez, Fox Meadow Road, where I've been for 12 years, thank you. Thank you. Please go ahead. Yes, hi, Rachana Singh, Griffen Avenue. I'm speaking in my individual capacity. Thank you for all your hard work on the budget so far. We really appreciate it. So the budget to budget increase of 5% is very high. Looking at the CPI

141and the current core CPI level, this projected budget over tax levy is not the most favorable budget for the taxpayers in the stakeholders of Scarsdale. Add that to the fact that the village itself is looking to go over the tax levy. In such an environment, the school district needs to be fiscally responsible while balancing the instructional and curriculum needs of the students. Any other items should be subject to cuts. You have to adapt in allocating resources and avoid unnecessary spending. I'm looking forward to the second budget study session which will address instruction and curriculum and special education. In the last special education presentation, the Special Education team said, "The special education students are thriving." However, it did not present the data to support the thriving narrative. Budget should be a quantitative exercise, not a qualitative

142one. Before we spend more money on special education hires, which I'm in favor, however we need the administration to figure out if the kids are making those gains and to show it to the taxpayers that they are making those gains. It could be progress monitoring tool, it could be state test, but show us that this current special education programming is working. But overall I do support increasing the continuum of service in middle and high school. But we need to evaluate data first. Also, this district needs to do, I agree with Myra, they need to do long-term financial planning and stress test. So you can plan for events like inflation, so you can plan for events like this foundation aid being lost. This is the reason why you do long-term planning. So you can plan for

143these things that creep up. Two questions. Do you think that the enrollment projections could be lower due to the villages moratorium and also are you projected to get more in IDA aid this year and funds this year than last year? Thank you, and thank you for taking our feedback in the public comments. I don't see anybody else on Zoom. Okay, thank you, Suzie. We will move to follow up to public comment. Drew, do any follow up? Yeah, I think in terms of the special ed Rachana had mentioned the December presentation. I definitely would encourage people to kind of go back and look at the December presentation education report as it tried to talk about where we've been and we'll hear more in the next budget study session about where we're going, and obviously with the

144special education portion of the budget talk about those FTE and the programming and we'll certainly remind people that the emphasis there is to expand the continuum of services to place students in the least restrictive environment. So just some thoughts there. I think the last two questions about, one about IDA funding, we don't have those projections yet. That's a federal dollar amount. Correct. We are making an assumption that the levy will be consistent, which is in the neighborhood of $700,000. I don't have the exact number off the top of my head, but we've factored that into this budget presentation. And the question about would the enrollment projections be lowered due to the moratorium on building, we could get Dr. Grip's opinion on that. I'm not sure that, typically, what I've found remarkable coming from different school

145districts than Scarsdale is that the regular replacement of school age kids when people move out is just so steady and consistent. That's really driven by the desirability of the school system I think and just the regular sort of turnover of when people decide to move out. I think those probably are the dominant factors, but we can certainly ask that question. I would just also add there's a lot of factors that play into enrollment changes, the interest rate environment and the mortgage rate environment, things like that that are added of our control. It's always challenging I think year to year to look, which is why even in the demographer's report I think you see a lot of variances, which is why we through the budgeting process, use mechanisms like contingency positions to deal with that. Any

146other wrap up, or sorry, follow up? Okay, we will move to item 13, wrap-up items. Side we talked obviously within the budgeting about the wrap-up items. Anything else? I don't think so. Okay, we will turn to item 14, meeting dates for the coming month, Suzie. Thank you, Ron. Upcoming meetings include on Monday, February 12th, a special meeting, an executive session at 6:00 PM here in this room. On Monday, March 4th, there will be a special meeting or executive session if needed at six o'clock, and a budget study session and business meeting at 6:30. On Monday, March 11th, there'll be budget study session number three at 6:30 here in this room. And on Monday, March 25th a special meeting or executive session if needed at 5:30, and the budget forum, education report and business meeting at

1476:30. Thank you, Suzie. And the last item adjournment. Can I entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting. Amber, and second? Bob. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. And let me just hold on. Sorry, I saw Jessica on my Zoom screen said "Aye." The motion carries. Good evening, and Jessica, thanks for bearing with us and staying with us over Zoom this evening. Thanks for making it. Thank you for accommodating. Okay.