001It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say I. I. Post. Same. Motion carries. Call for a motion to enter into public session. >> Motion. >> Been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say I. >> I. Opposed. Abstained. Motion carries. Please rise to for the pledge to the flag. Pledge 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. >> Hey, welcome everyone. Um, tonight we'll we'll start with um our Falcons of the month recognition. Thank you. Hey, thank you everyone. If you've never been here for a Falcon of the Month um ceremony, these are our favorite meetings. Um the nights that we don't have with Falcons of the month, pretty boring, you
002know, budget presentations, all that fun stuff. This this is what we really live for. I know the board loves it. So, thank you for coming. I know we all know there's this Sabres game happening. so made this quick but at the same time respect all the kids who did the work to get here and we're really proud of them. So tonight we have the distinction of honoring our next group of falcons of the month. Each school in our district celebrates numerous students each and every month for being outstanding. We have asked our schools to select one individual from the many honored to represent the group. Therefore, the students we will be honoring tonight were selected because they personified the trait or characteristic being celebrated this month. In other words, these students, they're the best of
003the best. Each student's going to come up. They're going to when their name's called, they're going to get a certificate. They're going to shake my hand. I'm going to hand them the certificate. They're going to walk down the table and shake their hands sitting at the table. Each one of the certificates reads as follows. Whereas the philosophy of education of the Niagara Wheatfield Central School District calls for aiding all students in the development and achievement of their potential. And whereas the primary goals of the school district include encouraging each student to develop a sense of values, instill a feeling of responsibility to self and to others, as well as an appreciation of good citizenship. Be it resolved that the board of education of the Niagara Wheatfield Central School District hereby recognizes the following students. And
004our first student tonight that we're going to be calling up is Sarah Polarmo. Sarah Next up, we have Jade Winshell. Next we have Christopher Sandonado. Next we have Ryan Clark. Next we have Alexander Frisky. And next we have Abraham Montanaer. Thank you. Good. >> Hey, congratulations to all our falcons of the month. We're going to take a short intermission. There's some cookies and punch. Please feel free to help yourselves. Also, if you'd like to take a photo over by your wall, welcome to that as well. Um meeting with our annual budget hearing. >> Okay. Thank you. Um this is the official budget hearing. Uh each school district in New York City is required to have an official budget hearing. Obviously the board and those who maybe have been in the audience before or maybe even
005watch online. We've done multiple budget presentations. A lot of this information will sound familiar. What we really just focus on tonight are the numbers that we've established um going into the budget vote and board elections. So um we'll get right to it. Here are the stated numbers that we have at this time. We still don't have a state budget adopted yet. So, we don't know exactly what we're going to get, but we're going with what um the governor proposed in her proposal. Um that has a 1% increase on foundation aid. And foundation aid is the general aid that we can use for anything any of our expenses in the district. >> Um Yep. And I would just add that um the Senate and the Assembly have put out numbers of 2%. So we'll see where
006they land, but at the end of the day, we needed to put a number in here for the budget. The reality is we'll use less reserves if we get more money in foundation aid. Okay, that's the plan. >> So, we have other um buckets of aid that we can receive. Um one of those areas is expense-based aids. Those are reimbursements for expenses that we've already had in the past. Um based on a ratio that's applied to the expenses. So things for capital improvements, that's our building aid, transportation aid, um BOSI's aid on items that we buy through and services we get through Boseies, public high-cost access cost aid, and private access cost aid are associated with special education. um when students hit a certain threshold of an expenditure um we can get a percentage of
007that reimbured to us. The other area of aid that we get from New York State is instructional materials aid. Those are allocated to us based on our enrollment. A dollar amount is applied to our enrollment. So um for example, we get $25 for um technology aid. So um that hasn't changed in many years. So, we often have to make up for that with our taxes and other revenues. Here's our tax cap calculation. A lot of times you'll hear this referred to as a 2% uh tax cap. 2% is just part of the calculation. There's other factors including a tax base growth factor which takes into consideration how much the district's at best value has improved. Um it also takes into account our pilots which are payments and of taxes. Those are agreements that um our
008industrial development agency will try to encourage businesses to come into our area and improve on properties that are vacant so that we have an increased tax base in the future. But for now they get a discount on how much they pay in taxes. So that's a payment in li of taxes. Um so they they take that out of our calculation so that we don't raise those impacts as um and then you'll see the in about the middle way down allowable uh growth factor is 1.02 that's where the 2% cap comes in and um it's either CPI or 2% whichever is lower. Um other things considered in exclusions are our capital expenditures. So when we have a capital project they net how much we um receive in aid and that's allowable exclusion. So we can increase
009our tax liability based on that. And then there's also exclusions for employers retirement employees retirement system which is the retirement system for everyone except for teachers and our teachers retirement system. um if their increase is more than 2% which in this year it's not. So overall we have a 2.14% tax levy limit which is what the board approved for us to move forward with for our um levy next year. >> What you're looking at here is the 9-year average. Um, every time I show this slide, I just remind people that um, a few years before this, the district was in a pretty bad spot and we've slowly been able to build back our program and we've done that with an average levy increase of 1.8%. Okay. Um this right here is um our foundation aid
010or excuse me it shows our foundation aid at 1% but it also shows in the right hand column on both of these grids the percent of our total revenues that are each one of those categories. So as an example the real property taxes are about almost 40%. If you go over to the right hand side you can see the subtotal of state aid is is 46%. Right? So those that's where we bring where really get the bulk of our um revenues as a school district. The the the bottom corner there right hand corner you see our um some of our different reserves and we'll talk more about those in just one minute. >> So our expenditure budget we have at 96,480,000 and what we had as our projected revenues is 89 bill261,000. So that's about
011$7 million um that we have as a gap, which you might think sounds like a lot, but we have plans for utilizing our reserves and plan expenditures within our budget that are offset by reserves. So for example, we have our capital transportation reserve. Um our reserves are our savings that we can set aside for a specific purpose and ensure that we have money available if it fluctuates um from year to year. So in for the example of the capital transportation reserve, we have an expenditure of $944,000 and then this re reserve will offset that expense. >> And and what I would just say about each one of these uh restricted reserves is we the board has been very prudent about putting should say recommend the public to put these monies into these reserves. the public
012votes on those things and we're then able to utilize those reserves each year for these expenses and you know the the the transportation reserve right there of $944,000 that's to buy buses right and a few other vehicles every year we buy so many so we can keep replacing we have our whole fleet on a replacement plan we do have our own buses so that's how we do it if if when you see a proposition that has an expense from the transportation reserve that's the purpose Okay. >> The other expenditures that we have in the budget that are associated with our reserve usage specifically is our uh C capital technology reserve for technology replacement. We have a greenway bond that was a grant um for a project that we have years ago. We gradually get that
013money and then we're able to apply it to the debt service associated with it. So that's $800,000 of an inter fund transfer. And then our employee benefits and acrewed liabilities reserve is um for our teachers or staff members who retire and receive um the reimbursement of their sick leave. Then um we can set that we can set money aside for that which we have been doing knowing that we have 29 teachers retiring this year. We knew that we were going to have um many teachers and other staff retiring. So, this is helping us to offset that expense in um next year's budget, which we it's not something that's consistent from year to year. >> And and so after applying those reserves, there's still 3.5 million that you have to come up with, right? And here's
014how we're going to do that. with $500,000 um from our workers compensation reserve about $750,000 from both the employee retirement system reserve and the teacher retirement uh reserve. Those numbers together then reduce the what we have to actually appropriate from our unappropriated fund balance. Let's call that your checking account of 1.5 million. Now, never do we expect to really have to dip into that money, right? The goal is not to expend your entire budget. A school district is only allowed to keep a 4% unappropriated fund balance. So for us, it's just under $4 million, right? So we don't want to expend that 1.5 and we don't plan to. Here's that we don't expend those dollars or we don't expend all of our budget. We put those money into reserves so that we can do the
015things that you see right here. Okay. >> Maybe I just did that, didn't I? Yeah, I think I just did. >> That's okay. Okay, but this slide here because voters will ask this sometimes. There's multiple capital transportation and multiple capital improvement reserves. The reason that's important and I want to explain this is because um a district once they set an amount for let's say it's the transportation reserve and it's $6 million, you can't fill it up more than $6 million even if you're expending from it. So you got to start a new one. So when districts create these, they're creating them because the other ones, they've already filled them and they've expended them. Okay, that's really important. This right here um really important slide the the what I was talking about earlier um a little
016bit the position we were in at one time 2013 14 we were one of the most fiscally stressed districts in all of New York State. We were in that position because we didn't have reserves. We spent the at that time they spent down all the reserves. The reserves were gone. We had a really bad international inflation crisis. There was no money to draw from. The district was actually borrowing money to make payroll. We don't want to be in that situation. Again, you want to keep reserves. Um if you look down at the bottom, right, that is what you want your fiscal stress score to be. You want it to be really low or almost non-existent. When it's low, when your reserves are high, you get a low fiscal stress score, which results in better interest
017rates when dis has to do things to borrow money with bans and bonds and all that good stuff. Okay? And we would ask people to please come out and vote May 19th. Voting takes place in this very room, the high school ALC. It's from 8:00 a.m. to 900 pm. And um we hope to see you there. Any questions? Moving on res comments sign up open the floor anybody. >> Moving on then to our consensus agenda items. I'll call for a motion to accept consensus agenda items 1 through 7 as presented. So second. >> It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor please say I. I. I. Opposed. Motion carries. Moving to our personnel items. We have two to separate uh numbers four and seven. So I'll call for a motion to accept personnel items
0181 through three, five and six, and 8 through 28 as presented. >> Second. >> It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say I. >> I. Postain. Motion carries. Uh moving on to F4. Turn to Mr. Stack here. >> Good evening. This is Samantha her. Samantha her is coming to us. Uh we're asking for the board's support for her appointment tonight at the middle school as a technology teacher. Uh a little bit about Samantha, she really has established an affinity for the technology programming as well as technology education really from her upbringing at Grand Island schools. Right. And Grand Island has a very strong reputation for technology and that's where you really kind of first decided that you you thought you were very interested in technology education, right? >> Yes. >> And uh
019she's prepared obviously at one of the top programs not only in the state but really the country at Buffalo State for technology education. And a couple weeks back we got together and we met and uh Sam did a great job in the initial interview, did a great job in her demo lesson at our middle school and by the way was extremely impressed with our facilities. >> Correct. >> So she was blown away by that. Um certainly has done her student teaching and is closing up her student teaching currently at Clarence and uh prior to that was at Stark Point. So she does know uh kind of what's out there in the realm of some of the facilities and she was just really impressed with ours. So again, thank you to the board for your support
020there. We ask that you support her appointment uh as soon as she reaches her uh certification, which she's working on right now. And I think um she's keeping me up to date on those things as they as they go on for the technology position that's open at our middle school. >> You uh call for a motion to approve the appointment of Samantha her as moved and second. All those in favor, please say I. I. Carries. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. Samra and Entourage with her this evening as well. They're excited to get to the Saber team, I'm sure, as well. >> Then as far as F7 goes, thank Miss Bird come on up. Um, I asked for the board support tonight and the appointment of Renee Bird to the executive assistant to the superintendent
021position. Um, I can't say enough about Renee and uh I knew very early on when uh several years back when I first met with Renee that she brought a a special glimmer to uh the district. She is extraordinarily professional. She's helped us in a myriad now of different titles and job responsibilities here in our district. um anything from working in the business office, right, as a as a kind of a Swiss Army knife, if you will, of things to uh a Swiss Army knife of sort of working with our students, right, every single day across our district. So, um, when the opportunity came up and, um, uh, for the executive assistant, uh, it wasn't a surprise that that Renee really shined as we went through the process. And, uh, I asked for the, uh, this
022evening for the board support, the exe executive assistant to the superintendent's position for Renee Bird. >> Thank you. Call for a motion to approve the appointment of Renee Bird as second. All those in favor, please say I. >> I. motion carries >> and moving on to reports from our standing committees. Uh capital projects, Bob, there's nothing really new. >> No, the May 20th date. >> Well, so right now we're tenative. We're going to put it out to the rest of the group. >> Okay. >> Right. you want. Right. Right. May we're looking at uh possibly a ribbon cutting is uh on May 28th, but more information will come out on that. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Good. >> Good. Very good. Uh from the policy committee, >> um we met tonight and some first. >> Thank
023you. Uh there's an external written communication to the board from uh parent teachers parent I'm sorry the parent group fundraiser um exeicio is not here tonight for report. Um I don't have anything additional tonight so we'll move to the superintendent report >> just really really quick um the I just want to thank everybody who took part in the eco campus wellness walk wellness fair on April 25th. I I said it to the kids who were here in the morning for the uh eco campus project. Uh we had about between 40 and 50 people there. Uh which was incredible. It was 30 something degrees out. It was wet and rainy. I know that's a surprise this spring. Um but it it was incredible. And I said to them that morning, I don't know how many districts
024that many kids on a Saturday 8:00 would have been getting up out of bed and staff members to come help uh plant. We put in over 160 um uh small little uh tree saplings in the back along the creek. So really an awesome thing. And the there were 25 vendors here for the wellness fair. It was really an awesome day and and then a number of kids here for the walk. So some of the kids walked outside, some walked inside, but it was really an awesome awesome day. Um NISSBA conference is uh October 22nd to 24th. I'll just keep this on here to keep it on everybody's radar. We can talk about turf field stuff at the next meeting. The budget vote board election I already mentioned is May 19th from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00
025p.m. voting in this very room. And um we mentioned the the 28th if we end up doing the ribbon cutting that day. We will also uh the time capsule will be put away also. That's a part of that. That should be pretty neat. That's all I have. >> Thank you very much. Uh there are no other reports to the board. Any items for board discussion? Old business. New business. Any public comments? >> Any board member comments? >> Go Sabres. >> Go Savers. >> Two nothing Buffalo. >> It's two nothing Buffalo. >> Two nothing Buffalo. >> Nice. >> That's what I'm hearing. That's what I'm hearing. >> That's what I'm hearing. >> Most discussion we ever had. >> Yeah. >> That's awesome. Great. >> Um I call for a motion to adjurnn. >> Call for a
026motion to join. I >> moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say I. I. >> Ocean carries. We're journey. That's like that's like a good phone.