001I call the regular board meeting to order. All board members are present. Miss Buckinger, would you please lead us in the pledge of allegiance to the flag 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. [Music] Good evening and welcome to all in attendance. Please be advised that in the event of a fire and emergency and an evacuation should be necessary, an alarm will sound. Please note all marked emergency exits and evacuate well away from the building. At this time, we request that everyone turn their cell phone and other electronic devices to silent. Thank you. We are on item three, recognition. Are there any board acknowledgements this evening? Mr. Balia. Um, I just wanted to uh
002acknowledge Maple West and the uh librarian there. Um, Mr. Warington. I had the opportunity uh to visit uh on Star Wars week and he does this every year and um it was the first year I was able to visit and it's just wonderful when you can see the kids enjoying you know every little activity he had planned and he gets parents involved and he gets the community involved and the kids are just um so excited. And then on top of it all, he still is able to have the kids, you know, take turns getting books out and uh incorporate reading and obviously that's, you know, very important in education. So, it was just it was a great experience and he does such a wonderful job. I thought he deserves some recognition. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.
003Any other board acknowledgements this evening, Mr. Bulan? Uh, I just wanted to acknowledge the golf program in Williamsville. Yesterday was boy sectionals at Diamond Hawk. There was a very large contingent of Williamsville golfers there. I do not believe anyone made states, but it was a very it was nice to see so many uh boy golfers there from Williamsville. Thank you. Any other board acknowledgements? Ms. Bleinger. Last Thursday, Milles orchestra participated in their NISMA festival at Amherst Middle School and they got gold status. So awesome, Mil Middle. Thank you so much. Anything else, board members? Okay. Thank you so much for sharing those wonderful acknowledgements. Is there a motion to approve item 4 A, budget notice, 4B, minutes, and 5A, exceptional education preschool report as presented. Mr. Mana, Dr. Spicer. Any discussion? All in favor? Motion
004carries unanimously. We we will be having our board retreat on June 17th and our student board member candidates have been selected and on May 20th each high school will facilitate their election by their student body. Our remaining 202526 building visits are to Dodge Elementary School and district office on June 13th. And are there any board member comments or questions regarding these items? Dr. Singh, would the student the the winners of the student board election would they be announced at the same time as the candidates? That is a very good question. That is a good question. I believe we could potentially do that because we should know at that point uh because it's happening during the school day on May 20th. So Nick said that should be able to happen. So, we should be able to
005do that. Thanks for the suggestion. The first board meeting that they're eligible to attend is the August one. Or is it the reorganization? The reorganization. Yeah, that's what I figured. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? [Laughter] Okay. Moving on to items 6B and 6 C. There are five board candidates. Julie Emerson, Mark Mana, Phil Danielson, Stuart Bulan, and Christina Blackinger that are running for three available positions on the board of education, each with a three-year term. Additional information on the May 20th board of education election and district annual budget vote is available in board docs. Now, we're on item 7A. Dr. Brown, I turn it over to you for our budget presentation. Thank you very much, board president and board members. I want to thank you throughout this entire budget process which begins in October
006of the previous year for all of your questions, your reviewing the budget, asking about programs, making sure we're able to continue the programs that we uh love having in our district. So, thank you for all of that support and all of the work that it's taken from October until now to bring you a balanced budget. So, we will be presenting our final budget this evening for the budget hearing and I will ask our assistant superintendent of finance and management services to take it away. Thanks so much. Appreciate the opportunity to present the budget. This is going to be the proposed budget for the 2026 school year for Williamsville. Uh we'll go into our next slide. And on this next slide, I simply want to remind everyone where we started from. The current year's budget, which
007was approved last May, total 232,740,574. On the lines below, we see the budget areas where costs increase to continue to provide the same dynamic levels of services Williamsville deserves. These cost increases totaled about 9.8 million and include areas like employee salaries, health insurance, Boseie services, and transportation. On the next slide, the district presents his program enhancements for the 202526 proposed budget. The program enhancements are twofold and include adding additional special education classrooms at the high school and middle school levels. Additionally, the department is adding special education itinerant services which will be contractual services and enhance our current level of services. Altogether, the program enhancements total 524,852 for the 202526 school year. As noted on the slide and at previous meetings, $374,852 of these increases or enhancements were previously budgeted and do not add any expenses
008to the proposed budget that we're seeing tonight. The program enhancements total less than one quarter of a percent. The next slide includes our budget reductions that the district made along the way. After starting this process, the district looks for ways to reduce expenses without compromising services. In all, the district was able to reduce costs by over 2.9 million in areas like salaries, debt service payments, health insurance, and transportation. Recall that during this process, at one point in time, we had budgeted for the school year, changing its transportation structure because the school's start times were going to change. When that initiative didn't go forward, we were able to reduce some costs and you see that reflected here in this transportation line. The next slide, we look at our program enhancements. I'm sorry, I want to make
009sure I have it. It's a little harder to see today with the changes here. We're further. Oh, nope. I think I went one too far. Yeah, I think we're here. Y uh our our program enhancements uh which we just talked about. I'm sorry. Let's go to slide four, which includes our budget reductions. Okay. And we talked about our budget reduction. So, we are actually on slide five. I'm apologize for that. The next we look at our our program enhancements along with our program continuation. In all, these costs total 9.9 million in addition to the current year's budget, which brings our total proposed budget to 242,719,867. This increase represents a 4.29% increase from the current year's budget. Without the cost reductions built into the budget along the way, the district's budget would have totaled 245,671,123. By
010way of comparison, last year's budget increased 4.19%. So, we're very similar in our increase this year compared to last year. Okay. On slide six, we have the property tax calculation. This work allows the district to determine its property tax cap as well as its property tax levy. The district proposed levy increase totals 2.99% which is below the maximum allowable increase. The total property tax levy as proposed for the district is 148,413,562. I'm happy to report that the district was able to stay below its property tax levy limit by 431,651. Okay. On slide seven, we have the key highlights to the district's revenue budget. State aid totals 69,916,534, which is an increase of 6.1 million. In the proposed budget, sales tax was decreased by nearly 674,000. Interest revenue was decreased by 175,000 while the use of
011our fund balance was increased $750,000 bringing the total fund balance use to $3,750,000. Altogether revenues total $242,719,867 which is our proposed budget total. On slide eight, we have our estimated tax rate changes. And it's important to note that the equalization rates are the same from the proposed 2526 budget school year as they were during the current fiscal year or the 2425 school year. The tax rate changes are all about 3% for the 2526 school year and these include the increases for Amherst, for Chawaga and for Clarence. Okay. On slide nine, the district presents the estimated school tax bill for homeowners within the district. In Amherst, a house valued at $250,000 would have an estimated school tax bill of $3,05. And very simply, if you had a house assessed at $500,000, the estimated school tax bill
012would be approximately $6,10 in Amherst. And you can see the rates for cheating and clearance. As I mentioned a moment ago, because the uh equalization rates and the tax increases are all similar, the estimated tax bills are all similar as well. On our final slide, I want to note some of the key highlights of our budget. The proposed budget totals $242,719,867 for an increase of 4.29% comparable to last year's increase. Similar to last year, the district again stayed below the tax cap. This year, the district is below the tax cap by $431,651. The district is anticipating state aid increases of $6,143,460. The budget is balanced with revenues equaling expenses and no deficit to present to the school board in the community this evening. With that, I'll turn it back over. Thank you very much, Mr.
013Kelly. Um, are there any questions from board? Looks like Mr. Bulan might have a question. Yeah. And I don't know if this is answerable. When and if at all does not having a state budget affect us like when would it actually affect operations of Williamsville? Yeah, you know, interesting question and I'm sure the superintendent can draw upon his experience and knowledge. But what I would would have said if we still didn't have that state budget, if the if the state didn't pass it, we'd be going out with a proposed budget, not knowing what the sort of contingencies would be in the final state budget. Um, so there could be some, you know, some changes there, but we do our best. The state's pretty good about putting out information along the way to give us pretty
014good estimates. So, we would build it off of those estimates and kind of hope for the best in that situation. Agreed. Thank you. Any other board member questions? I actually have the same question Stuart had. But on the other hand, like for the interest sales tax and those revenues that we get, uh these are conservative values and we might actually get little more than that. It it certainly is possible. Uh we're in a little bit of a turbulent economic time and we wanted to be conservative with some of those numbers. So, we looked at where our sales tax were and what's going to happen over the next year and we sort of projected that out. It is certainly possible that those sales tax numbers could come in higher than what we budgeted and and the
015same is true for interest, too. There's there's been some talk recently that interest rates could be decreased. So, we wanted to potentially build that in and be conservative with those numbers in case, in fact, interest rates do decrease over the course of the next school year. Thank you. You you'll probably remember last summer uh the summer before last when we received notification from Erie County that our sex sales tax revenue will be decreasing substantially. So we share that with the board. We sent it out to the community to let everyone know. Luckily, you know, it was half of what we estimated the the decrease would be. So we were comfortable there, but we know that our sales tax revenue will be decreasing again. Was that the same year we got like a gambling tax something?
016Yeah, it was. Yep. That we weren't expecting. So yeah. Any other board member questions? Okay, then we will move on to the public hearing. If anyone in the audience would like to speak at this time regarding the budget, please step up to the podium and state your name. James Hanley at 51 Sable Run. uh just have just a few just I just want to hit some of the larger items that increased from last year. If you could just explain what was was a reason for the large increase and uh the three items are uh special items if I'm referring to this yeah pamphlet. I don't have that right in front of me. Okay, I'll let you have it in a second. But uh special items, it went up 37%. And human resources legal services that
017went up 17%. And these are big items. These are together those are 5 million bucks. So, uh if you look at those increases, they're quite significant. Um and then uh I guess it's pupil uh pupil transportation that went up 8%. So, if you could explain those three items. Yeah, a a couple I can take. You know, the easier ones. When you when you look at the HR and legal expenses, we we contract out with our legal services every year. And every year when we recontract out, our outside law firms increase their rates. And in recent years, we've been incurring additional legal expenses. So we build in those additional expenses to try to account for the increased rates as well as the increased legal services. So that's that's why you're seeing that number increase so much.
018Um in in terms of the you know transportation again we contract out with our service provider and if if you look at the contract the rates increase every year. One of the other things that we see in there uh gas costs and what the fuel costs are as well. We don't have a crystal ball and we can't really totally project out what those cost increases are. So we try to build in a little bit of room there in case we see a spike in those transportation fuel costs as well. So that's what accounts for, you know, between the contract services and the fuel costs. Those are the two biggest areas uh a transportation increases the cost increases in those areas. Um New York State retirement, that's simply a factor of how much we're paying for
019our employees. Um, so the state sets that rate for all of our employees and as our salaries increase, you may you may not know, uh, we are currently in negotiation with our teachers and typically there's always a pretty significant cost increase when that contract is settled. So as salaries increase, which they do every year, uh, our our contribution and our payment to New York State goes up along with that. And we don't really have any control over that because the state sets those rates. It's the New York State controller that sets the rates for the New York State. We have we have two retirement systems that we pay into the teachers retirement system and for our our employees like uh the folks that are in the facilities department. Uh they're in the local retirement system.
020And the state sets both of both of those rates, but it's really a factor or a percentage of the total salaries paid. And if you look at last year, you know, we we did settle uh a cost increase with a lot of our non-eing uh folks and that drove costs uh from last year to this year as well. So now you you mentioned that the the special interests that is the legal is that the largest one the special items. I I would really like to if you can call me I know we met one other time if if you will if you look at page five. So, if you go on the website and you look in the proposed budget book on page five, it has a detailed explanation of special items and I can
021read it to you. Um this category groups individual items which are not allocated elsewhere in the general support section as estimated workers compensation expenses, insurance premiums, patient protection and affordable care act fees, Bosey's administrative costs, tax assessment p payments for district buildings, and payments for successful property assessment challenges. And if you look at our past board meetings, we've had several of those where you see we've actually had to refund because of the assessment challenges. So when we look at those, especially the workers compensation expenses and the insurance premiums, those have all gone up. And so when you look at it from 2024 to 2025, the the school year budgets, it has gone up about nine $900,000. Right. Which about 37%. Right. Right. Right. Right. So those are the items. Just to give you an example,
022our property and casualty insurance that increased in the neighborhood of about 10% this year alone. And as you all know, you have to have insurance and um that's that's a big number when it comes to a district this size, too. Sure. But yeah, I guess you can understand, you know, 10% that's that's understandable for an increase. There's always reasons for those. And again, it's just why did it go up 37? That's that's the main thing. what's what was the drive one one particular driver there that did that. So I can meet I can I'm sorry to keep but keep interrupting but if you look at our uh budget development that uh uh Mr. Kelly just went through also you'll see that our Bosey's services line increased also and the Bose services line increases I believe
023it increased over a million dollars because we're using more Bose services the Bosey's administrative cost also increased and that's what's included in the special items also. Okay. So, I I wish we had a little bit more control over what some of these services are and what the districts charge for them. Unfortunately, you know, we we have very little control in in Bosei services and what those cost increases look like. Sure. As you send students, that's their whatever their charge is is is their charge. So, I understand that. And and I could I talk about the like one item, transportation, you know, bus drivers, bus transportation very expensive, getting more expensive. Every district is facing this challenge trying to find drivers. Um, you know, some districts like Amherst make their make the students walk. If you
024live, I think a mile or a mile and a half from the school, you do not get transportation. You pay for transportation in your school budget. It's part of your school taxes, but your child does not get bus transportation. In Sweet Home, I believe they're looking at a quarter of a mile or threequarter, I think a quarter of a mile uh uh radius where the students will have to walk. So districts are trying to um cut that cost because it's growing so much transportation and it's not unanticipated. Um kind of knew that the first year with our our contract with student transportation that we're going to have this this bigger bump in the in the second year. So we did not uh we knew that was coming, right? And I think next year is even
025going to be larger. I believe from what I remember the projection and if if we try to go out for bid if our if this if this transportation contract ended this year and we were going out for bid starting next year with the new provider it'd be more expensive than what we're going to pay. And as far as the legal billing, I know you mentioned that uh you know the board reviews, the legal billing at whenever every couple months they send them. Uh I know I go through them line by line and look at what we're being charged per hour. And I think we're even trying to with the with our HR staff to kind of um insource that more do more of that legal work inhouse rather than pay uh uh the attorney fees
026for doing it outside. Okay. All right. Very good. And and I think in terms of transportation, there is a survey that Dr. Brown Hall and and the communication staff developed to try to see I wouldn't say cost cutting, but to see how many students take where, you know, efficiency. Yeah, they actually called it the efficiency study. Um, so we're trying to see how many kids take buses, you know, to and from school, high school age, uh, so be more efficient and that hopefully could drive cost down. Sure. And and I believe that uh since the school didn't go to that uh change in and pickup times, the actual cost I think would dropped in the budget a little bit over the months. Y and one reflected that with that efficiency study. I I just talked
027to our transportation director today and she's looking at some of the routes where we have potentially, you know, maybe 50 or 60 stops for high school students and we're only picking up maybe 15 or 20. So, we want to look and see if we can reduce that if some of these families don't in fact need district transportation, which would potentially save us money, too. Sure. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate you question. Thank you. Always appreciate the question. There anyone else in the audience that would like to speak regarding the budget? Okay, seeing no one else, we will move on. The PTSA Council school board candidates night will follow this meeting and should begin around 7 p.m. The budget vote and school board member election is on May 20th and our next
028regular board meeting is May 27th. May I have a motion to adjourn the special board meeting? Dr. Singh, Miss Blackinger, all in favor. Motion carries unanimously. Awesome. Good night. And for those of you who are staying again, uh the school board candidates night should start around 7. Thank you.