Board of Education Meeting 6-10-25

001I call this meeting to order. Please stand for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Good evening. Thank you for joining us. Please be advised in the event of a fire emergency, an alarm will sound. Please note all emergency exits and evacuate well away from the building. At this time, we request that you turn your cell phones to silent. Thank you for your cooperation. We will be starting tonight with additions, deletions, and changes to the agenda. Dr. Chanel. Yes. So, this evening there are uh several additions. You'll see additions under new business. Uh we are right now getting some bills that are coming in from other school

002districts for things that we um that we have agreements with them to do. So you're going to see some of that here. Uh since we don't meet again until July, just trying to make sure that we get everything through our board meeting for the close out of our school year. Uh you'll also see the addition of um the contract that we've been waiting for from Hunt Architects and Engineers. I'll speak to that more when we get there. Under personnel, you're going to see new appointments, a couple of MOAs, and unfortunately, a couple of resignations. Thank you. We will be moving to a consent agenda. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the following consent agenda items as listed 1 through 10. May I have a motion, please? So moved.

003A second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. We're going to go on to communications starting with correspondence and points of pride. We proudly celebrate our prek raiders. The class of 2038. Both AM and PM classes performed on stage for families singing and sharing their joy as they marked the end of their preschool journey. Huge thanks to Mrs. Hopkins, Mrs. Pukos, Mrs. Fox, and Mrs. Stein for creating such a memorable event. Our youngest Raiders are ready to soar into kindergarten. Our fourth graders explor explored future possibilities at career day attending two of four engaging presentations. Speakers included a vet veterinarian, a CPA, a Navy officer, and a former teacher turned executive man manager. Students asked thoughtful questions and learned firsthand about different careers. Thanks to our inspiring

004presenters for making this event a success. Our fifth graders put their learning into action at Viztown. Hands-on economics experience at the Kodak Center. They ran businesses, balanced budgets, and navigated real world financial tasks using the Junior Achievement curriculum. Big thanks to Mr. Leonard, Junior Achievement, and the volunteers from Paychecks making this impactful day possible. Our talented Raiders lit up the stage at the spring concert featuring the fourth and fifth grade chorus, ukulele club, and both grade level bands. The evening was a joyful celebration of music. Thanks to Mrs. Peterson, Mr. Bowen, and all our student musicians for a wonderful night of song and spirit. This year's Steam Day had a safari theme and offered hands-on learning in science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Students collaborated, created, and explored across grade levels. Thanks to our incredible

005staff, parent volunteers, and Jennese Valley Boseies for inspiring innovation and imagination in our young learners. Our Raiders went out into the community to perform live under the direction of Mr. Young's. It was an evening of song at the Stone Church in Calonia. Student vocalists chose songs from their favorite artists to perform for the audience. This was our second annual cabaret. Three candidates from the class of 2025 presented their culminating projects in Spanish to a panel of administration and faculty members to earn the New York State seal of biiteracy. Students had to research and learn about issues affecting one of the 21 Spanish-speaking countries around the world. Using their literacy skills, students worked hard preparing their findings and showcased their proficiency in Spanish. Congratulations to Ava Amarice, Lily Clement, and Juliana Scott for earning the seal

006of biiteracy. Camp Raider 2025. 32 teams competed in an incredibly in an incredible day of teamwork, strategy, fun, and school pride. This year we also hosted speaker, author, and consultant Chris Collins, who travels the country inspiring students with his powerful message. Chris made an instant connection with our Raiders, and we want to thank our student council leadership for bringing him to the home of champions. Thank you to the Calonia, Mumford, and Scottville Fire Departments. Our juniors and seniors had the opportunity to experience a DWI simulation as part of our prom and graduation party se season. And I just wanted to say I went to it and I thought it was very informative, very good, very graphic and um was very good. They even had the funeral director come there to get the the person who

007supposedly died. So I think it was a meaningful thing and thankfully the fire sirens did not go off that weekend. 36 National Honor and National Honor Junior Honor Society members travel to the Fred Frederick Douglas Greater Rochester International Airport to be part of Honor Flight Rochester. Our Genese United basketball team played in their season ending tournament in Nazareth University. We are happy to report they finished fourth overall this past season in division 1. Division One Season Awards Partner of the Year, Lily Johnson, and Coach of the Year, Donna Howard. For those that have not been to a game, I highly recommend you go. It's one of the best events that I have been to um of all the things I've been exposed to on the board. It's it's one of the I just can't speak

008highly enough of it. It's fantastic. We were proud to be represented by three of our golfers at the 2025 boys golf individual sectional championship at a very challenging Mil Creek golf club. Our Raiders finished in the following places amongst their class C competitors. Fourth place Liam Mardle, fifth place Tyler Cook, seventh place Trent Kesler. And our girls and boys track and field teams travel to Dunley High School for the 2025 section 5 class C3 outdoor track and field championships. Our girls team finished fourth overall and our boys team finished seventh overall. And congratulations to our section five champions, Emma Burwood, Aaron Blake, Carl Claver, Sullivan Williams, and Jake White. That might be the longest points of pride that we've had. We had points of pride. That's really nice. It's June. June. Fantastic. All the good

009stuff going on in our district. Uh we will be moving on to board committee reports. Did elementary or middle high school compact meet? I was not able to go to the elementary one. I don't know if it met. Okay. The high school one only met um we had our senior banquet and that was it was a great night. Yeah, it looks like it was a nice night. Thank you, Liz, for all you do for that. Yeah, you're welcome. Um any other committee reports that people have to discuss or talk about? It's hard for me to see. So please, if I'm missing something, let me know. Okay, moving on. Guests of the board. We have none tonight. Um, next is public forum. Nobody has signed up for public forum. So, we're going to move on to

010superintendent report. Dr. Chanel. Yeah. So, first thing I would like to do this evening is actually introduce uh the board of education to the middle high school principal that you all appointed at our last meeting, Miss Morgan Marcelo. Morgan, will you just stand for one second, please? Uh for those of you that were not on the committee, this is Morgan. Morgan, will you just share a little bit about yourself, your experience, and uh what brings you to Cal Mom? Absolutely. Um I'm currently at Elba, the junior high school principal at Ela. I've been there. This is my third year. Um prior to that, I was the assistant principal at Baron. Prior to that, I taught middle school social studies and high school special ed and Kendall. Um so love the the small school setting. I

011think it's where I meant to be. Um very excited to be here at Cal Momum. Um I I've been able to stop in a few times and everyone's been super welcoming. The kids have been awesome. So um I'm I'm thankful and very excited to join you and and be a part of this great team. So thank you. Welcome. We're excited to have you. Thank you. Uh the next thing I will do is just comment a little bit about the um the marking period averages. Uh so when we're taking a look at student achievement across the middle and high school, we're always paying attention to those lists for kids that are on the honor role and high honor roll. And when you're looking at the comparison, this marking period, I would say this marking period looks

012a little bit more equal to what we're used to seeing where last marking period we did see that dip. Um, so our kids are pushing hard as we're getting to the end of the school year and hearing that consistent message from the leadership to finish strong. Next up for me, I actually have two presentations on the dock today. We're going to start with our athletic presentation. So, we have both of our athletic directors here. It'll be Mike Reed's last uh board presentation, and Mr. Ricardo is going to join him this evening um as his first. Yeah. So, welcome you guys. Come on down. You'll have to come to the podium for us because without the microphone, the cameras won't be able to pick up your your voices. Make sure it's on. Uh first of all

013before I get going because uh Tim will take over at the end and it's kind of like how we divided up the year. Um, you know, I was working as athletic director and when Tim was hired, he came in and we kind of divided himself up and he was really taking the lead going into next year and it was I think it was a good transition plan because um it allowed him to ask questions sitting there trying to find a golf course someplace. So that worked out well for him. Um, so I'll start off the presentation and he'll finish. But I did want to say thank you. Thank you to Cal. Thank you to the board of education, uh, Dr. Schnel, previous superintendent for allowed me to be the athletic director. It was funny when

014I took my admin classes. You know, everybody has to say like why are you doing this? What are you doing? Assistant principal, superintendent, athletic director. I always like what are you doing here? I'm just like, well, that's what I want to do. So, I'm appreciative I was able to see that happen here. Come on. Thank you. All right. So, every year we I come in June and I just kind of summarize what's going on. Uh we do several reports throughout the year that that come in. I just trying to tie them all together. I don't have a clicker so is all right. Maybe all right. So last time I was here, we did talk about the code of conduct because uh it was the first reading of it. Uh so there's nothing new to it.

015um the things that we talked about are still there. Uh looking at students that quit is probably the biggest change and a little bit of language just to help them understand how impactful that could be on a team. Especially when you have teams that don't have a lot of student athletes. Um the student says they're going to play and they start the season and make a plan and then all of a sudden they're like, "Yeah, I'm not going to play." It's not that they can't do that, but we really want them to be aware of the impact that could have. code violations. So basically drugs, alcohol, um substances. We had two student athletes violate the code this year each time. They won last year. It's kind of a recover usually is around hopefully, you know,

016maybe not only one or two. Um there are uh consequences moving forward. So as part of the transition that off to work so he's aware of student athlete and make sure that step two is a little more punitive. Step one is a little bit trying to help them realize uh what's going on and give them some help if they can I can answer any questions too. Participation pass. So we talked about this a little bit the code of conduct. Uh you know we got some minor changes to that. You can see we started out in the fall, seven passes used by seven students. Um 12 passes used by 11 students in the winter. In the spring, we were really running after I'm not sure um what happened in the spring. It was probably the highest

017number um of student athletes. I think maybe part of it I don't know if it was a schedule change or not, but um I know a lot of students have study hall first thing, some of our high school athletes, and so they were just like, okay, you know, why am I really trying to get her study hall? I will say that nobody um lost game time to this. So once they exhaust their participation test, if they come in late, they're not allowed to participate. They're not they're not eligible. We did have a couple get right to three and we had one to three and then like never was on the absence list again. So again, as we've talked about over time, what's the purpose? The purpose is to get our students here to school using

018athletics as a little bit of a carrot. And then we believe as teachers that as long as they're in school, we can work them. So I think the code works very well. Even though the numbers are high, a lot of those are like 8 o'clock, 8:15, it's it's not it's just sometimes where um especially in the spring, if they're walking, going to school, biking or things like that, they might just lose track of time. Um you know, as you heard Dr. Chanel say with the academics um is rebounded back. So I would assume that part of that was kids were out a little bit accustomed to it. That includes middle school kids, too. Sometimes the spring is like their first athletic event for team. So that may also hit something. Okay. The percentages for um

019participation I mean generally we hover right around uh in seasonally around 50%. You get a little bit of 40 sometimes in the winter. Not shocking. We have the fewest number of teams available in the winter and they're not big teams. So like a big team would be football or soccer or baseball where they have more students on the field or on the playing surface. You have basketball and wrestling, cheerleading. Indoor track has helped put a dent in that one, but usually in the winter it's a little bit lower, but the numbers have covered around the same. And what we just see is as we get fluctuations in the um student population, then it then changes. So, for example, we had a very small number of males in the senior class. Well, it's not surprising then

020that your athletics teams that require males are going to struggle a little bit. And then you can kind of see it go one of two ways is what I've seen historically. Sometimes that next class up, so junior class, the boys, sometimes they meet that challenge because they have to step up a little earlier to advance levels of play. Sometimes they step up, they love it. Sometimes you get sophomores that do the same and you get a couple of years where you have the same kids playing over and over again. And then unfortunately sometimes it also goes the other way where because they're being advanced up because of numbers not being there um they don't choose to continue the sport and then you kind of get a little bit of a hole in there where you

021have maybe one or two years. So you can see up there with our numbers um year by year it it hovers around the same. Again, a lot of times you get a student who's interested in a particular sport and they try friends with they bring friends with them. If you have younger kids, you're probably seeing that now. Do you want to play baseball? Not really. And then all of a sudden, Tommy comes up and says, "Hey, let's play baseball." Next thing you know, you're baseball. So, we do see a lot of that. um for us on the last row. I'm not going to do it right now, but for the board of members, if you want to look at it, you can click on those links and it it breaks it down by sport. So,

022baseball, softball, track. So, you can look at those numbers in more depth if you want to. Um obviously, myself, Mr. Cardo the principles as we as we plan and look at possible scenarios where we may have to you know engage in a merger discussion those numbers are really important if you ever look at them I've started putting a couple years ago I started putting sixth graders on bottom not because sixth graders can play for us but it's always good especially if you're trying to get a handle on the modified um teams like what it looks like at that sixth grade level so again we're trying to project out fortunately many of that work here live in the community. So, we also have some firsthand knowledge of kids playing in different teams and leagues and we

023kind of see where where it's going. Dual participation um it's grown a little bit. Um we've, you know, had some hiccups and bumps along the way. This is probably the most number of student athletes that have uh used our dual participation which is playing two high school sports teams in one season. You can see also for the first time the probably the highest percentage of kids that actually completed the season. A lot of times they may start and just realize it's too much. Uh in this case the only time we lost one was the spring and really that was kind of the technicality. uh the student athlete just didn't make enough games to be eligible for sections with like rain every other day and one of the sports they're involved in is baseball. So we

024were trying to figure out how to get baseball games and I can't imagine how a dual athlete was trying to make that work. So they did actually finish the season with the team but there's a minimum number of games you have to play and be eligible for section. They didn't need that. So that's kind of just like a nitpicky situation where technically team played sectionals student wasn't scholar athlete. Once again, our numbers were really uh really good. Um and so we've been honored each year that this program has been in effect. Again, you can look at the numbers in the fall. 51 student athletes, which fall is generally our highest number of student athletes participating. 37 in the winter and 49 fall. Again, that requires student athletes to have a 90% average in the market

025creating during the season. Sometimes it's two mark per average. Sometimes it's just one. [Music] Not that that wasn't good news. Not really good news. So, unfortunately, this year I don't have any sectional champions to show pictures of. Uh we had some very good seasons, some good uh results but not quite section results. So we had Livingston conference champions, girls basketball, softball and golf, section 5 champions as individuals. However, probably the most individual champions we've had since I started doing this report. We had Jake Bishop in wrestling, Emma Broen in indoor track with two events there. Emma broke in with two events in outdoor track and then we had the relay team for boys track along with um no just the relay team one section. Several of those you might say like what about Emma I

026heard she's going for three sports at states which she is but she didn't actually win the section she just got the qualifying state. So those are individual section champions and as you heard Miss Dal our unified team did not win their championship but that program is fantastic and Mrs. Howard and Lily Johnson were honored for their participation. So probably one of my favorite I guess things I would say accomplishments but it wasn't like I did to a team effort but definitely one of my favorite things that we've added to our athletic program uh in my time here. That might be May I have a question? Um, sure. Have you had um students who have had to um be taken off of teams because of grades? So, no, because we don't have um the academic policy

027where there's a hard grade on there. Uh we do have it where it's informal that if a student athlete is struggling usually works through the the teachers contact myself, high school principal, guidance department and we generally try to work together to make sure that they're meeting the standard that's required. Okay. So like in the past examples where we had coaches that had the student athlete, you know, not practice and sit there because they have to be supervised sit there and do some work if they were delinquent in their work or maybe they are like I saw Miss Pope today, not that she was doing early but given a review session. They might say come to practice late for a review session. So our coaches and our teachers work very well together. And again, uh kind

028of the data we use is how well we do with our scholar athlete program. Our students perform very well. Good. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Any other questions? Mr. Reed, thank you very much for your time at Cal Mom, for everything you've done and we wish you the best in retirement. We really do. Thank you very much. Now, Mr. Carl is going to take over and it's like passion. Thanks, Mike. Yes, it is. Thank you, Mike. Uh just echoing, you know, the Mike's done a great job uh as a teacher, a coach, an athletic director. He's put a lot of time in. He's done a lot of things for California uh youth and and teenagers in our sports and uh you know, it's big shoes to fill. So, um I'm excited for the opportunity, but I

029mean, he is leaving a great legacy behind. So, really appreciated his support this past spring. um as we transition together. Uh just a couple brief things uh moving forward. I'm not sure if you have a live doc uh or if that's a PDF you're looking at. So my stuff is uh going to be behind you. First the first thing is is we're going to be offering um our coaches entire coaches staff is coming together at the end of June um to kind of do a kickoff as we move into the next chapter of our athletics. Excited to lead that. Uh we also are going to be utilizing our new uh nurse who is now newly certified as a first aid CPR AED trainer. So it's a two for one meeting. So we'll be kicking off

030athletic logistics and then also being able to do the first aid a you know all the certifications that they need at that same meeting. Um and we're not having to pay for that uh because that's part of our staff. So it's a really nice benefit uh that we have that's involved. So that'll be kicking off in June. One of the big things that I believe in in athletics is developing the student athletes. So not just the the skills on the court, but developing um you know their strength and conditioning and and their abilities to think. Um so one of the things that we did uh that we're doing this year is we're looking to build some culture. Um, so one of the summer opportunities uh that students will be able to participate in will be

031Tuesday nights on the turf. Um, we have we've partnered with 2012 alum John Capotelli who will be our consultant as a strength conditioning coach this summer. Um, he will be leading this along with myself which this will be open for any 7th through 12th grade student. um as well as our rivals uh players from Leroy. Um it'll run from 8:30 to 9:45 on Tuesday nights. You know, kind of bringing in uh the power, the speed stations, uh gamelike agility, high energy music and that culture piece. So, we're looking to bring everybody there um under the lights to really have some exciting opportunities for our kids and kind of build that culture and everyone pulling that rope um in the direction that we need to go. With that said, we also are going to have a

032very organized um Raider weight room opportunity. Um Coach Capelli will be putting together an 8-week summer lifting program. It'll be open to all 7th through 12th grade students and our rival students as well. They'll have the opportunity to come to the wait room um up to four days a week. We want them to come 2 days a week. Um we'll be offering from 7 to 8:30. Um and then from 4 to 5:00 are the two options for student athletes to come. So, you know, obviously for us to get better um in competition, we got to get faster and stronger. I mean, we're getting outperformed in some of our sports in that area. We unfortunately haven't had a organized strength and conditioning um situation and we have a beautiful weight room. So, we're going to utilize

033that. Uh we're going to be encouraging students to be a part of it. Um today we did a huge kickoff assembly. Uh John was here, Coach Cap. Um and it was an option for any students to show up. That's how many students showed up. Um, and this was open for our 6th to 11th graders. We focused in on communicating to them the opportunities that are going to happen uh this summer. Uh, we wanted to be very clear with what was going to be available. And then Coach Cap led uh our student athletes through demonstrating some of the core lifts that will be a part of this um this season, this summer's program. So, we're really excited uh for the energy that was in the gym today. Uh we're really excited about how the the kids

034took it. We had a lot of good feedback after. We had some competitions that were happening during it where we had a lot of hands up. A lot of kids wanted to come down and be a part of it. Um, so it was a really good uh kickoff for what hopefully will be a very active summer of Raiders getting better, uh, getting stronger and working together because the culture piece is as important. Thank you for your time. Any questions for Mr. Mardell? Good. Thank you very much. We are looking forward to working more with you. Okay. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Tim. Uh next up for me will be a presentation by Brennan Cowwell uh on contingent budget. All right, good evening. I am going to provide a little bit of a briefing on

035the implications behind a contingent budget tonight and some of the things we need to consider moving forward here. So, first thing I want to start with um there's a lot of mention of the word equipment in the guidance and regulatory statutes around um contingent budget. So, I wanted to start off with that just so we have a common understanding of what that means. It's not football equipment. It's not just equipment in general. Equipment um according to NISD refers to expenditures that have a life of greater than one year and generally are $5,000 or more for unit price. Um I say generally because it can be board policy to make that more restrictive. So, anytime you hear contingent when we're talking or I'm sorry, anytime you hear equipment when we're talking about a contingent budget or

036anything that may need to be removed from the budget if we go this route is referring to things that last longer than a year and cost $5,000 or more. Um, I have some things down there that have been disallowed by the state and exceptions to that rule. um furniture, new desks, technology, certain hardwares, laptops, maintenance tools, instruments, athletic gear, new buses or vehicles, security systems that have all been disallowed in certain cases. And then exceptions may include things that we may need. Um things like fire alarm panel after a failure, buying a new boiler, things that keep the building open, replacing the kitchen range. Um, and these must be classified and justified as emergency replacements. So, we'll get to a point in this presentation where we discuss what that review process could look like if

037we move in this direction. So, the big pieces of a contingent budget is um or how this falls on board of education in terms of responsibilities and consideration. a couple items here just to summarize the uh considerations for the board. So the first is enforcing the administrative cap. Um all the things I'm about to mention obviously we know that we're going to set the budget up with the correct administrative cap. That's one big piece in this budget. However, that's all projected. We know that the budget is projected for uh fiscal year 2526. It's on us and the board together to continually monitor that. and ensure that anything that happens in those actuals still stay within the required um compliance of the cap. That means which number two brings us number two budget code transfer restrictions

038under contingent budget. The board must provide oversight to ensure that only budget transfers between codes that are allowable if they stay within the contingent budget categories and do not cause the administrative cap to be exceeded. There's not a whole lot of rules in the condition budget, but the big main thing we need to focus in on is that administrative cap and uses for the purchase of equipment. And uh we'll get into uh ordinary costs in just a little bit here. Limits on new commitment uh new commitments. This doesn't necessarily impact us, but it's worth considering and hearing said out loud. The board cannot approve new multi-year contracts, leases, or financial obligations without voter approval. Um, just some examples here would be equipment lease purchases, multi-year service agreements, and capital project transfers. Got a couple more

039here. Um, managing the budget format, the board must continue to present just like we would tonight. report out on a three-part budget and it is recommended that the board of education and district review actual expenditures on a monthly or quarterly basis in order to ensure that the administrative caps adhere to throughout and that's just another mention. So I kind of mentioned that already but actual versus projected can throw those percentages off. So we need to know on an ongoing basis of proving that we're good with clients. Um and then finally the last point here just in terms of considerations and things we need to look out for is funding increases with non- tax sources only. This is actually I say a positive but the only way that codes can increase is if it were to

040be increased through these um items. So, we could fund things through unanticipated revenue, available fund balance, or gifts, grants, or insurance proceeds. Um, that's the only way we would be able to increase appropriation during the year or purchase things that are not ordinary contingent expenses. So, kind of delving deeper into ordinary contingent exper expenses, uh, nice doesn't prescribe a specific formalized process for boards to determine whether or not an expense qualifies as ordinary contingent expense, which is interesting because they like to mention it quite a bit in this guidance. Many districts adopt a structured, transparent approach to ensure consistency, legal defensibility, and community trust. Um so in service of this our recommendation if we had to go down the route of contingent budget would be to develop and implement the following processes to govern the

041allowability of proposed expenditures during the contentious budget. So we would establish a um board policy and resolution stating that this would be our procedure policy and protocol. or to form a contingent budget review committee, utilize a standardized evaluation framework for the review of those proposed expenditures. We would document all of those decisions whether approved or denied and then we would communicate and report out regularly to stakeholders to ensure that those decisions were being made in a transparent fashion. Um I lifted this from formal opinion of council that um helped govern this uh this regulation is the emphasis on those expenditures considered essential to maintain an educational program, preserve property and ensure the health and safety of pupils and staff. All right. So I'm going to take you through each one of those five really quick.

042Um, this one again, we would establish a board policy. We'd adopt a formal policy or annual resolution stating that the budget hopefully not annual, hopefully just once. Um, stating that the board will use a structured process to determine allowable expenses under a contingent budget. Um, this is just formalizing a review process to test for ordinary expenses. What we're looking at here is how do we test to prove an expense to ordinary and how do we make sure that if we're ever audited on that or called on it that we have the ability to document to that it was a model expenditure. I'm going to interrupt just for one second because this is this is actually the component of the contingent budget that I think is the most challenging to be able to answer community questions

043on like what will happen if we move to a contingent budget. In the end, what you're going to hear from Brennan today is really that lever around the board's responsibility to then make decisions around what is allowable and what is not. So you think about our business, our business in terms of managing this budget is going to boil down to having to create procedures that help us make sure that we're thinking through this framework around every every expenditure that we're thoughtful about it. So it has been hard to answer community questions when we've gotten emails or phone calls. I imagine that's been happening to some of you. So, just wanting you guys tonight to hear a framework for thinking around a contingent budget. So, I just want I needed to frame that for my own

044absolutely learning could be as um as nuanced as a weed whacker needing to be replaced and we might have difficulty explaining whether or not that is ordinary and necessary based on just the simple fact that that expenditure could last longer than one year. So, we do have to have a full review process. So the second part of the contingent budget recommendations here would be to form a coni um I'm sorry to form a budget review committee. Uh this is only a recommendation and a hypothetical at this point but um I think at the very least that committee should include superintendent, business official, board president or design and legal counsel as needed or maybe on the committee full time. The purpose would be to vet proposed expenditures before board votes and the frequency would be to

045convene um during the budgeting cycle and after a budget defeat and then ongoing likely in a monthly basis um perhaps even at the regular board meeting. I have a mock up um standardized evaluation framework I have proposed here. We can add or delete from this. Um, it just outlines the criteria for how we could discuss each proposal from legality, constructional necessity, property health and safety, and community precedent. And what it really comes down to is the legality and whether or not the expenditure falls within compliance, whether the expenditure is defensible, and if it aderes to or if it is in service of student need safety. wellbeing as well as staff. [Music] Uh really important piece of this. I wasn't able to pull a whole lot of examples because it hasn't happened very often, but um

046it would be crucial to keep a running log of all decisions made um including the expenditure, the justification, committee recommendation, and the board vote if applicable. documentation um would help guard us in appeals because it is important to know that any community member can make an appeal appeal to SED on any expenditure we make throughout this time if we go to a contingent budget. So it would be crucial to ensure that we've provided ample documentation through our committee on how we approve that expenditure if um if you were called the department on that audit or even on that um that appeal rather. We'd also recommend stakeholder engagement. Um create a public summary of allowable versus non-allowable expenditures to share with staff and community post or approval, including rationale for the program or staffing changes. You

047could post this decision on the district website or during contingency budget um reviews. It also recommend you could use this to either monthly or quarterly, you could call it stakeholder engagement meetings or newsletters to ensure that everything we are meeting on to discuss is transparent and publicly available. um ensure that there are no surprises and also this helps on um this also carries the weight of ensuring that any of these approvals are also considered against the administrative gap and how that impacts the uh that end of the compliance for this budget. All right, the next thing we're going to cover is that part of austerity or part of contingent budget makes it required that we set rates on the use of all facilities that are that fall within the district. Anything that is not compulsory

048for the student or for the operation of the school district now requires payment, now requires a price tag be assigned to it. So um we've developed a uh a cost formula to ensure compliance and protect taxpayer funds. Something two things that are important um is mainly one thing but a couple points I want to make before we move forward. It cannot just be a flat rate. It cannot just be something we decide pull out of thin air subjectively we're going to charge $50 for the use of anything. It must reflect actual costs incurred by the district for the additional use of that item. if it would not be something that we would be paying for already, right? So, if lights get turned on right now and it's not for us, it's not a compulsory uh

049operation and we have to calculate the use of those lights. We have to calculate the use of everything that would be set up. Maybe a table set up, this table set up here, there's an administrative cost associated with that. So, these are all things we have to consider when building this next part, which is honestly one of the biggest lifts I'd say in a contingent budget. So I have some definitions here um worth considering in the development of a formula and um so I'll just take you through these. If we move to this, we'll have to really dive deep into each piece of this uh this table and make sure that we understand everything that could be used on an annual basis and have a really good understanding of what each piece could cost. That

050would give us a uh a cost per use. So we have facility type, estimated operating estimated annual operating costs for each facility or each thing that could be used. Annual hours of use. Hourly custodial rates where applicable when a custodian would be needed or where we would incur additional cost for the use setup or cleanup of that space. Average custodial hours per use and the administrative overhead. Um, I use the percentage for administrative overhead. I think this is an important one because this is the extra cost to administer tasks like scheduling, insurance verification, billing, staff coordination. Um, and I saw a couple districts use it this way. This would just be a markup on the cost of the use of those facilities. So, what I have here is just a simple table and um, I

051want to be very clear. This is just a projection and these are all estimated figures. If we go this direction, this would have to be um developed pretty intricately to ensure that we know what the cost of everything would be from using a classroom to using um turning on the lights for the field for a night game for a club. So the uh let's say 1 2 3 four most left columns you see annual operating costs, annual hours of use, hourly custodial rates and average use per or average custodial hours per use. These are all projected. We would obviously need to calculate actuals for all these potential uses and the actuals on the hourly race, the salaries for those individuals we'd be deploying right down to the wattage and light bulbs that could be turned

052on toward these events. Um, and then price per right down to the uh uh with using national grid to help us with that. These will help price actuals for all uses of school property. Um, and then I have a another note here for the admin percentage. You'll notice that there's just a multiplier here. So, all of those help us to get the hourly use rate for any use of a uh facility here or any use piece of facility. Then it multiplies by that to give us the final hourly rate in the rightmost column. Thing we left out here, which we could so we can we can kind of go up from here or down from here. We can make it more complicated. We can make it less complicated maybe. The one thing I will say

053that we left out was the depreciation of our of our facilities here, which turns out to be, if I'm remember correctly, about $6 per 1,000 square ft. Um, we have recommendations on that as well. So, that's just to give that's not to add as a discussion point tonight or matters to track into this formula. more to make a point that wherever we decide to go, it can become much more complicated and more comprehensive on what constitutes a quote and how we would bill out for or invoice for the use of our facilities. Um, or things that maybe we say I don't know if that's fair or necessary to include in and we'd like to make it a little bit more simple and straightforward. [Music] You'd be surprised how much our architects and engineers and campus

054construction all have data on the way that they study our buildings to help us for capital project improvement. So, a lot of phone calls out to folks that we partner with that have been able to get us back like our depreciation amounts and our square footage and what this looks like. They've studied our electricity use. So, there's a lot of things that we've been able to collect. Um, so I would what I would say is we've collected things at a surface level. we've been able to call our friends and just say, "Hey, can you help us get some numbers, not expecting the board to take action this evening, just feeling very strongly that it's I if we end up where this next budget vote is not successful and we have to get back together, it

055shouldn't be the first time that we're talking about what contingent budget expenses might be back to the community." So, what questions does the board have? You're very thorough. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. I think what's not mentioned in here, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that if the community votes on a contingent budget, our administrators will be using a lot of their time to work on this kind of stuff, which takes away from directly impacting education. Is that a misstatement or is that accurate? I'd say that's correct. I'd probably extend that past administrator to uh part of the clerical office staff, support staff, anybody who would have any level of ability to support anything from setting up a a lifetime table to cleaning up on Monday after an event was taking

056place. They're going to have to be cognizant of their time. what that looks like reporting that there's absolutely an administrative load that this places on our staff and I wouldn't restrict it to just administrators but certainly administrators for that's a very good point um and that is a very difficult thing to calculate as well I don't know that you can but it's going to take away from our our goal which is to educate children absolutely all of this austerity certainly um takes away from the product for children Thank you for your time. Are there any other questions? Yeah, I have a question. Sure. Um you this is for in instructional use and things like that for the kids. What about um you know paying for I don't know proms and and activities and and all

057the different things that we do socially that are good for our kids. Are those included or not? Yes. So this is not for instructional. This is for any use that is not compulsory. So when I say non-compulsory, I mean anything that's not required as a free and appropriate education by state law and federal regulation. So if it is prom, if it's a soccer game, if it is a un [Music] a math club that isn't sanctioned by um Tel Mom, but is they're asking to use one of our classrooms. Anything that happens here that is not required to graduate, that's not required by law for free and appropriate education would have to be an additional cost incurred by whoever was requesting to use that facility. There's definitely a difference too between like I'm going to use

058prom because you use prom as an example. We don't pay for prom out of our school budget, right? So prom is actually funded through student council which is an extra class account through fundraising that the kids do and then they pay for their ticket price. So there are certain things we already don't we already don't fund with our budget. Okay. But but definitely when you start to think about and I've had people in community emails and conversations that I've had this has actually been the most challenging piece is people want to know like I've got a specific question what happens to Camp Raider and so I'll use Camp Raider as an example. I personally as former principal of the building and the designer have said event I think having the obstacle course for the kids

059to go through as a team bonding event I I think that's pretty important right I've been willing to position budgetary money to make sure that that happens in a budget like this we could not justify something that we know we could we could talk about social emotional learning and team building and why this day is so important you would now have to look at every event that we do inside the walls of our school and say not what the educators think is what's best for kids really in this moment but but if if Joe that lives down the street sees this expenditure from the school does Joe agree that it's necessary and really what I'm understanding of this budget is that we have to be so cognizant of that because the last thing that we

060want would want to have happen is that we agree a committee of people and the board then acts and we agree that something that we thought should be purchased for the sake of the kids has been purchased. Community member challenges that and the commissioner comes back and says, "Yeah, I agree. That was not that should not have been purchased." Imagine the trust that we would violate in our community. So, when you end up in a budget like this, you have to be more we're very conservative in our spending. You have to be more conservative than you've ever been because if not, that community trust piece, I think, goes a really long way. So, we would become far more conservative in our spending. So, how will it impact kids? We would have to sit here and

061go through every single event and say, "Oh, we won't buy the balloons. Oh, we won't buy flowers." Right? So, I think about like all the nicities that we do to make our events feel really classy and special. You will find us having to say, "Oh, but that wasn't really necessary. That's not really a necessary expense. It's nice, but it's not necessary." So contingent budget has that that component to it where we will become so conservative to make sure that we're listening to our community. And and just to clarify what you said, who pays for prom? Student council. Student council pays for prom and then kids buy tickets. And so the ticket sales actually pays for a bulk of the expense of prom. But to my question, if if there's uh a committee that's renting a

062room for that, they are then going to be charged for the use of that room. When you say that, I guess I need clarity. You're are you talking about prom or student council needs? No, student council is part of us. Okay. It's part of what we do. But let's say for example, our our facility at the elementary school is used by Boy Scouts. If Boy Scouts wants to come in, they're going to have to pay. Okay. Um if somebody wants to come in, a group, we have like the Hoops Club, all the little kids that play basketball for the Hoops Club. Hoops Club uses all of our gyms all year long. The Hoops Club is not a part of the school. We would have to charge every single time, right? So, anybody that's not part

063of us, think about their bank account is separate than us. They don't fall underneath our charter. You don't you don't hire these folks. You don't pay these folks. They're not part of us. Anybody that uses our facility that's not actually part of our organization has to be charged in this budget in a contingent budget. And so, also, we have other schools that come for like the track. Yeah. Like things like that. Are those then allowed at our school or do we then have to charge if we're allowing them at our school? There's some nuance there. So I I think you're not referring to like an invitational or we would also be competing. You're saying like York wants to use our baseball fields cuz they're more dry. That either either or like we're involved in it.

064No, that's that be like a home game. But in the situation I understand York this year has used their baseball field. I believe it was yours because theirs weren't up to stuff to to hold the game. They would we would have to charge them for use of the facility. That's an example. It's a good question. It's a good question. So, based on your presentation, um it sounds like pending what happens next week, if the budget is defeated and we do go to a contingency budget, we're supposed to notify stakeholders with a newsletter justifying our expenses and the changes we've decided to make. I think that would kind of be a time for the community to speak their piece. uh if they did have an objection to an expense uh to allow for planning throughout the

065year, I would hope that we could communicate that out if that is a circumstance. Um yeah, it's going to be double duty for the admin team to figure out what we're doing. That's unfortunate. But yeah, it's going to be uh it'll be a lift, that's for sure. We've learned a lot in the last couple of weeks here to drill this deeply into even our facilities. Um, I think just in general I I'm hope I'm very hopeful. I'm very hopeful that we pass a budget. I'm very hopeful. But we're also very prepared to move forward because we have to. We can't get stuck in a spot where we don't have enough information to make good decisions. So, if the budget doesn't go up our next time together, we will be asking the board to adopt a

066formula, right? We'll we will continue to build and create the same way that we have been so that no matter what happens on the 17th, we're ready to move the work of kids forward. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. At this time, it is 6:54. We're scheduled to start our budget hearing at 7. So, I'm going to suggest that uh somebody makes a motion to adjourn until after the budget hearing. So, move. Well, you want to make it make the motion. I make the motion that at 6:55 p.m. we adjourn the meeting until after the budget presentation at 7:00 p.m. sharp. Thank you. You're welcome. So, are we closing this meeting and then opening a new meeting? We don't need to open the budget hearing. So, we'll close our meeting and then we'll adjourn

067until that's complete and then we'll come back after the budget hearing is with the new meeting. Yes. I'll open it back up. Okay. Is everyone comfortable with that? Yes. Um just to be clear, we have our budget hearing at 7. Uh we're going to close our formal meeting, go to the budget hearing. For anyone that wants to continue and stay after the budget hearing for the rest of our meeting, please stay. Can I have a second? Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? All right, we will be back. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. How are you this evening? It is a beautiful day outside. We've gone so long. One of the teachers at the middle high school told me the other day that it has been seven months since we have

068seen a weekend where it was not rain or snowing. We feel that, don't we not? I feel that. So each time that the sun is coming through the windows, it's a good day. Uh welcome. This evening we are going to do a budget presentation tonight and then open the floor for question and answer session to make sure that any um any concerns or questions that you all have can address. So I'm Becky Schnell. I'm the superintendent here at Calon Munford and I'm pleased to present the budget to you this evening. To get us started, I want to talk a little bit about this budget. So, the proposed budget is for $21,660,678. This budget um we when we start off building our budget here at Calonia Monford, we actually start by looking at all of the

069things that we need in order to build out our programs, take care of our students, our facilities. What happens in the very beginning of that process is we end up uh needing or asking or wanting more things than what we can afford. So the process of our budgeting is often spent where you know the administrators and the directors are submitting back to central office the things that they need and we're beginning to weigh those things out. Um what I would say to you in terms of the community is that we know what our revenue is going to be and it has been our um our commitment to the community to make sure that our expenditures align with that revenue. We like to make sure that we are not going to expect more from the taxpayers

070in the community than what you are expecting to see from us. So we begin to take our budget and even though we've had lots of asks on the local brick administrative saying there's lots of things that they asked for that are not in this budget. So this budget just to help you understand some of the things that we feel we need that have already been cut from the budget. That's what this slide is actually indicating to you. So across the middle high school right now, we do have um we have a a block of time for our eighth grade students that we've been monitoring for the last two years where the kids really do have room in their schedule to take on another elective. And so the original request was to add more of a

071STEM program across our middle school. We have STEM that we offer in grade six. We do not offer it in grades seven and eight. We offer it again once they reach the high school. and so trying to get some program development inside this budget. When the budget could not sustain that, that position was quickly eliminated. We also had an academic intervention teacher at the elementary school who resigned to take a job elsewhere. So when that happened, oftentimes and I I I'm sure as we get into the question and answer session of this, you guys will ask questions about our studenttoteer ratio and how we plan our budgets. And what you're going to see is anytime that we have a vacancy in a position, we always begin to look at that particular vacancy and ask ourselves,

072is that something that we can live without? Is that something that we can rebuild our systems and our structures to handle uh having that particular position eliminated? We made the decision as an administrative team that we were going to eliminate the AIS position at the elementary school and that we were going to fund more staff development to make sure that we're taking care of what we would refer to as best first instruction. So if kids are reading and writing and doing math on grade level and they're doing really well in the classroom, there's less need for academic intervention. So when you see AIS numbers kind of go up, it's really important that you start to challenge the system to start to look back down at best first instruction. So we have a commitment in this

073budget to do that and have selected the elimination of that position as almost like a a spearhead for us to say we have a new problem. We are short of person and now we have to figure out how to create some efficiencies and how in doing that do we drive some of our own data and make some of our own local change. In previous budgets, we've also had a strength and conditioning coach, a position that we actually shared with Leroy that was funded through our local hosties, which allowed us to generate aid on this particular position. The position went all year unfunded. So, it was another quick elimination for us when we're trying to solve problems and budget that we just take out the things that have been unsuccessful. So, we removed that from this

074budget. We also have some summer curriculum work. teachers will submit proposals for summer curriculum work this year. Uh, one of the things that I'm really pushing with the administrative team is that we get very clear around what our initiatives are, the kinds of change that we need to see. We're on a literacy push right now, ladies and gentlemen. It is going to be the top priority of this administrative team across at least this year and probably for the next couple while we fight really hard to make sure that literacy levels are in a place where we'd like to see them for our community sake and for our students sake. So we are going to reduce some of those summer curriculum hours that we have given to teachers for summer curriculum proposal and instead we're going

075to fund only the things that are backmapped into the the literacy initiatives that we're running. So saying no more often to our teachers is is not necessarily awesome but it gives us the ability here to say we're going to streamline our approach uh for this coming summer. We did we do have we do have some technology replacement plans. So when I think about a budget and I think about this at my house like every month, every year, um there are certain expenditures I know are coming. I do have a mortgage and so I pay my mortgage every single month. I can anticipate that that's coming and I can plan accordingly. School budgets are no different than your budget at home in that regard. We definitely have things that we know are coming and we must

076prepare for. We know that we have technology and that our technology is going to age out and we're going to have to have a replacement plan. So, it's been a solid couple of years that we've been working very hard. We have a replacement plan on paper. We just have not been able to get the budget large enough in terms of our ability to um to fund a replacement plan. We've not been able to get the budget to do that. So even though we've submitted again a request for some replacement plans, uh we our kids are well taken care of. Our teachers are using older equipment. So we still don't have a replacement plan inside this budget. Our facilities team is no different. Uh each year they submit another proposal to try to make sure that

077we are thinking a little bit more long term, not about just this year, but what does a replacement plan look like for us in terms of facilities and equipment that we need. so that we're paying attention to yearly buying and trying to make sure that we're not always buying once something has broken. So, a little more proactive, a little less reactive. This budget also did not hold the techn or the maintenance uh facility recycle plant that they built. We are going to be under a capital project. Our voters approved the 202526 capital project that's happening across the district for the next year and a half. Inside that project, about 3/4 of our parking lots and the driveways coming in are actually going to be taken care of in the project. So, we decided to go

078ahead and eliminate for this year some parking lot sealing. Again, you own a home. I'm sure you seal your your driveway every couple of years. You do need that. We can pull it for this year. That's going to have to make its way back into our budget for next year or we will have uh long-term issues in terms of preserving our property. But for this year that's been parked uh for momentarily. We also have been paying for a grant writer through a Boseies coaster. We we are still able to partner with our local BOSIS for some of the larger grants that they're going to invest in across the school year. We are in one for technology. So cross your fingers that hopefully that grant comes through. I was hoping we would have it back already

079in terms of that. But we're going to continue to look for opportunities to get involved in grants with Boseies. But this particular expense was an expense where we were paying to make sure that Boseies held out to write a grant for us in particular. Something that we would choose and say that we need this for right now. I'm putting my writing on pause. Definitely something we need to circle back to. Uh I do think in terms of generating revenue and the kinds of things that we need as a school system, grants are going to be very important to us moving forward. Um we are also we had a request to increase lunch monitors at the middle high school. So right now the middle high school does not have lunch monitors at all. So the lunchroom

080is monitored by teachers. That's the same time of day that our teachers are running academic intervention. And so every time that a teacher has to be pulled from their classroom to do a lunch duty that means that they're not working with kids to take care of AIS. So that academic intervention that they need. Although the request came through, that was also not funded in this budget. But what's in this budget is also still really good for kids. So I want to celebrate a little bit about what it means to be a student at Cal Munford. This budget, I believe, upholds the values of the community. I think the community expects certain things from us and this budget certainly does that. We know that that safe and secure school facilities are super important. Kids cannot learn

081if they are not safe. As families, you are not going to send your kids to us if you're not feeling like our facilities are safe. This budget definitely takes care of the investment that the community has already placed in our facility. This budget does have in it another uh another camera project. Uh we are consistently keeping all of our security cameras active inside the district and making sure that we're updating the cameras that need to be updated. Making sure that we're adding cameras actually to our facility in areas where maybe we have some blind spots. Um, typically how that works is your building principles will will start to notify district office of things that maybe happened on the campus that we were unable to go back and see or view because we did not have

082camera angles there. So, the project, that particular project is still in this budget and supported. This budget does support two full-time school resource officers, one in each of our buildings. Um, we do have an intermunicipal agreement with the village of Calonia to provide our school resource officers. You'll see Officer Burnside back there. He's actually working for us right now on that contract. Uh whenever we invite the community in for board meetings, our SRO's are present. So, we like to think about the safety of our facility with all of the decisions that we make and that is true of this budget. This budget request is also asking you to approve a school bus. We do have a school bus replacement plan. So, if we do not purchase a school bus every year, that basically means we're

083going to get off track in that recycle plan that we have. We run our buses between 12 and 13 years. At that 12 and 15 year mark, it doesn't mean we necessarily retire a bus. The bus might actually come out of our regular fleet and move into a fleet where it's doing only short runs for a field trip, but we have a great transportation replacement plan and this budget is asking that we maintain that. We have one full-time mechanic over in the bus garage. And so just thinking about what happens when you don't have buses on a replacement plan, you would actually kind of increase your costs in other ways. And so we have been able to develop a replacement plan that allows us to only have one full-time mechanic in the district. Uh this

084particular budget also includes, and we'll talk about it as we get down a few slides, but this budget is asking for what we call a capital outlay project. Every year in the state of New York, school districts are allowed to do a capital outlay project up to $100,000 does generate state aid and we'll talk about that. The capital outlay project is included in this budget and it would allow us to update some of the HVAC systems in this building from old technology to new technology which in the end does save us in terms of energy consumption and energy management. This budget also offers a high quality academic program prek through 12. So, there are no cuts to in this budget to our programming. Um, still offering all of our advanced placement courses, all of our

085college level dual enrollment courses, uh, and all the way down to our prek students. This budget definitely maintains all of our extracurriculars. Uh, a push that the district has been on since we did our last um, strategic plan was to try to make sure that we increase opportunities for kids across all grade levels to be connected to their school. So, one thing we know to be true, your school is safer every time a child feels like they are seen and they are heard inside your school walls. Baking club is important. If you don't have someone doesn't have something to do after school here on our campus. So, this budget supports all those extracurriculars that help make sure that kids see themselves as part of our school community. So, how do we come up with our

086budget? Well, we first start looking at revenue to be honest like our our cuts do begin to come through when we realize that our revenue is actually not going to keep up with the expenditures that we that we have proposed. And so that's really where we start to go back to the administrative team and talk about where the cuts are going to have to come. So these are our revenue sources. You'll notice there that we do get a majority of our school is funded through state aid in terms of our overall budget that we have spent this year. Boy, it was great, you guys. We got a $600,000 increase in state aid this year. I can't imagine where we would be sitting in terms of our budget had we not got those increases in state

087aid. That has not been the past for California. I don't predict that that will be in our future to see major increases in aid. Um so taking that into consideration um this budget now because we did have the budget vote go down we have now adjusted to say that we are not going to collect a tax levy for this particular budget. So we were asking the community for 2.3% tax levy increase. We're now going out with a second budget where we're asking for a 0% tax levy levy increase. So what you'll notice in this table is that to make up the difference between what we originally needed when we're not going to cl collect tax, how are we going to back fill the gap? The board of education has decided that we will actually use

088a little bit more in reserves in order to take care of what we would have collected in tax for this year. So I've been asked in the last couple of weeks, you know, why why are we going back out with the exact same appropriation? you know, why didn't we maybe make a decision to cut something? I think just in general, my response to you would be we run a very, very conservative and efficient budget here in Calonia. When we start to have conversations with our community about where our cuts will be, you really are going to start talking about cuts to programs. That didn't seem like a decision we should make in a matter of a week. It seems like a decision we should go out with a 0% tax levy increase, use a little

089bit of our reserves to take care of this issue for this moment and then engage the community in real conversations around like I said in my previous slide. I think the community has come to expect a particular kind of educational experience here to make a decision in the moment to do something different would have meant we were doing that without the community weighing in on what are we going to let go of? what is maybe no longer that important to us in order to make significant change here. So, we can talk about that um when we get into the Q&A, but I did want to show you the reserves. Every year when we build budgets, we do use reserves to build our budgets. Um the board is always appropriating reserves to take care of budget

090pieces. Um so, you'll notice that what we did in the very in our original proposal, um we did take the reserves and you'll see it in the in the bottom slide. This will post to our website, too, which I think will be easier to read once you're looking at it there. But originally, what we would do is take all of our reserves and what was being allocated out of them and put them in separate budget lines. But for this conversation, I wanted to make sure that you guys would see that what we have now done is increased our reserves. Where we were going to rely on $1.1 million, we're now going to rely on 1.4. So year-over-year, you're talking about a 28% increase in our reliance on reserves in order to balance this particular budget.

091Our three-part budget, the state of New York actually requires that we think about ourselves in these three categories. Okay? So we have an administrative category, a capital component, and we have our program component. Think about program as every single thing that the children touch. The program component of our budget is the largest budget. It's everything from athletics to Chromebooks, you name it. If the kids touch it, it's part of their daily experience. That's actually where it shows up. The capital component is everything that we do to take care of our facility. It's our it's our capital. It's every building. It's all of our grounds, all of the things that our facilities team uh uses to keep us healthy every day. And the bills that kind of come in around our facility. And the administrative component

092of our budget is anything that we pay that allows us to generate the other two. So I'll give you some hard examples around the administrative component. So I' I've had folks ask me in the last couple weeks, is that just your administrators. It's not just the administrators, it's administrators, it's directors, it's everybody that's kind of leading and building and doing in order to keep the system moving. So, not thinking about it just as the principal and the assistant principal that are in the building, but everybody that it kind of takes and all the bills that come in uh to be able to manage our programs. So, our budget to budget increases, you'll see here based on percent sort of where our expenses are. And I'll go back to we are a people business. The majority

093of our expenses are always going to be, you saw the instructional component of that pie. The expense we're always going to have is going to be people driven. So, it's always going to be based on salaries and benefits for all of the educators, all of the support staff, all the administrators, really everyone who works here. Those are the major increases that we're also seeing in terms of our budget. Uh major increases in health care costs. So whenever we see those major increases, they are built into our budgets. I would say another big driver of our budget this year, and it is not just Mford, it is across the state of New York, is that we are seeing massive increases in terms of proportionality to our budgets and the increase of costs to educate students with

094disabilities. One thing I will denote that I think is really important because this sort of shows in that bottom corner that total overall percent increase is at 5.1%. And I think just in general when I'm thinking budget to budget I think 5.1% budget to budget seems like a pretty big increase. So I want to talk about that with you for a second. We just took on a capital project. So the capital project is the 2025 2026 capital project. So you're going to see that when that debt service and transfers that's our capital project coming on board that actually increases overall what our budget is going to be but it does not impact 11. So if we were to pull the capital project back out of this slide and say that we aren't even going to

095talk about that because that's been funded through reserve and taken care of by public vote. If we were to pull that back out of here you're talking about a budgettobudget increase of 3.98. We're doing really well in terms of the randomization of holding our expenditures down as best as we can. So, right now we are proposing tax that would be at 0% increase to the tax levy. A 0% increase to the tax levy means whatever you paid in school tax last year is what you will pay in school tax this coming year. No increase to what your tax bill will look like. This is our property tax report card. Again, you're going to see in that proposed levy. Last year, we collected the 7.9 and in this proposed budget, we would be collecting 7.9. Our

096capital outlay project, as I mentioned to you, $100,000 that we would like to spend in this budget. Uh, one thing that has uh, sparked a little bit of interest just in my conversation with community is that folks don't necessarily understand that as a school we generate state aid. So, I like to think about state aid as the state already came into your paycheck and they took taxes and they took them to the state and they're in this big bucket up there. And every bucket of money that the state has, they actually decide how it's going to be spent. There is a there is a series of dollars that are considered paidable money. So when we do a capital outlay project of $100,000, we are actually going to generate back in aid $86,000. So in the

097end, we're going to do $100,000 worth of work, but that is not what we pay for it when it is all said and done. So I want to go back to like that cycle. So, one thing that I would like to just communicate in terms of what it will look like for us if the capital outlay project comes off, we end up in a contingent budget and we don't have a capital outlay project. We really project both our senators and our revenue. We always do a capital outlay project. So, we always have a revenue coming back in. The moment we take whether you're talking about buying the bus or you're talking about the capital outlay project, the moment we take those away, that actually comes with an impact in revenue. Not just that we didn't

098get the capital improvement on our facility, but we also then don't get the revenue. So, I've had some folks say, "Well, but that just means you're saving money." Well, it you could look at it that way except we won't have a bus, right? You could say, well, you'd be saving money, but we would still have an HVAC system here at the middle high school that we're struggling to maintain, which means we're expending money in other ways. So, when we're thinking about our capital alley project, we're strategically choosing this this HVAC system because it cost us quite a bit in this last year. We had some heating issues in our gymnasiums. The heat was stuck on. And to come in on a Saturday morning for a wrestling tournament and have the gym be 87°, first of

099all, waste. Second of all is Saturday morning service call. So we start to think in our capital outlay project around what is it that's causing us to have to spend reactively because we're not being proactive. This capital outlay project is designed to take care of something that we have been reacting to. We'd like to get corrected. So on June 17th when folks are about to vote for this budget, you will see two propositions on the ballot. The first proposition is to approve the budget, the budget of 21,660,678. The language inside the pre the pro the proposal, I just want to make sure that we're clear. You will see even on your ballot in red written by our attorneys to make sure that the way that this was written is as clear as it needs to

100be for legal reasons. You will not see a tax increase from California schools. The same will be too true for proposition number two. We are asking that you give us permission. You have to give us permission for two things in proposition number two. We have a reserve, capital equipment reserve that was established by voters in 2023. So we established the reserve with your permission. We have put money into that reserve. We now need your permission to spend money out of that reserve. So in the second proposition, you're actually going to give us permission to spend out of the reserve and to do so in order to buy the school bus. So that second proposition also does not have any increase in the tax. Now you'll see it in red even on your ballot when you

101come in to vote. What questions do you have? Yes. Um I just wondered if you could clarify for people because we recorded last night. If we don't use a microphone members of the community that want to watch us and they are from MACD. if you could clarify for um the people here in the audience um something we've talked about before um is talking about how the reserves got so high because of the quote unquote COVID money and the stimulus money and how you're were using that to spread out over the years um and how uh the idea was to use it strategically rather than try to hire new teachers that you would then have to lay off later on. Oh, because you don't have any money anymore. So, I was I wasn't here as part

102of that process. Um and um I would have been wondering the same question. I swear I have a slide for you. But I think I think the important part was I agree the The reserves came from that, not from being overt taxed. Yeah. So, I hope you all got a budget newsletter, the second one that we put out. Got a nice spread on the inside. I love it. Thank you for bringing your newsletter. I do think that this is something that we've been trying to discuss. So, it's really it's connected back to that controller report. And and here's the deal. I am not afraid to have a conversation with anybody in the community about what the controllers report said, what about it is is real and that we need to address. And what about sometimes

103the way in which things are communicated or written about makes them very salacious. So you are correct that the money that you see in reserves actually came in because we were awarded stimulus money just like every other school in the state of New York. So when the stimulus money came in, I was principal in the high school and I can tell you what it looked like from the inside of challenging us around the use of stimulus money. Superintendent Melisani was determined not to waste this opportunity. He did not want to take stimulus money and have us invest it in something like hiring a teacher or hiring a social worker or hiring three more counselors only to have that increase our overall budget because we had an increase in revenue that wasn't going to stay. The

104increase in revenue wasn't going to stay. It's gone. We are not expecting that money to continue coming in. So everything that we did as a district during that time was what we referred to as a one-time expense. If we were using the CO money, it was to take care of things that we would take care of it. For example, teachers all got new laptops, right? What do we do that we then don't have to build into the budget for our community because the budget already can't hold it and it's a one-time expense. We're not going to have that bill show up again next year and the next year and the next year. So instead, the reserve money supplanted some of our bills and it ended up in our reserves. It ended up in the reserves

105where it's making quite a bit of money in interest. And we are using the interest that the reserves are generating to act. If we go back to our revenue slide, there's an area of revenue called other revenue. That's where you're seeing interest revenue coming in to support the budget. The interest revenue, uh, I'm going to put Dr. Capron on the spot. The interest revenue, are you ready? Are you ready? Was it $240,000 I think that we supported this budget? Uh just just in this budget. Yeah. Just the the interest was uh we jumped it up Yeah. significantly to I mean know there was more in that particular budget category but we took it up to you know 80 $100,000. Yeah. So just just thinking about what we did, we've increased the revenue support of the

106budget which meant it was okay that we went out at the property tax gap because we could generate the money using revenue. The revenue is important to us. The the interest it's generating on that money is important to us. It's showing up in the revenue slides. So was it taxpayer money? The answer is no. It wasn't taxpayer money. So did we collect did we did we have a levy in the years during CO? We did. So there is a piece of this where you got to almost look at the strategy and if someone asked me I said this sounds like a strategy it it is a strategy it was very much a strategy. So the second question that I got after someone said well that sounds like a strategy they said why didn't we know

107that was the strategy. So just in general we definitely report out on our reserves and at board meetings that happens. I think what I can do in this moment for every taxpayer is say that I think I think what I'm hearing people say is maybe during budget presentations when you do come in for something like this next year if we're talking about reserves in this moment that I'm building in a reserve conversation in the budget conversation so you don't feel like you have to come to every board meeting in order to understand all the strategy that's going on. There was definitely strategy in the reserves and it's benefiting the taxpayer. I did double check with my colleagues. I just did a quick show of hands. I said, "How many of you superintendent, how many of

108you during the co years did not levy tax on your community?" And there was one out of the entire group of them that said we did not. That one actually gets 98 cents back on every dollar that they spend and made. We get back between 74 and 84 depending on what we're buying. So there are some districts that generate more state aid and they felt like they could be a little more gracious during that time. The rest of the superintendent said to me, we were in the most unprecedented time we've ever been in. It was not the time to not have enough money to do what might be coming next. Other questions? Well, I think what's important What I think is important is the audit report showed a $6.5 million mismanagement they called it or

109something budgeting. I don't remember what it was. But what I don't think people understand is of that 6.5 million, how much of it came from taxpayers each year? So if you took 6.5 million, where's the sources of that money? By who? Who who contributed that money? You want to answer a little bit? Me Mr. Polo. Um so the question is from start to end we had around $6.5 million. We have about 3.45 just shy of 3.5 million in that time. Um as Dr. Schnel just outlined a huge portion of that is from CARES Act Cersa. There's a couple other grants in there as well. And then there's also interest. Uh we invested in treasury bills which generated $400,000 and another $340,000 just from interest being generated from uh money sitting in reserves. Out of all

110that $3.5 million increase in those three fiscal years, I'm sorry, four fiscal years, 400,000 of that came from tax. So 100,000 a year went or was deposited into reserves in we'll say we could say excess um or contingency or money built into the budget for a just in case. So just $100,000 a year $400,000 total out of $3.5 million in increases out of $6.5 million total return. And take that like from the perspective that I told you I think we're an extremely conservative budget. We're talking about a a $20 million budget last year. And if we get to the end of the year and we have spent where we have $100,000 left, we did really good. We did really, really good. But you're talking about one major thing happening in the walls of this building

111that we wouldn't be able to handle. We would have been out of money. So, the one thing to always know is that as taxpayers, when you approve the the budget, you actually set the actual dollars and cents of what we can spend. We cannot spend over that amount. So, to get within that in terms of our budgeting and the decision-m that we're making to get us down to about $100,000 of what's left over, that's really conscientious spending. I mean, if I had 100,000, so somebody said this to me, I would love to have $100,000 in my savings at home. I would, too. I also don't have it at home. At home, I could make strategic decisions to make up my my losses. Like, if I needed to, I could tighten my belt and I could

112make some significant decreases in my expenditures. When you start to think about what that means for a school, I told you that one of the largest areas of increase that we're seeing in our budget, as are everyone else in the state of New York, is an increased cost of educating students with special needs. You can't run out of money to take care of a student that needs an aid as support. So, when we're budgeting, we we're not even 100% sure. I can tell you in this moment, I have no idea what our student enrollment will look like next year. families. A family could move in this summer and we could have expenses that that show up at our door at registration that will be our responsibility, our collective responsibility to meet the need. So, when

113we're building a budget, we've got to make sure that we're leaving ourselves enough to take care of all of those things. We're taking care of all of those things and ending up at the end of the year with $100,000. If we move that money into reserves, it generates aid and we also get to use it in the pre in the next years to take care of other things that we need. So thinking about it as not not overt taxing, I understand the concept of that, but that we are going to turn around and spend that money to do the work and the mission of the district. So speaking students is a great segue. One of the things we used to see in these budgets was the historical enrollment and the projected enrollment. Um that's no

114longer seems to be included and also a breakout of maybe the percentage of special need students that and the cost per student cuz it's got to be higher for special needs then you know what I'm saying. I don't know if providing that information makes any sense, but I just kind of feel like you can say we have high expenses for special needs, but we don't know. I don't know if anyone in this room knows how many there are. You know, in the enrollment of how many students you have, what do you have about 800? Can I put you on the spot? What's the percent? Do you know? Oh, we have 111 students with disabilities. 111 students with disabilities enrolled in the district. Is it what is our percentage about that? Yeah, about about 10% about

11510%. Okay. But I do you understand? Of course. Of course. To the taxpayers. I did bring up total enrollment. So, we can look at that for a second. One of the things that I definitely dug into to to look at this, so I don't know that I have a slide on our per pupil cost. I might I will go in here and look for it. We are the lowest per pupil cost in Livingston County. Calidon conservatively we are the we are the lowest in Livingston County. I can tell you that there's one school district in our region that is below us and they are at they're just a little bit below us in the cost per pupil and they have half the number of students that we have. So we are running an extremely conservative

116budget. One thing I did want to note though as enrollment has dropped. So we do have our enrollment is pretty stable right now projecting it out. We're we're actually projecting that we don't we don't really see a decline. So, we're probably going to stay as I'm going to say we're hovering at right around that 800 number, we're we're staying there. We've dipped a little bit, but not much. And when we're projecting it out, even looking next year at um our incoming kindergarten next year, I'm hearing that kindergarten next year might be another one of those larger groups for us. We might get, and I say larger, like some of you are used to seeing class sizes of 150. For us, when we see a class size right around 70, that's a really big group for

117us. And there's a hand there's a few of those in the district. and we're anticipating that the incoming kindergarten, not this year, but next year, we're we're seeing major numbers in our prepaid rating. So, what I did is I just did a quick math because I was so curious, and this is something that I think just in general, you should know. Every single time that someone retires in the district, we don't necessarily replace them. So, I don't want to get us lost in the weeds of the Davis. I think the clearest conversation for me to have with you is just the proportionality of if we go back to 200910, we had 963 kids enrolled in the district and we had 95, this is just teachers, 95 fulltime teachers. When we get to 2425, we have

118797 kids enrolled in the district and we have 80 teachers. We're still running right there at like 1 to 10 teachers. In terms of who constitutes teachers, you're you're seeing in this number still like um an OT, a PT, like folks that might only see 40 kids to take care of their needs across the the entire week. But proportionally, we are not like some of the other districts. And I I pay attention at this point to everybody's budgets, right? What are people doing in order to decrease their budgets? I would like to see that. There are some school districts around us that in order to decrease their budget and meet close their gap, they've actually gone from four sections, let's say four sections of first grade, where they have four first grade teachers down to

119three first grade teachers. We've been running three first grade teachers for years. We are three sections in in the district right now. I couldn't make a recommendation to cut a teacher at the elementary level or at the secondary level without telling you that class sizes would would go up significantly. Those are hard community conversations that we we have to have. And I know that we've got to engage with one another over the course of this next six to seven months to have real conversations about what it would look like for us and what we would be giving up if we were actually going to take the $21 million and try to drop it back down to 20 million or to 19 million. What are we talking about? What are the changes that we're looking to

120see? And for us, our greatest expense is people. So, in order to make up cost, let's say to plan for a brand new teacher that we're hiring, you plan right around $90,000 salary and benefits to make up that same $90,000 by saying, "Hey, facilities, we need you to cut $90,000." They probably couldn't even get that deep to really change our budget. That's what we're talking about. Yes, he's gone. My understanding is that if this budget does not pass, will then be forced to run on a contingency budget. And when I looked at the numbers in your mailing, thank you for sending that by the way. Yes. Um it looks like the program component of the contingency contingency budget is actually higher than the proposed budget. Can you explain that? I can. So, right now when

121you see um in a school our size because we I'm just going to talk about the manpower of administration. We don't take every single bill that we get and kind of divide it. So, I'm going to use one very specific example for you like legal fees. So, we we pay lawyers to do a lot of things for us. Unfortunately, we live in a latigious world and as a school district, we have to make sure that we're doing things the correct way. Well, when you look at our original budget, we have every single lawyer fee actually scheduled to come out of that administrative component. Mo, not most, but much of what we're actually expending in terms of legal counsel are things that started because a child was involved. We've never taken some of our bills and

122actually sliced them to say this is an administrative component, has to do with the big people, this is the student component, has to do with the little people. We've always just put it together. we go into a contingent budget, we are going to have to start parsing that out. So, we've begun to do some of that work like what did we put into the administrative component that probably lives someplace else. So, lots of conversations with um auditors around this is what we've done. This is why we put it here. It was just a it was a strategic decision to put it there, just put it in the c in the administrative component. Can we or should we move that into the instructional program and getting advice for that? So you'll see that in order to

123live in a contingent budget, we're going to have to go in and make sense of the budget itself. We'll stay at the cap of what we can spend, but we're going to have to get much more strategic about where we place things in category. It's not wrong where we put it, and it won't be wrong where we move it to. It's just we're going to have to thin slice. And we haven't had we haven't had anything like that. Great question. Uh next week we're basically deciding between two opportunities with the same price in our taxes. Um I want to understand better what if we go the contingency route and we can't do the capital project will ever be done and it's postponed in the year. What happens to it if you say no it's too

124I'm so glad you asked that because this is one of the things that I have been I actually said to both of these gentlemen today like I have to make sure that I address that. Um the the voters of Keller and Munford have already approved by vote the 2526 capital project. That capital project is happening completely outside of this budget. They're not the same. The capital project will move on until there's another a new one. Right. Yes. until there's a new one. So again, we actually have a 5-year cycle on our capital projects as well. So when our when our aid comes back to get building aid on our capital project. So as our aid comes back, you'll watch cycles for us where we go into a project and then we come off a project.

125And so we've created that cycle when they stop coming in, it's time for us to go back out for another project and regenerate the aid. It allows us to maintain our facility and to keep ourselves state-of-the-art by going and chasing after that bucket of money that the state has set aside where it's aid on capital improvements. So yes, every 5 years we are in a every 5year cycle to keep ourselves healthy. I mean, I can tell you that when we go into a capital project, there are things that this capital project is not going to address that we are going to have to take care of in 5 years to maintain our facility and keep ourselves operational. We run a building condition survey. We're constantly paying attention to the to the health and wellness of

126our facility and our infrastructure. It's your turn. Uh you cautioned or stated that there would be we would say no increase in our school uh taxes, but you should clarify that if you have been reassessed, we see Mr. Capram, did you hear that question? I did. He ran point on this. So, I'm going to have him address this one. I had he's called um a couple of assessors in the area just to make sure that we are certain of what this looks like. So, I'm going to Did you hear his question? I did. So, the question is if my assessment went up, the levy might taxes are going to go up even if the levy stays the same. And the answer should be if you had a full just put them in perspective. What happens

127when the school only collects certain amount of money in the levy and then it's divided up across all the taxpayers based on how much property they on how much property really what percentage of property they own in the entire tax base. As a result, if you're if one town increases their overall assessments, what it means is the tax rate in that town should be going down. So unless your home went up more than your neighbors because maybe you had added on a new addition or did something where you made a capital improvement but in general if assess value goes up because they do a new role the tax will proportionally go down to keep the tax bill the same answer your question. I in a way I I just don't I'm okay assessor if if

128he reassesses my housing as the assessment doesn't necessarily mean the school tax. No. And just just to be clear, the school's going to collect that levy, the $7.95 million would be all the money that it gets. Even if if we set the levy and their property value, everybody's property value went up, the school wouldn't collect any more money. So we we actually will calculate a tax rate for every individual town. And so and the idea is then if the roles go up in one town, the tax rate goes down in that town. if the uh you know if something else happens. So you'll see in the five communities in the tax base here the uh the tax rate is pretty much different in every single one of them and that's how it tries to make

129sure it's comparable so that changing the rules should not um increase the tax. I've gotten that question a lot. A lot of folks have asked that like how what happens if my property is assessed differently? What does that mean for my sales tax? So, that one I think required a couple of phone calls out to assessors just to make sure that we were there. I'm going to put you on the spot one more time when you you mentioned you a few of them that you spoke to like assessments like should folks be bracing themselves for new assessments? Um, I can't remember if that was part of the conversation. If it wasn't, tell me I'm crazy and we'll move on. No, I know at this point I don't I'm not aware most of the assessors didn't

130say they have anything in the works certainly for this year compared to what was already done. Um but what you will say if you look at your tax rules you'll see that sometimes the state actually tweaks the tax rules by saying they're not up to market value the way they should. So occasionally what'll happen is if you look at what's called the equalization rate as it gets lower and lower from one down to say 7 or 6 then the assessors are motivated to redo their rules. But all these factors go together so everybody should be paying fair tax bill. Okay. You had mentioned in the pamphlet that you sent out that if the budget didn't pass that we wouldn't be able to use the facilities. What does that actually mean? Yeah. So basically what I

131what I said is not so much that you can't use the facility, it's that we will have to charge community use for the facility. And so thinking about some of the clubs and organizations that that use our facility in the evening hours. I think a challenge for folks is going to be that maybe they don't even have a means by which to collect. they weren't thinking about. You've already signed up for maybe summer youth soccer, but now if summer youth soccer wants to use our fields, we're going to have to charge for that. So, it it's going to have a complexity in terms of what happens in a contingent budget. It's our ability to share the facility with the community at no cost. That's our current practice that we do not charge the community. So

132if you have a let's say boy scouts for example they want to come use our facility we don't charge them for using our facility they do as an organization have to be insured to make sure that the organization is taking responsibility and liability for their event. So we require that as a school but we don't add any additional costs in a contingent budget. we would actually have to build for the use of our property which is so strange right you've already paid this I'm assuming the controller did the report in good faith and what I thought I heard you say is that the results may have been somewhat sensationalized. I'm curious as to whether other districts experience that and why why dress. So, I'm going to tell you yes, that other districts have also experienced

133that. So, what I'm learning is that the controllers report, it doesn't seem to matter if the comproller is reporting out on Calonia Mumford or any of our neighbors. Doesn't matter. This these are our our reserves. Let's see. Where are we? We are the fourth one in. I don't know what's happening to my slides here, ladies and gentlemen, but we are right here. This is Kelum. mixed in this reserve table. You're going to see school districts in Livingston County, school districts in Monroe County. There's a few school districts in here that are way above us that also had controllers reports. Their controllers report read just like ours. Just like ours. So, in general, what I'm understanding is that when the controller comes in and the controller is reviewing your financials, especially reserves, the controller doesn't they

134don't love reserves. they don't love them. I mean, I don't know. I don't know how you function in a space where you have a massive responsibility of educating people's children and taking care of them without having some form of a savings account to make sure that whatever happens, you can you can respond to that. But it doesn't matter. For us, we had 20 we had about 20 saved. Our height our height was about 29% of our operating budget was in reserves spread across all of them including our capital reserve and I know nearby districts had almost 70%. And I can tell you I read their council before just like ours. So there's part of it that I think I'm trying to decide like am I desensitized to them? If I were you, if I were

135a community member and I read that about my school, I'd probably be thinking the same thing. So, it's a matter of our conversations now in very open ways. The board of education and and myself, we need to have lots of conversations in the open. We need to have some reserve workshops that you can come in and sit and listen to us talk about our reserves. We need to establish reserve targets. I'm a big fan of setting goals. I think if you're going to buy a car and you decide you want to have a certain amount of money that you're going to put down so that your monthly payment would be a certain amount, you set a goal for yourself and then you save that money for that to happen. We should be able to share

136back out with you that we have a capital reserve, which is the money that we set aside to take care of our capital project. We should be able to say to you that we have a goal. our capital reserve before we go over our next project needs to have somewhere around $3.4 million in it. We need to just be able to build a document for you that you can see and say, "Oh, they actually are chasing after a savings account that looks like that so that they can chase after a capital project." It's going to take care of all of these pieces. I think we've built I think we've built it. We've built it. We're ready to start working with the board. I am a firm believer in goal and chasing after goal. And I

137hope soon that you see our reserves as intentional, targeted, and that you say, "Yay, we hit our reserve target this year for capital project." Or, "Ooh, I watched a board meeting. We did not hit our target for the capital reserve. What does that mean for us in the next project?" Well, it means we probably aren't going to get to some things, right? I if we operate a little bit more transparently, I think you'll be proud of our reserves, proud of the way we budget, proud of the way we think about ourselves both in the short term and the long term. My goal now is to help get us there where like these guys look at the reserves. I'm I'm not a business official, okay? So, I look at the reserves like you look at the

138reserves and I just want to talk about it, not from a money standpoint. These guys are really excited about the reserves. When I say, "But the community and when we say this," they're like, "But that's not what that means." They get very excited that we have a savings account, as they should. Our accountants are super excited that we have a savings account. The controller himself is actually very excited that we have a savings account. One side he tells us, you should not have as much reserves. The other side he tells us, "Congratulations, you are not in fiscal stress. You have the ability to operate. You have liquid. You have cash flow. Good for you. And show you two separate reports. One that says one thing and one that says good for you. I will feel

139good about my pool when you guys say good for you. You have reserves. You have a target. Hit them. Congratulations. And then you know what they're for. What we're going to do with that. That's our future. I I just wanted to make a comment. Um I have I have the background financial stuff. So, a lot of what I read and see this makes sense, but for the everyday busy mom and dad, kids in the school, the current environment we're in, they don't even have time to read this, let alone understand it. And I think if there's any way you can, I like to say this, dumb it down and make it simpler to read and be consistent in how it's presented cuz I think what you sent out this weekend is slightly different layout than

140what was in the first one. I think it would go a long way for helping because I think you're on to the transparency thing but also it's very difficult for people to understand you know I was telling Brendan you know what what reserves are restricted and which ones are unrestrict you know that kind of thing and what does that mean because there's no explanation we're just kind of giving the information and you're doing it from your experience that he's doing it from what makes sense to him from his perspective, but everybody is a very diverse recipient of this stuff, right? And I don't I don't know how you do it. I struggled in my career, but I think that that attempt has to be made. And I do think the enrollment should be shared and

141I do think cost per student in a percentage level needs to be shared special need versus regular and if there's a comparison of that it needs to be the schools in Livingston County not the schools the big schools outside of here you know and then I have a thing about the bus I understand buses fly and it's good there's plans But I went to the school board years ago and what really fries me about the buses is every bus I see has eight or 10 kids. I think there ought to be a strategic plan to give kids a ride to school. Um because the bus costs the same to maintain, run, drive, whatever with eight kids versus 80 kids. And I that just really bothers me. And we went to a standardized school staff for

142both schools. I just don't understand um from a logistical standpoint and a cost standpoint why the kids in some of the older grades. I mean, think about it. We're a crossroad community, right? You can make stop in Melbourne to stop over the bridge, two stops at each place leading one at the monument, pick up everybody who's standing there. You know, I I just don't understand it, but I'm not against the bus. It's very Thank you. Thank you. Challenge accepted for trying to create the newsletter in a way that is more user friendly. It is a lot of information and we're making lots of decisions around if we go any deeper into that vendor's people in the meets there. Sorry. Yeah, Brennan and I have had a conversation. I definitely want to have a I like

143as principal I've always had a compact committee and so something that I have already decided for myself for next year that I want to have a committee of community folks to come and sit with me because I do think some of these things for people to ask their questions or say well that doesn't make sense. Can you say it like this like that? um would be helpful to us. So, challenge accepted. And I'd like to tag on to her um point because I um really appreciate the chronicle and this meeting tonight and hearing the questions that people are bringing. Um it makes me feel more motivated to um continue to ask questions to make everything work better. But I wanted to say you had a slide um tonight that was very helpful. Refinements to appropriation.

144Yes. And even though um I'm not positive, but I think if um in this handout rather than so much um hard to understand uh charts, if you had that information, it would extend an olive branch to people because they would get a handle. Even if it was controversial, it would become it it would help them. Um not just it's not dumbing it down. It's just making the point that there is um recognition that there isn't um that that you are not um with that decisions are made on almost a dayto-day basis. So I think that information being missed is going to lead to people making conclusions that it was never done or is not important enough for them to know. So, if you could um uh continue to try to give people more reason to

145be in your shoes, then we'll be able to have a better uh agreement as to what um what we we'll do going forward. [Music] I want to say thanks. I think this was great. Um, I have shied away from staying out of this stuff because I not too far out retiring kind of when I threw my hand in the ring and said I'm going to retire and I could do this anymore. But anyways, um, I do appreciate the meeting, but I also want to say this is a very difficult time. This community's been through a lot between the changes the village made, the fire department thing, you know, and all the chaos that's going around, you know, just all the cost increases and the chaos our country is in. You know, it's it's tough times.

146So it's just the school budget thing was just another thing that I think people showed some distaste towards which maybe if the environment was different it wouldn't have happened. So thanks Brian and Trey YouTube. That school bus uh situation. This has been a pet peeve of mine. I was on the school board here for 9 years back in the 80s and I was always complaining about the buses then. Why? Because I rarely see a full bus. rare. Why can't we buy smaller buses? Wouldn't they be cheap? They're not necessarily cheaper. I think the second you know, Bruce, you can weigh in on that. I feel like this is I'm not opposed to tossing it, but just in general, like the second you need a big bus. So, think about think about a day and I

147hate to say this, but like plan for the worst, hope for the best. Think about a day where we have to get all the kids out of here. We got all the buses and we have got to get out of here. If we had a fleet of all small buses, we wouldn't be able to manage our safety plans. So even even on just one day where we can say in this moment with reduced cost every day, we actually have to think about the worst case scenario. I'm getting everything. So the principle in me says I can't have a lot of small buses financially. Yeah. Building them. And financially, I guess I just remind everybody we get really strong aid both on the purchase of the bus as well as on operation. And the other part

148of it is the uh you know as um Dr. Chanel said the uh smaller buses the cost doesn't drop that much and again the other part is all your extra activities and sports and then you need to transport a sports team probably need a big bus. So, but why can't we, if we're going to use a bigger bus, why can't we reduce the number of buses, pick up more kids? I mean, you need less drivers, but you always have a problem. Yeah, I hear I hear you. So, you're asking I think you're asking the same question that was asked, which is, are we running the most efficient bus routes that we can? We believe we are. Have we asked someone on the outside to come and study our runs? We when I first got here,

149we had nine campus runs. We have eight campus runs. We actually have a bus that we have kids at the elementary school that wait for 6 minutes, 8 minutes. They wait for 8 minutes after middle high school dismissal for the bus to make its way out of here and then stop there and pick them up. So we I can tell you like from our lens of just like the daily operation of the school, I think we're running pretty efficient. Have I asked somebody though from the outside that's not us to come in and take a look and challenge our efficiencies? I haven't. But it's not a bad idea. You know, sometimes fresh eyes helps you see something different. One last thing, keep referring to state aid, but it get mixed up with that because we're

150paying for state aid. So it's not a US of Europe. The way the way I see it, they're taking it anyways, right? And we at least have to go and try to get someone back, right? So think of it as a game of chess. We're going to try to play it really well. I'm done. So for the buses though, I don't really understand it. My kids my kids never rode the bus because their daycare was out of town. But um so do elementary and high school kids mix on the bus and they're still not full because we stop letting big kids above what grade in the village? Sixth grade and up. So 12 in the village, residing in the village, don't write. So I guess if I was on the committee, that's where I would

151start to see how many, you know what I mean? Without going like really deep into the weeds on this because I there is a really deep in the weeds on this. I'm sure there is everything. There is. And that the one thing about school finance is there's nothing really simple about it. Again, it's a game of chess. So, I'm not going to go into the weeds, but please know that transportation aid on our runs is actually factored into how our runs exist. So, there are kids at the elementary school that we should not be transporting. We don't generate aid on transporting them. We got to get really creative in how we build our runs to be able to still have that whole run get aid. I could take you into the weeds on that in

152seconds, but there are reasons why some of the buses don't have a lot. And you could say that fill the buses, but then if you don't build your runs the right way, you actually won't get aid on the run. So to to our point, like the municipal law and aid and how it's generated, there are books that we read that like, oh, did we do that well? We try very hard to generate every dollar of aid. And I'm going to tell you, even though we're being thoughtful about it, we probably leave money on the table because we didn't maybe have that one go the right way or turn down the right street. But if we stop and pick up all the kids, I just want to tell you, we will I know just based on

153what I understand on transportation aid, we will not get aided on those roads. You also got kids. Yeah, that too. Kids be on bus for a long time. Yeah. What we what we sometimes think is a nicity like it just doesn't make sense. Well, sometimes the reason things don't make sense, and I I agree with you, doesn't really feel that rational, but there's a there's a law and a rule over here that we're complying with, which makes our decision-m look irrational. So, where's our lobbyists to fight the law? Are we ready for electric buses? Are we ready for electric bus? Can we not talk about electric? Can you come back on the 18th? We're in no hurry. We're in no hurry. That's That's the answer. There's a question in the back. So about the bus.

154It's not my thing. I know you sent out um the newsletter, which I haven't looked at, but um so say I hear about this newsletter. I'm a community member. I want to go and find out about this budget. Okay, let me go to the California Mford Texas School District website cuz that should be reliable. Oh, great. There's a link about the budget. There's no information about this current second budget vote. The contentious budget is there. If I click on that link that's on the homepage, it just says there's a to vote May 13th. Okay. I think if we want the community to know what date to vote, it should be very obvious. Okay. Another example. I look at this. All right. Well, maybe we didn't get it updated. I'm a millennial. Let me go to

155Instagram. Okay. Scroll down. It's like nine posts in. It's not a story. It's not at the top. Okay. Maybe I'm not as savvy on Instagram. text me. Let me go to Let me go to Facebook. It's not on the banner. Like it's I got to scroll way back. Um I think maybe we need to disseminate the information. Well, it used to be on the website obviously and then maybe more apparent on social media. Just suggestions from maybe somebody who's a little bit younger. Thank you. You'll you'll see it on social media soon. We don't want the tea but it's question but now like I want to know whe I'm a baby boomer and I live in a house with this woman over here. I couldn't find it either. Just a clarification on the what happens

156to the capital project if we end up in a continued budget. And the meeting last meeting previous to this about the budget stuff was option three. The first thing in option three was you can't do capital stuff. What does that mean? You said a different thing. There's definitely a difference between the capital project which has been voter approved and any capital improvement outside of that project that we'd want to do. So let's take the capital outlay project as an example. We want to update this building from a track unit. we would not be able to do that. That would be a capital expenditure out of this budget that we would not be allowed to make. So, anything that has to do with improving our infrastructure, our capital that we would have spent out of the

157voter approved budget, we we cannot do. The capital project itself though, the 2526 capital project, the voters have already voted and approved. That project has launched and it is moving along the way. It's actually a completely different budget running on its own that you've already approved as voters. It was approved last year, the year before. Yes. Yes. Was previously approved. Yes. A separate vote. Separate from the budget vote. Capital projects go up for their own vote and they're voted on by the community up or down. So, think about that separately. However, capital improvements to our property unless it becomes unless becomes an emergency, they would allow us to expend on an emergency, but other than that, we would see no capital improvement out of the budget. What's appropriate? Wait. I vote yes. I can't tell

158you to vote yes, but I can't tell you to vote. So, we do ask that you come out and vote. Um, your decision to vote, we understand, is a personal one and we respect it. As a school, I think I will just speak on behalf of the board and my and the administrative team right now and just tell you that we believe you built a conservative budget that meets the expectations that the community has set for the academics that kids experience here. I feel very strongly I came here in 2018. I feel very strongly that the students that graduated in 2018 had a remarkable experience. The children that are going to graduate in 2025 had a remarkable experience. I hope the children that graduate in 2035 and 2040 have a remarkable experience. We are not

159just thinking about ourselves in this budget. We are thinking about ourselves in terms of what does it mean to graduate from California Central School District and that we're maintaining that level of excellence. This budget does that and I'm proud of it. I hope the community does support the budget and the future of family schools. Thanks for coming out tonight and don't say that. Can you imagine measures on the infrastructure? Thank you so much for your feedback. Call anytime soon. Yeah. Don't ask any [Music] ranch and [Music] $12 but that's what we expect. I think that's relative to neighbors. I have seen cases in our community down by Naples where they will cycle through and like every couple of years they decide to reassess the hill and then next property house time because my neighbors with

160their colonials too. I appreciate what you're saying there, but technically I'm just saying be cautious with that tens if they just came in and said tax are going up 40%. And everybody's property went up 40%. Absolutely. There'd be no difference. probably Thank you, sir. Appreciate that, Bruce. to Sue to you. That's the chain. I just I haven't paid any attention. You're lying. Yeah. My bad. I was doing okay. So many. Mike, are you in terms of emotion? I I didn't No, no, no, no. So, my concern is not another meeting. I don't know. No, we can adjourn. We can adjourn and return. Yes. Okay. I checked that with legal counsel before our last meeting because I wanted to know how to close out and come back. You know, we start. It's the same continuation. Thank

161you so much. about talk about bosses. Just know that Ronado gets eight on every Well, what I was thinking is it'd be worth mentioning how long the runs are for some of those kids, but I appreciate what you're saying. You know, I understand what they're saying about efficiencies, but like it's it's like an hour and is it's over an hour. Wait, everybody go. I know. Nobody I don't we have our first our first run about an hour cuz the first run goes out at 6:30. probably does its first pickup by like 6:35. Back on campus by 7:20, 7:25. Oh gosh. My computer is up, but you I don't know. I'm ready. I need some dinner now. I'm starving. I was doing okay till I got just Yeah, it's just the agenda for me. Can I

162have a motion to re-enter our meeting, please? So moved. Can I have a second? Second. All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That's passed. Welcome back. We just finished our budget hearing and we're going to continue on with our regularly scheduled meeting. We are going to move on to old business number one, adoption of code of conduct. Dr. Chanel, did you want to speak to this before I read? Um we actually reviewed the code of conduct the last time that we we were together um and did a presentation on that. So it's a few minor changes to the code u just to recall what we did. I want to say it was the addition of some language around truency and then there was some language in there around students um helping others plagiarize. So

163it was just was a couple of edits in in blue for the community to examine. So, it's been up for its 30-day comment period, and today we're allowed to take action on the code. Thank you. Uh, just to well, I'll say that's discussion resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the district-wide code of conduct of the 2025 2026 school year. Can I have a motion, please? Yes, I make it. A second. Second. Discussion. Can I just add that we did not implement the cell phone ban that you're going to see next year uh in this particular code of conduct. We do need to address that through board policy. So the next time our policy committee is together. So you will see one more revision to the code before the

164close of the summer. So the code will be sitting in front of you in July with some updates around cell phone policy. Exactly what I was thinking. Thank you for mentioning. Any other discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number two, approval of revision to board policy reserved that the board of education resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the revisions to number 3311 notification to of disclosure of employee disciplinary records. Number 7670, due process complaint, selection and board appointment of impartial hearing officers. Number 1210, board members nomination and election. Number 7440, student voter registration and pre-registration. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? I have uh fielded a few questions regarding the board member nomination election

165which specifically addressed the de facto student member. Um in talking with Dr. Chanel, she will come up with guidelines for that following this meeting um with the the sentiments of the board. Is there any further discussion on that? All right. All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Moving on to new business. Number one, date of the annual organization meeting. Resolve that the board of education hold its annual organizational meeting per board policy number 1620 on Tuesday, July 8th, 2025. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. A second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Acceptance of bid number two. Resolve that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the cleaning service bid from B and T

166building services for the 2025 2026 school year. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? Quick question on this. Um, it goes along with what John asked about the capital project employees. Are these employees vetted by the district before they start or is it just are we relying on the company to do that vetting? Um, both the company does have standard of practice for vetting and so then they will submit to us their employees that will be coming here to work and we will also run them through our systems. Thank you. Any other discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number three, sale and disposal of school district property. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent awards a bid

167for miscellaneous items to the highest biders from auction auctions international website per board policy number 5250. Sale and disposal of school district property. May I have a motion, please? So moved. A second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number four, approval of new civil service position of school bus dispatcher. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the creation of a roster position for the civil service title of school bus dispatcher effective June 11th, 2025. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. A second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number five, approval of intermunicipal cooperative agreement. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approved

168the inter municipal cooperative agreement with the Leavonia Central School District regarding the placement of students in special education programs that have capacity for additional students in the 2024 2025 school year per attached resolution. May I have a motion, please? Second. Second. Thank you. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number six, approval of transportation services agreement. Resolved that the board of education approves a written agreement between C and F transportation in the Calonia Mford Central School District for student transportation needs and authorizes the superintendent of schools to execute the same. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. A second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number seven, ratification of the collective bargaining agreement with CMTA. Congratulations, Dr.

169Chanel, on this. Thank you. And the committee and everybody that works so hard to get it. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent ratify the collective bargaining agreement between the Calony Muffford Teachers Association and the Superintendent of Schools effective July 1st, 2025 through June 30th, 2028. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? I will just um let you all know that what you have in what you got in your email inbox is actually the there's no change from the conversation that we had last time we discussed this negotiated agreement. You'll notice that the agreement itself that you're looking at is not polished. It's still in its version of what we've confer what we confer as draft. Um memorandums of understanding that have taken place

170over the last couple of years still have to be pulled into this particular document. So you're still seeing a document in draft. what you're ratifying this evening is the commitments uh that we did make during our negotiation process back towards um the contract. So, thank you. Will we have to approve the final draft of this? You don't. You don't. I asked that question, too. So, what you're approving is that the content, you're not going to approve like the final clean version where there's no typos and no red lines. So what you're seeing now is the the committed language of the contract that we've agreed upon and then it will go through a series of the MOAs are already things that the board has approved. So those MOAs will actually be coming over. So the board

171has already taken action on those and then it's just going to be a lot of, you know, grammar and mechanics and getting rid of all of the red lines to come to a finished document. I'm told that could probably take us until about August before that document is nice and clean. So, the teachers union has already voted to um ratify and it's it's y'all's turn. Any other discussion, questions? I did not read a single page of that document. We got it this afternoon and I don't know whether I abstain because I'm completely uneducated on it even though I participated in the discussion uh on that committee or I I don't feel comfortable voting no because it's something that I was comfortable with when we were negotiating it. But I I'm unsettled with voting to approve

172something that I haven't seen. So, I'm I don't know. I'm I'm stuck on that one. Okay. Any any other discussion, ma'am? I'm sorry. Can I have a vote? All in favor say I. I. I. Any opposed? I guess I'm abstaining on that. Okay. Apologies. That motion is carried. Stars of Tomorrow Gala rates. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the Stars of Tomorrow gala rates for the 2024 2025 school year. Rehearsal $25 a day and performance $50 a day. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? Didn't they already do this or say is it 2425 or 2526? No, this is for this spring. This is for Okay, thank you. All right. Oh, I we're doing this after they performed or am I confused

173about the the date? So, in terms of this the this did not make its way into the reorganizational meeting in July and these rates are not contractual. So, I technically can't pay claim forms that I don't have a board resolution for. Oh, okay. So, I need to have a board resolution that allows me to pay folks. This is exactly what we paid them last year with no increases. I do think it should make its way into the reorganizational meeting. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Good questions. All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number nine, acceptance of gift to the school district. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent accept the gift of Wonder Books, a print book with readytoplay audio, a $500 donation

174from Dev Gear to the library. This is in accordance with board policy number 5230. May I have a motion, please? So moved. A second. Second. Any discussion? I would just say thank you to Courtney Monahan for working so closely to secure text. she actually did pick the books out. Um, so these have been really curated in the same ways that we curate all other texts in our library. So, thank you to Courtney. All in favor say I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Moving on to board self evaluation. We had tabled this at our last meeting because we got some information um some data from our district clerk that wasn't people were not able to review. So we are in a position of discussing our recent board self evaluation. You all have that in front

175of you. Um you know I I I'm I'm pleased with the progress we've made in the last year. I think the numbers that we see um trending upwards are good. I would say I think that there's still room for improvement and for us to grow as a group. Um but I would like to open this up for discussion for everybody, please. So, last meeting we decided to table this because we got new information at 3:00 from the district clerk. And today we got new information on the biggest contract we have with the district with the teachers union. That's our functioning like directly related to the board functioning is our ability to come and prepare to fulfill our duties. So you're saying that it seems kind of similar from one to the other. It's exactly the

176same. I would say for me that we have had conversations in executive session as we moved throughout the negotiation process. So what you're seeing collected in this reflected in this document authored by our legal counsel who served as our chair is exactly what we agreed to and you've been briefed on that in executive session. I understand your concern. I just think that I would like to point out that I think that's what makes it different. So past president, I've expressed concerns in executive session and had commitments in executive session and then the way it works out when we actually approve things, it doesn't happen the way it was agreed to in executive session. And that is not the circumstance here. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm not comfort what I'm saying is I'm

177not comfortable making decisions without having information. And I think it was prudent of Liz last time to say we haven't had this for very long. Let's pause it. Um, we have a huge responsibility in in what we do. And I think it's it's so important for us to be educated on every single thing we decide and approve. We are answerable to the community. Um, yeah. So, I thought it was a smart choice to postpone that last time and under the same standards. I mean, I guess I'm salty about it and it's probably inappropriate for me to bring this up now since it it just happened, but I mean, this is essentially a complaint about the way we function. I respectfully hear what you're saying, Mike, and I'm sorry that you were disappointed in how things

178went. Right now, I would like to lead the board in the self-evaluation discussion. Um, and maybe uh that could be a part of this, maybe it can't, but I think that we do have the self the board self avail. My intention was never to um be inconsistent. So, I apologize if you feel that way. Regarding the board self, I do think it's important that we as a board talk about that. um and the progress we've made as a board over the course of the last year and where we're headed. I did send a email late last week asking for some feedback on times to regroup this summer. I proposed the dates of August 4th and August 8th. Um I heard back from two of you. Uh, and one person is going to possibly uh No,

179I heard back from two of you that those would be good dates. So, we have to discuss that as well. Uh, for me, I'm not sure which. You can just put me down for both dates. We only need one. So, we only need one date. I just didn't know if one date was better for a majority of you or not. Sounds like either is good for you. Either is good for me. Yeah, thank you. How do I access the digital copy of it? Cuz I don't have a print out copy of Yeah, I'm looking the results and I don't know where they are. I thought it was in the back. I thought it was too, but I Where did I see that? So, I'm not Let me look. I'm sorry. No, you're fine. I wanted

180to comment on something, but I need the So, in my backup notes online, I actually am not seeing it in the last got to be way at the end. Am I missing something? Was it cuz it Mrs. Did you resend that to the board this time in backup notes on Friday fourth? Oh, I saw it on my on my on my email, but I don't see but I don't see it in this. I don't either. So that's what I I saw it in my email. Let me just get to So it was sent to us at our backup notes um on Friday. It looks like it's not in front of us in this Cammy version. So tell me how you want to proceed. Let me just We need to have a discussion somehow. It's in

181the executive. Say that again, Mrs. Boo. In the executive session. Thank you. Thank you. It is an executive session. Thank you, Miss Boo. So you all can reference it there for for now what's with what's in front of us. I had a a paper copy so I wasn't looking at that. Sorry guys. There it is. Thank you. session. So, where is that? So, executive session. Oh, up there. Okay. I can't click on you. I No, I got to click on it. Okay. Thanks. You click there. Then you can just go to the alphabet. You can click see it now. It's on page 17. Yep. All right. We're good. Thank you. I do think we as a board have made improvement. I think some of the work we did in our workshops was helpful. Um I

182have seen growth. I do think that there's some opportunity for us moving forward to make continued growth. Um, I think the fourth and the eighth will allow us the opportunity to to do that and to set our board goals. As you're aware, the board goals ex are from 20 they they end this year. So, we have to do that. Um, there's been a lot of change this year. We have a new board president, myself. We have a new superintendent that started in February. I think there is some learning curve for all of us. Um, you got a new new member. A new member. We had two new board members last year, but you know, I I can't lead this discussion by myself. Those are my thoughts. Liz, I didn't get the email. I'm sure I

183got it. I don't I'm not good with emails. The fourth is okay with me. The eighth isn't. So, okay. Thank you. And as far as the the growth that this board has made, let's say in the last 12 months, it we hit we hit a couple low spots. Then we seemed to level off and I would say in the last four to five months the the direction's outward. I'm I'm personally uh very satisfied with being under I'm very pleased I'm very pleased with the direction that I've seen in the last say five months and with the all that you just said four sentences ago moving forward I can't I can't say that the the limits are endless but we've we've got a very good group here And that pleases me because I've been on some

184boards where we there weren't very good groups. They were actually terrible. And this one is uh I'm I'm personally delighted. I'm giving get my my uh thing of approval, whatever it's called. Okay. Thank you, John. So, thank you to the other five of you. And Arie, it's not your first rodeo. So, couple thoughts I had. I think that our group work together was beneficial um doing that. I also think that our uh Becky coming on has kind of reinvigorated our engagement with the curriculum and goals of the building and joining NISBA has kind of brought an awareness that the board and administration should be collaborating together to set goals for the district. Um, we're kind of in a bubble here where as board members we might not be aware of the the needs and ambitions

185of the admin team and I feel like NISBA has kind of made that clear that like you said our summer workshops are are designed for that purpose and that's something new for us that I think we should all look forward to and hopefully it makes a more effective product for the community and students. So as I was looking through the board evaluation, one of the things that really struck out stuck out to me was that it seemed like as a board we kind of rated oursel lower with our interaction with the educational program and the instructional and as a member of the board that's one thing I have talked about with Becky a few times that and as Mike was just saying we are kind of removed from some of that stuff and that is

186something that as a board I think we see across the board us wanting wanting to be more involved in that and not involved in that without hearing from the stakeholders. We want to have the principles coming and talking to us. We want to hear what's going on in the schools, what the community wants our schools to look like and then to be able to formulate what that looks like for our schools. but to have that interaction between everyone so that we are really representing the education that our students should be having that they need and that the community feels is appropriate for them. I agree with both of you. I've had a couple conversations just to piggyback off on that before we someone else speaks. Um I have started some discussions with Dr. now and

187I shared with some of you on the board about making the administrators or having the administrators be an active more active role um with presentations and sharing of information and making sure we do that in a thoughtful and meaningful way and I think this summer our work could consist of that because I can't make those decisions in a bubble by myself. We as a board need to make them so I look forward to that. Um, one of the things that I've heard a few times is that board members are hearing information through the community, which I I've been in that um, situation where I'm out in the community and I hear something that I didn't necessarily know. Do I know everything that's going on in the school district? Absolutely not. Um, but sometimes things you

188want to know. Um, so just making sure that those uh communication streams and those avenues are open for us as board members to really know what's going on instructionally, academically is important. And I've heard that and I think Dr. Chanel is invested in making sure we we get that. I think the goal of uh working with Dr. as a new superintendent and for me as a new board member um has gone well and I think that um I've been very pleased at how well she is communicating with um us and with the community and um so as far as one of the goals that we have of of supporting the new superintendent and helping her to um get on board has certainly gone Well, she definitely had to um you know start on the first

189day and keep going paddling fast. So, I think that's that's been very good. And I I I also appreciate the um the goal of working on the literacy and um it's important and I would like to be part of that. Liz, was there anything you wanted to add? No, nothing, Dad. I think we've made the progress. There's always room for growth, and I think we're poised to latch on to that and keep going. Okay. Thank you. Any other discussion around this? I'll move forward with um sending out a date. It sounds like the fourth is going to work better for us. I'm anticipating a 4 to 5 hour block. Do people prefer morning or afternoons blocks? Well, you didn't I didn't know anything about the morning or afternoon thing. I'm sorry. What are we looking

190at again? August 4th. It's a It's a Monday, I believe. Okay. I I see it as like I want to I want to plan for five hours hoping we use four, but knowing how this board works, we do like to talk and there's not a lot of opportunities for us to um do that. So, this is a great opportunity. I would like to plan 5 hours. I'm thinking 8 to 1, 12 to 5, or 4 to 9. I'm just waiting for you guys to sort of share with me what the best time of day is for people. How about 6 to 11? Chad, you're killing me. After I wake up in the morning. And Liz, I'm going to be out of town that week, so I need to remote into it. Yes. Okay. Will that

191be? Um, we're going to add that to the P. I think that that's fine, but we do need to discuss remoting in um and add something to our policy around that, but I think that will be fine for the workshop. Thank you. I did have Sue pole policy language on that. We do have some policy language. I'll share with you all what we have. Okay. Really just align to the law. I just like to revisit it. But I'm I'm comfortable with that. Um, Liz has asked to remote in. I think that it's, you know, sometimes as board members, we can't always be here, but we want to be, and I think this might be an opportunity where we can allow someone to do that. All right. I will send out a follow-up email about times,

192but it looks like we're going to shoot for August 4th. Okay. And I look forward to that work. So, thank you very much. Um, there's no resolution needed for that. So, we'll move on. 11 in the morning. Okay. Need to make sure that I have a little bit of texture. Is that Is that Are you guys good? Yeah, we're just trying to sort. Yeah. Number 11. Correct. Yes. Thank you. Approval of health and welfare services. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the attached health and welfare contracts with Penfield School District per attached document. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 12, approval of Hunt architect and engineering contract. Resolved that the

193board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the Hunt architect and engineering contract for the 2025 2026 capital project as attached. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. We are now going to move to executive session. Resolved at the board of education adjourn to executive session at 8:50 p.m. to discuss the employment employee history of particular persons and matters leading to the appointment. May I have a motion please? I'll make it second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. We will be back after executive session. Resolve [Music] that the board of education return to regular session at 9:37 p.m. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All

194in favor say I. I. Any opposed? Motion is carried. We're going to move on to personnel. Number one, appointment of summer workers. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the following 2025 summer workers effective June 30th, 2025 through on or about August 18th, 2025 as listed. May I have a motion, please? Yep. A second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number two, resignation of bus driver for purpose of retirement. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent accept with regret and best wishes the resignation for the purpose of retirement Dan Freeman, bus driver, effective August 31st, 2025. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed?

195That motion is carried. Number three, resignation of bus driver for purpose of retirement. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent accept with regret and best wishes the resignation for the purpose of retirement. Jim McManis, bus driver, effective August 31st, 2025. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number four, resignation of bus driver. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent accept with regret and best wishes the resignation of Tim Mcquinland, bus driver effective June 27th, 2025. Motion, please. Yep. Second. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number five, resignation of elementary teacher. Resolved that the board of education upon

196the recommendation of the superintendent accept with regret and best wishes the resignation of Carly McCory, occupational therapist, effective June 30th, 2025. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? Number six, appointment of intercolastic coaches positions. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent appoint the attached list of intercolastic coaches positions for the 2025 2026 school year. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Yep. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number seven, appointment of extracurricular advisor positions. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent appoint the attached list of extracurricular advisor positions for the 2025 2026 school year. I have a motion, please. Yep. Second. Second.

197Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number eight, appointment of special education teacher. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent appoint Amanda Amanda Yanick to a probationary 1.0 FTE appointment of special education teacher tenure position effective July 1, 2024 through August 31st, 2028. The appointee holds initial certification in students with disabilities, all grades, and initial certification in Spanish 7 through 12. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number nine, approval of extra trip coordinator stipen. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the stipen for Edward Mitcho as extra trip coordinator for the 2025 2026 school year. I have a

198motion, please. I'll make it. A second. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 10 has been deleted. So, we're going to move to number 11. Appointment of special ed teacher resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent appoint Jessica Booth to the 1.0 Oft probationary tenure position of special education teacher effective August 28th, 2025 through August 27th, 2029. The appointee holds initial certifications in childhood education grades 1 through six and students with disabilities 1 through six. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it second. Yep. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 12, appointment of elementary summer reading program teachers resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent

199appoint the following teachers for the 2025 summer literacy program as listed. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. 13. Appointment of special ed teacher resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent appoint Angela Guza to the 1.0 FT probationary tenure position of special education teacher effective August 28th, 2025 through August 27th, 2029. The appointee holds permanent certification in special education. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 14 has also been deleted. So we will move to 15. Approval. Approval of mentor. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approved Trish McMullen as mentor to Emily D'vour retroactive

200from April through June of 2025. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. 16. Approval of MOA. Resolve that the board of education approves the written agreement between the superintendent of schools and the Calonia Mumford Support Staff Association executed on February 25th, 2025. May I have a motion, please? A second. Second. Thank you. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 17, permanent appointment of computer service assistance assistant. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent appoint Ian Wilson to the permanent civil service position of computer service assistant effective June 11th, 2025. I have a motion, please. I'll make it. A second. Second. Any discussion? All in

201favor say I. I. Any opposed. That motion is carried. Number 18, resignation of school bus mechanic. Resolve that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent accept with regret and best wishes the resignation of Reese Lambert, automotive mechanic, effective July 6, 2025. May have a motion, please. Yep. Second. Second. Discussion. All in favor say I. I any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 19, approval of MOA. Resolved that the board of education approves the written agreement between the superintendent of schools and Calonia Muffford Support Staff Association. Executed on June 10th, 2025. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 20, appointment of school bus dispatcher. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the

202superintendent appoint Andrea or to the 1.0 FTE civil service provisional position of school bus dispatcher effective June 11th, 2025. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 21, appointment of school bus monitor. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent appoint Sue Mills to a summer bus monitor position effective June 30th through on or about August 30th, 2025. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. 22. Resignation of school bus driver. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent accept with regret and best wishes the resignation of Richard Greer, bus driver, effective June 28th,

2032025. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. A second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Number 23, approval of compensation agreement. Resolved that the board of education upon the recommendation of the superintendent approve the compensation agreement with the secretary to the superintendent as attached. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? That motion is carried. Good. Yep. Okay. I'm going fast, so I just No. No. Number 24, approval of MOA resolved that the board of education approves a written agreement between the superintendent of schools and super supervisor of transportation executed on June 10th, 2025. May I have a motion, please? Yep. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed?

204That motion is carried. Finally. We're going to move to adjournment. Resolve that the board of education adjourn the meeting of June 10th, 2025 at 9:48 p.m. May I have a motion, please? I'll make it. Second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any opposed? Motion carried. Have a good evening. Thanks everybody. A lot of district