03.24.25 LESD#25 Special Governing Board Meeting.

001States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, we'll move on to general business 2.1 presentation update on FY25 budget. Um, Ken, Mr. Ken Hicks. Thank you very much, Madame Vice President, members of the board, superintendent Dr. Monroe, colleagues, and community members. Thank you very much for allowing me to continue our conversation from our March 4th board meeting. Is that a little loud? A little bit. Sorry. I I don't like to listen to myself talk anytime, so I can't tell if it's good, bad, loud, or not. Um, so we're going to um we're going to continue the conversation um that we had last time. Probably provide a little bit more details, hopefully answer some more questions, and I know uh 2.2

002to uh on tonight's agenda is to more formalize and create an action item kind of summarizing up all the proposals tonight and hopefully moving forward in that sense. So just to rem remind us where we're at is that we have an adopted budget limit of around $36 million. We are expecting our May budget revision uh $36.5 million. Um I apologize to the board if probably when we answer questions this number keeps moving all the time because we keep having conversations about other things that are happening. For example, one thing that was happening when I was here on March 4th and we were referencing BSA 55-1 from AD's uh website and at that time it had an ADM of 4279 but as you remember from that conversation in the ADMS20 report at AD it was already

003down to 4270 and as I ran the report today it's down to 4267. So that number continues to change. So, in general, I try to use just general ballpark numbers just to cover a lot of that little flex or uh those um es and flows of a lot of the inputs and outputs going in and out. So, that is a little rough estimate. We are recommending at least a $700,000 um DA transfer, possibly more. Um we'll talk about that. Um which would put us up to around 37.2 million. So that is the um expenses we don't want to exceed by. Now I actually think we want to be under that because we want to carry forward to leave ourselves with zero would be horrible. So we really looking at moving our expenses down from that.

004But that's some of the internal goals that we are shooting for and we're talking about. So when um this not this morning this afternoon for the last um almost two hours we've been just talking about strategies and what we think um some of the numbers are going to adjust to what some of the actions we've already done how much it's uh made some impact um you probably want to use instead of shop talk you might want to say what you say da I'm sorry community would probably like to know what that is thank you very much uh next time can you speak into the microphone phone for everybody when you're asking that question. But um yes, I'm sorry uh madam vice president, members of the board and community um district additional I'm sorry I say

005I do this a lot so I apologize. Uh district additional assistance is the capital funding that's provided in the state funding formula really provided M and capital. We could do whatever we want with both of them. We could 100% transfer all of capital to M. We could transfer 100% of M to capital and then transfer capital back. it it is literally gives us the complete freedom to do however we want with it. So that sounds kind of like crazy. Why is that set up that way? It's because the systems morphed. We used to have soft capital or capital levy um that were more specific to what you could spend it on and had limits of what you could transfer and some of those other it's all changed now. So we have a complete flexibility to

006move 100% one way or 100% the other way. So, what we're talking about is um currently um we have a capital budget, a district additional assistance budget of about $3.3 million. Um it'll go down to about 2. At least 2.6, maybe even a little bit more um when we're doing our budget May budget revision. So, that is we're looking at transferring some of the funds provided for capital. We're going to move them over to our maintenance and operation budget. Thank you very much, Clive. Any questions on Okay. Um, Mr. Kenyon, no. Mishmitt, no. Mr. Cernio, no. Okay. I just want to make sure that I understand. Um, so the adopted budget that was passed um last June and then maybe like finalized in July of of 24 um is the 36 million. But that does

007that include the kind of I think it's like 1.1 carryover that you know kind of our reserve is that included in that um madame vice president members of the board are you talking in the m carry forward which was at 1.2 but is only 1 million so yes we are making some adjustments of increase in ADM and adjustments to carry forward in each respective funds before we do the transfer. Okay. So, when the adopted budget says 36 million, are we including the reserve, that 1 million? So, if we spend all of that, then we will have zero as the reserve. I just I'm just want to make sure I'm understanding. Yeah. So, so maybe the best way, madame, vice president, members of the board to think about it is we're just rebuilding a new budget,

008new looking at all the inputs. It is not 1.2 million care for as we talked at the last board meeting. it's closer to a million in that sense. So, we are going to move it down to a million. We're going to take the override. We're going to take the base support level, the revenue control limit, um, and then uh, and then we get an additional amount for the Prop 123. And so, we'll add all those together. And then we're going to do the district additional assistance transfer, our capital transfer over to get to the 30 37.2 million. With that, then the question is, do we spend all our money is an expense question, not a budget question. Do we spend up to $37.2 million which I would say no we should not because you don't

009want to end the year with zero carry forward. Okay. So even with transferring if we transferred the 700,000 and we spent all of it 37.2 then we would have zero carry forward in M. So we would have spent the million that we carried forward. That's correct. Okay. So the 36.5 um is that that we we we think we're going to spend 500,000 more than we had planned in the adopted budget. Is that what that revenue um that budget new budget limit is? U madame vice president, members of the board, two different things. Revenues uh the budget is one thing, the expenses are a different thing. So we are going to revise our budget, change our carry forward down, increase for the ADM that we didn't budget for. So remember the budget this year is built

010on 4200 basically. So it's higher than that. We're going to pick up that amount. We're going to reduce the carry forward. Then we look at it, it's now around 365. What we're saying is to make sure that we have carry forward, we want to transfer an additional from our district additional assistance over to M to make sure we have enough budget balance to cover all of our expenses and have a carry forward. Okay. But we're not sure what the carry forward is going to be at this time, even with the transfer. Um the actual carry forward, we will not know officially until the AFR is done. and all transfers and and our revenue limit will go down. Remember, we talked about the adjustments in our ADM that will happen throughout the year. I think it'll

011put us at around a $500,000 carry forward somewhere around there, but that's yet to be determined. Okay. So, so less again. Yeah. Okay. Less than the million. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Uh sorry, less than the previous year. Yeah. I should have specified um that DAA revised budget limit. Um, so that's not necessarily what's left. That's just what we were able to spend this year on using that fund, right? Because now you're transferring 700,000. You said it was 3.3 originally in the adopted budget. Okay. Um, do so, Madam Vice President, members of the board, just to be clear, if we wanted to have a $2 million carry forward, we could drain all of our cash funds and do some journal entries and move things around. I would not think that's prudent. Um, so we're we're balancing

012everything and looking at everything we have and coming up with a good strategic plan that kind of lands a soft runway on everything through this year. Also knowing that we're going to be working on cuts for next year um to bring those under control too. Okay. So just make sure so when you say budget limit that's just the most we would possibly have available to spend not what we plan on spending. U madam vice president members of the board in m correct. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Any other follow-ups? I apologize. Okay. Thank you. So, just to summarize um a little bit of what's been going on is um we continue to close purchase orders. So, I know we had spring break last week, but uh working with Miss Williams and um Miss Mosher um Moher

013Mosher Moher, sorry, I always call her Crystal. um on the last day of Thursday because I know we got a budget report on Wednesday and I think I freaked out to a lot of people saying hey are we doing any work and closing and reducing some POS um because it was going in the other direction and I appreciate the uh urgency that uh they started going through and working opening up um going through different DAXs different departments and looking at the open POS and starting to close some some of them are very simple that we talked about before um you might have a $200,000 PO and through March you have only spent 20 grand. Double check. Normally a lot of it's progress billing. You're not going to spend another $180,000 between now and the end

014of the year. So those are easy to reduce down to $40,000 or $50,000. Uh they did that. Um so I appreciate that to start closing and freeing up incumbrances and that does not mean allow budget capacity so people could enter new wrecks to respend the money we just closed in that. We also have closed the vacant positions. Um, and that although that has not as we've computed all year and done a few of our payroll uh processes a little extra to see how much that's freeing up, that did not free up any money um for full uh transparency. That's okay. Not everything may have been fully encumbered and so it fully encumbered when you compute all year. It takes every pay period and everything that's in visions and will calculate and encumber it out uh

015salaries and benefits. I don't know when the last time they did it if they've done it at all this year. So it might have reenenced things and then reduced some things. So we kind of had a net not really moving anyway. So we thought that might have freed up some money. It did not. But we know that closing the vacant positions and with a hiring freeze meaning that it has to come back through cabinet uh before anything's approved will at least not make sure that that number keeps a moving target and getting worse. And so I feel like from bad terms and I don't mean to use this like stop the bleeding uh address that first and then go after the source which is after closing the POS doing the revisions doing the journal entries

016that I'll talk about in a second um and then transferring the money this year is how we will get through. So early on, I think I led uh communicated to the board about I saw clear paths of how to do that. And that's because when I looked at five or six funds that were easy to use, you had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in each of those funds. Um I saw that you could pick up some budget capacity. I saw that capital had very little expenses against it versus budget. So you could transfer that money. So between the three or four things of doing, I saw us getting through this year very easy. And so that's part of why when I have been saying we have a there's a strategic pla path to

017get through that. It's a combination of three or four things. It's not one thing. Um and remember there's lots of things that probably got us into this situation. One overestimating growth probably given raises probably hiring people. There's a combination of multiple things of how we got where we are. Be that as it may, we got to deal with what it is and we have to identify and put in place a plan to get make sure that we end this year with carry forward. And that's what this is. questions. Mr. N y um you know a little bit of my concern you know with closing purchase orders is you know staff you know schools were like you know you can't buy supplies and you know I feel like I you know kind of surfaced this a

018little bit at the last meeting like my concern is you know are we creating a kind of a false sense security because we really can't tell our schools you know I know they you know they said well you can use different funds But, you know, as we kind of get into the discussion later on, I don't want our schools, who I don't think necessarily got us into this position to over, you know, they didn't overspend to then feel it and certainly our students with, you know, supplies and things like that. So, that's my concern with like closing all of the POS. Um, and just in general, my concern is that we're still going into the reserve. You know, we're we've and we're basically transferring money from capital to have a reserve. So, we've spent the

019million. Um, and I just, you know, I was hoping that we'd find some other ways. So, I'm curious to hear, you know, your adjustments, you know, that part to help me understand how we're going to make those adjustments. So um so madame vice president members of the board uh we really shied away from schools. I don't know how many you went into but we went to departments that is that is who has the large balance to outsource and do other things or comm to contract with them. So I'm not sure that we hit any schools a little bit. So we did hit the schools a little bit. We tried to avoid them as much as possible. Yeah. Agree. Uh I I think none of us should be doing this. I mean it I don't want

020to do it to anybody. I don't want to say no to anybody. But it also means that just because we close a PO, it is literally the click of a button to open the PO back up. It is go into divisions and you just click open from closed and it was just one button to close it. U we could do that. We could reverse that. Some of them were just reductions in PO. So if they come back and make a strong argument okay if you'd like. Yes, please. Good evening. Um what we kind of used as a basis was a lot of these POS we opened at the beginning of the year. Say some of the schools had some POS for a set amount. Um they thought they might spend $5,000 on basic office supplies

021or classroom supplies, but we're very far in the year now and they've only spent $1,000. So we did look at that. We didn't necessarily close them and say you can't have any more at all. It was let's reduce it down so you can get a little bit more for the rest of the year. Um the other thing we did is um we let them know that we're going to work with them for alternative funding like you said. Um and also we're not just saying you can't order anything. It's let's review the orders as they come in. So if you're a PO you were intending to use has been closed. Let's just do a one-time PO now so we can evaluate one purchase at a time instead of just having an open PO where they can

022spend and order things. So if that helps. Thank you. And madame vice president, members of the board, I actually appreciate their efforts in this because it's not we understand everybody is in difficult positions, but we also want some urgency so people to feel it um and understand it so we're all living in it. Um because we're all part of the solution. It's um if we just uh make lots of choices without including our um stakeholders, mainly the staff and employees, they're all going to leave. We don't want anybody to leave. we're creating stress in their lives right now, some uncertainty. We want to create as much certainty. And I know that I probably don't add to it because I talk really blatantly or very cavalier about some of it. Does that mean that we don't

023have amazing people doing amazing things? We do have amazing people doing it and anything and everything we're doing, we're trying not to create a lot of stress. Uh because there's a reality out there and there's morale and there's are people signing contracts to come back and we're trying to decide if we want to offer them a contract. they don't might not want to come back. We're balancing everything. It's it's the reality of what we're doing and we're trying to do the best job possible. Okay. Thank you. So, I did just want to highlight um this was the projected M expenses. So, pretty much every time I show up um I ask them to run me a B&E just by total. Um I'm not looking at details of anything. I just want to know what it

024is, where we're at. So, when we say that we're looking to um get our expenses down to um maybe a budget a revised budget limit of 37.2 and our current expenses are 37.7. Um yes, we have to do some journal entries. We have to do some more work. I think we might have freed up about 2 or 300,000 from this. So, this will go down a little bit, but as you can see, the capital is at right now uh incumbrances expenses incumbrance 1.4 million. So, with a $3.3 million uh budget, even if we overestimated the carry forward, which we did, so maybe the budget's down, um even at 2.6, we could transfer 700,000 and there'll still be a half million to carry forward in capital in our DA. So, we're looking at all the balances.

025We're looking at what it does. Does it make next year harder or worse? And so, we're trying to balance all that. So, this is just really a quick little uh check to see prior to any adjustments, here's where we're at. Any questions? Okay. And so just you know for clarity purposes. So right now our expenses and incumbrances are 37.7 and the goal is to get it 36.5 roughly. Um I'd like it as low as possible uh to give us as much carry forwards as possible. But yeah, we're and and so yes, I use round numbers. I round things up and down to just try to get it because the actual details will flush out will be a little different. But yes, we're trying to get in that 365. So it's about 1.2. Yeah, a little

026bit. Yes. Sorry. Instead of the 372. Thank you for clarifying. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Here's um here's where we started going through a lot of the funds, a lot of the fund balances and seeing where we had flexibility. Um, and so I know one of the questions um, the board had I think was give us the details of exactly how much in each fund. I don't want to do that because I want flexibility between funds and if the um, if we say, "Hey, we're going to do 100,000 of classroom site fund and maybe we could do 200,000." We do have to investigate because there's supplanting rules. And so some of these are not very quickly of just do a quick journal entry and move A into B and get it out of ML. Some of it

027we have to do research and investigation. We've started doing some of it but we still got lot more lots more to do. So do I know that there's a couple hundred thousand or in classroom site fund 100,000 in instructional improvement civic center that is our facility rental. U we actually when we looked at the expenses there was no expenses but there were revenues and so we said are you renting your facilities? They said yes, but the people that are making sure they're open and using are having expenses that are coming out of M and they should be coming out of civic center. So some of these are just logical things where the fund where the the activity is happening should be bearing the cost of the activity. And so this would be moving those uh

028direct expenses out of M and into Civic Center. The home development is our donations developer home developer donations that we receive and um I believe we're somewhere around $600,000 in that fund. Um that is for just growth in general. And so it really it's our own internal rules of what we have and that and how to use those funds and being um good stewards of it that it is one-time money but a lot of times when you have development agreements that produce some revenue from the developers it is used to satisfy growth that is why you're asking for the money that's why you should be using the money so anything growth related indirect cost that's our indirect cost fund that we could be charging off and I think we charge off some uh we identified

029we think we could charge off a little bit and What that essentially is is that um maybe uh we'll just use some federal funds, some title funds. Their budget might be X. And to process that, you have some HR people, you have some purchasing people, you have payroll people. Everybody's doing a little bit of work for this fund, but they're not getting build directly. We're not journal entrying 1/8 of their position or anything into it. And so what you do is you charge an indirect cost rate for overhead. It has to be approved by AD. You take that indirect cost rate and you take it off the top of those funds and then you move it into the indirect cost fund and then you could pay it for a lot of times very traditional to

030spend it on district office expenses. And so we're looking to maximize that and then move some of those costs uh couple hundred,000 into indirect. And then MIP is the conversation we had last year which is the last um last meeting the March 4th meeting not even your last meeting sorry um the March 4th meeting um and that's our Medicaid and public schools and that is a reimburseable fund so that is we provide certain services that are AC that eligible students get the eligible services provided once we provide those services we get reimbursement from the feds through the state which is access and we could use that on any M life expense um cannot use it for capital so it's not uh used it on anything indirect cost we could also use it for capital home

031development uh the developer donations we could use it for M capital uh civic center can be M capital so we have fluctuation with a lot of these funds and really what we're looking at is around 940 but it might be up to a million we were looking in talking through some of the journal entries is really we just like to say we're going to move between 940 and a million dollars of expenses out of M& into these other funds that are the most eligible um and most appropriate possible. And so that is what this is really just given a good general outline so that you can see here's our plan for our journal entries. Uh questions. So, I'm just, you know, processing along with everybody else and I process out loud. Um, so if you

032have, we'll we'll round up to make the numbers easier. And if we have a million in adjustments, then that brings kind of our expenses and incumbrances to 36.6. And if we made the transfer, then that leaves us, I'm just, you know, crossing out around 500,000 for carry forward. Okay, Madam Vice President, members of the board, that's about the math I was doing in my head, too. So, yes, where that's and it could be a little different. Um, it could I'm not holding you. It could turn out to be six or seven. It could be 450 or something that plan. Um, I will say it's a it's an interesting conversation because if you look at your fund balance report and a lot of those funds and some of the balances and I think I threw out

033we'll still have about 2 million in instru uh classroom site fund. You still have half a million in instruction. Civic Center, you have half a million. Home developer, 400. 400 indirect, 750, 800. You still have a few million left in other funds. Literally, if the board told me, here's what I want our carry forward to be, I could do the journal entries to get that carry forward to almost any number you say right now. So sometimes as we're talking the exercise if I want this carry forward X Y or Z without looking the whole picture I could move I could move expenses all around. So really uh so I do like the exercise of this meeting and getting through and getting the board's blessing of here's our strategic plan of what we're looking to do.

034We are going to journal entry a million. I could move two million. Do we want that kind of car for what would that do? That would deplete a lot of those funds. Is that very prudent in that sense? I don't think it is. And so this is us coming together with what we think is the best possible solution, the best we could do with everything paying a little bit uh paying into it a little bit and then doing what's best uh what we think is for the district this year to set us up for next year. So, I know um so I know we've already kind of talked uh over and over closing the purchase orders, but I do think your little summary there kind of hit it on the head, which is the milling

035and journal entries, the transfer DA around $700,000 over is the two biggest crucial things along with closing the POS, freezing the positions, making anything can be undone, can be appealed to cabinet and or superintendent to say we really need this and then make the case for that. But between those four things that we're doing, that is our path to landing this year with a carry forward. Questions or kind of comments I guess about um FY25? Mr. Kenyon? Um not so much questions. Uh Mora, thank you for diving into this because obviously this is something that's important. We need to get this figured out and for this we're just basically getting a handle on the rest of this year, get some stability um finish out the year and then obviously we'll be talking about the next

036fiscal year here uh shortly. But thank you for the work you your team has done on this. Thank you. Because it there's a lot going into it, you know, behind the scenes. We know We don't see it. We We don't. Thank you, madame vice president, members of the board. Uh I would like to thank Crystal and Becky because they actually do all the work. They're feeding. I come in and just say a few things, look for two, three hours and then move on. So I do appreciate the people that are actually doing the work and the superintendent is going to have to hold a hard line on some of this and uh so I appreciate everybody's efforts involved. Even Clyde has jumped in on a few things. Thank you. Mishment. Um, I'd like to also

037thank you for the work that you've done. Um, a question about the carryover number. I know that you said you could have it be whatever we wanted it to be and what is the benefit of keeping it at 500,000 versus 750 versus 250. Like if we can kind of move that goalpost anywhere we want it, what is the benefit of having that as sort of our goal? Um, madame vice president, members of the vote, that is an excellent question. Uh, why should we have care for it? Why shouldn't we spend every dollar that we get on the students that are here today? Um, and really um the law the world changed about eight years ago when the legislature switched from prior year funding to current year funding and created instability within all school districts. And

038what that meant was at that time they also said you could not carry forward more than 4%. So you had a a maximum you could carry forward. They changed that and said there's no limit now. And so most schools at that time, most districts had to pivot and start increasing their carry forward to cover the instability of anything that could happen. And you had to because before there was a floor that your budget would never go below X when the law changed and said your budget's rebuilt every single year. Maybe every budget revision. As we do a budget revision, we're rebuilding the budget. That's happening every time. So, so everybody moved to at least 4% and maybe moving towards 10%. I think I mentioned out there 10% is kind of like a standard out there

039that a lot of people are trying to get to and that is just for the instability of maybe we were budgeting to hire everybody in at step three and everybody came in at step seven and so the cost came way up. Maybe um we thought we'd have 4300 kids and only 4,200 kids show up. So, and covering for anytime all of those happen at once. And so, I do think we need to be as conservative as possible. I think that part of what makes this a good plan going into this into next year, it's because we're making cuts for next year. If we were doing this and not doing subsequent cuts for next year, we'd be burning one-time funds to get through and setting us up in a position that we're going to overspend again.

040What are we going to do on that? So, we're going into next year with the next uh I think 2.4 going into um the agenda item 2.4 of looking at our plan to how can we reduce those expenses and that puts us on better firm footing to get us through this year and set us up for next year. Thank you. You're welcome, Mr. Serenion. Oh, yes. Also, thank you for all the hard work you guys are doing. Uh, I don't want to like ease up on this, but there was some good news I feel like brought into this, but we can't just take it for granted, right? And like let up what we're doing. One thing that's important on here, I think you mentioned it too, was like with the reopen stuff, the superintendent in

041your cabinet, like keeping that hard line. I know it's going to be tough and everybody that brings something up is going to be an emergency to them, but we got to make sure that, you know, we really weigh it out and decide what's important to open back up at this time and what's not. Um, you know, I have to say I I guess I'm surprised that we aren't going to be able to move forward with the million carryover. I didn't realize that we um had really kind of already dipped into that. Um, and I know that you're saying we can move it around. I I I know. Um, but the fact is is that we we over spent on an M again, you know, and and that is my big concern is where, you know,

042and why I appreciate Becky gave me um the comparison because I think it's so important that we look at where did we overspend because I think, you know, right now we're just trying to kind of survive this year and make the adjustments and and um and I think it's important to like look at the root pause because I don't know how we're not going to get in this position again if we don't look at where we budgeted and we overspent in in categories or where they've jumped significantly. And you know, I'm just going to use plant operations as an example that in in two years it's 1.6 million more than we spent in FY23. So, I think those are the things that we really need to look at because the as you as you said

043the instability I think the instability in education funding is at an all-time high um with the current climate and the you know possible closure of the department of education and you know I read you know an update that said hopefully title one funds won't be affected next year but you know for fiscal year 27 we don't know. So, you know, for me as a board member, it feels super scary to go in with 500,000. When I looked at the other districts around us, you know, most of them are between like five and 10 million in their reserve. I mean, that's a very different position than us. So, um I don't know that it's a benefit to kind of just move the funds just to say we have Terry Ford. I I'm not sure that I

044think that that's beneficial because, you know, as other board members have pointed out, we could do that at any moment, right? We don't, you know, it's just a number at this point. Um, but you know, if there is any other I, you know, I appreciate all the work that you're doing and Crystal's having to pinch it again for a second year during the budget season. um you know if there's any other things that we could cut this year to allow us you know any other positions or things um you know we didn't end up with a like a savings from um Natasha Camp leaving you know in the middle of the year that didn't you know her salary that isn't being replaced we didn't end up with um um Madame Vice President members of the

045board when we compute all year. It calculates all of that and we've closed the position. It our numbers are what that numbers are. So it may have but something else might have replaced it. Every time we do a payroll and there's overtime, it's going to add to this number because that was not budgeted in the vision's payroll system. So we're trying to keep a lid on everything. So I appreciate the urgency. Um I would also just uh so I gave you all a sheet. It is completely incomplete and it and I apologize. It should be in color. My bad. Um, but one thing I wanted to do is I think one of the things that I heard was how can we get some better regular updates and just talking with Dr. Monroe about what he's

046done in previous districts, what I've done in uh my previous districts. This is a little sample of it and it is in the top portion you have budget controlled funds in the bottom you have cash controlled funds. And so I have not filled it out completely. Um, I only had about 45 minutes to work on it. We were working on board questions and so we did not have time to fully work on this report because we were working on questions and preparing for this meeting. But this will be something we'll get completed and filled out um uh for for that month through that year through that month. So it's year to date and then you can see there's encumbrances on it. So you'll be able to see whether it's salaries, benefits, purchase, service, supplies, property,

047debt, service, other where the expense, where the incumbrances are, and then how that relates to what that is against our budget on budget control funds and how that impacts what our cash controlled funds are. And you see our cash controlled funds, those are all the cash carry forwards. So all the numbers that are on this are accurate except for it's just not very complete at all because I was just in the middle of it and did not get it completely finished. This is something I think talking with Dr. we'd like to put out in board meetings. We'd like to come up with a form that the board's really comfortable with and we can all educate each other on and then bring this to the board every month at a board meeting. So, it's constantly we're

048constantly looking at it vigilant. The board can say, "Hey, in 570, why is 570 look like that? Why why did the amount go up?" And just bring that every month as kind of a standing agenda item. So, we're trying to come up with a form that's real comfortable, not too busy on one page as a good summary to put in front of the board and present publicly. I'm really happy to hear that because I had been thinking about when I look at the vouchers and it kind of tells me how much, you know, we're spending on each fund, but I don't have the comparison to the overall budget and so I was thinking of something very similar. So, I think that would be excellent and we'll we'll come up with a format and you guys

049can kind of pick it apart, but we don't want to give a 10-page booklet every time. We want to have something at a glance that just makes sense and then the board can say, "Hey, Crystal," or "Can you tell me about this or why is this, why, why is that?" So, so we're working on that form and hopefully that'll just be one of the standing board agenda items for the board to review at every board meeting. Okay. If there are no other questions, we'll go ahead and move on to um item 2.2, two, which is discussion consideration of the administration's proposed strategy to complete the 2425 fiscal year budget. Um, Dr. Monroe. Yeah, Vice President Zimmerman, members of the board. So, I'm going to kind of do my best. You guys can elbow me or

050uh to summarize kind of the four points that we would ask for the board to kind of have an a vote moving forward as far as what our strategy is that Mr. Hicks just went over. So, I like to make things real simple. So, it's four things. Number one is are we are closing and reducing our purchase orders for the rest of this year as you've seen. Those can be undone. We're trying to communicate with uh school offices and departments. They can always call Crystal on things. But that's the first one that we're doing. We're to eight or nine weeks of uh school left and then you know the fiscal year is coming to an end in in June. The second thing is the hiring freeze for the rest of this year. It's not to

051say we're not hiring for the next year, okay? positions and such, but for this current year, any exceptions are brought to the board and we'll bring those to the cabinet. Um, you know, I don't even want to come up with something uh as an example. I'm just thinking if there's something safety related or what have you. Um, but to your guys's point, we need to hold a have a very hard line on that uh on those uh hires. The third thing um is uh utilizing some of those journal entries, basically accounting into another account. Um, I think you said nine, I think we talked about 900,000 to a million dollars, the classroom site fund, the instructional improvement fund, uh, civic center, home development, um, indirect cost, and then MEIPS, MIPS or Medicaid, you know, you

052use those interchangeably. And then the fourth fourth one would be uh the transfer of around 700,000 of district additional assistance um, uh, into the M, which is some of our capital funding. So those are the four you have uh closing and reducing purchase orders, a hiring freeze, some journal entries into those other five or six accounts, and then the transfer of DAA into M anywhere between yeah 700,000 or maybe it's a little more depending on what the board thinks. But that would be the strategy moving forward. So if there's a motion made, I don't know if someone wants to just say as presented as presented instead of all those four things, but um but that's why the purpose of 2.2 two is here for the the the board to kind of bless that strategy so

053uh so we can kind of hold the line and continue forward for this year. Okay. Questions or comments? Mr. Kenyon? Again, thank you for this. Um I I think especially looking at those journal entries, making sure that the appropriate funds are being used for these payouts instead of just everything come from M um is is good housekeeping. you know, it gets things right where they should be as much as we can. I'm okay with the 700,000 uh being used, that number being used to help get us to the where we need to be and have just that little buffer room of if unexpected things like you said, Mr. Hicks, this is budgeting. It's not spending, right? It's not expenditures. So, those could fluctuate. So, we always give yourself a little buffer room whenever you're making

054a budget. So, I'm okay with that. Thank you, M. Um, I would agree with Mr. Kenyon. Uh, I would say, you know, and I think we've already discussed this and everybody knows it, but just to continue looking for places to save money. So, the least that we, you know, if we have more left over at the end of the year, that'd be better, right? So, while these are great strategies and it's good we're moving in the right direction, like we should not stop at this. We should continue to find places to save Mr. Sheni. Oh yeah. So transferring the 700K out of the is it DAA? So DA and M those are whatever you can spend in one you could spend in the other right so like if we move the 700K we don't have

055anything earmarked in the DAA that we could possibly end up encumbered more than we expected. Is that correct, Madame President or Madam Vice President, members of the board of ish? Yeah, there's a little statement at the beginning. You made it a little incorrectly. Um, but yes, but we can move the money back and forth. There'll be no expenses that are tied to any budget transfer. We can just transfer the expenses are where they are and they need to be spent in the appropriate fund, two separate funds for two different reasons. And we'll leave enough in the each fund to make sure they cover all the expenses. So, there is expenses that can only come out of DAA. Um, madame vice president, members of the board, absolutely. So, DA is a different way of saying capital.

056We used to call it capital. It's just changed. So, brick and mortar things that last more than a year. So, a supply, you can spend some on supplies in in capital, but unless it's a capital supply, you can't. It's going to be consumed that year. And so, a supply is m daily things. Capital more fixed long-term things. Okay. And then the other question was I don't know if it's just a match I'm not understand but it says utilize uh journal entries is so is transferring the 70k is that the same is utilizing the journal entry. Um madam vice president members of the board great question. Uh so no when we utilize journal entries we're going to take the expense that happened in m and we're going to do a reverse journal entry. So say we

057spent 60 grand in in that fund. We're going to reverse it and put it down to zero and then move that equal expense into another fund. So it looks like it never happened in M. Okay? And that's different than transferring the budget limit. So one we're talking about expenses, one we're talking about the budget limit. And so one we're going to transfer the limit from capital over to M and then we're going to transfer expenses out of M to a different fund. Thank you. You're welcome. Good question. Um, do you happen to know or be able to look up quickly what our DAA carry forward was from fiscal year 24? So, we um budgeted um Madame Vice President, members of the board, um on the adopted budget, we put in $1.9 million, but the actual

058was closer to $900,000. So, we're only going to carry forward 900,000 instead of 2 million. Um, another good reason why we have December budget revisions because you got to refine that. And then it generates um around 2.4 million. So the 2.4 million plus the 900,000 is the $3.3 million that was presented up there. Okay. So, we also spent around a million dollars in carry forward in addition to the revenue for DAA that we got this year. Is that an accurate statement? Um, madam vice president, members of the board last year. So, this is carry forward coming into this year. So, if we were budgeting to have 1.9 million come into this year means that we were underspending it in the previous year and that did not happen. And remember, you're making estimates based back in

059end of May to understand what your actual expenses are. They were obviously higher or the budget could have been reduced. Either one of the two. This was the official amount coming from AD after they evaluate our budget and expenses from the AFR. Okay. So at in the AFR for at the AFR, so not the adopted fiscal year 24, but the AFR, you know, the final budget, we had 1.9 carry forward in DAA. Um, Madame Vice President, members of the board, we budgeted in this year's budget to have 1.9 million added to the amount we generate this year. Okay. The actual expenses from the 24 AFR showed that we spent more than what we're planning from the estimate we put in the proposed budget. And so the actual gets replaced with estimates and that came down.

060So yes, it came down from 1.9 down to 1 million or 900,000. Okay. And and then the the what we think we will kind of carry forward in DA DA is 500,000. Uh, madam vice president, members of the board, as you saw, our actual expenditures put in the conferences as $1.4 million. We generate about 2.32.4 and then with the 900 carry forward, we have 3.3 million. So that is us transferring that out, getting that over and we'll still have a carry forward, a goodizable carry forward in capital. Okay. Um, you know, you know, I agree with Mishmid that, you know, although, you know, we've kind of figured it out, I think, you know, as much as we can, you know, if there's things that we can do because, um, you know, I am certainly concerned

061going forward um, with very little uh, carry forward and, you know, I think it's just going to put more pressure on us in the next agenda item to make bigger cuts to protect protect ourselves essentially. So, um if there are no other questions or comments, um I'll go ahead and take a motion. I make a motion to approve the proposed strategy to complete the 2425 fiscal year budget as proposed. Second. I have a motion and a second. I'll call for the vote. Mr. Kenyon, I miss I. Mr. Cernion. Hi. I'm also an I. We show that I approve 40. Um we'll go ahead and go on to 2.3 presentation update on fiscal year uh 26 budget. Mr. Ken Hicks. Madame Vice President, members of the board, Superintendent Dr. Monroe, colleagues and community members, thank you

062very much for all the work we've done so far, but that is just getting us through this year. And so here's just and I'm really uh I'll go through it all, but I know there was some work done with uh the community input and some board uh doing some input. And so we have more activities, but I just wanted to kind of summarize kind of some of where we are. Um obviously would like to thank everybody for help, their help. um Crystal and Becky on the front end and not waiting until somebody else thanks them before me. So, thank you guys for all your work and effort. Um so one thing um I think there was a comment made right at the end there like how do we make sure we don't get into where

063we are and some of that is just eyes wide open u where the board is right now very cognizant of carry forward and very cognizant of ADM so a budget because there is no previous year funding and it's now built and standalone every single year really the foundation of uh uh of any school district budget limit is the ADM. And so I am a big believer that anytime the board is approving a budget, revising a budget, really needs to know what the average daily membership is that's supporting this budget. And so part of that is why why would I say that is because sometimes especially growing district, you could throw in there we're going to grow by 4 500 students. Maybe a board member who's been on for a couple years or maybe somebody that

064hasn't wants to ask that question about well well how much did we grow last year? Oh, we grew by 100. So why do we think we're going to grow 500 or 600? So those are good questions and really the foundation if you think of all the different funds and all the different areas we get funding roughly around 85% of all of our funding is derived by the number of students we have. So it is paramount to every budget. So I do like to always throw in uh what is the average daily membership we're uh budgeting on. And so our estimates everything is built on having 4370. And so right off the bat, you probably did quick math saying, "Didn't he say last me or last year for this current year, we're looking at 4267 now?"

065Yes. So that means that we're adding 100 ADM. So there is a little bit of growth in here. So part of what why we're in the situation we're in is because overestimating growth. We do think opening the new school, some of the other trends that have happening, we think the advertising where we're at, new schools attract kids. We do think um 100's prudent right now, but there's a little risk in it. And just being an honest um I am throwing out the BSL. Our base support level is based on right now it's 5,3. So it's going up a 100red. So this budget is generating just from a hundred more per weighted student count times by our student count is probably good six to $640,000 more just because of that uh base support level being what

066it is. Also has an increase because of the number of students. So you multiply it by the students also generating another 520500 plus thousand dollar. So almost $1.2 2 million increase just from those two um uh factors involved right there. Uh we are putting and it does you could see I think I just told you uh we have estimated carry forwards. I always estimate a little low. So they're not actually balancing if you're doing the math from 25 to 26. I assume that all the efforts we do do not come in as high and rosy as we think. And so I start planning for a little bit less carry forward in both of those. And so both funds probably have closer to $400,000 carry forward in them uh from that standpoint. So, um but we

067also have in our M budget limit um our override is based on the previous year's ADM and so we know this year it went up by 70ome ADM it's going to go that means it's going to generate additional funding. So, our override will also kick in a little bit more money too. So that's a long way winded of saying although I'm saying 38 million1 is uh what we're looking at right here as we've been going through exercise and you've hear I'm talking it's just budgeting uh until we get into the year and know for sure um nothing's for sure but that is our projections and that is what you should be benchmarking off going forward for a proposed budget adopted budget budget revision how and everything are we making uh as soon as we know

068that number is or isn't or is maybe under when are we making adjustments to capture that and start spending more money or making adjustments to um reduce budget as we just learn the sooner that we find out and the sooner we make adjustments the lesser impact it has. So um as soon as possible we know whether 4370 is or isn't the right number and make adjust adjustments up or down from that is the best thing possible. Okay, Mr. Kenyon question. Um, my main question is right now is just the the presentation that's actually online has a different number there. Now, I don't know if it's just the old one. Um, Madame Vice President, members of the board, I am sorry. I know I made a change to that this morning. Um, I did not know

069it was published online or anything. I thought I can make still little changes prior to today. So if this was published prior to this morning, but this is the updated correct amount. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Yep. It was it's going up. If we want to spend I mean remember this is a budget limit. We do not want to spend to the budget limit. We want carry forward. We want to So that is not saying, oh my gosh, we get to spend so much more money next year. We're going to pick up a little bit because of inflation and some other things and those factors I mentioned. that is expected at this time which is four, five months, a year, 14 months before it actually happens. Thank you very much for calling attention to that.

070Um, sorry, just to clarify the additional 100 ADM we're talking that's being projected based on the new school mostly or is that growth and the new school? Um, because where are we getting that 100? I just, you know, after sitting through the last ones and seeing that there was this we thought we were going to get all these students and really we didn't get anybody And that is putting us in a tough situation right now. Just making sure we're not overestimating growth again. Like I would always venture to, you know, we think it's going to be 100, let's project 50 so that we're not over projecting and we have more money and then that's great. We can figure out what to do with that. So Madame Vice President, members of the board, this is where

071you feel comfortable. This is your budget. You guys approve this. So if we think that's too much of a stretch, then I would say let's pull it back. If after the 10th day you see a greater amount, then we can make adjustments at that time. I just I just really want to know like where we're coming up with that number from. What are all the things that we looked at to decide that a hundred was the number? Um because what we used last year wasn't correct. So I just want to make sure we're not doing the same thing over again. And it's always better to underestimate than to overestimate in these things. So, Madame Vice President, members of the board, absolutely. This was actually uh me and Dne when Dne was still here talking. So,

072I don't know exactly the source of it, and that's okay. Um if we don't feel comfortable, then we should move it down. Thank you, Mr. Sernion. All right. Okay. Um, yeah, that was kind of my question is can the board decide to not use that hundred number because I also am concerned we haven't grown by that much in at least two years because in fiscal year 24 we gained three students and then this year 70 and you know Dr. Monroe had told the board that um the eighth grade class is bigger than the projected kindergarten. So I think you said even as much as a hundred kids. So we're projecting that basically we're going to have 200 kids in growth. And I think that you know I think it's a high estimate based on um

073I mean I I'm not applied economics. So, you know, I'm just I'm just basing it off of my knowledge of what our previous ADMs for the last two years have been and the knowledge that the kindergarten class is projected to be smaller. And so, um similarly, I don't want to be in this position again. I'd rather have extra money um than not enough. And so, um I don't know if that's something um you're already doing the calculation to tell us what 50 would be. Love it. Um sauce, madame vice president, members of board, all just a ballpark number, but really um you get the 5,000 um uh $5,000 per uh student. So, if we're going to reduce it down 250 instead of $500,000, uh with the weighted student count, because it does get weighted, I

074would cut $325,000 more to cut this in half. And we can cut it even it's where the board feels comfortable on this. And this is if if and we need to really budget under this as well because this leaves if we were to spend this it would leave us with zero carry forward. Correct? Because this is our budget limit. Yes. Okay. Okay. So, Madame Vice President, members of the board, just so we can change that really quickly and easy, but that means that additional cuts going forward. So, we're not coming back and doing journal adjustments and moving money all over. Means that further in the board meeting when you're talking more specific about those cuts means we have to go probably a little further. Got it. Okay. We we'll discuss, you know, we'll have everybody

075give their opinion as we get to that point. Not that I'm not going to, you know. Perfect. Um, now this is I just wanted to bring back kind of um and I sorry I put this uh in before I saw the um uh spreadsheet that we're going to kind of actively live go through. So this kind of just summarizes a lot of that. So I don't know that we need to spend a ton of time on that. It's really just resummarizing in different ways that I think you're more detail on the spreadsheet. I did see a summary of um the public input summary and just read through some of that and really it was clear to see protect the classrooms um instruction. Um I think I had to ask what CHAPS is because I saw

076Champs in there about um that um there was a couple others uh reduce Dreambox um and then look at uh increasing fees for preschool athletics. So, all things that should be considered, but I think a lot of the comments I think I would have guessed uh what they were because people care about education in the classroom. So, no surprise and they want their teacher and as harmed as little as possible. What can we do outside of that? Um so, that's really we got some good affirmations about some of that. Um and and just appreciate um I don't know if Dr. Slo is in here. There is in the back. Thank him for his efforts for facilitating a process that really collects everybody for that. So, here we go. There's one Dr. Slow fan. Uh, two

077actually. I'm a fan of Dr. Slow, too. So, I appreciate all of his efforts. Any question on I think you guys all got a copy of the summary of the uh input as well. Yeah, I think um you know, we'll probably save our discussion for the spreadsheet, but I think I speak for everyone and we appreciate Dr. Slo as well and his attention to detail and all of the information that he provided us. So, I I know that all of us appreciate him and his work as well. All right. Uh, going on to the next, just looking at just some of the things that I think I was asking and I think I saw as others. Um, employee groups, are we doing everything all or nothing is if we're we're talking about a free So,

078I'm just going to go through a few of them really quick. Stipens. Um, there's been nothing that's been said about stipens. I think I was asked about it a couple times. I would say leave stipens already embedded into our current cost. Don't make any changes to stipens um, going forward. But I did think somebody asked me that question. Um step increases. Um that's another discussion because if you're saying what we're doing, if we're going to freeze everybody's salary from this year to next year, do you do the step increase for those people that got to that year that would flip them to the next step or is everybody exactly frozen where they are not just for a cost of living increase but also for the step increase? So I think that's something those two diversion

079paths the board needs to weigh in and provide some um guidance on that. Um I would say I I know um I think just talking with three three people uh now that everybody asking my opinion how we should do how many how much should we cut uh we should cut as much as possible um because there's always unforeseen things that happen. Um I I actually would not do a step increase and I would not do the percentage increase to everybody right now. Um growth and some other projections got us into an issue that we have had to use our carry forward and other funds right now. I know that it's very difficult across the state right now and there are many districts that are looking at zero raise um one 2% at the most. Very

080few are doing probably a handful you could list that are doing more than 2%. the ending of the COVID and Esser funds had a lot of big impact on that. And so during this time, I would not look at making any of that. And I actually think if we do any of these little a little bit here and a little bit there, you only create confusion that we're talking about close close vacant freeze positions, but yet we have enough money to give people raises and stuff like that. I would hold everything. Don't um don't take away as take as little away as possible, but don't take more away just so you can give more. It sometimes creates confusion and other issues. That's just a personal editorial comment. The board obviously can do what they want

081on that. Um I think maybe the board should have a little bit of a discussion here about the step increase because it's not really in the spreadsheet. And so I think we could bring it into the spreadsheet, but I think or did I miss it? Is it in? Oh, okay. I don't No, I don't I don't believe it is. Okay. Um, and so, you know, for clarity purposes, um, if you know, our administration can talk about who gets a step typically and who doesn't. Sure. Sure. Um I can clarify that typically it's our hourly support staff, our exempt support staff, administrators, um those different types of salary schedules get an increase when they hit certain years of service. Um we've also calculated because HR has already done the work to figure out who those people

082are. So salary wise it's about 129,000 with benefits tacked on to that about $180,000 for next year. Um, so we'd have to add that to the budget priorities. If that's something that you didn't want to do, we would add it to the list. If you wanted to leave it alone, then we don't do anything. We were we have it in the plans right now. Okay. And to clarify, teachers do not get a step. No, their salary schedule works differently. Okay. Steps. So, do we want to have this discussion now or do we want to add it into I I think just if you have a you know an initial comment about the step let's and then we can talk about it when we get to the spreadsheet. I guess I one question it might be

083a legal thing is are the step increases part of the contract? The governing board is in control of that. It's not part of the existing contract with employees. So, it would be your decision. I don't know if you have an employee handbook that has uh steps in it. Is does it identify them in the handbook? Not in the handbook directly. It's on the salary schedule itself, but not in anything like a handbook. So, your employees aware of a salary schedule that includes steps, but it can be changed by the governing board, legally changed. Okay. And then I guess the other thing is um when when we calculate like u performance bonuses, is that included in steps too or just flat? It's based on their actual base salary. So not their prop 301 money or any

084of that performance pay. Uh Mr. Kenyon, did you have some uh question or comment? Yeah, thank you for bringing this up. uh you know if right now we're trying to dig ourselves out of the situation that we're in and it's not going to be easy. Um with your recommendation, Mr. Hicks, I'm looking at those numbers. I would like to add that to what we're going to be looking at in a little bit our Excel spreadsheet just to see where the board comes on that. Um, initially my thought is we do hold off and see what that looks like and what we're going to have to go and I I would be in favor of um, so you said salary would be the 129 and then with benefits would be the 180. Yes, correct. Yeah, looking

085at the 180. Mishmid, um, I agree with Mr. Kenyon. I'd like to see that worked in there um as a way to, you know, as you said, if if teachers are not getting any raises, I think we need to look at that across the board. Um it would feel wrong to me to not give a teacher a raise, but to give raises to other staff members in the district. Um we should all be holding everybody at the same level. So, I'd like to look at that. Thank you. You don't mind? Could I just ask a question? So, I know we're saying teachers aren't getting any raise and this this necessarily the step increase isn't necessarily a raise. It's it's it's step increase, right? So, teachers on the other hand in their contract um or in

086their wage schedule, they do still get kind of that uh for their experience there's a level that they go up. Is that correct? Um, HR can help if I say anything wrong, but uh, the teachers are given their years of service when they're hired and they're placed on the salary schedule appropriately with their years of service. The only way their salary increases is is when they get uh, an increase in salary. So, when we do 2% raise, they get 2%, but they don't get any more years of service once they're employed. Oh, that doesn't increase as they're employed. Correct. Okay. Thank you. Uh, Mr. Siani. Oh, no. I already asked that. Oh, okay. Um, I just I I would agree. I cannot in my good conscience um offer a step increase to certain employees and

087not to our teachers who are with our students every day. It feels um awful already that we cannot give even an inflation kind of increase. And you know um so I would you know be in support with my other board members that that would be added. So I I would agree as well and I'll just jump in and uh I don't know the most apppropo place to to say this but uh I just wanted to communicate to the board as far as a a superintendent's performance pay. I agree with the board. I I would choose to forego any type of performance pay this year in light of all of the things that all of our employees are experiencing. And so I just wanted to communicate that to the board. Thank you, Dr. Okay. Um, thank

088you. So I keep putting this slide on uh at the end just kind of reminding everybody what we're doing but really this conversation that the board having is uh the most important and so uh just remind uh we're still going to be vill uh very u diligent about the reductions holding um making the cuts as possible as they feed in. But I don't think I need to continue going on and on uh on so much of that. So, I think we really need the next agenda item for you guys to go and delve into some of the actual cuts. I I do want to say one thing on this. I know uh I think it was the last meeting we're talking about audit was the auditor general's report and how we uh our plan. So,

089I want to make sure we're staying on top of that because I know that's not specifically listed in there, but we got to keep making sure we're implementing those plans and and following up and reassessing those. And I think you sent an update right before spring break. So, I just don't want that to fall off either. We got to stick on that stuff. We'll do. I agree. Um, before we move on, um, you know, because it it isn't really in here, but in the in the first budget study session, um, I don't think Mr. Hicks was here on February 20th, but, you know, there was a conversation that, you know, with the, um, incumbrances and things for next year that, you know, basically we needed to cut 3.6 million Um, and then when we get

090to the spreadsheet, it says 1.9. Um, so I just want some clarity before we start because I think that is important be, you know, to know for us how we move forward, how much we actually need to get to. Madame Vice President, members of the board, that is a great question. Um, and really I am going off of a lot of the information that uh, Mr. Balden Dayne gave me when I first came over. Um 3.3 was he had multiple scenarios of where it was and uh 3.3 was the worst case scenario um making uh for those projections. So I've been looking at around $2 million is what we need to cut. We're doing some reductions here. We're going to transfer also some money next year, a little bit of capital over, not a lot,

091but remember we generate around 2.4 and this capital budget only has about 2.2. So there's a couple hundred,000 coming over also. And so with that, that's why we're thinking around the 1.9 is what we need to cut. But would that just take us to the budget limit? Well, that would take us to around uh four 500,000 to carry over. I thought it was 600 or 700,000, but it is still a small carry forward. It's not really adding to the carry forward. But if there was more reductions, if we went above the 1.9, we could carry forward more money. elbow me if I know and and give us some buffer, right? Because we haven't necessarily projected correctly. And um madam vice president, members of the board, remember uh we just cut some of the projections with

092the revenue uh side of cutting 50. So we just cut another 326 off the revenue. So we need to cut an additional 326. So if you wanted a buffer and go a little further to create more of a buffer, it's probably closer to 2.25. And now anything beyond that would start giving some additional cushion car. Yeah. Carried for. Okay. All right. Any other questions or comments before we move to the next agenda item? Okay. We will go ahead and move on uh to 2.4 for discussion of the proposed prioritization of fiscal year 26 of uh fiscal year 26 maintenance and operations budget interest. Dr. Monroe. Yeah, Vice President Zimmerman, members of the board. So, this is the activity where the board will discuss and staff is here to help answer questions as far as uh

093prioritizing budget items for next year. Um, in planning the agenda with Vice President Zimmerman, um, we had asked you guys to kind of come prepared out of the gates with with three things, if you will, and not in any type of order, but three things that you would consider a reduction and three things that you would consider not a reduction. And and I want to remind you just a few things before I kind of pass the ball back to Mrs. Zimmerman is um number one remember that the the order of these things does not really matter when we we're kind of talking about what we prioritize above the line and what's below the line meaning what would we reduce and what wouldn't we reduce so I don't want us to get stuck into the conversation

094well this one is more important than that one that should be four that should be five really we're looking at kind of what's a priority above the line um that should be a reduction or or or below and So, let's not get hung up into that to say, "Well, that one should be on on top of that one." Um, the other thing I would um uh also say is, uh, it's always good when you're having these conversations to think about, uh, the positions, to think about, uh, the things we've talked about. Cabinet. Um, we have some recommendations that we've come up with, but we had a community meeting. I know the board members have different ideas, so there's definitely things you may bring up tonight that aren't on this list. and Crystal stands at the

095ready to add them on there. She already added on to board member Kenyan's 180,000 for the um uh for for the step increases that we just talked about to be considered. So, if you bring something up, we'll do our best to try and find a a pretty accurate conservative estimate to that and add it to this list. So, I don't want you to get caught into this list and say, "Well, why isn't that up there?" It can certainly be added. You have the report from Dr. slope where the community had a lot of different ideas and um so uh I think with that being said Crystal will kind of drive and we'll move as you see the spreadsheet you see the 1.9 to vice president on the top right hand corner vice president Zimmerman's point

096if there's more reductions that are made and that gets to 2.3 2.4 before. That is a buffer. That is more carryover that can happen. And so what we've just presented as a staff is about $3 million. But I know the board has some ideas. I know there was ideas that came up in that public forum as well. And so with that, I'll kind of pass it back over to to Mrs. Zimmer, Vice President Zimmerman to kind of lead the discussion or start it off. Okay. Um before we um so what I like to see us do is the first thing is what are three um cuts that you feel comfortable making like you know you're like okay absolutely we can cut that and then we'll kind of go down the line and see if there's

097some consensus you know if somebody else's 31 of yours is in agreement and I don't know um Miss Moer if we could have just like a a plain main um like word document where we could track them before we move them to see the consensus first. Um and then before we do that, I just want to see if we can discuss the ADM um you know what we want the ADM to be because I think it it affects the discussion and and what number we're trying to get to. Um so um if you're you know able to you know what your what are your thoughts I guess between 50 and 100 it seems to be the two numbers. Yeah thank you vice president. So the I I also curious how we came up with the

098number 100 for the ADM. Um, however, with opening a new school, with with the growth projected in our district, I can see that happening. Um, does I guess administration, everybody who's kind of looked at this, do you feel like 100 is realistic? Because I'm going to lean on you for this answer. Um, I I I mean I I would say zero and then, you know, we save everything, but that that's not reality. And so we have to plan for growth. We have to plan for a number of different things that are going to happen, unforeseeables in the future, right? Um but I also want to make sure that it's realistic. So what what again are do you think is that 180m is pretty close to accurate? You know 50 like Vice President Zimmerman was saying

099cutting that in half is safer. Um she's right. I know we have talked about the eighth grade classes that leave our district are typically at least the last couple years while I've been here have been bigger than the kindergarten class. So you already kind of start off as a negative. So we are growing but you have to almost double that growth to build. And so I I'm not sure I'm thinking about DNE's 100 number and maybe he was looking at um applied demographics I don't know pattern or their their report of growth. But one thing to keep in mind is we might have let's say 450 500 eighth graders promoting this year and let's say we only enroll 400 kinders, you know. So there you're off 100 right there. So 50 may be a safer

100number. Um and perhaps I can't speak to Dane. I don't remember where we came up with that 100 number, but okay. I'm I'm okay with moving it to 50. I'm okay with moving it to 50 as long as the board understands that's going to mean more cuts in what we're doing. So, uh, Miss Schmidt, um, yeah, I definitely would feel more comfortable, um, dropping that to 50, uh, and working from there. I understand that means more cuts to start with, but hopefully that means that next school year we don't have to start cutting in the middle of the school year and and ending up in a position where we're in right now trying to figure out how to get through the end of the year. Um so, you know, I will we get new students

101because we're opening a new school probably, right? New shiny things always attract people. Um, but also knowing that we always end up sort of on the negative with the eighth graders leaving and the number of kindergarteners coming in, I think we need to be more conservative in how we're looking at the numbers. So, I would feel much more comfortable with 50 as our top end. Mr. Serenion, no, I feel the same as the other two. Okay. Yeah, I I'd feel much more comfortable with 50. And uh similarly uh I totally understand we're going to have to make more cuts, but I prefer to do it now and not in March of next year. Um so um with that, um if we can if we can start with Mr. Kenyon, um for your like not top

102three, but like three that you're like, "Okay, this seems like an appropriate cut." And then um you know, we'll kind of Anybody else had that in their top three? And then we'll kind of maybe make little check marks or something just for us visually. Um before we start, can I ask a question? Like this course this one time purchase reduction. What what exactly do we mean by that? It's in green here. Two pages. The third one from the bottom in the green. Oh, the green. Becky, do you want to speak to that one? What we called it? Oh, okay. I see that one. 50,000. So, that was our estimate of things that we needed for this year for a special project or a one-time purchase, but we wouldn't need that LA next year or any

103year moving forward. So, that was the amount that we kind of estimated that we could cut out because we wouldn't need those special items. But, of course, there's a chance that we'll need different special items. Um, I just also want to clarify for the board that like we'll go through the three things, see if we have some consensus, then we'll do three things that we really don't want to cut and kind of move those. And then my thought is just kind of to process through the rest of the items individually, but just as a starting point to try to get us to jump off and find try to find some consens. So, we'll eventually just go down the list and see if everybody has a problem with that one item or if we Yeah, hopefully

104we'll be able to get some at the top, right? and just not have to spend a ton of time on every single thing. And if there are things that we're like, "Nope, we're not cutting that." All of us are like, "No." Then, you know, we can move that off and kind of see where we end up. Okay. Mr. Kenyon. Well, really looking at what administration's presented here, um, you know, looking at basically all the green that's on there. I Some are harder than others, but I'm okay with it. uh to that point. There's really one, two, three. So, if there's three things in the blue that I would rather not touch and we keep is the teacher signing bonus. Sorry, we're doing what? Three things that you do want to cut. Do want to cut.

105We'll come back to not cutting in a minute. Cod first. Okay. Before I say exactly what it is, if I can get a little clarification from administration counselors, the counselor attrition in past conversation that just means that's been positions open that hasn't been able to be filled. And I know there's some rhetoric out there about, you know, basically cutting counselors. It's not cutting counselors, it's closing open positions. Is that correct? Yeah, Dr. Mohorn, uh, where is Dr. Mohorn? You want to come and speak to that? Correct. When we use the term attrition, we're talking about positions that we have budgeted for that no one is in or no one is in for next year. And Dr. Mohorn has some more specific numbers on counselors. You got a mic? Okay, I do. Right now, we have

106four counselors that are ours. We have two other counselors that are contracted counselors. So, we have four that are ours. We have two the two counselors that are filling one is filling Estraa and West Star combo and one is filling Blue Horizons. Those are contracted counselors. The counselors the other four counselors right now are at Rainbow Valley, Liberty, LBA, and Freedom. Those are our counselors employed by us. Okay. So, there's three open positions though. That's correct. That's that's what we're looking at. Now the other thing is for the psych uh psychologists um we currently employ four and there's two open vacancies. Is that correct? We currently employ six and there are 7.5 and we have 1 point we have two that are contracted 1.5 that are contract that are contracted one and a half. Okay.

107Okay. So, we're looking at the two positions that haven't been filled. Correct. The attrition that we wouldn't need to fill. So, can I ask a clarifying question just about the counselors? So, if we didn't fill them then cuz right now the idea normally we budgeted for fiscal year 25 to have one per campus. Is that correct? The two at the one at Westar and the one at Estraa Mountain, we have a grant for only one more year. So, if we couldn't find uh counselors, but if we did, they would only be for we only have funding for one more year through the school safety grant. So, if we hired somebody, it'd only be one year through the school safety grant, but we weren't able to fill. We had somebody for Australia, but then they left

108at the beginning of the year. Okay. Um but the rest of them, we have one per campus. We did. Yes. Okay. So if we got rid of some of them, we'd have to redistribute them across, you know, counselors would have to share then. Correct. Yes. But we'd have to be careful because of the funding um because some of them are half funded through title one and so a title one cannot share with a non-title one school. Yep. So we'd have to look at that very carefully. When you're saying we have the people that contracted. So when we say if we reduce those we get rid of those contracted positions also or you saying keep the people contracted? No those contracted they end at the end of the year the contracts. Yep. And keep in mind

109the contracted positions are significantly more because you're paying their s a higher salary and then you also pay the company. I don't know of one district that doesn't have to contract out with our shortage of uh people who have specialty training like special education and other positions, but so we do have contracted employees here in Liberty. We try not to, but there are cases where we have to. Okay, thank you for that. Um, so with that, the three that I would pick would be the counselor attrition, the psychologist attrition, and then the dream box learning. I know that some absolutely love the dream box and others think it's not as important. Um I know my kids love it. They're always on it. Um but it it is a learning tool, but it's not in the

110classroom. Um it's more done at home. So um I think it's a great thing to have that. But I have a hard time looking at these other options and saying we need to cut something else. So those would be my three that I'm looking at. Okay. I think for to allow each of us to talk, let's just each do our three and then we'll talk about the list. I think is going to be easier. Okay. So, Mishmmet, uh, so my three that I was o that I would be okay with cutting is the communications director position, um, the district secretary position, and the juice box for the new web page. Okay, Mr. Serion. Yeah, I thought that they find the easy ones first. So, I just knocked off the Lumis Armored Car Service. uh the

111district consulting fees and some of the district memberships. Okay. My three um are um the communications director. I don't know. Okay. Um, uh, I would, um, cut the director of support services and I would reclassify um, the assistant superintendent of HR into a director position because all of the um, you know, people that they have uh, that they were in charge of now have their own director. And so the um the the amount of money for um this you know the supervision of basically HR doesn't seem to add up to other um positions. So those are my three. Okay. So, um, the only common one that I heard was communications director. Looking at my notes, there are two people mentioned that. So, we'll start with that one. Um, you want to start at the top?

112I don't know if it'd be easier to like see if anybody has an issue. Oh, because I feel like the green are the ones we're assuming there's be less controversy about between us. Oh. Oh, okay. Can we just start with the common one here, the communications director? Um, it's at it's at the top. It's in green. Is there um concern about removing it? Um, do you have a concern, Mr. K? Looking at me. No, I I I honestly like I said in my first comment was all the green here I'm okay with. Oh, okay. I apologize. So that that's where I thought that we were saying our additional three where we had to get. Oh, okay. I Yeah, I picked all from all. My only thing with the communications director, um I think it needs

113to be cut, but the job unfortunately still needs to be done. Um, and so I think, you know, we have to figure out how we're going to redistribute that job description because we still need to have a district Facebook page. We still, you know, especially if we open the new school, which I feel like is a whole different discussion, you know, that we'll need to get to. But, you know, we there still has to be some marketing and things like that. So, my concern is yes, I think we need to get rid of it um or cut it, but, you know, how are we going to account for that and where is that going to fall? you know, we'll do. Yeah, great point. No, we we'll redistribute some of those tasks at the district office

114and make sure that we're filling that need. Okay. Yeah. To that point, sorry. Um to that point, I think one of the other things here was the the communications marketing budget. Um and I know right now it's saying 30,000. I don't know. Is that the whole budget at this point? Is that sort of like wiping out the marketing budget? Um because the reality is is we'll still have to spend some money on marketing. So maybe not, you know, slashing it entirely, but being more realistic and leaving a bit behind because we're going to need to do some marketing throughout the year. Yeah, I I agree. Yeah, even though we distribute those duties, there will probably have to be a small budget for marketing materials or those kind of things. Yes. Okay. Um I'm just thinking

115the best way to do it. Um let's since we're on the screen, let's go ahead and do our top three keep and then we'll move to the spreadsheet. Okay. Um so uh Mr. opinion your top three that you don't want to touch. Um I would say the permanent guest teachers. It's very important for me that those stay. They they do so much. Um the teacher signing bonuses, those are important for attracting and retaining. And then at this point I would say the benefit uh savings with the HSA. I think that that that um that's one that I've talked to numerous people about and they you know it hurts. All this hurts. Uh but those are some of the things that I really would try not to touch. Okay. Mishmmet. Um, this may shock someone everybody

116here actually, but I agree with most of what Mr. Kenyon just said. Um, just kidding. Just kidding. Um, no. So, I don't want to touch the permanent guest teachers. Um, the public comments at our public session were pretty much overwhelming that they thought that the guest teachers were important. Um, also the um, class coverage. We're asking teachers to do more and then not paying them for it. And you know, we want to keep teachers and prevent burnout and not have low morale. And that is a recipe for that. Um and then um I would say that let you know not letting go of some of the reading in uh interventionists not having the attrition. Um they perform such an important duty. you know, their service is immeasurable without the reading interventionist at a young age.

117We just set students up for failure later on. So, um, finding a way to have as many as we can keep, I think should be a priority for us. Okay, Mr. Sincio, I agree with you guys on a lot of these things too. Um, mine were the permanent guest teachers. I also I'm trying to focus on stuff for like academic, right, that we have to have. I think reading and interventionists are important. Um their kids aren't reading, they're not learning, so I don't want to touch them. And then uh the other one for me was if I have to pick, it was a tossup, but I kind of don't want to touch the signing bonuses because we still need to be able to retain or attract new teachers. So those would be my three. Um

118I uh have reading interventionists as one of my top three. Um, I would like to see us maybe get to what we had before, um, we added the extras in February of 24. Um, so not the full attrition, but um, it would be, um, I believe we're at 8.5 and so it would be 9.5 to ensure that, um, Westar and Estraa each have their own. Um so um and although I would love to keep all of them, you know, the real the reality is we we have to make cuts and um those extras were paid with esser money. So I just going back to what we were prior to February of 24. Um so uh not quite what is presented but close. Um my second one is psychologists. Um, I do not think this district

119can afford to lose psychologists. Um, we have, um, psychologists that are testing students that went through the CST process last spring. So, if we cannot keep up with it currently, um, I just think it puts us in a very difficult position for special education. And, you know, it was brought to my attention, and if Dr. Monroe, you can speak to this that at the beginning of the year, um, Miss Hammer came around with a a lawyer, not not Mr. Dangerfield, talking about just some special education issues, and they had talked about having the psychologist ratio 500 to one. Is that is that a legal requirement? Is that just a suggestion? I believe that is um a recommendation. I believe that's the recommendation from ASCA or from one of the associations. I think I don't think

120it's a legal requirement, but uh that that is a really hard that's a really hard one for districts to be able to do one to 500 and uh a lot of school districts will you know share multiple uh share psychologist but uh so I don't believe that's a legal requirement and maybe ask I know that's the counselor one but I I don't know if anybody else has any input on that but I don't think it's a legal requirement. No it's not a legal requirement it's a recommendation. Okay. Um and just because you know Full transparency, I haven't got to read all the answers. So, how many psychologists did we budget FTEES for this year? Dr. Mohorn, you want to I don't know if Kay is here. Do you want to come up? And we haven't

121been able to fill all of them. I want to say we've contracted out with for two or so. Yes, we had been able to fill for the eight that we wanted. That's why we had to contract for the other two. So we we we budgeted eight FTEEs. That's what Kay had budgeted for was eight. And so that's why we have the contracted for the 1.5. Okay. And one is part-time, right? Yep. It's five. So it's 7.5 FTEES. Okay. Um Yeah. So, we have six of our own, but then we have 1.5 that are contracted out currently. So, you know, uh I'm not sure, you know, if if like Loretta and and Liberty, you know, would be able to share, but of course, the preschool takes a ton of that psychologist, so that may not be

122practical, but you know, if we could get to seven maybe instead of 7.5, but I'm just uncomfortable really reducing it. And then my third one is uh I was really torn between the HSA and the class coverage. I think both, um are important to not pass the budget shortfall onto our teachers. Um so, um I'll go with HSA, but you you got four there. So, let me So, let me summarize kind of what I'm hearing because I'm taking notes. I'm kind of watching crystals. So, some commonalities we found here, which again helps the conversation. It's permanent guest teachers to keep those. Uh, two of you, the teacher signing bonus, uh, the HSA benefits was two, and Vice President Zimmerman kind of said that was up there with her, the reading interventionist, and I think those

123were the sh some of the shared ones were those four that were in common with at least two of you. Yeah, I I hear that everybody really wants those permanent guest teachers. Um they were paid out of esser funds and we do not have those esser funds and so I know that we value them but we I want to talk about the subsystem in relation to the permanent guest teacher. So, and again because I didn't have a chance to read all the answers to the questions, um, did we start the subsystem? No. And Dr. Mohorn can speak to this. I believe it starts next year uh, in August, July one. Okay. Because in the in the board docs, they had said that it was going to start in January of 25. So, um, you know,

124if if the board, you know, really believes that the guest teachers are important, I would love to see that maybe they are district guest teachers and not assigned to a school to make sure that they're truly being utilized every day and that we're having some sort of system about, you know, oh, it there's not a need on our campus today, but, you know, because the idea would be to to reduce the class coverage, right? Because some of our schools have a ton of class coverage. Um, and you know, my concern with the permanent guest teachers is, you know, probably for two weeks at the beginning of the school year. You know, they're not being utilized in a classroom, right? Most teachers are coming to work the first two weeks, maybe the last two weeks during

125testing. And how much, you know, are they not being utilized? I guess. Sure. It really depends, too. Sometimes if a principal is in a bad way or there's something that happens at the beginning beginning of the year which we try not to have that guest teacher could be used at any time. And just a reminder as we talk about this just to put this in the board's mind remember we don't necessarily have to be all or nothing too. We could come up with a formula where there's a reduction of permanent guest teachers down to three or four you know that are more centrally located and centrally controlled or or even shared between two schools. So I think what we have down there is, you know, seven permanent guest teachers and I think it's 300 and

126something thousand dollars, but so it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You know, we're very flexible in the conversation um talking about permanent guest teachers. So if I could on that for the permanent guest teachers, right there you have um nine comma seven are filled. So that means we budgeted for nine. There's two open positions for permanent guest teachers. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Okay. So, you know, the we currently have seven. Um I've heard from multiple campuses that they they are utilized to death. Um they they they need them. They use them for everything. Um yeah, I don't know what that seven means if each campus currently has their own or if there's some that don't have one, but um I'm not opposed to sharing the permanent guest teachers as kind of

127was was mentioned. Um however, you know, I think we can those other two open positions, we can label those as attrition and see what that is. Um and maybe that's some cost savings that we can look at. Yeah, I'm I'm okay with is there sorry was there I thought that the the cost savings was just the seven the permanent guest teacher seven are filled that that price of 32 26 is that for seven or is that for nine? That dollar amount is just for seven because those two have been unfilled all year. Okay. This is the price for seven though. Oh. Okay. Um I think maybe you know I think it is a very big interest of the board to you know to keep them. So maybe as we you know move down and we're

128struggling to get to where we need to be then we can discuss how many. So, if we want to go um I think I think reading interventionist is another big one. Does anybody have concerns about those about keeping them? Okay. So, I know reading interventionist and and again, Dr. Mahorn, jump in if I misspe, but I believe that we have 12 budgeted for after the February meeting like you were saying. Vice President Zimmerman, there's four that aren't filled. However, it's not an all or nothing prep uh proposition. Like you said, if we need to um just reduce to nine and a half, we can make sure every school has one with our title schools having a formula based on need to have more. And so, but yeah, we haven't been able to fill the 12

129this year. I think we've only been able to fill eight, I believe. And we may have we may even have a resignation or two, I don't remember. of some reading interventionists who aren't returning. So there is some flexibility there where schools can have 1.0 to your point with our title schools having 1.5 or higher. Um so we do have some wiggle room within that 12. So even if the board said well let's take it down to 9.5 we have 2.5 FTE of attrition of two salaries that we could work with. Is the board okay with 9.5 versus 8.5 which is what is listed here like as the savings? So one per school it would be we would look at one per school like title one schools have to have more than the non-title one. So

130that's why you're seeing the 1.5 and then blue had two just because they were so large. Um the only thing that I noticed on here is that Liberty also had one. Were they not title one at that time? That is a good question. Was in the in the So I pulled the presentation from February 24 to just help me. And so it just lists what they had. And so Liberty only had one um as well as Westar and Estraa only having one. But I thought that you know Title One needed to have more. So was Liberty not a title one at that time? They are title one but because they have such low student count they don't get very much title one money where the other title one schools get a lot more of the

131title one budget especially like you said blue horizons. But like the legality of assigning these and using title funds, you know, the reason that they went up very specifically is because we had to increase by the same amount. So I just want to clarify if the board is okay with 9.5 are is it going to be okay that Liberty only has one where all the other title schools have 1.5. So the way we kind of budget it in the grant itself is that if Liberty was really only entitled to have a half, we're giving them an extra by giving them a 1.0. Stephanie, can you add? No, that's not I don't know where that's this February 24th because right now Liberty has 1.5 title. No, this is in February of 24 and I'm just pulling

132what we used what used to have. Yes, Liberty has 1.5, but if we're talking about trying to not fully do the reading interventionist attrition and just getting back to what we had before, we increased them. Liberty, it says, only had one. If we're going to go back to what they had before, even though Liberty has low numbers, we would still give Liberty 1.5. If we gave Westar and Australia one, we would give Liberty maybe 1.2. 25 or 1.5 even though they have low low numbers to give them more and we can check on making sure we're not misstepping with the legality of title one right you know I'm just trying to get us as accurate as we can so that we're budgeting appropriately so if it needs to be 10 you know that we're putting

133the right number up here for us and then of course you know I feel like maybe we need to have the conversation about Loretta Zumbro because you know then we have to account for them you know a reading interventionist as well. So so my question is if we legally had to have them how was it even on here as an option. It it's not that we legally have to have them but because we use title one funds we have to give title one schools more. So if Estraa and Westar have a 1.0 then all of our title ones have have to have more. If we decreased Westar and Estraa to 0.5 and made them share, then we could reduce the other ones. Correct? Okay. So, are we comfortable if Crystal puts some things at the

134top and some things at the bottom based on what we've heard? Meaning, you know, keep and reduce like we've heard permanent guest teachers. Now, we may not be set on the amount, you know, we may not be on what that is, but we know that's important to the board. We know teacher signing bonus, HSA benefits, and reading interventionists. Do we want to start to say those we're going to keep or But I think the reading interventionist we could have a little bit of attrition, you know, some but not all. So if we wanted to give a safer estimate because of the concern about liberty and we haven't factored in Loretta Zumbro, maybe we say 10, right? So that we're saving 2.5 FTEES and put that number in the spreadsheet. So I think we can go

135to the spreadsheet. Yeah. Okay. We can adjust that. Yeah, just trying to add. Okay. So there was some discussion um of maybe things that we agree like turning a different color um so that it's easy to see um and then move them. So um if you if we could go back to the top I think the communications director is actually first and I think we all seem to agree with that. Did you have a problem with anything in the green? I didn't think that I didn't control So, uh, the items that I highlighted in yellow are ones that multiple of you agreed on. Okay. So, I think we'll we'll start going down. Um, I think the communications director, I think we all agree that that position um can be a reduction. Um, so we'll go

136ahead and move down to the groundskeeper. Um, hold on. Intervention is yellow. Also, that's pretty confusing. I I think maybe the things that we are keeping we need to move out because I think we need to be able to see the total. I apologize, Crystal. Okay. So, uh, like the um, yeah, where is my cheat sheet? So, the things we're keeping such as uh let's see, signing uh signing bonus uh benefit savings. Okay. Are we we're all okay with the signing bonus? Let's just start there. Yes. Okay. H Yeah. So, I don't Yeah, if you just So, just remove it off or hide it? Yeah. Hide. Yeah. I mean, I think we could get in a situation where we realize we're going to have to make unfortunate decisions. So, you know, I'm sure we all

137have these printouts. We can look at at it if we have to. And then, uh, was HSA was everybody okay with the HSA? Yeah. Okay. Class coverage was another one. And reading interventionist. Well, I think the reading Did you want to go to Did you want to go to 9.5 or 10? Do you want to go to two of attrition there? Yeah. Mr. Kenyon or Mr. I'm only okay doing any attition. I I think reading interventionists are critical to have um especially with our kids that um I'm okay doing some attrition there as long as the board can get behind doing attrition with either counselors or psychologists as well. My concern with the counselors and the psychologists attrition is that then campuses are sharing. we're not asking any reading interventioness to be shared across campuses.

138So that's that's my concern with the attrition there. Um is how are they going to be redistributed? I don't necessarily um not share your concern, but that is more of a problem for administration to figure out rather than us. Um, I think right now we're just looking at budgets and not necessarily getting in the weeds of how they do their job. Let's just look at the budgets. I I understand what you're saying. I just think it's still important as a for me as personally as a board member to make sure that we're being equitable. Um, and I think um, you know, without knowing how they're going to be redistributed and how it's going to affect different campuses, I feel for me it's personally hard. um especially personally the psychologist one in terms of how we

139are able to meet the needs of testing students for special education and being able to um meet IEPs on time and and follow the CST process. Like I just I if we cannot keep up with what we are currently doing, I'm just not sure how we're going to do it by decreasing the number. Um, and our sped population is higher than the state average. Um, so I mean we can leave that, you know, we can leave the reading interventionists for now and if we want to start at the top where it's easier in the green, I think it's probably easier just because it's about Yeah, I would I would agree. And there's one more before you do that. Okay. I think class coverage was another one too that I think two board members said or

140two or three board members. So, are we okay with one and a half? Yeah. With keeping with keeping it. Mr. Kenyon, are you okay with keeping it? Yeah. Okay. All right. So, we'll keep that and then we'll go to the top and just start discussing some line items. But there are also some things like for me that are not on here that I like to add, you know, to have a discussion about. So, um, did we add the, um, step freezes basically? Yeah, I think it's down towards the bottom. Okay. All right. Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. All right. It's okay for right now because we'll we'll work our way down. Um, yeah, we can make it yellow. Okay. So, the first one is the grounds the one groundskeeper. Um, is there right?

141That's the next thing on the line. Okay. um discussion about um the grounds plug my computer in. So yeah, that's totally fine. U Mr. Kenyon, what's your thoughts? Um same as what I said before. Everything that's currently in green, I'm okay with with what's been presented by the administration and leaning on them for what we have here in front of us. Um, so I don't have a lot to comment on the green areas, um, except for the HSA, which we already discussed. Okay. Um, Miss Schmidt. Um, yeah, I'm okay with that. This is just not filling a vacancy. So, we're not eliminating anybody's job. We're just not filling a vacancy. And I'm assuming that the remaining work has already been split up since this is an open position anyways. So it would it would yes

142it would be similar to other positions that go through attrition. The job duties would have to be split and that goes for number four too. I don't know if it's number four but groundskeeper and skilled maintenance worker. Y I believe that we have Bob people retiring or people who have left that would leave those positions vacant. Okay, I'm good with that. Mr. Yeah, I'm fine. I'm on the same with Mr. Kenyon though, like besides the the HHS HSA savings that we already took care of, I have no problem with the green stuff. Okay. Um, you know, I think I saw, you know, I'm just going to look to Mr. Young that we still feel like um not outsourcing grounds is a savings. It's not okay. Madame vice president, members of the board, uh when I

143first started with the district, we were outsourcing it and it was very expensive, but it was also they were not doing a good job. There's a lot of things that we've been fixing this entire year that they just instead of fixing valves and wiring, they just put a a battery note on top of it to make it come on. And we had like a hundred of those. And that's not an exaggeration where valves were just coming on at different times and stuff. The batteries would go dead. Nobody would change them. But instead of fixing it, right, which is what we are doing now. I think you saw some pictures the time clock. We're rebuilding. Uh putting the wires in and getting everything the way it's supposed to look. Uh the field's not where we need

144them to be, but they're a lot better now than they were a year ago, and we're going to continue to improve on them. Uh and it it's grounds has the same if we contract grounds, they have the same problem we do. If somebody's sick or doesn't show up or anything, they just skip and do the best they can to get things going, but we still pay them the same contract amount. Okay. So, you you think that it it is a cost savings to not contract grounds, correct? Okay. All right. I'm okay with the groundskeeper. Um, so, district secretary, um, you know, my concern with this is that it primarily served ED services. Um, and as we get into the ED services cuts, you know, you're basically cutting 2.5 FTEES from ED services, which is the

145department that directly impacts the education of our children. And um, you know, the other side of, you know, the operations side of the building does have admin support. And so now we're taking away that admin support from ED services. So my question is is that is that admin support that we hired recently for the operations side are they going to support ED services as well? Well, we any district secretary duties we'd have to redistribute. So possibly um but uh we we know having admin support um for a lot of leaders or duty isn't really effective. So we would have to redistribute those duties among district office staff whether that's ED services or that position or other positions. So because we want to make sure they have that administrative support. Yeah. So that you know that's

146my concern there. Um, you know, I'm okay with it with the understanding that, you know, I want to make sure that, you know, we're treating our employees equitably, you know, and that they are getting the same support, especially our employees that are directly impacting the learning of our students. And so that's my concern. Um, I just didn't go through everyone because a lot of you said you're okay with green. So I'm just moving on if that and obviously step in if you're have something to add. Um skilled maintenance worker could could Mr. Young you just kind of uh just explain what this position does or these two positions exactly. Madame vice president, members of the board, uh the skilled maintenance worker, one of the ones that just resigned was an electrician. And so he he

147did all the you know lights and all those kind of things which at this particular time I mean we need electrician for sure because today at West Star somebody knocked the electric hand dryer off the wall and the wires were sticking out you know safety hazard for the kids. So we had our air conditioning guys going to go over and take care of that but you know he does wiring so he knows how to do it. The other skilled maintenance is the plumber who's retiring in in May 15th I think it's his last day. So, you know, he put in his retirement for that. Uh, so we're going to have to fill in for those two. Uh, it it's, you know, we're putting more square footage on the new schools under warranty for two years,

148but still things happen. We need to get maintenance people over. Uh, it's it's going to be tight. Instead of getting work orders done in six or seven days, it might take nine or 10 days sometimes, but any any emergency life safety kind of things, we'll still address right away, get them done. Okay. So when you say these two people, are you saying that these skilled maintenance workers are the electrician position and the plumber position? Those are the ones that are leaving, correct? Or left. The electrician left already. The plumber's leaving. So if you said we still need them cuz we need them to do the job. Like is this going to be a cost savings? Because are we going to just contract people to do that work? Like I'm just concerned, you know, I don't

149want us to put it on here if we're going to need to hire for it. Right. Exactly, Madam Vice President. And I I spoke to Dr. Monroe about that. We can see how we're going to do get by, but if the budget changes, can we bring one back on, you know, down the road just because we're going to be spread so thin. We're only going to have two maintenance people and the maintenance supervisor. Uh, and you know, they're all very qualified at what they do. They're all willing to help out and do the best they can to get things going. So, um, similar situation. I met with the Deer Valley operations people a couple weeks ago. They were asking me some advice on the SFB process and they said they have four uh, air conditioning

150technicians positions to fill. They haven't been able to fill them in two years because they're not paying enough to get an air conditioning person, but they spent they spent $2.8 million in contracted vendors coming in to fix the air conditioning. So, it's, you know, that's what you got to kind of look at. You know, raise the salaries to bring somebody in and save a lot of money or keep spending it. Well, that's my concern with this particular item is that if we're going to have to contract to fix electrical or plumbing issues, then this isn't a savings. So, you know what I mean? I don't want us to get into the position where then we've spent, you know, we've had to open a PO and then in, you know, we're going to look at it

151sooner. So, in December next year, then we're over budget because we didn't account for it correctly. So, We can't just do it because, you know, it looks good on paper. We have to functionally be able to run the district. Correct. And I think madam vice president, members of the board, one of the things that's going to help us with the electrician wise, obviously there's going to be some issues with outlets and stuff like that. But Var coming in and doing the complete lighting retrofit and things like that, it's going to save a lot of time on our side not having to go out and change ballast and those kind of things. So, uh, you know, it's a year process or more, but I think we're going to be in good shape with it once it

152once it's all said and done. Okay. So, the other two skilled maintenance that you have are what what are their positions? One is the the new air conditioning tech that we just hired recently and the other one is a general maintenance. He does a lot of he does he he can do plumbing, he does the well, you know, the wells and uh all different kind of items as well. So, and then the maintenance uh supervisor is also an air conditioning guy, electrician type. So, he's out there working as well doing his job. So, okay. So, we do have people that in an in an emergency, we have employees that could go and if something comes off the wall and there's wires, they can go fix that. We don't need to call and hire an outside

153electrician in an and pay them emergency money to come in and fix something. Yes, madam vice president, members of the board. Yes, that is correct. We we have people air conditioning tech. We have two of them basically because the supervisor is and they do wiring, plumbing, all that, you know, that's part of what they do with air conditioning systems. I just wonder if we should build in a little bit of money here for contracting some of these services that maybe they aren't going to be able to do. Like should we save $50,000? Again, I just want to set our budget up so that we're not in a position where we've overspent. and the idea that, you know, we're not going to have a, you know, we we're used to having a true electrician and a

154true plumber, I I think we could end up in some concerns because we definitely have older schools. Exactly, Madam Vice President. Yeah, you're you're exactly right. You know, the Australia schools, a lot of plumbing issues up there. It's uh you know, he's up there full-time basically. So, not working. Um, so what's the thought of the rest of the board? Um, I'm okay with right now going this route with what we have, understanding that we do have employees that could fulfill what we need in an emergency basis and they have um and so they have ran over and taken care of issues that have arisen. Um I I agree that we do need to support that the maintenance uh staff just because we are a older you know some older buildings we have some new construction

155going on there's always things happening um but as you stated earlier looking through here I'm okay with for currently until we see what happens with with our projections next year and and what we get into maybe then we can step it up and bring some of this back. But right now, I'm okay with making these reductions. Mr. Um I This is I felt okay. And then you said that the plumber was at West or at Estrella full-time. And then I'm like, okay, if he's at Estraa full-time and now we don't have a plumber, the other guy can't fill in for a plumber full-time and do the other job. So, I was okay. And now I'm more hesitant to like completely wipe out that position if he's basically at Australia full-time working on plumbing issues. Um,

156so I I kind of would lean towards what Miss Zimmerman was saying and you know maybe we can not replace the two workers but we have to have some money on the side in case we need it because we can't have nonfunctional plumbing in an elementary school, right? So we we know that that's going to be a priority especially if it's already an issue. So sorry, remember there's two vacancies that could even be one where we could look for that's maybe maybe that's a a compromise. We make it one um uh again sort of just talking out loud. So yeah, again contingent on finding someone who's qualified, but it could go from two to one and that's still a savings. You know, kind of like what we've talked about with reading interventionist and attrition. We

157it doesn't have to be all or nothing. we could find a middle ground and then see what what we get to here in the next few minutes what the total amount gets to. Yeah. Um I'd be more comfortable with one because I just think we're going to end up spending the money and I'd rather budget for it that I mean we can see where we get to at the end but I don't I don't know how we're going to not have these two positions. I would agree with wanting to budget ahead for it. And also, I would rather employ someone for the district than pay an outside plumber all the time that we're going to end up paying a lot more for than if we employ a plumber within the district. All right. um the

158behavior interventionist coach. Um you know on the notes it talked about using an alternative fund to pay for this position. Um could you speak to that? Yeah. And I mean, look, the crystal and and Ken, I believe this was possibly created with Esser monies and then it was moved over to M I believe, but uh I think we talked about Medicaid, Ken, or Mips for the behavior. Do you remember that? Yeah. Um, madam vice president, members of the board, I think we talked about either instructional improvement. You could even with the expansion of classroom site fund look at this position possibly going into that. Are they certified? Uh, no. Okay. Yeah, probably more instructional improvement fund. We used to have behavior interventionist. Remember those were reduced last year that were paid for out of Esser?

159The behavior interventionist. I think that's were they behavior intervention behavior specialist. Yeah, behavior. Uh, so we had one at each school, I believe, and then they were overseen by the behavior interventionist coach. And so those went away last year when Esser did. and we have the one coach who kind of services all the schools and works with the principles and psychologists on a needs basis. So, but we could look at other funding again that frees up M if that's a position that's valued, but we have some other pots of money that we could look out for that salary. Some of a lot of some of these things in the green are that they're not going away necessarily, but we'd love to have the board's kind of blessing to say, "Hey, you're okay to use this

160budget code for that." So, it's not build to M and it's sustainable. But there could be some question about Medicaid funding in the future based on, you know, what's happening currently at the federal level, right? Yeah. It's it's hard to say. There's a lot of unknowns out there and uh trickling down from the federal level and a lot of things that are being questioned. We've been informed about a lot of different grants that are in question or may not be coming back or may be reduced. And however, we're in a position with all the districts, it's just a cloudy future to really know what's what's going to happen with that. Plus, the behavior interventionist coach um Dr. Mohorn can correct me if I'm wrong. takes a unique skill set and hard to hard to find

161that that person who can consult and support the teachers and um so uh you saw a lot of those type of positions created during COVID from districts and then some larger districts will have those people uh on staff. So does the board want to discuss if you're comfortable like moving it to a different fund or would you prefer to you know cut the position? No, I'm definitely comfortable moving it to a different fun um and saving the M money here. Uh, as long as that, you know, obviously this is something that is necessary for our district. It it really supports the kids. It supports the staff. Um, and, you know, I'm okay with moving it to a different fund. And to member Schmidt's point, um, we're going to continue to look for savings and grants.

162Just know as as the board gets communicated with that grants are just under the microscope right now, really closely. uh federal grants that are maybe come through AD or through the state. So, a lot of grants are being looked at really closely that way. If if I may, um you know, with what's happening at the federal level, uh we we have no idea what's going to all play out, right? And so, I caution that we don't, you know, yell, "The sky is falling." Um we have to focus on what we have in front of us. But I do know that with some of the policy changes we made in the past that kind of protected us from some of these things that may be coming down the wire. Um so just it may not all

163be as bad as it sounds. Uh Mid just uh you know moving it to a different fund. Good. Okay. I'm good with that as well. Um okay. Um I think that we should talk about the ED services coordinator and the assessment coordinator together um just because they're both fall under ED services. Um and um just clarifying Mr. Kenyon, you're okay with um both ED services positions at this point. Yes. Okay. Um, if these positions are eliminated, not build, uh, where where do those responsibilities then fall? Who who's going to take over the things that these two positions were doing to support the teachers who are then supporting the students? Um yeah, that's my my major question on that. It would be, you know, district office uh district office ad services staff as we'd go through

164job descriptions, we'd have to there would be different duties assigned to different people so that we don't lose a beat on assessment and those kind of things. Um it allows us to to support the site. It I agree the teachers lose some support that way. However, if we can preserve things like the instructional coach and reading interventionist and find a way to support them, we can still get after it. But like any of these positions that are in attrition, we're going to have to do more with less or do the same with less and be more efficient, have to be more flexible and and monitor monitor and adjust. So, we're seeing it the federal level where there's layoffs happening and and the job still has to be done. Mr. Schmidt, so you're absolutely right. So,

165we'd look at district office staff, district office ed services staff to to look at those duties. How um how many ed services staff would there still be? Oh, boy. What would they be, Dr. Mullen? Three, four, three. Three. Yeah. If you don't count special ed, it's the assistant superintendent, the um executive director of school effectiveness, and then the director of um curriculum and instruction. And then technically our LEAP director, so our before and afterare service is under ED services as well, but we're not counting that. So three. Yeah, we have a few positions that are uh they live in a lot of worlds, but they're typically housed in ed services. Dr. float Loretta's position, community education, special education are kind of under that umbrella. Those are my questions. Mr. Sen, you're um personally I am

166very concerned I'm not okay with taking ED services down two positions. Um, you know, I would compromise with one as long as we add the director of students services because that position we have not had and that person that, you know, we approved, you know, honestly that this budget work should have been done before that and I am not comfortable cutting one side of the building, the building that supports our students in the classroom. I'm just I'm not okay with it. Um, and we have to be equitable. And if we don't look at the other side, the operations side and a director position, I'm I cannot support just demolishing ed services, the ones that support our students. The reason we're all here is to educate our students. So, I'm okay with getting rid of one,

167but with the understanding that we put the director of student services as a So, do you want us to just make uh for purposes tonight? Do you want us to just again so it's not all or nothing? Instead of two, just have one. Is that kind of what I'm hearing from the board? At least to see we can at least see what we get to on this first iteration or how close we get to 1.9 or above. This is my concern um with with too much compromise. We're not going to hit our number. We're just not. Um we we're going to be here all night talking about individual things down to probably past midnight discussing every little detail. Um you said there's no no hits to operations. There is. It's we talked about it. there's

168maybe not at you know the high high levels but there is and most of this from my understanding is attrition of of you know positions that haven't been filled. Um you know I just I think we need to get this solved by relying on the experts we put in place as the board. Remember we're at the 100,000 foot level. Looking at this, I'm I'm really concerned about us digging in every weed and overturning every, you know, garbage can trying to find how they do their job. Um we saw today uh sadly an email somebody great candidate for our district said he's not willing to come anymore because he thinks that we are as a board just too micromanaging and how that's destructive to a district. And I completely agree. He's not the only candidate. There's

169been other ones that have said the same thing. I think we need to rely on the, you know, I'm not saying that these conversations aren't valid. I do think we need to have conversations about it, but I'm I'm leerary about let's do one here, part of one there, part of one here. Um, this is what was presented to us from administration standpoint. they believe and and if they think that maybe they messed up or would like to change something, I'm still good with what's presented here because that at the end of the day gets us where we need to be back in compliance, back in a budget and then, you know, we can see where it goes after that. But, um, I just I have a feeling we're going to be here all night and

170we're still not going to hit our number that we're looking for. I would just say that it is the board's responsibility to set the budget. It is it it is our it is our responsibility. So I I disagree that you know we are out of our lane having this discussion. Um I you didn't say that. Oh, okay. That we're being too detailed. And unfortunately, we we are in this position because my concern is that the board wasn't detailed enough. So, my concern is to make sure that we are, you know, I agree. I'm I am concerned that we're not going to hit our numbers. So, I don't want you to think that. I don't think that because I agree. I I am concerned. But can we add the director of student services into that cut?

171Because I don't think it's fair to cut two director positions from ed services. And we haven't had that position. We have the the district has not had it. The nobody's relying on that position, but we are relying on these two positions that are going to have to be redistributed. I it's Can we at least add to the list? Then I'm not opposed to adding to the list. I would like to ask administration what their thoughts are on adding that position and what that does to which position the director of student services. Uh we can add it. Do you know Dr. Mahorn about what that was? I know it was before you, Jason. No, we just we just approved the position. Yeah, I know. I'm just trying to think what the amount is. Yeah. Oh, I

172had somebody look it up in my question. So, it's it's in the board update line. Yeah. Just so the board understands, if we add this on here, this would be terminating a current or terminating an employee then because they've already have they signed the contract. They've came on now. Yes. Okay. So, these other ones we're talking about attrition. This one we're talking about terminating an employee. It's just not it's not it's not we're not terminating them for this year. It's that we're not offering them a contract for next year. And let's just be clear about the attrition here is these two ED services coordinators told they were going to be non-renewed. It's not an attrition. They were told they'd be non-renewed or to resign. So, let's just be real clear about what we're saying here

173because we did not offer the director of student services a contract for next year at this point because no administrator has been offered a contract besides principles. Correct. That's correct. So, do we want to leave that there and go to 13 or we can move it up? I mean, not 13. Um, go down to I guess 14 there. I mean, again, the board may not come to a consensus on a lot of these, but we can see as far as we can go. Can we get to the 1.9 potentially if we go through all of them? So, I'll just speak to 13 and uh Ken and Crystal again jump in, but um this this would this 230,000ish would just be funding part of our custodial and operations out of a different fund. I believe it's

174um I don't remember what the fund is called from the indirect cost and civic center. So we have seven custodial services and we have seven FTE seven people. We have three positions for operations. So we'd be able to fund half of those out of a different pot. So we wouldn't have to use M uh dollars to pay those uh positions and sustain them. And that would save 230,000ish to the M budget. So that would be using a different pot. I see nodding of head. So, I'm going to say I think that's fine. I'm sorry. I I saw nodding of heads. So, I just want to clarify um from a different pot, is that a one a one-year solution? No, we believe that uh as long as kind of like what Mr. Hicks was talking about

175as long as we have good fund balances in those funds, they're sustainable because they are a lot of them do receive monies each year. When you pay for something out of uh u uh the fund that collects facility rentals, we we count on those monies. Um so it wouldn't just be a one-off. It wouldn't just be a fix for next year. So uh we don't want to do that because like you said, then we'd be in the situation next year. So we want it to be sustainable. But one thing I think we can do better with our budget is just diversify um diversify the budget and use some um some positions for where they can really be earmarked and tagged to be. I think we can do that better. So So yeah, it'd be more

176than a one year be sustainable. Okay. Um energy savings. Um my question was just how did you calculate the 25,000? Yeah, Bob, you want to speak to that? That was part of the energy conversation when we were looking for a very conservative number of savings. Go ahead, Bob. Madame Vice President, members of the board, uh, a couple of the energy savings, transportation due to electric buses, and I think that was fuel. Those are all under promise, overd deliver kind of ideas. We're trying to get to the basic what we can save but uh like the uh cost savings energy is what we can save on water and the conservation we can do with the water uh those kind of things that we're looking at inhouse uh along with very and uh AES defined is the

177company that's helping us with our utility management and we're working with them you know they've saved us some money right up front when we started with them but then APS raises their Great. So, the money savings is gone, but you can see where we're saving energy. We're not using as much energy. And so, that's what the savings is on those things where uh the buses is, you know, the APS tells me one thing. RWC tells me, you know, in the between and a couple of the other districts I've talked to, they they a lot of people haven't had it in service for a long enough time to tell me exactly what the exact savings are. I mean, uh, I know on the electric buses, the maintenance of them is supposed to save us a lot

178of money because there's, you know, there's no engine basically. There's no transmission, things like that that are serviceable on on the diesel engine. So, so we we just did a a best guess on these. Again, hopefully it's going to come in at more savings than what we put in there is is basically what we did. But this is a this is a different energy savings than verergy because you know the my understanding when the ver presentation happened is that it's basically a wash because of the payment. Correct. This is this is what we're doing inhouse with water and those kind of things. Okay. Okay. Yeah. We started it I don't know about a year ago. Uh you know we had air conditioners at schools turning on at 3:30. You know what I mean? And so

179simply having them turn on at 5:30 or 6 is just a you know significant savings. And so so we've been doing this for a while um in house with um I want to say air conditioning, water, electrical and water. Um I think those are the two main ones. Correct. Just to be more efficient on our on our on our bills, right? It's like running your dishwasher at peak times and those kind of things. We can be a lot smarter with how we're using our energy. Okay. Did you have anything to add? Oh, well, I maybe jumping forward, but you mentioned transportation, electric buses. Um, and you're right. I do think that these numbers are pretty conservative. I think we're going to find that we have much more cost savings down the road, hopefully. Uh, when

180we get into some of these things, uh, but there's so many different variables as well, right? You know, you look at electric buses, have we factored in the insurance costs because those are going to go up, right? because it's an electric bus, not a diesel bus. Uh there's many different factors that go into these things. So, um I appreciate you being, you know, conservative on the numbers just because then we're hopefully going to have much better savings in the future. Correct. Yes. M vice president. And again, it's when you're charging the buses. you know, if we try to miss the off peak hours for the electricity. Uh, in the future, we've talked with Bar, maybe we can add solar panels to the transportation yard to cover the buses, but also, you know, uh, storage batteries

181that will charge the batteries at night. So, uh, there's different things we can do in the future if, you know, things work out and we have additional chances to go for those kind of items, you know, and I I can understand those, you know, the trans going off of the transportation, you know, it's about $62,000, but I just want us to also realize that we're making a $500,000 payment, right? So I mean it is a savings but not exactly because we're paying you know a large payment that we weren't paying before for the electric. That is correct. The initial investment is a a bigger investment than if we would have bought 13 diesel buses but then we would have all the additional fuel costs and maintenance costs and that and those kind of things. Okay.

182I think we're fine with you know obviously saving. Um, can I ask real quick if you guys don't mind? Can you change that 1.9 to two the 1.9 million start to 2.3? Is the board okay with that? Of course. Yeah. Not 230. Thank you. on 17 that um is as we transition from the ASBA policy services to the trust model policy program kind of the conservative estimate of what can be saved every year up there that was number 17 I believe and I know we have kind of a timeline to try and get that work completed by June that we can talk about later in the in the meeting we're on chapter four as the board knows uh 18 was the communications director marketing budget Board member Schmidt made a good point. We still want

183to be able to market. Um, so we'll just have to consider is that a lower amount? Do we keep that amount? That's what was budgeted this year uh for the communications director, but we still want to have those efforts. We're going to redistribute those duties and make sure we can market our schools and our district. Is that how much was spent on the marketing budget? This Do we know what was actually spent for marketing? Do you know? I don't Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head um if that if that was spent, if there was more, if there was less. Okay. Because I think I I think we should address that. Um but it would help to know how much was actually spent this year, how much marketing was done, and then

184to be able to come up with a realistic amount because we don't want to say, "Oh, we're going to spend $5,000 and that's not realistic at all." Um 30,000 seems like a lot to me. Like I feel like we should be able to be more frugal than that. But yeah, we can do some work on that and see what those see what those costs are. It's certainly not the marketing budget of a charter school, but uh they market really well. I mean, it's at least 15 because that's how much the um advertisement on the back of those magazines. So, you know, in a different board update, it was 5,000 in a voucher and it was for three months. So, you know, I'm going to say it's at least 15. Yeah, we can we can dig

185in and we can bring that. Um, uh, 19 and 20 are district memberships, district consulting fees. And we just I just we listed a few of those just as examples. It doesn't necessarily mean they're a keep or reduce, but just and I and I think in the questions, and I apologize the questions took us a little long today to get them to you guys, but we put some links. We put a very conservative number that we think we could reduce those memberships and consulting fees by $40,000 each. And I think that's very conservative. I think it can be a lot higher. um just kind of thumbming through it, spending a little time on them today. I was personally getting up to 1, 110, 120. So I think that 40 number is pretty conservative. My recommendation

186would be for the board to allow staff to look at that and come up have the board maybe give us a target number. Can you get to 50? Because, you know, we already approved uh principles and ASA at this last meeting. But I think that there's I think that there's money to be saved there. But just know that 40,000 was real conservative and I think we could get to more for the memberships or for the consulting fees. Um for for the memberships for sure uh for sure a lot more and then the consulting fees will be close but I think the memberships if I'm looking at the sheets right. Uh but yeah like I said I was doing a little math thinking about what potentially gets lost if we're not a member of the Chamber

187of Commerce or this or that. We don't have the demographic study done every year from applied economics, which is more expensive. We don't have to do that every year. Um, you know, uh, guest speakers coming in at the rally, you know, there's a lot of things we can do, but I I guess what I'm saying is that 40,000 number, I'm pretty confident it can be higher. I'm pretty sure we get to 50 or 60. Uh, between both of those, we can get higher than 80,000. So, in the in the questions from today, you know, it looks like we spent $212,000 on consulting this past year. Um, so is there a way to get that number and what we're saving higher? Because that seems like a lot of consulting to me personally. I don't know what

188it is in prior fiscal years. So, you know, I can't speak to that. Yeah, we can look at that. that I know a big part of that is is payroll. Um, you know, when we had our our payroll people leave and we've been uh having to consult and pay for that. So, there was a big ticket item there. But I think so I think so definitely we can we can get higher on that consulting and memberships. Um, and you know, we will if we have a board meeting on Wednesday night where we can approve contracts, we're going to bring the proposal for payroll to bring that way down because we've had to outsource our payroll because of what's happened since uh December November. I believe so. Um, so we're going to bring a a proposition,

189I'm sorry, we're going to bring an idea that will float to the board that can save us money, help us be more effective, and bring down our cost and in and in our consulting fee bring that down as well drastically. So, I just want to clarify that we're not getting rid of like all consulting because like Gallagher for the health benefits, I think is is pretty important. I know we did lock into a lot of two-year rates, uh, you know, for this fiscal year and fiscal year 26. Um, but same thing with applied economics, we want to make sure that, you know, I agree. I I think we'd go through a prioritization and uh just say what can we what can we live without? And again, as we've talked about with everything, if we get

190in the next couple years, we get to a good carryover balance, we continue to grow, positions could be restored, memberships could be restored. But but yeah, I think we just prioritize what are the memberships and the consulting fee. And then like I said, I think we can get a lot higher than 80,000 on that. Okay, I think we're good. What's that, Brian? Member Sansion, what did you Okay. experience and and Crystal on the consulting membership maybe put a little asterisk or something so we'll we'll drill down into that too because again these very conservative. Uh Juicebox, our new web page. Um we're looking to back off of that. Um there have been things that have paid been paid for already, but looking at Lane coming on talking to our legal to maintain our current web

191page, which I believe is eight or $9,000 a year, a maintenance fee, and then back off of uh Juicebox can save us money. We can still maximize our current web page. I think there's a lot we can do to make it a lot better. I I do think it's not the best, but but I think that's an area that we can easily back off on. I know one of the board members also brought that up, but we'll have we'll probably have more details for the board as we talk with legal about kind of severing with Juicebox, but that would be one of admin's recommendations to the board would be to remove that cost. Can I just ask what we already paid for because the voucher was for $25,000. Yeah. So, let's see. Is Lane is

192Lane around? Lane, you want to come up? We'll see if we can. And Lane just started a couple weeks ago, so Oh, and Megan has info, too. Okay. Yeah. Madame Vice President, members of the board, um, Juice Box. Oh, Megan's got the numbers here. Um, Juice Box, we paid $24,000, $24,500, I believe. And that payment was divided up into five equal payments. Um, and it would be for website design, some logo design, an intraeb. Sorry, excuse me. Sorry. So, we would still need to make four more payments of $25,000 annually. Each year is $100,000. I'm I'm sorry. I'm not following. No. No. 24,500 per year. Okay. But so we paid that for this year, but we're not utilizing the website yet. That's correct. So they're they're doing the design portion. They're working on logos and

193things of that nature. So we would look to back out of that and see what kind of uh how we could sever that agreement and just maintain our current web page of where we are. Okay. Um, I went back and listened to the meeting where we had Juicebox and and I apologize because Derek was here and you know you weren't. Um, but they said that to stay with our current website it would be 20,000 or 40,000 or 60 or 80. So I'm where is the 8,000 coming from? I you know again I just want us to be factual. Absolutely. Absolutely. So in that particular oh madam vice president members of the board in that particular situation um they had quoted frontline is the company or final site final site I can speak um so when

194Juicebox did their presentation they got that number for their savings because Final Site quoted us to revamp our website and do the same things that we were asking Juicebox to do. They quoted us $40,000 and another company, Parent Square, quoted us $41,100 to do the things we're asking Juicebox to do. So that's where those numbers came into play. So the 8,000 is what we pay Final Site currently for the website maintenance right now. Okay. So to make improve, sorry, to make improvements, it would cost us $40,000. Okay. So, because we already paid Juicebox $25,000, which I assume is for the design, do they have a a payment to just maintain the site or is that 25,000? Because you said like final site, they wouldn't have to design it, right? Because we'll just stay with what

195we have. But if we already paid Juicebox $25,000 to design it, do they have a just a maintenance of the website? So, I guess your question is utilize uh Juicebox's design services and have it hosted or maintained by another company. I don't believe that's a possibility. Okay. But to host it and maintain it is $25,000 a year for Juicebox. Um yes, ma'am. To all the services they include, they annualize a cost. And so for the next four years, we signed a contract to pay them $25,000 per year for those services. Okay. But we're not sure that we can get out of it at this point. Correct. There lane's had a few initial conversations. Uh but yeah, we haven't dug in with legal to quite look at all the wording and all that, but uh but

196the conversations have been okay. They've been the few that you've had. Yeah, the conversations have been promising. Um, we've talked about reducing the district's liability on this, maybe renegotiating the the the contract. Um, we need to send the service agreement and talk about the, you know, what we can do with it. Okay. Depending on the board's will. Yeah. I mean, my concern with leaving it in here, you know, as a savings is we don't we can't count on it. Just remove it. Um, we could Yeah, we could remove it. We could until we get a better answer. Yeah, that and that'll give us I just I again I just don't want to put us in a position where we're estimating wrong as much as Absolutely. We want to have a high confidence level. So, we

197can we can remove that. Okay. So, the Lumis Armored Car Service and I'll let Crystal speak to that. That started this year. We think we if that's something that we want to maintain and the board is okay with that that we can fund it out of a different fund um we can kind of talk about the importance of cash handling and having clean audits and um you know picking up money from the sites and those kind of things. So Crystal you want to um so this kind of started this school year to address some of the audit issues that we've had over multiple fiscal years um over cash handling. Uh it was to bring currently we have Lumis going to each school site picking up once a week and taking all deposits to the bank.

198Prior to this year everything had to come to the district office using our own mail couriers and then a district office employee had to um prepare the deposit as one big bulk deposit and take it to the bank themselves. So in order to eliminate a lot of the security risk that's why we looked into Lumis. Um, so the options are move that fee to another fund altogether. So we could split something between indirect costs and even food service because some of the money goes through the cafeteria so it can be charged to their fund as well. Um, or go back to the way we were doing it and eliminated altogether. Can I just ask one question? Um, have you seen a difference in the audit um, this year with do you know doing it with

199a service? We haven't been audited yet since we started the service. So that'll be our audit for next year. Okay, Mr. Ken. Yeah, thank you. No, I I you know, initially when you look at this, it's like, well, why do we need that? But I I do remember seeing the audits where they were, this was one of the areas, the cash handling, there's so much room for potential fraud. There's so much room for, you know, liabilities, as you said. Um, and this was one of the recommendations to to reduce those. Um, and so I I do think it needs to stay. I I do agree. It would be better if it came out of a different fund, though. Mm. Um, yeah, I would be fine with it coming from different funding and figuring out how

200to pay for that in a different way. Um, I mean, personally, the idea of district employees having to carry cash to the bank just does not feel good. There's just so many things that could go wrong there. And, you know, um, so having it handled by someone else seems like the safest possibility as well. Um, I wouldn't want to be the employee who was tasked with having to do that. So, I wouldn't want to put that on someone. if we could figure out a way to pay for that um in a different way or do we need them to come once a week? Could they come once every other week? Would that reduce our cost? I don't know if that matters, but um just all the things to look at. Yes. Um we have a

201deadline of when cash comes into a school, how quickly that has to get to the bank. So that's five business days. That's why we decided on once a week. That's the bare minimum we could do. Um another thing we've looked at is maybe going back to consolidating stops, but we'd still have some money being transported to another site so they could pick up, you know, say two or three sites at one location. Thank you, Mr. Spenc. Uh, I personally don't have a problem with getting rid of the service. I know if this is the first year we have it, we don't even know if it's beneficial to us yet. Uh, and I know a lot of schools don't use services. I personally know that. um that the staff does take the money in, but it

202is a safety concern to people. I understand that too. So, I'm okay with reallocating it to a different fund, but also not opposed to totally eliminating it either. I'm I'm with Mr. I I would be in favor of eliminating it. I just think some of these other funds we could be depleting them. I have not seen the audit um where this was a concern. So, you know, I too would kind of like to see did we solve the problem, you know, with this service because if we didn't, then we might as well go back. So, um I'd kind of prefer to get rid of it, but you know, I'll go with the board's majority to move it if that's, you know, the consensus of the board. Would you be okay with paying for it through

203a different fund for now and then when we get the audit report seeing if this actually helped um and then at that time we can look at eliminating it if we need. Do we sign a contract with this company? It's an annual thing so we can always adjust but if we start for next year then we have to go through with it. Um, we'd have to look at our contract if we're locked in or we can make changes throughout the year. I believe we can make changes. Okay. So, the audit show up before the contract has to be renewed, right? Yes. Yeah. We'd have to start it for the new year if we want to keep seeing if it's effective. I can say that it is effective for getting things to the bank on time.

204That was one of our biggest issues. Um, because there was just so much it was going through a lot of hands, it takes longer. So, that's definitely been helping. Um the other part of it is our recent auditors, the performance review that we had. Um their biggest issue was the security of it. Um so that is addressed automatically just by having it. But we'd have to see audits if we'd get zero findings and our bank deposits being late or maybe less findings in bank deposits being late. We'd have to see next next year. I'm okay, you know, if we want to keep it and move it to a different fund, but I definitely think we need to move it to a different fund. Um, but I'd really like the board to revisit it, you know,

205in the future. Okay, I'm going to move it up and then I can talk about line item number 24. So that is um using some prepaid money that we have sitting sitting in an account to pay for a portion of the district insurance. Um that's our property vehicle liability insurance. So we have a prepaid account with that company and they've just been holding a little bit of a balance in there for us. It's gotten up pretty high. Um so we're pretty comfortable that if we used a h 100,000 out of that prepaid account, it wouldn't put us too low. Um, but it would help with the invoice that's going to be coming in mid July. But this would potentially be a one time thing. This would be a onetime thing. We couldn't do that again

206without going too low in that prepaid account. I mean, again, I caution the board to do something that's a one-time fix for a whole, you know, fiscal year. And $100,000 is quite a bit. It's not just the $20,000 fix, you know, we're talking about a large, you know, the director salary. Um, so while I think it's great, I just am concerned for the future. You know, what are we going to cut next year or uh the increase the fees? That was a idea that came out out of the community forum which was a a really good idea and uh we need to have a better system to collect the fees. I want to talk about the fees. Well, oh, sorry. We haven't finished talking about what we want to do with the use prepaid. Are

207we going to say yes, make it yellow? Oh, yeah. Sorry. 22. I mean, what's everybody's feeling about it being a one-time issue? Uh, personally, I I you know, it kind of stinks that it's a onetime issue, but in order to do, you know, I I don't want to take a chainsaw to everything. If we can use this to soften the blow on other areas, I would rather do that. And then obviously, we already have a plan in place that the board's going to be updated monthly, you know, assuming, you know, what you gave us, Mr. Hicks, uh, moves forward, that will be updated monthly. We can keep an eye on things um if we have to adjust, but I think that this will help soften the blow on what we have to do tonight, the

208cuts that we have to do tonight. Do do you have any thoughts about Sorry, I'm No, I'm good right now. I totally lost my train of thought. So, Mr. I I agree. We need to caution for the one times, but I think we need to do it and just pay attention to it. I I mean I think we need to do it, but you know it we have to think that it's a position, you know, a large position for next year. Um I do want to talk about the fees uh because I just want to provide some history uh and I'm pretty sure Mr. Kenyon was on the board or close, but we we raised the fees um in I wrote it down. Um in 2022, we raised the athletic fees from $25 to $50

209when the override um had not passed yet. It passed in November of 2022 and we and the board never changed that. They kept the fees um you know, higher. And so, you know, my concern is um have we really dialed into, you know, how much are the referees or the umpires, how much, you know, you know, the stipens, like have we figured out what the actual cost of the program is? Because there's very specific state statute even about athletic fees that we cannot exceed the program cost. So my concern with this is that if we haven't done you know the findings the the work to know if we can do it you know are are our fees equaling what the cost of the programs are. We are really limited for at least athletic fees by

210state statute. Um and then for the for the preschool the history also is that um when we started the preschool um for fiscal year 23 was the first year of inclusion preschool or tuitionbased um it was 275 a month and then in May of 2024 we raised it to 300 a month. So we did also just make some increases. So, you know, my same question for preschool would be um are we paying for the half time, you know, the the half portion of the inclusion teachers? Like, have we factored out what that cost is? How many kids we are putting in the preschool? You know, those are my personal concerns about the fees. So, I guess my question is, have we worked out those specific things? If the board was interested in increasing the fees,

211we would we would bring that and work that out. I do know from conversations with Tara, I know we um are pretty much a great deal in the West Valley, probably the best deal for tuition based preschool where where we could get a lot more uh still be a great deal for a family but not be bottom of the barrel. But we haven't done the work like you said to talk about what does it pay for, what does it cover, is it covering our cost. Um however this idea was brought up in the community forum. So we explored it a little bit but not not in detail to say is there savings there if we do a better job of collecting these fees which we need to do a better job of and then is

212there can we still be a great deal for families athletics and with preschool still be you know in the lower part of the market. Are we leaving money on the table? We don't want to put this on the backs of people but we can definitely dive in more to see you know are we covering our costs with these programs. um or what else are are we missing out on with referees and sports and things like that. So, but we do know we need to do a better job of collecting our fees specifically athletically. We want our kids to have the opportunity um uh and and there's opportunities to be scholarship to play a sport, but we want our schools to do a better job and have a system of collecting and tracking um when kids

213play a sport. $50 pretty smoking deal for for two months and you get the uniform and games and those kind of things. And so I I do think we can do work in there. So um personally I'm okay with leaving it on here. The $10,000 that seems like a pretty conservative number in my opinion. uh you know looking at athletics and and and preschool uh especially with well you know my kids are athletes I they're always in in sports here and uh you know it as a parent if I want my kids to be involved I got to pay a little bit and you're right this is much cheaper than any district I've ever been in uh when it comes to sports fees and athletics Um, so I think I'm okay leaving it here because

214the number is only 10,000. I think it's actually going to be more savings than that when when it comes down to it. Uh, again, I agree, Miss Zimmerman, that that uh administration needs to dive into it, make sure we're not violating any, you know, statutes or anything. Um, but I do think that we're pretty low when it comes to our fees at this moment. Miss Schmidt, I would be okay with leaving it here um with the understanding that you're going to do the deep dive, making sure that we're um in line with state statutes and that um you know, we're not overcharging for anything or um but also you know coming up with a way if if you said that the schools are not doing a good job of actually in collecting the fees. That's

215probably a great place to start. Um, but yeah, so I'm okay with leaving it as long as there's like the asterct, you know, we're going to dig into it and and come back with those actual numbers so that we we can be sure that we're not um violating any statutes. Mr. Shenzone, I'm good. Um, yeah, I would, um, you know, I would have a hard time personally raising the fees for athletics, but, um, you know, I I want to see if we're breaking even because I I do think we should come close. And for preschool, I think we should break even. The tuition students should be paying for the other half of that inclusion teacher. So, I would just like to see the numbers. Um, I am more of a conservative and would rather not

216leave the number if we don't know it, but I'm okay for right now because it is a smaller number. But, you know, it does make me a little nervous. Becky, did you want to speak? So, do you what do you want to make that yellow? What do you want to do? No, it can be. I I think we're okay with it green. Oh, yellow. Green. Yeah. Uh, the one time purchase. Oh, yes. I I apologize. I Yes, I'm fine with it being yellow. Sorry. Okay, Becky, maybe you could speak to the onetime purchase reduction. I mean, what what you were looking at when you saw those, we kind of just put that title on there, but when you were going through the books, um, that we had the 50,000 onetime purchase reduction things that were

217out of M. I know I'm putting you on the spot, but we were trying to find a title of what to call those things. Crystal, you remember? I know some of it was some special onetime maintenance projects. You say that again. Sorry. I'm sorry. Uh I know a portion of that was some special onetime maintenance projects. Um and like Bob had mentioned earlier, there's a lot of things like with bringing grounds on board that this year we had to buy that piece of equipment, but that's not something we would ever have to buy at least, you know, for 10 or 15 years. So some of that was was that money. But I can't think of a specific example off the top of my head. So, one one concern I have with that is like it's

218so hard to pinpoint even a conversation here that how are we going to say we're going to be able to save $50,000 if we're not even sure what it is and next year we might have some random firsttime purchases also. So, I kind of don't want to say that we're going to be able to save $50,000 and we're not even sure what we're talking about. I would have the same concern. Yeah, we can we can move that. And like even like you said, member Sansion and Vice President Zimmerman at the beginning, onetime purchases do come up for things, right? So, it is it is hard to predict that. And I'm I'm sorry I'm short on the memory. I know it was a lot of different little things that we were trying to throw in there

219and find a title for um the shared instructional coach. Um, so that would be at Loretta Zumbro and at Liberty because of their size because they'd be a lot a lot smaller than another school. Uh, kind of the recommendation would there would be to have them have a 0.5 until those schools continue to grow into having a full-time. So, as opposed to adding another FTE for instructional coach unless the board board so desired, um, that we could potentially split that until those schools continue to grow. Uh it's an important job. We know it is. Um but again, that's something that the board could make that a 1.0 if you'd like. But again, we have a moving target with Loretta Zumbra. We don't know how big that school will start off as um you know, as

220we open the doors and then Liberty is going to be small. We know for the next couple years till that development really kicks in like Dr. Slo has kind of talked to us about. My question with the Sorry, I just had a question. Is with the Are are you accounting for that 100,000 as part of the incumbrances that we thought we were going to have for Loretta Zumbro? Like Dne had mentioned, you know, that that he had set aside like $500,000. Is is that is that 100,000 part of that? Because it's not really a savings because Liberty already has one. Yeah, I think it was different. I think when Dne was talking about the 500,000, that was a pretty conservative number for those kind of four positions I was telling you about. And they may

221not even be that high, but I think these were separate because we had started this worksheet with Dne before he left. So, is it really a $100,000 savings then? Because Liberty already has one. So, well, if we hired another if we hired another, like if they both went 1.0 you know, and we hired another instructional coach. That person's salary and benefits, we just estimated up to close to, you know, benefits are 21% of the salary. Okay. But is was it in part adding one for Loretta? Was it part of the incumbrances that you planned for fiscal year 26 to consider it a savings? Um, I you know, I I I don't want to get I I don't am I not Can somebody help me out? I don't want to misspeak. I'm trying to get a

222good handle on um Madame Vice President, members of the board, I don't think we know. Uh there's lots of spreadsheets and lots of things that multiple people have been touching and so we can't say with complete certainty. Okay. So, that makes me incredibly nervous then because that's a large number that we leave there in hopes, you know what I mean? If we don't know Oh, so sorry. I think Dean did put that in there as a plan of savings. I That's just from my last conversation with him that it would be planned to share it. So we that would be a savings because we wouldn't have to hire one for Loretta Zumbro. Just from my last conversation with him. I guess we're trying to figure out is was that position at Loretta Zumbro part of

223the budget already. So, is it truly a savings or was it something we're thinking we're saving by combining, but we never actually thought we were going to fill that position at the red? So initially when this is from a conversation I had with Dne thought that would be one we would have to spend money on the principal the shared like they have at Liberty and Estrella the shared coach and AP which he budgeted about 100,000 the custodian and there was one more maybe office manager for that would be unique and if then he decided if we share with Liberty and Loretta then that would save us about a h 100red,000 was his thought that was just a conversation I remember having with him. So now we wouldn't have to do that. We could just share.

224So then that would save us money when this budget conversation came up. But in the 3.6 I think we'd have to go back to look at that that February 20th meeting in the incumbrances that got us to being, you know, over 3.6 is that 500,000 that he had said because I had had a conversation with him about Loretta as well. Um, I'm just trying to again I just we'll we'll let let us get back to you on that to Ken's point. Let's just make sure. There's conversations that have happened, but let's get back. Was it part of that encumbered I think he called it pre-enccumbered 500,000? I don't think it was, but we'll we'll go back and look. Um, Madame Vice President, members of the board, I would still the question is whether you not

225achieve 100,000 or not. I would not put this down. I would still have the conversation about is it okay that they share one and you are doing that. The question is whether or not that actually generates savings or not. So yeah, I see leaving it yellow but you need to come back. That's what I would do. Yes. Okay. But I'm not sure should it be in in the money because we can't necessarily count that it's a savings and Yeah. No, no, sorry. I I I think it is a savings if we are not having to hire a second, you know, an additional coach for Loretta Zumbro. Um, and I think that's where we're whether and administration can come back and and tell us what the plan was previously, but moving forward, we're saying we're not

226going to hire a another coach for Loretta Zumbro apart from the one that we have at Liberty. Does that make again budgeting expenditures, right? So budgeting wise, we have to research it to come back to see if it actually does. Okay. Do you move that one? Right, Crystal? That was one I think that came up. Okay, that one came up. Um, let's see. Where are we? Okay, so so Dreambox. So um some mixed opinions talking to the principles about Dreambox. Some that um I it wasn't real um affirmative or negative. It was kind of just mixed. However, when we did have the community meeting, it came up a couple times with a couple of the tables that there wasn't a real favorable view of Dreambox from some of the people in the room. But um

227so because of that and because it came out in Dr. Slot, we added it up here. I believe that 73,000 is a yearly annual renewal that we pay for it. Dreambox is a online math program uh that students can do from home and some of you know it because your kids do it and some of you might have feelings for it one way or another but but we put it up here because it came out of the community forum. Uh Mr. Kenyon. Yeah. I mean I'm it's one of those kind of luxury things that I I see. Um like you said, I've heard mixed reviews of it. My kids use it. They love it. they're always on it at home. I think it helps them learn at home, which is a great thing. However, I

228do think, you know, this isn't directly in the classroom. You know, this is it's one of those things where it's kind of a luxury thing. So, when we're looking at these hard hard issues, we we have to look at where we can cut and try to stay away from the classroom. So, I'm I'm okay with this coming off. I'm probably the one up here who knows the least about Dreambox. So, um, do we have any other alternatives that for math that they could use for like online math? I know my son's school uses for math. So, um, do we have two programs currently that if we're getting rid of Dreambox, there's still something else that they could be using? Um because I think I've heard that we do have for something, right? Just for very

229few. Um I think the gifted program uses it and then kids that age out of Dreambox that like master the eighth grade standards then if you know that allows them to keep going higher. Okay. But there is for lower grades, right? Do we have access to that or do we not have access to that with our I think it's only for the gifted. It's just the gifted that we pay for. Okay. I think it's available, but I think we only use it for Got it. for the gifted. Yeah. And then there could be free online. I don't know the answer to that question. I'd have to because I would, you know, I mean, I'm it's a great thing to use and if kids are using it, that would be another question. How often is it

230being used? Is it worth is it being utilized enough to to pay $73,000 a year for a subscription for it? like that does seem like a lot of money to me. I don't know what um the going rate is for that since I don't purchase them, but um you know, if we're seeing I'm seeing thumbs down from the the audience and um I think and and I think if it helps we can also bring try to bring some Dreambox reports to look at usage rates. Again, this is people's kind of opinion that we've heard. And I I you know, I would agree that it's sort of like a luxury item kind of I would rather keep teachers, right? $73,000 if we're looking at that. That's almost two other positions somewhere else potentially. Um and you

231know, sometimes that's exactly what you have to look at. we did in my my other life. You know, we were paying $120,000 for a subscription for something like this and we cut it to have a position so somebody's job didn't get eliminated. Those are the kinds of things we're talking about. So, um I would lean for keeping humans and getting rid of uh a subscription. Um uh Mr. I am in favor of getting rid of Dreambox. uh as a parent that caused so much frustration to my child. I don't think it's a good program. It it it Yeah, it's frustrating. I If you get the answer wrong, it just tells you you're wrong and the kid has to start over like it doesn't teach them what they did wrong. It's It's frustrating. I'm all in

232favor of getting rid of it. Um uh my children have a very similar experience to Mr. Cincerone's. Um my concern is is should we be eliminating uh not necessarily the program but the instructional support because I do think that teachers use it in the classroom. I do think that they are for 100% junior high students are definitely doing dream box in their classes at least at in my particular like uh school you know where my children attend. So, I guess I shouldn't speak for everybody, but it does allow um teachers to assign standards and things like that. I do think I is a great program and my son particularly enjoys it way more than Dreambox for the reasons that Mr. Serenion mentioned that it explains what you do wrong. But from my understanding, is more

233expensive. Um, so I also would be in support of removing it. Um, more along the lines of human versus, you know, a program. But, you know, of course my concern is, you know, the the board has talked about, you know, proficiencies and achievement and, you know, is that supporting that? You know, that's where my concern is. Should we really be replacing it with a more valuable program? But I think in the situation we're in, it probably needs to be a reduction at this point. Are you okay with that, Mr. Kenyon? Because I think you Okay. So, in a conversation with the teacher advisory group and also with some of our principles, we were trying to identify was there any curriculum materials, supplementary materials that are being used that were not getting a bang from the

234buck from the principles and some of the teachers. And so, these were three programs that came up. define learning is a u I believe it's a online career exploration type software that's specific to blue horizons uh it's what's that okay their career and technical education yeah it's very specific to blue horizons to their signature program the defined learning explore learning I believe was it's a science supplementary one um is the gizmos uh that we didn't hear a lot of positive from the teacher group or the principal group and then the HMA education that is the Sax and math that we were considering to have at Loretta Zumbro the traditional math curriculum. So we paused that process uh we paused the process just to put that up with everything happening with the budget. So that 38,000

235is kind of a conservative number but those were three of the kind of curriculums that we just identified that we might be able to have some savings on. There was, you know, you had Achieve 3000 that had some pretty strong positive opinions and other things that came out, but these were ones that didn't didn't seem like there was a lot of love loss from the teachers and the principles when we we talked about with them. And then with regards to the traditional math, you know, um we could always re-evaluate that in the future. We could always just look at that um continue our current math um our illustrative open up math over at Loretta Zumbro. And just like I said, we paused the process of looking at that um just with everything happening with the

236budget. So those were three of the curriculum materials reduction. I think we may have a we may even have a list of other curriculum materials. Um I think that Crystal added up like all the supplementary curriculum materials for med services that we pay for annual. Some of them are like a two or threeyear thing. So when we we uh we renewed like achieve 3000 um we we renewed it I believe for three years and we're going into year two. Is that right, Crystal? Achieve 3000 we have till June 30th, 2027 and Reading Horizons we have until June 30th, 2029. So, we've prepaid on those and we got great deals by doing that. And I will say uh I will say Reading Horizons is a very at least with the groups we talked to a very

237valuable program to our teachers, you know, K2, K3 and our principles. So they really spoke highly about reading horizons and I think it's our second year and people are showing a lot more fidelity to it. That's kind of our phonics based program. So that was definitely one that was a resounding we love reading horizons. So that was one that came loud and clear. U Mr. Tenyan. Yeah. Thank you for um going to the teachers, going to those who utilize these curriculums and and discussing this with them because um you know I I want to give them as much support as possible, but if these are ones that they're saying aren't aren't necessarily working, we can put a pause on it, then I say let's do it. And then if you can find more, you know,

238that list continues to grow. Um, you know, sometimes we just we want so many materials at our hands and then we don't know which one to use, you know, and just things that we pay for just sit and collect dust. So, um, no, I I appreciate this and and I'm okay with these at this moment. Miss Schmidt, um, I agree with Mr. Kenyon. if we have if the teachers and the principles are saying these are not being utilized or you know they're not the greatest programs and that's who I'm going to have to trust because they're the ones using them. So, and then continuing to look through and seeing if there's other things that we're just not utilizing. Um, you know, if we're playing a lot for them and only one teacher is using it,

239it's probably not worth what we're paying for it. Um, so I I'm good with leaving these. Mr. Shenzion, I agree. Okay. Um, my only question was for the defined learning for the Blue Horizon's um, signature program. Do they have any other supports? Because certainly we're providing signature program supports to other campuses. I just want to be careful that we're not removing their only support for their signature program. Let me look into that. I know this was Mr. Naminsky was part of this conversation. Okay. But I don't want to make that assumption. I assume there's something else, but let me let me find out if there was something else. Okay. Um, so I'm okay right now, but I would just um like that if there are other things we're going to discontinue that you bring it

240to the board prior to doing that. Understood. Okay. And so now we're to kind of the attrition positions that the board started to discuss a little earlier and Dr. Mohorn was clarifying about some of our attrition. So, positions we haven't been able to fill or or positions that potentially we've contracted out this this year. There's and I apologize that there was a lot of confusion initially when we're looking at like counselor attrition. That's not to say instructional coaches is the number one priority. That's to say that there's one potential position that's not filled next year that could be a reduction. And then you have psychologist and counselors there. So, uh th those are some uh those are some big ticket items as you can see. And so we can kind of discuss that a little

241more now. Um could could we just move the step Okay. Could we just move that step increase is not given up because we've all agreed to that and that will Yeah. Where is that? Okay. 35. Thank you. Thank you. And so where are we at Crystal? Okay. Okay, we're right around a million. Okay, so um so go. Okay, so g 31, 32, and 33. May I jump in real quick? I just want to say one thing about step increases just for hourly staff. If we don't, we may run into in January um when the m the minimum wage we might be in trouble by not meeting based the minimum wage for our hourly staff if we don't do step increases. So just something to keep in mind just with our hourly staff. Could you we

242might be in Could you bring back what that would be for that particular um employee group for us? Yeah, just something to think about. We might be in trouble for that one. Just sorry. The that's not going to help. Step increases won't help with the minimum wage. That'll be if we don't add any money to the hourly support staff wage schedule this year. That in January of 2026, we might be below the minimum wage. So, we'll have to do an increase at that point. Um, the only other thing I would love to bring back the hourly support staff numbers just to for consideration because they're a very smallly paid the you know our lowest paid employee group to not give them those will be hurting them greatly. Yeah. Could I could we bring that back

243just for us to see um especially the minimum wage, you know, because if we're not meeting that, we're going to have to meet that. So, we need to factor that in. Okay. Okay. So, um let's talk about this is where you know it's going to get more difficult because these are directly affecting our kids. So, let's talk about counselors. So, when it says attrition, how many counselors do we currently have in you know, do we have one per school? No. Do you want to grab the mic Dr. Mohorn? No, that's okay. We want to make sure we have the accurate numbers that are our employees. We have four that are contracted employees. We have two. Okay. So, did we only plan to have six this year? Oh, did we plan to have seven? We did

244plan to have seven. We wanted to have seven. We could not find seven. So, West Star and Australia are currently sharing one. Okay. But theirs is paid through a a safety grant. A school safety grant. Okay. So if we were to not fill three of them, that wouldn't that would be taking them mainly away from our title one schools. Correct. Because if Estrellas and Wesars are paid by a safety grant, they're not being paid out of M for this year. They wouldn't be paid out of M for fiscal year 26. For right for fiscal year 26 would be the only year they wouldn't be paid out of M. for Australian Westar only, but after that then they would be paid out of EMO just one year, right? But it seems like it wouldn't make sense

245not to take advantage of the safety grant while we have it if we can find somebody. We weren't able to. Sure. Yeah, that's but you know my concern is if we're getting rid of three. So that's leaving uh two basically for No, we would we would we would still continue to have our four. We just wouldn't be paying for the contracted positions any longer. Correct. Correct. Okay. But the the ones at Estraa and Westar can only service those particular schools because of the grant. Correct. Correct. Okay. So then we're sharing two for five schools. Right now we have four. We have four that are ours currently. Okay. Um just to clarify, I think this is where the confusion is coming in. So we currently have four. Yes. We have one that is shared between Westar

246and Australia. That is one of the four that we're discussing. No. So that is separate. That's separate. So we have four that are ours and we have two more that are contracted. Two additional that are contracted. One at Blue Horizons by himself and one that is shared between West and Estraa. Okay. So the one between Wester and Australia is one of the contractors. Correct. Okay. And then we have four that are employed through the district. Correct. So we're we're still going to keep those four. We are still keeping those four. We plan on doing nothing with those four. The two that are contracted, their contract automatically ends at the end of the year. Okay. And then but for the Wester and Estraa one, because it's paid through another fund, if we can find a person

247to fill it, we would still fill that. That's that's our goal. That's our goal. That's always our goal is to fill that with somebody with the caveat knowing that it would only be for a year that it would be paid for out of the grant. Okay. So, that person we would technically hire for one year knowing that it's only we have one year of grant funding. Okay. So, when we're talking about the savings though, like are we accounting for the grant money? Because two of those really are coming from Westar and Australia because you couldn't fill one. So, is it really a savings to M because they're being grant funded? Not technically if we those two. Not technically for this for the for the fiscal year 26. Not for the next fiscal year 26. Blue

248horizon. Yes, for sure. Right. So, if if we do the attrition, it's not it's that's not really the savings then because two of the three are being grant funded. They they should be grant funded if we would find somebody. They should be grant funded. Well, but it's not a savings to savings to M. If they're funded by the grant anymore, right? How are we pay? So, what are we paying the contractors at current? Currently, how are we paying? Oh, okay. So, we're currently paying the contracted that. Thank you for the contracted person at Estraa and M. Yes. Oh, yeah. So it would be because they won't hire Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't think because you can't use the grant money to pay for a contractor. No. So that's that's the issue. Unfortunately. Yeah. Okay. I

249mean that all makes that makes sense. When the school safety grant adjusted years ago away from SRO's and gave you the option for social workers and counselors, a lot of districts ran into this not being able to find those positions which was a challenge. So, we're basing the savings off of this year because right now none of it's being grant funded. No. No. Okay. I'm just I just want to make sure that we're 100%. Um because we could technically have to pay for it next year if you wanted to have counselors. It would have to be M again. Yeah. So it could be it would be a savings if you didn't have counselors in those because it's all coming out of M. So a model would look at a a shared counselor, right? A counselor

250that'd be shared at two schools. You know, might be Monday, Tuesday at one school, Wednesday, Thursday at another one. you know, if there was a crisis, they go over to the neighboring school or what have you, but it could set up like that um where a counselor shared between the principles. So, they still have someone on campus and they come up with that schedule. We don't make them drive, you know, every day to a different spot, but we just say or a week to week, how whatever the principles figure out. But it's been my experience that you come up with like a Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday model or something like that for continuity. That's kind of what I was thinking. But also, you know, with, you know, most of our schools having assistant principles now.

251Um, you know, that kind of should help with the counselor side of things. Um, when it comes to dealing with discipline, when it comes to dealing with, you know, getting the families involved, reaching out to parents, all that kind of stuff. Um, and so with the three positions for attrition, you know, really I I like what you said. Basically, I think we I know it's not popular opinion, at least in this room right now with, you know, kind of letting these go with attrition. Um, again, it's a hard thing. We have a budget we got to figure out. Um, and these are positions that we haven't been able to fill. We've been having to fill them with, well, two of the three, right? There's still one open position, right? Because there's seven. Um, and so,

252you know, if we can't find somebody to fill it and we've been making it work, then, you know, I think we just get a little more creative like Dr. Monroe was suggesting and, uh, and we go ahead and we do without it for the time being. we realize the savings and then if budget allows then we can look at increasing this next time. Well, two and two quick thoughts to uh there were some really good points made at the community forum. One was uh we have our SSOs for a year. It's not to say they have the same skill set as a counselor, but they but they do do fill a different need and again it's only for a year. And then it's also the second thing I would say it's also uh my understanding

253that uh Dr. Mahon I think the school safety grant is going to reopen. It reopens every three years and I think it's going to reopen next year and that's where again we can apply at least in the past you've been able to apply for funding for SRO SSO counselor social worker. So at that time we could evaluate and say hey does the board want to because we only have the SSOs for one year we think one school year at every school and uh but again that's another grant opportunity if we want to look at counselors or SSOs to continue or SRO but but that was an idea uh uh someone brought up at the community forum that I thought was really good about having that'll be a new feature on the campus that most campuses

254haven't been used to is that officer on campus having lunch with kids being out on duty you know building relationships, those kind of things. So, not the same as a counselor, but it does fill kind of fill a need in a way. Yeah. So, if we were able to hire for Estraa and Westar with the grant, then really we'd be sharing four with uh six six schools, but Loretta being very small, which again, we still haven't gotten to that discussion, but right, that's if we were able to hire for West Star and Australia, we'd be sharing six with eight schools. because we have four and then we have the other two. But can they go to other schools because they're grant No, you're right. My mistake. No, we'd be sharing four with We'd be sharing

255four with six schools, which is doable. Yeah. And I think we just be um really smart about where we put them in the greatest need, you know. I think I think I'd feel comfortable with this with the you know really big goal that we really tried to hire um being able to use the grant money for Estustrala and Westar and then you know I think that you probably could share Liberty and Loretta you know pretty easily. Mhm. Um, you know, again, it's it's not my first choice, but obviously, you know, a lot of what we're doing here is not my first choice. So, it's been really tough to to hire for Australia and Westar for some reason. Really, really tough. and especially with only having one year of the grant left and having to be

256really transparent with the candidates that this is one year and one year only that we have this you know I think in this particular position that it's you know it's not involving you know teaching of students and it's not uh tied to special ed like a psychologist like I would caution the district to to contract it you know um if we can't fill it then I I think unfortunately we have to kind of make do and because the contract I think is what's killing a lot of the budget just to clarify you want us to contract that. No okay that's what I want that's make sure that that's an accurate that's an accurate statement. No accurate statement. Okay. Okay. Psychologist. So Dr. Mohorn, you want to give us a a summary again? bring we've been

257talking about a lot of stuff. Give us another psychologist number what you met with Kay today and I know you've been looking at it. Okay. So after meeting with Kay, she said that we could here was her proposal that we could um make do with six sites and LBA and Australia could share. Westar and Liberty could share and then Freedom Rainbow Blue and Loretta Zumbro with the preschool would have their own. That was her proposal. Okay. So, how many do we currently How many did we budget for this fiscal year? So, what we had was 7.5 and she said we only need six. So, the attrition would be 1.5. 1.5. Yeah. Are we going to be able to hire a part-time psychologist? Like, she said we wouldn't need Oh, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And

258how many do we currently have? Sorry. 7.5. We h we currently have 7.5. Yep. No. Yeah. Yes. Yep. This is her writing. Yep. She even wrote it. I mean, are some of those contractors? Is that Yes. Oh, okay. you know, I I think we have to do it. Um, you know, again, I'm just going to vocalize my concern about meeting deadlines for special ed and and making sure that we are doing everything we can to test students that have gone through the CST process. Like, for me, it was really, as a special education mom, I was really hard to hear that somebody that went through the CST process last year is just now getting tested in the spring. Like for me that hurts my heart that that kid, you know, hasn't been getting potentially not

259getting the services they need because we just can't test them. Just we just don't have the the manpower. And so, you know, it's not going to get any better. Um and so you know I if Miss Ham is that what she's saying we can survive with you know but you know it's it's still you know high for me as a concern but I I agree we have to make a cut. So is there any other I apologize I keep stepping forward. Okay. Um, yeah, instructional coach. This is just the extra one at blue, right? I'm okay with that. Any thoughts on the instructional coach? Um, let's see. And then at the bottom there's another blue crystal. And then I I think the board has some other Oh, the reduction of the AD stipen. Do you

260want to speak to that one, Dr. Mohorn? Well, I think we need to finish talking about the reading interventionist. I mean, I think we need to discuss those other things, but I can we go back to the reading interventionist and maybe the current. Okay. So, remind us Stephanie on the reading interventionist. The Dr. Mohorn, how many numbers? We had 12 or so we budgeted for 12 12.5 12.5 we So, one we were never able to fill. One was moved out of the classroom right away into a position. So, it was never backfilled. Um, one resigned and one retired. So, right now we have 8.5 bodies in reading interventionist positions. Right. Currently, 8.5 people in those positions. And this is the one we were talking about earlier where if we wanted to get to 9.5, every

261school would at least have one full-time and we could still reduce by two 2.5 what do with our title schools having more but every school would at least have 1.0 instructional coach. I do know this is again all of these things are very important but a very important princip uh position for our principles for our teachers. Yeah, these are these are super critical for our kids. Um, however, again, it's one of those things. It's it's just hard. We're at that point where we got to make cuts and it's never easy. So, um, I'm okay if we have to I I don't want to I don't want to do all four. I don't want to use that. But what what would the board be willing to look at on this? Um, I would be willing to

262to go to what Miss Zimmerman said earlier and get back to where we were, which I think we came out to. I wrote down 10 FTE. Um, because I think that's what we decided we would need based on the extra time for the title one because Liberty on this paper at 9.5 only had one and I think they have to have 1.5. So I think we'd have to get 10 10. So we would save two two.5. There's be a proportional. Yeah. Yeah, that's what we had talked about. 2.5 because we have 12.5 right now. Okay. So that would be Crystal just updated that and you adjusted the number. Sorry, I turned my head for a second. Yeah. Okay. Now, we had permanent guest teachers. That was one that was discussed earlier that the board was

263for keeping. Uh, however, we have nine that were budgeted for. Only seven were filled, one at each school right now. But there was multiple board members who said they wanted to keep that. Do they want to keep the nine? Do we want to reduce? I just want to ask is the number for nine or for seven? The 326? And Malia reminded me last year that was reduced to seven just one at each building. Oh. So it's actually seven. Yeah. Oh. Okay. So is that number based on the seven then? Okay. Sorry. This worksheet's gone through a lot of iterations. Sorry. Yeah, I'm still wanting to save those as much as possible. That's kind of our lifeline when we have an emergency. So, um, one at each campus seems doable and reasonable for me. Other thoughts?

264Are we making that green? So that's not a reduction. Um, sorry. If it was going to be one at each campus, we would need eight. But, um, I don't know that I would assign one to Well, I I mean, I was just pointing out that there That's a good good point. But um I'm following it up with at this point when we need to make these cuts and we still have money to come out, you know, maybe if we want to keep the guest teacher, as was talked about earlier, maybe we do three or four that are districtwide and they go to the school that is most in need that day. Um, and because I'm I'm sure they're utilized, but do do we need one every day at every school? I'm not in the school.

265I couldn't actually answer that, but that's a large budget line. And so reducing it by half or down to three maybe is more appropriate at this point if we're reducing some of these other areas down as well. Um, that that's my thought. So I kind of the same question M I know was floated about having them at the district. Um you guys deal with the guest teacher way more than we do filling positions. Is that even feasible? Do we are they used every day at the schools as a need? I I think they're very important to the principles and the teachers. I think they would say yes. They're used every day. Um I I'm pretty confident that they would they would say that. Uh, could we go to a shared model where there's one for

266two sites? We could. We are counting on a larger pool of subs when we start. Um, is it called subsource? I don't remember what it's called. PSI. PSI. We are counting on a larger pool of subs. Do I think that's a magic wand to to wish away all of our sub issues? No. But I think it will definitely help. But again, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. We we could look at a model that's half and evaluate it as we go. Um, but I I think the principles and the staffs would say they're necessary and and some people have been at that campus a long time. So they they have a lot of roots and relationships there. So some of these people are very very valued. I think that's what they'd say. So

267So you're saying you would want seven. Is that what you're saying? Well, that would be one per site without Loretta Zumbro. And uh but to board member Schmidt's point, I mean, if you don't have a permanent sub position, you could always go back to being a sub or if you have the qualifications, you could become a classroom teacher. So, we could reduce and have a central program system for them to go to the site. But I do know that if the principles were sitting here, my guess is they would say that they're very, very valuable on each site. They would say that as much as this would be a big ticket, a good way for us to save a lot of money, I 100% know they would all say that they there's I can't tell

268you a permanent guest teacher that's not used every day. If so, it's very rare and few between few and far between that they're not used. My other question is where it says rolled over to M from Esser. So, is that really going to be a savings because was it on M this year? Yes. Yeah, it was M. Yeah, that should just be in parenthesis. Sorry, that was a reminder for us that we originally paid this out of ESR. Yeah, it was 100% out of Esser before and now this year it was absorbed into M. So, what I'm going to say is I know that principles really want this 100%. Um, I know that. Um, but I also have to think about the budget and when I look at the class coverage and where schools are

269I'm not going to earn any favors with certain principles right now but are schools that are not struggling with class coverage could they share one and schools because I don't know if you all looked at their report it came in in an update I don't know how many weeks ago don't quote me but you know there are some of our schools that are a lot of class coverage meaning they're splitting or all the time and So, I feel nervous uh removing that. I also have a hard time not being equitable, but I also part of equitability is giving people what they need. And so, if some of our schools are able to get subs easier 100%. Then maybe they don't need it. Um and although it doesn't look great on the surface, we have to

270make really hard decisions here. Um, so for me, um, Freedom, I made my notes. Yeah. Uh, you're right. Freedom and blue have our most northern schools, Freedom and Blue, have the hardest time the closer to the freeway or what have you. The schools that tend to be in Australia or closer to Australia, maybe because there's a population center there, I don't know, but they can fill it easier than Freedom and Blue. So, Mrs. Zimmerman's right on that. One of the reasons that we are doing ESI, we're really really hoping that it will help freedom in blue with subs and the sub pool and getting more subs over there. But I think if we were to reduce that, I would want us to give Freedom and Blue their own and then, you know, share maybe across

271the other, you know, not one but I I don't know how to get this number, but it is a large line item and I think to not reduce some of it. I just don't know what else we're going to add in there except not opening Loretta Zumbro, which would be about $500,000. So, if we want to talk about that and and servicing the children that we currently have, I I think it's I think it's at least worth a discussion tonight because if we didn't open it or we opened it differently, we opened it with preschool. We opened it with Sierra Schools who already has a principal and preschool has a coordinator. Could could we do that for a year or if we could do kindergarten? I'm not sure if the coordinator could overlook kindergarten or

272not, but with preschool, you're already going to have to have food service. So, you know what I mean? And that's supposed to pay for itself. I I don't know. I just don't know how we're going to I'm looking at this budget and it it's it's going to get really tricky. So, unless there are other um well, the one is up there that I wanted to add, but yes, there's there was one other thing. As for still atlet permanent guest teachers, um I I get what you're saying and especially with the you know the northern schools having the difficulty. Is there a way that we can keep the seven employed and kind of like was stated earlier, they can almost be like hot shot, right? If they know blue has an emergency, there's two, three teachers

273that called out, the seven are instead of them being dedicated to a campus. They're more that's their that's their home campus, but we have an emergency over here. Let's take a couple from schools that don't need them, send them over there, help kind of fill some of those immediate voids. Um, personally, I I think that that's a better way to go. you still hold on to those individuals like Dr. Monroe said are a lot of them have been in the community and in their in this district for a long time and they kind of know how things go. I I really like the sub pool we're looking at. The concern with that, you know, yes, I know some of our subs will be part of that pool, but it's also going to be subs coming

274from all over the place. So, they're not going to know our staff. They're not going to know our kids. They're not going to know our building layout. There's just so much going on. If we could hold on to these seven and utilize them better uh districtwide, I think that that's probably a better bet in my opinion. I got a question, too. Uh you don't want Yeah. So, our subs, like if we sub, how are the subs paid out of M? Yes. So, even if we got rid of four of the guest teachers and we fill it with four subs, it's not technically a savings because we still have to pay those subs. Also, I'm looking for Mohorn HR. Did you guys hear that question? Benefits. Yeah, because the permanent guest teachers paid a higher rate.

275I think I don't think it's that big of a savings. So, the permanent guest teachers get a higher daily rate. They also get insurance benefits. So, that costs us more. Um, and using ones from the pool would be more of an ondemand. So, if only one day out of the week it was needed, then we only pay that one day where the permanence we're paying all five days or however many days they're being used. I guess I'm confused. I thought we said we're using them every day. I thought we were using the guest teachers every day. So, they're Well, they're there, but they're there, but are they in a classroom every day? We'd have to evaluate, right? They do money functions throughout the throughout the campus if there isn't a classroom like needed. My thing

276is too is like kind of to Mr. Sion's point is can we ensure I think sometimes we save the guest teacher in case a sub doesn't get picked up. So then sometimes I think we're left with a sub with a permanent guest sub because every position was picked up. But to Mr. point. If we if the first line of defense is you have to use the permanent guest teacher first, the first person that's going to be out that day gets that assigned, I think that would eliminate I know that principles like to use them in different ways, but if we're talking about a cost savings, like I think I think that's kind of where it gets a little tricky. That's how they've been instructed to use them that they are supposed to assign them to

277the first opening on campus and then backfill them with the other guest teachers or reach out to other guest teachers. But the permanent guest teacher is supposed to be the first one assigned on the campus each day. We started the year with um reporting all the campuses reporting to us who was available if they weren't assigned. We never got a day that anybody wasn't assigned. So to try and manage that, you know, we've we kind of let that go to the wayside just because we were checking with all the campuses every day and they're like, "Oh, I haven't gotten to assign them to this yet or this person's out but they didn't put it in and I haven't gotten there yet." So there was a lot of busy work that we never were able to

278really send a permanent guest teacher to another campus. So I think a fix to that if that's going to go is like having them like I think you said couple is having them assigned to the district, not to schools, and then the district farms them out. But it's a, you know, it's a management piece. Yeah, for sure. Um, my my question is, you know, when you say that they need to be assigned first, but like let's say a teacher puts in their day and they have a sub they like, how how is that all managed? Because the then the principal isn't really involved, right? Like typically the office managers are the ones that oversee the guest teacher system. Um so they're supposed to report, you know, especially for future absences, they're not necessarily supposed the

279teachers are not supposed to reach out to the the guest teachers. They're it's supposed to kind of be through the office manager. Whether that always happens, I can't speak to that, but they're supposed to be managing that when a one comes in. If it's, you know, a sick day that's put out in three months, that permanent guest teacher should be assigned to that one. So, it's not available for anybody else to pick up. Okay. And just for clarification, in the subsystem, can teachers not request subs? Because I always thought that was I to my knowledge, we have that feature turned off. Oh, interesting. um they can put in they put in their absence but they can't assign or request a specific sub we have that feature turned off to Yes. Yes. So that's that was

280the way that the office managers could control assigning that permanent guest teacher and not having that person assigned. I think you know I think this is a really tricky one. So you know just to move the conversation can maybe we go back to these other things and we'll you know we'll keep going. Sure. Um, yeah. No, that I'm trying to I I'm just not sure if we're going to be able to agree completely right at this moment. Okay, let's go. I think we can get to some other numbers here. Yeah. Well, I know the board has some things to add on here as well, but Dr. Mohorn, did you want to talk about just the AD stipened idea? Dr. Mohorn, come on up. Why don't you stay up here so you're not coming up all

281the time? But uh so the idea um let me think here um uh would be to reduce the AD stipened at the schools that had an assistant principal and then to keep the AD stipened. Does that sound right? To keep the AD stipen at the smaller schools that only had the instructional coach for athletic coverage. Does that sound right? Does. Yep. And I think that this just like for a history uh you know frame of reference I think these came after we passed the override because extracurricular was tied into the override. So to just kind of alleviate you know our assistant principles uh just you know for frame of reference. I mean I'll go first. This stuff is not or do you want do you want to speak to it? No, I mean again it's

282one of those hard ones where I I don't want to touch it, but we kind of have to, you know, and it's it's not a huge line item, but it is something and uh it's it's important that we get get what we need. Um so I'm I'm at this point I'm okay with what we have presented here. I'm seeing nodding of heads. So, you know, I think we have to do it at this point. Okay. I think, you know, do you want to go back and talk about the green or do you guys want to put up some of your ideas? Yeah, just one one thing. I'm sorry. Uh, so but the the ad job we put on the assistant principal, right? They're not going to find some random person say you're the AD now.

283Um, no, it would be the assistant principal. I and I to be honest with you, I'm not really familiar in my career of schools that have an AP and also have an AD at like the K8 level. High school different, but but no, and you know, I don't get to every sporting event, but I try and get out and spray myself between all the schools and and go and support our kids and our athletes. And a lot of times I see the administration there anyways, you know, the principal and the assistant or the assistant principal is at a lot of the events, at least the ones I pop into. Yeah, they are. They're definitely All right. Can we go ahead and go back to the green uh at least uh I guess the permanent guest

284teacher is blue now. So um the you know these are the coordinators right besides the marketing budget these are um and I don't know I I want to say one last thing I think is me but the director of student services when you approve that position in was it February um it was approved for her to start March 24th was her start date so she actually starts in the morning but just for the rest of this year. Yeah. Oh yeah, she's actually for this year. Obviously administrators haven't been issued contracts for next year outside of principles. Yeah, outside of principles. So with what we have up here at the uh starting at the green director of student services, I I think it's an important position. I don't necessarily want to cut it, but I, you

285know, we're kind of at that point. If we were to eliminate director of student services, eliminate education services coordinator, that gets us to the number we're looking for, at least close. Um, and so I think with Miss Zimmerman, you know, you wanted to add the director of student services if we were going to have one of these ED services um, positions in there as well. Do you have a preference at this point, education services coordinator or assessment coordinator? Um, from looking at the job descriptions, um, I think I mean I should I should let you But I'm just going to answer Mr. Kenyon's question and then I'll I'll let you speak. Um I would prefer to keep the assessment coordinator is from looking at the job descriptions that but I certainly I I think that's

286fair. Uh and again I would we would plan on bringing some revised job descriptions to the board uh because we'd have to sift out duties. But I I agree the assessment coordinator is very important. All the all the positions are important, but I think the job descriptions would look a little different than they do now. So, we'd have to bring that to the board for approval. So, you could take three positions and make that two uh or two positions and make that one potentially there. And that that's at least savings on one uh coordinator position with benefits, 21% of salary benefits. Uh the the number 32, we'll do a little research on that and get back to you on that. Uh because member Schmidt was asking about kind of what we spent this year, what

287the budget was. Yeah. So I'm I'm okay with 29 and 30 then being the two that we look at savings on. Uh yeah, I I would feel comfortable with that being, you know, sort of the the compromise that we're coming to removing from both sides. Um but keeping the one the assessment coordinator position, Mr. Spency, I'm I'm good with 29 and 30 and keeping the assessment coordinator. Okay. So, and we still need the some of the board's thoughts. I know that you guys may have some thoughts of things to add on here. I just want to see where we end up. Yeah. Can you remove 31 offus? We're saying keep that, right? We also have the permanent guest. Oh, did we talk about class coverage? That one should be yellow, right? Didn't we say that?

288Oh, no, no, no. We We're keeping Oh, we're keeping Yeah, we're Oh, we're saving it. Sorry. Yeah, that's So, do you want to move that one down? It is. Oh, it is down there. Okay. So um you know I know we need to cut and just you know for frame just to kind of bring us back together is this is like the what we're getting to is the bare minimum. It's not providing us any buffer or carry forward. It gives us Ken I think it's 500,000 carryover approximately. Yeah we up oh we up the number. Okay. So that would be what? 900,000 carryover. Well, no, we changed the We reduced the ADM down to half. So the the 2.3 was the minimum we needed to get to because we reduced from 100 to 50. Correct.

289Which you said would give us about a 500,000 carryover if we got to that 2.3. So in order to give us more of a buffer, we need to reduce more. Get more kids. Well, that's what we're hoping, but that's why we estimate conservatively. Yeah. Capture more doubt so far. So, there there there were a few places the the subs the membership savings and the consulting savings where you're going to go back and look at those and see if you can save more because right now you're thinking that that's pretty conservative. Um, so if those were places where, you know, if we spent half on consulting next year that we did this year, it was 212 this year, I think you said, M Zimmerman. So if we spent a hundred, I mean, that's a pretty large

290savings that gets us closer. Um, so I think those are things that we'll need to see. Um, we're closer, but We would love to have more. I am with um Vice President Zimmerman on that. Um I can I just surface some other like ideas that I had? Well, one question I had is um Dr. Slope because he's grant funded and from my understanding we're not going to have that grant next year. Is that a true statement? I don't know that for sure. Dr. Mohorn, do you know that? I I don't I don't think we have confirmation and last year it was kind of late in the game when we found that out. I want to say it was like April or something through the project momentum grant. Um I know it's kind of on hold,

291but um but we're in the process of asking because yeah, we'd like to have Dr. Slo come back at a minimum part-time because he's pretty pretty close to retirement and such, but he's invaluable. You're right. Yeah. So, you know, I just want us to be thinking like, you know, some other things. Um, and uh, you know, one of the ideas I had was the reclassification of the assistant superintendent of student services just because we have created other administrative positions. And again, I'm just talking about the position. I'm not talking about a person, okay? Like I just want to be clear. Um, but when you look at the budget and what we are paying to have an assistant superintendent, that's not managing, you know, we have removed maintenance, transportation, um, food service, all of those things

292that used to fall under that, um, person's responsibilities or that role should say person, that role is no longer there. And so, is it appropriately classified for the amount of pay that we are assigning to that particular position? I we could look back at the salary study. Uh that could give us a point of reference. I I think it probably is. I will say if that was made to be like an executive director or director position, I think that'd be very challenging to find someone who would oversee human resources and student services. I think that'd be very very difficult to find. But I mean, we could look back at the salary survey for a for a point of reference. Um you know, especially if the director of student services does not you know, if that's

293a reduction for the next school year, then that position is still seeing overseeing all student issues, all student stuff, and all employee stuff. So, it's a in my view, it's a tall ask. I I appreciate the creative thinking, but um not thinking about individuals specifically. I think it'd be very very hard to find someone to do that scope of that job at that rate. Yeah. I just you know we we uh you know previously that that role had a lot more you know supervision to different things and so we've created other roles which again is a budget you know interest we created the um executive director of of maintenance um you know I just you know I'm not sure that you know this in my opinion. Sure. Right. No, I I think yeah, talking about

294talking about a lot of things. I think uh th those are a lot of big responsibilities to to spin those plates and handle those things and not have someone burn out or or get sick or do it at a high level. Um and you're right, some people do manage a lot of things. Currently the assistant superintendent in that role manages a lot of different functions in addition to athletics, in addition to school safety, which you know we lose a little bit with the director of student services. So it's it's a lot. My fear is the board does that, we feel convicted in doing it and we don't find someone who wants to do that job at that pay level for so many things. Um I I just don't think it's tenable and I don't think

295it's it would be sustainable to find someone for multiple years to do that. That's that's my view. Yeah. And if I could um you know before some of these positions were created and a lot of that was put on that position. I can recall times where a lot of things didn't get done in the district because that person that position had so many responsibilities that they were just spread very very thin which a lot has to do when we created the position that Mr. Young currently holds and he's been doing a fantastic job. We see a lot of upkeep, maintenance, uh, that had been deferred for a long time being taken care of. And that's one of the reasons why we've been spending so much in some of these, um, areas, but putting so many

296things on one position just spreads them really, really thin. And, uh, I I don't necessarily I don't want us to be topheavy either, right? I don't want us to be have a position for everything in administration, but I do think that there's a there's a balance. Um, and currently, especially with what we're doing right now, I'm okay with leaving it as it is. That way, we can figure this out. Let's get this balanced and see what happens because this is going to create its own challenges when we have to start delegating different responsibilities to different positions. But, uh, it's Good to think outside the box though. Um, another thing, you know, you know, is Loretta Zumbro. I mean, I I would just like us to at least have a discussion and and and in the

297frame of, you know, if if the incumbrances are $500,000 to open it, essentially a principal, uh, health assistant, health uh, officer, custodian, and We have to figure out the if the instructional coach was part of you know um you know are we comfortable opening a school with 180 students like as a board are we comfortable spending that money and champs although I did see a position posted where it looks like PE and music is going to share at Liberty that's the way it's posted yeah I would to see with HR, but I think with Champs, you're going to have a lot of sharing because of the size of the school at at Loretta Zumbro and with Liberty being smaller, but they they wouldn't have that exclusive staff until they could they could grow into it.

298I'm open to hearing the board's conversation. I I think that would be in my view a very uh poor decision in my view. Loretta Zumbro offers us a great opportunity to move the needle with enrollments if we can have a a good principle. I was actually talking to Mr. Naminsky today and he's going to start knocking doors next week in the area after school just to meet families and bring them to the school. Um Mr. Schmidt, member Schmidt is right. Uh I've opened a lot of schools during my time in Queen Creek and shiny new buildings attract kids and being built right on the boundary of Aendale, we have an opportunity to attract enrollment and we certainly don't want to short change our kids within the boundaries. However, we want enrollment. We don't want them

299to get a voucher. We don't want them to go to a charter. We don't want them to go to the new ALA that's going to be opening or to Odyssey. And I I think it's good to be ahead of the growth. Um again, if the school sits for a year or we have people that are in there, we're still paying maintenance cost. We're still paying landscaping and a lot of those kind of things. uh energy and um we can find out more information on the $500,000 on the incumbrance if that decision if that's included. However, I don't think it would be in our district's best interest to not open Loretta Zumbro Elementary. I know it looks really simple on paper where people say we'll just open the school. I think it would be a pebble

300that would drop into the pond and we would feel so many ripples, negative ripple effects that come because the state gave us money and then we decided not to open the school and you have all the political ramifications and things like that. But, you know, I I don't know if Ken wants to speak to it. He's been around a long time opening schools and things like that and what your view is, Ken, or what your insight is. Um, madame vice president, members of the board, if you want. Um, yes. Um, new schools, actually, Bob, we opened, I don't know, 20 um, new schools. They attract staff and students. That is true. Uh, you do have more competition than you ever have. You also will invite a lot of political commentary, too. Um, but it it's

301all around right now. There's more pressure for schools to make sure that governing boards are managing their budgets more than ever. There's but there's bills out there that are now looking at if you overspend by 50 grand, you go into receiverhip. So you would all lose your job if you do not do the job. So there's more intense pressure in every different direction. None of this is easy work. Um and yes, the SFOB would take a shot for funding a school district based on growth and then the district decided not to open it. So yes on everything and even more. I don't know if that helps. to add to every side of the ledger. And just remember that the SFOB, they run their own numbers. They they get numbers from us. They get numbers from

302us. But one of the controversial things about the SFOB is they've used this demographer from ASU. And a lot of the districts have an issue with it. But that's that's they look at our numbers and then their demography from ASU, the numbers from ASU when they decide on a school site. We do know we do know school number nine has been pushed back Bob I believe another year up in Australia to 2029 or or something like that that they would that they would fund and being in a being in an area that doesn't have the affinity to pass a lot of bonds and overrides easily. we really rely on that and so um yeah I don't know what the fallout would be with SFOB or if we would be in their target or what would

303what would happen potentially uh um but but again I understand the board wants to make a really good decision. I just want to give you my take as the superintendent. Gives us an opportunity to be in front of the growth. Gives us an opportunity to say, "Look at this school. Come to this school." You know, gives us an opportunity to hopefully relieve blue horizons. So, they can go from a thousand kids at least down to, I don't know, 900 or 850 or 800, which is a lot more manageable. And then we saw Dr. Sllo's number shows great growth in that area. And all you need to do is drive around to see all the single family homes that are popping up. Uh, can you imagine moving in, being excited to go to the school and

304then it sits for a year and then you go to a charter and we never get those kids back. So, I just think that there's a lot of a lot of things for the board to consider if that's if that's what the the board wants to take that real seriously not opening. Yeah. Personally, I I feel like the the ship has sailed on this project, Loretta Zumbrell. Um, that we're so far along in construction, we're so far along in planning. Um, I don't I don't think it's even reasonable to consider not opening it. Um, if we would have talked had this discussion and knew about what we're going to be talking about prior to this whole construction starting, that would be one thing. But we're I think we're so far along now that it's very

305important that we stay consistent um with the community, with everybody who's put so much into it. And it's not just in our district, right? It's statewide. Um, but yeah, we need to see, you know, what what we get out of it. I think like Dr. Monroe said, just even right outside of our border boundaries, they're building like crazy. Inside our border boundaries, they're building like crazy. There's so much growth. And the reason why we, you know, this all started with Dr. of focusing on getting school number eight going because of the population growth. Um, and so just I think what we did here tonight is is a very good jump on getting a hold of the budget. I think that um, you know, it's good to have the conversation, but I don't think it's the

306right move to not open Loretta Zumbra. Schmidt Um, excuse me. Is there a benefit to to doing some of what um, Vice President Zimmerman said, you know, starting it with kindergarten and first grade and then building as they move up? Are we worried that we're going to lose too many kids by not having it all the way open right away? Um, I know that I've seen other schools that have opened. Generally, they were high schools, but they opened with ninth grade only and then each year they added the next grade and the kids moved up. Um, and that's how they filled the school. Um, is something like that a possibility that we would still be opening it, just not fully opening it. Uh, is there costsaving? You know, would we be saving anything by doing

307it that way or not? Well, right now, right now the plan is to open at K6 and then have the sixth graders metriculate up to seventh grade and then eighth grade the year after. So the original plan was K6 and I don't know what the difference would be if we just opened K3 between a K6 plus you have multifamilies multi-ling families where big brother big sister comes with and so but the plan was K6 and then the add seventh and add eighth grade so we wouldn't be adding athletics and a lot of those middle school things for for quite a while. Uh the preschool is an option there. The Sierra schools at uh uh that we have Sierra Schools program at Rainbow Valley and one at Freedom currently. Um the preschool families who attend Loretta

308Zumbro are likely to fall in love with their teacher likely to fall in love with the facility and want to keep their kids at the school or or keep their kids at Liberty because if they have a good preschool experience. So although it may be smaller this first year and again and I'm knocking on wood, I could be wrong. You never know when you open a school. You know, like I said, I opened five in Queen Creek and we wish we could have been ahead of the growth as opposed to behind the growth because we'd have multiple Blue Horizon schools that were very very crowded. So, um that that would kind of answer your question. I don't I'm not exactly sure if we opened at K3 what the difference would be be between K6 because

309you'd still have to move teachers over there and those kind of things. Mr. Shiani. Yeah. I mean, these are all valid concerns everybody's having. Um my my opinion is we need to keep going with opening it. It's I don't want to say the ship has sailed because that seems kind of bad, but uh miss the ship, you know, but I I think we just got to keep rolling. It's it's a toss up. Like is it going to be successful and bring more kids? We all hope so. I think we just have to go see what happens. I know it's a bad thing to say, but and I I hear everybody's concerns and it's not that I don't disagree, but I'm also looking at the budget and I'm like, if you take those guest teachers and

310move them, we haven't even broken even. And I I don't feel comfortable going into the year with no buffer and no opportunity to build the reserves. I just I I don't think that's a good plan. we haven't adhered to the adopted budget for the last two years because things happen. I'm not saying that it's totally being overspent. Like we just can't predict everything, but we need to give ourselves the buffer. And so if you remove those guest teachers, we haven't even broken even yet. So I'm not where are we going to solve, you know, where are we going to add to this? Yeah. Yeah. Um All right. So, right now from what we've done, we're at 70,000, right? We still need We're still looking at Yeah, just let it out. Okay. Where we are right

311now 70,6678. Okay. Um, Miss Schmidt said earlier and she's right, there's a number of things that you can go back and look, we've been pretty conservative with the numbers on here, and try to find some more cost savings in certain areas. Um, could I ask if we were to leave it as is, does that give, you know, with the understanding we're going to come back, hopefully you're going to bring some more cost savings that's going to get us to that zero, which uh, Mr. Hicks, that if we get this to zero, does that still give us our 500,000 rollover, right? Approximately. Okay. Right. Plus, we dropped the All right. So, would this be enough for administration to go ahead and I know we have a meeting scheduled for Wednesday to approve contracts, right? Or to

312send out contracts. Would this get you what you needed for us to have you guys have what you need for that meeting on Wednesday and then uh I I believe so. If anyone else can chime in, I think so. Just the permanent guest teachers that that are blue there, but you know, we had talked about reading interventionist, instructional coaches, the board's kind of given some direction. You know, now we haven't had a vote on that. We haven't had public comment, but I think we could. Um, I'm just trying to think through some of the other positions. You know, my concern is that, you know, most of our budget is salaries, right? So if we lock ourselves into issuing contracts, it's it's really hard to find additional money. I think you know significant in my opinion,

313we should be we should be having another 500,000. That's my personal opinion to give us that would give us a million potentially in carryover, but also preventing us from over um you know, if things come up and we need more money, $500,000 is just You know, you have to think in FY23 we had like three gosh 3.6 million in carryover and and in two years we're down to 500,000. So it just you know to Mr. Hick's point like there are a lot of eyes on governing boards and and and managing the budget and if we don't set ourselves up for a buffer and if we don't make some additional cuts tonight and we offer all these contracts there's there's really not that much for them to find because so much of our money is tied

314up in salaries. I want to say as much as 80%. I think it's something close to that. Yeah, I think it was 80 85% Mr. said earlier, right? Um, which is correct, but what we're what we're looking at administration going and and trying to find more isn't necessarily tied to salaries. It's tied to other things typically. Um, and then Mr. X, correct me if I'm wrong, but earlier you said, you know, there's there's different there's not just the u the capital, right? There's M, there's capital, there's a number of other pools of resources that we could use. The 500,000 is our buffer for the M, but there's also available money in other pools that if we needed to, we could tap into for emergency uses. So, I mean it I'm not saying previous governing boards

315or administrations did this, but I mean if you really wanted, like Mr. said earlier, if we really want to make it look good, we can just have them pull $2 million from other places and say that's our carryover. That's not what we're doing. We have that still available to us out there, but this is getting us pretty close to net zero. We're not there yet, right? With a $500 500,000 roughly carryover um with the anticipation we're only going to have 50mm for next year. So, I I think that this is pretty safe knowing that we're not just at that 500,000 carryover there. There's other areas that we could use if we needed to in emergency situations. I mean, I don't want it to make it look like we're just throwing money around, but I also

316don't want it to look like we're in such dire straits. Um, I don't think we are. I think we did a lot of good work tonight, and I know that there was a lot of compromise between us just kind of figuring out what we needed to do. And it's hard. None of this is easy. But I think we're in a pretty good position. And correct me if I'm wrong. You're the consultant, the expert. Yeah. And you know, I I was just thinking, you know, we've been at this for four and a half hours and we are going to allow um the public to kind of, you know, not many are here at this point, but um those that want to give public comment about what we've discussed and maybe they will have some other idea

317because this isn't an action item and give us, you know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes and listen to public comment and then, you know, before we potentially have a vote, we we can continue the discussion after public comment. Um would would that be agreeable? Can we go back to this attachment though after Yes. If we move agenda items? Well, after the public comment, there is an item where you guys can go and change some things, but this isn't part of it. 2.7. No, 2.7. It is. It's the Yeah, it is. It's on the attachment. It's not an attachment. Exactly. But can we pull up this even though it's a different agenda item attachment underneath another agenda item? Yeah. Yeah. because it's about the proposed priorization and 2.4 is only a discussion item. It is not an

318action item. What we're in Okay. So, um sorry guys. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Okay. Um I just want to be clear for the public. We're going to uh take a motion for a recess, but um you do have the opportunity to turn in the orange forms for public comment during the recess for this particular meeting. Okay. So, with that, I'll take um uh we'll move on to 2.5, a possible action to convene a recess of 10 minutes. I'll take a motion. I motion to convene a recess. I'll second. Okay. We'll call for the vote. Mr. Kenyon. Hi. Uh, Miss Schmidt. Hi. Mr. Spenc I. I'm also an I. And we'll show that we are in recess till 10:10. Uh it is now 10:10. So we will show that the meeting is back in session. Um we

319will move on to item 2.6 which is public comment. Um just as a reminder, you will have three minutes um to speak. Um they are going to be able to pull us up for us today. Um so um I'll go ahead and call the first name, Vicky Johnson. Good evening. My name is Vicky Johnson. I'm a former parent, veteran teacher, and president of the Liberty Education Association. With all due respect to Mr. Hicks, I understand the damage has been done, and we need to be solutionsoriented. However, morale is hugely affected by the lack of transparency in not recognizing the cause of our problems. The elephant in the room must be acknowledged in order to have any semblance of confidence in Dr. Monroe holding a hard line in any more financial decisions this year. To suggest

320that staff needs to feel the pressure in order to have urgency to solve a problem we did not create is insulting. The public work session was not advertised in a way that generated much parent turnout. The attendees were mostly staff and yet by and large the ideas generated there are not included in their proposal. To summarize, we didn't create the mess but we should stress about solving it. We come to give input and yet our words fall on deaf ears to improve morale and get teachers to sign contracts. You might consider listening to our words. Also, in looking at student numbers, I was talking to a community member yesterday who said they pulled their three kids from our district in the fall due to our situation now to go to a charter school. That makes

321me wonder how many more students we've lost to charters. And with all of this, how many more might choose not to return? That is a concern. Um, regarding the sports fees, please consider that not all families in the district are in the same income bracket as you. Especially for athletic students that play multiple sports. This could be prohibitive. Okay. To be honest, as a single mom with very athletic sons, I would have struggled to pay for more than one sport. Perhaps you consider capping the fee at two sports. Have a maximum fee and then allow the students to play subsequent sports in the year might be a reasonable concession to that. I would just caution you not to create a possib possibly discriminatory situation. Okay. Also, regarding the permanent guest teachers, just for your clarification,

322I'm not sure if you're aware, they are used as floating subs on IEP days. So if I have an IEP meeting during the school day, the sub comes into my room for an hour, covers my class, and then moves on to another classroom all through the day. So with the extended school day and the, you know, the shorter week, it's harder to stay after or come early for IEPs. So we have IEPs all during the school day. And so that's a big part of what those floating subs are used for. That is critical for the servicing and staying within compliance for our IEP kids. Okay. Um, I need to say this is my 23rd year in Liberty and I love this district. What has been done the last couple of years is shameful. Vice President

323Zimmerman and Mr. Schmidt, thank you for your tenacity in asking the hard questions and I hope that with your leadership we can recover from this debacle. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Um, our next speaker is Ashley Ray. Good evening. My name is Ashley Wright. I'm a parent volunteer at Stray Mountain. Usually I have something prepared. Tonight's a little bit off the cuff. Um I would like to say to board member Kenyan's uh comment earlier that trusting the leadership that you put over here is what caused this. Teachers shouldn't be responsible for cleaning up the mess. The teachers have been waiting trying to figure out. We're in a situation now where teachers are being weighed upon each other on who gets to stay and who gets to go. Who's more important? who's more valuable.

324That shouldn't be a position that a teacher should ever be in. And I definitely want to speak to our guest teacher, Mrs. Swanie. She's amazing. I'm literally at Australia all day, every day, almost volunteering, but she picks up something every day. Um, and we are at a school, thankfully, we don't have a lot of trouble getting subs, but she's still busy from beginning to end. Constant duties, whatever she needs to do, IEP meetings all day. She is in and out and highly appreciated by the staff, especially Miss Boris. I know. Um, also reading interventionists, they are invaluable. We have a number of people that volunteer with our reading interventionist so we can spread her wonderful program to more students and it really is increasing our reading across uh all grade levels. Actually, this year we

325were able to bring in sixth, seventh, and eighth when typically we focus on K through three. Um I just I would love not to open Loretta Zumbro um you know as an option because I think it's imperative that we don't have enough teachers as it is and we're if we don't support those teachers that we do have they're going to find somewhere else to go. They're already looking right now. I mean they still have time and it's taking forever to figure this out. This should have started months ago with a budget review and figuring out what we were going to do. But now we're left in limbo because nobody did it. That's all. Protect our teachers and our students. That's just all I'm asking. Thank you. Our next speaker is Bailey Rosco. Okay. I'm short

326here. Okay. I want to preface and say it's been said that we often get so boiled down and getting um he said she said type of thing and so thank you all for doing all of the hard work tonight. We came to some agreements I don't think and heard things we normally wouldn't think we hear from some of the people. Um I want to also go on to say that Mr. or sorry, Fort Monroe, thank you for offering to suggest to give up your bonus, but um that's also a little too late at this point. You should have brought this to the attention of the board a long time ago that we were in this situation first and not allowed it to happen in either by bringing what has been brought up to their attention

327that you know we're over in some of these areas on our budget for suggestions. Um, I want to say to what Vicki just said, I'm considering pulling my son next year. Thankfully, my daughter's already moving on. So, you will lose some one from me if some of these things are caught tonight because he is in sped. So, this matters to me. A suggestion too, you guys mentioned removing lus overke keeping them. I get what you guys are saying about that. You know, yes, we need those protections in place and we have to meet those deadlines. So maybe have multiple personnel transport to a few locations or just the district. That adds some oversight and caves gives us a little balance of knowing that no one person is taking money or if somebody gets robbed or

328a car accident happens, whatever those situations may be, but then also we're still utilizing Lumis and covering ourselves there. though. I have similar suggestions like that in a bunch of areas, but again, we didn't get listened to and it wasn't broadcast enough for us to know to be at that work study session or people are been going very sick lately. So, that was a short notice thing. And then also, what about reducing some other new positions that just came across the board in the last few months? Why are we making all these new positions or splitting positions and giving those positions to new people, paying full salaries on those? Can't we move those around to give those some of those duties to other people or make it a partial position? Then I want to go

329back to say also to Mr. Hicks, thank you so much for the work you're doing. You're doing this for free. You didn't have to be doing this and it's a lot and it's bad. Um, so I definitely want to touch on that as well. But I want to go back to some of my stuff I had previously written. Our teachers and our schools are already feeling this in the classroom and it's impacting them a lot and we haven't had any answers as to why this even happened in the first place. We haven't had any apologies from previous board members and other people that put us in this position. We haven't had any accountability. If we did that to our children, we we don't. Thank you. Um, our next speaker is Paul Jensen. Hello, my name

330is Paul Jensen, a parent in the district. Um, just a couple of things. First, one of the big changes between the budget now for next year and the ones before is that we really weren't managing it and looking at it close enough. As you guys get get your monthly reports, you'll have a lot more confidence. And so to to worry that we're going to be over by $5 million with eyes on it, it's not going to happen. Um, couple of other ideas, gifted education, not sure what that's going to be like. Is there any possibilities to change that to save anything? Um, another one, can we share maintenance staff with other small districts? So, you know, all right, if we can't have a plumber and electrician, can we share split with Buckeye Union or or

331some other districts or get a day here or there? Um, there's a lot of conservatives still baked into the budget, especially with the electric buses. Um, I I really think there's a lot more that can be there and so get more information on that. I I think there's a significant amount of savings that can be done. And when you're looking at hitting the kids from some of these final cuts that you're looking at, I I I think you're at a point where you can go back and we're not completely done. You still have more time before we get the budget set, but ask to have that looked at. Um as well as the electric savings from Verigy. I know it's a wash, but which which fund is it coming from? Capital maintenance. Get more information

332on that. Um, the district said they could give you $50,000 in onetime purchases. Take them at their word and say, "All right, sounds good. Give it to us." They can they can do that. Um, a couple of other things. The the juice box, make sure that you have the clarification of go get that information and come back because I'm not sure the district clearly knew that you wanted to cut that or get that information. So, make sure that you're clear on give us the information because we if you can get out of that, we want to get out of that. Um, guest teachers, it's a big number on there, but it's not that big when it actually hits the budget because you're going to have to replace with subs. So, don't get stuck on that

333$350,000. Realistically, it's more like, you know, 5075. But those guest teachers are, I think, very good. Um my opinion on Loretta Zumbro, we've come this far. Let's do it. I when we opened up Las Besus, I didn't I think we opened it too soon, but we did see a big jump in enrollment that next year as we opened that. So, I know it's a pain. I think the thing that you need to go to the the district and say, "All right, they had initially said half a million dollars. What can you do to trim that number down?" So, let's open it, but not with a planned 500,000. How low can we get that number? Um, and then as we're going through, we've still got to fill a lot of these vacant positions and we're not

334going to get them all filled. So, part of that's going to be some savings from not filling positions that we want filled, but they're not going to be filled. Thank you. Thank you. Um, and our last speaker is Megan Kenan. Okay. Close. My name is Megan Kenan. I reside in district. I do have one current student, two former students, and I am an employee of this district. Um, I've previously spoken just as a parent. Um, I would like to speak though tonight. I think I would like to you guys to reconsider the stepup program for the hourly employees. Those are boots on the ground employees. Those are our bus aids, transportation, pair of professionals, support staff in the district office. Um, we're offering teachers still some incentives to stay. And one of those things would

335be the step up pro, the step up in years of experience for those of us that have boots on the ground and are making an impact in in other ways and that are just as important to keep them and that's something that's important to them. I don't think maybe reconsidering admin maybe not stepups for administration levels for years of experience. Um, and I know there's been some questions about Lumis. I agree. I think we can save some money with Lumis. I think we could get the schools to package the Lumis uh into in uh inner office, courier it to the district office and have one pickup location. That would save us a lot of money. Those are some things we've looked into and in those things. So, I definitely agree with some of those savings

336that we have discussed. But, um, yeah, I think some of the my biggest one was the the step up program is to really look into that and see if it's really something that we want to put a freeze on. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Um so we will move on to item 2.7 which is the discussion consideration of the proposed prioritization of fiscal year 26 maintenance and operation budget interests. Dr. Monroe. All right. So now that we've heard some public comment, we'll have Crystal pull back up the list. There is some work for admin to do. Um, however, this item was added to the agenda uh with the thought if the board was comfortable on voting on budget prioritization, which we've done some tonight, that the board could do so as an action item. We can

337also, Mr. Again, this doesn't mean we can't discuss or add things or remove things, but the idea would be to if the board can come to a comfort level, then we can have a a meeting on Wednesday. We have to be able to give 24-hour notice with open meeting law to approve the rest of the work agreements that would be given out so staff feels assured that they have a job for next year. So, u with that being said, I'll turn it back over to the board um to discuss more to make a motion now that we've heard some more public comment um like I said, I do know there's some things we're going to mine um uh mine a little more and uh update this. So, if that will help the board, but if

338there's anything else that the board wants to add or to talk about tonight, we can. Okay. So, um, you know, I'm going to take it back down and if there are things that were, you know, surfaced in public comment or other things that you want us to look at again, um, you know, and I think, you know, we could make a motion tonight with what we've done, but also, you know, potentially include that we need to come back, you know, and continue to look at some other things. So, you know, I think there are some ways that we can go about it tonight, but Mr. opinion. Did you want to start off with, you know, anything else kind of that surfaced or that you thought about in in your recess? Yeah, thank you. Um, yeah,

339I I would like to know a little bit more about the the uh step increases for the hourly staff and what, you know, how big of a number is that versus what we have listed here. So, where is that going to put us? Um, and if the board as a whole, I guess, or majority of the board wants to wait on that, does that put us in a bind then for Wednesday's meeting for those employees? Because we have to get these out. We got, you know, um, well, a few thoughts. um you know with the um uh you know with the teachers we gave out we gave the teach issues the issued the contracts to the teachers with an amount and if that amount was to change if it was to go higher we would

340add an addendum. So I'm just thinking if we had to could we follow the same course of action with work agreements and with other contracts Clyde and Stephanie if we issued something and then later on the board decided to increase maybe classified salary. We could issue an addendum. In previous years, we haven't done the hourly staff until around April anyway. So, we could we could do that. Okay. So, Oh, go ahead. So, you mean not not do not do the certified on Wednesday, wait a little longer or No, just the hourly. Oh, okay. Sorry. So yeah, that's what I was going to say is if we held off on the hourly, um, you know, and I did look at when we issued previous contracts and it was in April last year, so I don't necessarily

341think that would concern them, but No, but we would want to give them reason why, you know, just say we're going to do it, but here's why. You know, even though they're used to April, I would just like to to send an email and see why. Yeah. I mean, if you'd like to. I I don't know that the board is going to go one way or another on this. I just would like to see the numbers. Yep. I So I think Oh, you you already have them. Wow, you're pretty quick there. M I do have the number for hourly support staff only. It'd be right around 128,000. So we could reduce this 180 for salaries and benefits of just hourly support staff getting their step increases. All right, that's Yes, that's a lot more than

342I anticipated it was going to be. Majority of it is hourly support staff. There's not that many members of exempt or administration that get a step increase every year. Okay. The hourly support staff positions. So that would be like Megan mentioned um our bus drivers, our bus aids, food service, secretaries, parapros, um department staff members. It's quite it's quite a few groups of people. Who am I forgetting? Oh yeah, custodians. Yeah, nurses, library. It was 180 prior that included um other exempt staff and administrators. Okay. Yeah, I was I was anticipating it was going to be a little bit smaller, so it wasn't so much as a hurt. I mean, I don't with where we're at right now, I don't know that it's I understand the concern. I really do. Um, and it's going to

343be hard, but right now I I personally I think we have to leave it. Was there anything else that Okay. Um, one of the things that was brought up was, you know, is it possible to to open LZ Loretta Zumbro but for less? Can we look at that? Um, and I would really like to see the 500,000 that was mentioned by U. Mr. Balden previously like what that is broken down into and where that money is all going um and see if we can trim something off there. Um and then I think that's already up there but just to clarify that we are looking into juice box and getting out of that contract and seeing um if there's penalty on that or or um how much can be saved there. Yeah. And then the the

344Lumis savings. Um if we could put a note on there too, that that would be um Yeah. But just the actually make the note about the maybe just having the one pickup at the director office just so we know what we're actually looking at as like the reduction in cost to see if that would help. Just a specific note because I don't think we really specified that as an option. So thank you. Mr. Spenc. Yeah. Can you scroll down so you see the stuff we took off already? Okay. There wasn't a lot that I don't even think about. I know. Um Hey, one question I had when they were talking about the guest speakers and like covering for IEP meetings and stuff. Thank you teachers. Um, as long as uh is that part of like

345the class coverage? So, does that include when teachers are called into IEP meetings and stuff like that and somebody has to come in? Is that stuff the guest teachers are covering? So, is it showing us paying that and what the guest teachers are doing? guest to cover because the guest teacher is doing it already, but they wouldn't be getting also class coverage because that is what they're doing. That would be my understanding. Can you explain class coverage? Class cover is a couple different things. Class coverage can be when there's no sub and a teacher's gone. So, another teacher might have to come in and cover or kids are split between two different teachers which is generally what happens or kids are split between three different teachers which don't often h happen but what happens the

346most are kids are split between two different teachers if one teacher from the team is gone that's what happens the most okay and then sorry to keep go back up a little bit so see where we're at all right so is it our to figure out these last two things before we go home because I kind of hate the fact that they're just hanging out. Like are we kind of pausing on the permanent you guys teacher numbers that we're doing tonight? Like I'm you know from what I hear and and and it's not that I didn't hear it before. So I just you know I want to be clear that they feel very very important. Um and so I'm okay moving them down. And I'm okay with pausing for tonight and approving what we've done

347with the understanding that we still have to come back, right? That this isn't enough. Um, you know, not just the 70,000, but I really think we need to create ourselves some buffer. Um, and and so, you know, that is is my, you know, concern. I mean, some of the things that you know, that were brought out in public comment that I actually had that I kind of forgot to mention was gifted. Um, and you know, we we could provide gifted education through the gifted cluster model and not have the MAG program. I know people like it, but it's not a it's not a requirement. You know, it it services a very small part of our uh population. Gifted is about % and probably in the MAG program is probably 1%. Um, you know, could we

348also um, you know, not screen everybody in kindergarten for gifted because there's not a lot of research from what I've seen to support finding gifted in kindergarten. And if we're not putting them in a self-contained classroom or even a gifted cluster model till second or third grade, I don't know that we need to screen them then. Um, and I also think we need to look I think we could look at that stipened because we gave last year we gave a really large stipen to the gifted teachers and um they really aren't self-contained. They are only teaching math in ELA. They're not teaching social studies. They're not teaching science. They're not teaching champs. They're all going out. So, it's not it's not a self-contained classroom. So, I'm not sure that we should be offering, you know,

349a a a larger self-contained stipen than we are our special education or writing IEPs and dealing with a lot more. Um, so I would like to explore that potential. Um, and you know, if you scroll down to the one time the one-time funds that 50,000, you know, Again, I feel like if we put that into the savings, then it's just almost like we're having to create the buffer. So, I have a hard time with it. I mean, I'm hoping that maybe the juice box thing could, you know, work out, but I really, you know, I hear what people are saying about the step increases for our hourly, and I do not disagree. But with Mr. opinion. I was hoping that that number was going to be smaller than it is and I'm grateful that you

350were able to figure it quickly for us. I just don't know where we're going to find that money if I'm being honest. If we're keeping seven guest teachers and we're opening Loretta, I don't know where we're going to find it. I mean, you know, I would welcome the administration to come back and and and find other ways and but again, I feel like that's a position, right? That's a director position. And are we going to be able, you know, if we one issue contracts I I don't know at this point. I'm I'm with you. Um, I think what we did here tonight, we did a lot of work in four hours and and you know, I think that we've heard a lot of good things um from each other, from the public. And I'm personally

351I'm okay with approving it as is with the understanding that administration is going to work on some of those areas that we've mentioned, come back to us with what we're going to hope it's going to be some significant savings. Um but as for moving this forward and getting the contracts out to the staff so that they can um you know have that and hopefully we can lock them in for next year and start making sure we have everything covered. Uh I think that we're in a much much better position now four hours later than we were at 5:30. So, do we want to just move that guest teacher down like just take it out? Yeah, I think anything we haven't agreed on. I mean, just with the understanding that, you know, if we move the

352guest teachers down tonight, we're going to issue those contracts. Correct. Potentially. If we move those guest teachers down, we're we're issuing those contracts potentially. Uh they get a work agreement, right? But still, we're Yeah. Yeah. In essence, it's a contract. Yeah. So, I mean, if we're if we're moving it down, then we're kind of leaving it. I feel like we're committed to that. Well, and we have a we have a pretty good list of things where we just need to sharpen the pencil, too, and uh see what we bring back to the board. Um, so we'll review the minutes and see some of these other areas, Chris, or you know, the board members like you guys are asking about. Um, and see what some of these additional savings are, memberships, consultants, you know, things like

353that. Madame Vice President, can I say a few things because I think I've heard a couple times um how we're going to make sure these cuts happen. Say the marketing budget and I don't know if we use budget control groups. We do. So when we make budget cuts and we can reduce their budget, we wrap their budget control group that they will not allow to be overspending. So if we're going to subtract $30,000 from a market into budget, we can go right in at 6545, look at it, see what the department it's in and the DAC, and just reduce their budget by $30,000. That's how we know we get the savings without monitoring every single purchase that goes through. Similar uh I think I heard there was a few good ideas coming from the parent

354from the public comment. the $50,000 if we know exactly where those purchases are, we just reduce their budget by the 50 rapid budget control group and lock in the savings. So, some of it can be done very easy. I will make a few calls to both Buckeye schools on shared services. That's a great idea. Um, when I was in Littleton, we actually provided services to Union Elementary and it was a win-win. We got money to hire a staff and they saved about $60,000 on their HBAC services. So, I think that's a great idea. I know you'll look at the arm car. We talked about that a little bit earlier, too. Um, I'll let you guys talk about the gifted, but I still think we need to also follow up not just on the things we

355said here, but we heard some good ideas in public comment that we'll also look into. Um, okay. I think, um, I think we're ready for a motion. Um, if somebody wants to stab it, you know, I I think we can just give the motion as presented. Correct. So, could Oh, could we just add on that, you know, we will revisit it? You know, uh, as presented, word it. What what are you trying to I I think we approve it. I think we can approve it as it is as presented and then when it when we get to the point where we revisit the areas that haven't been agreed on. Ask the administration to report back. Ask the administration to report back. Does that have to be in the motion? I would I would include it.

356Okay. So, I'll try this. Um, I'll make a motion to approve the proposed prioritization of fiscal year 2026 maintenance and operation budget interest as presented and to have administration. Report back. Report back regarding additional savings. Regarding additional savings. There we go. Minnie, did you get Miss Camarada? I apologize. Did you get the motion? Okay, I second. Okay, we have a motion and we have a second. Mr. Kenyon, I. Miss Schmidt, I. Mr. Senion, I. I'm also an I. We'll show that. Approve. 4 Z. Um, go ahead and go on to uh 3.1 upcoming board meetings. Um this is just to um allow us to have the discussion if we are able to attend a quick board meeting uh uh on Wednesday to issue the rest of the contracts that we didn't issue. And then these

357are just kind of the work sessions for the policies that we had originally uh well that had been kind of talked about just wanted it like in one place for us to have the opportunity if if something had changed. And then that uh June meeting we had talked about um uh potentially moving it later to be able to do the performance review and evaluation after we had the data. So rather than trying to have two meetings if we were comfortable moving that meeting later in June, I just don't know what everybody's summer schedule. So those were kind of the things just to surface. I I was I was hoping for that and Mrs. Zimmerman, Vice President Zimmerman, Mman and I I'm sorry I'm tongue tied. It's late. Uh we're talking about this. I was hoping

358I don't know what your schedules are like that movie. We originally talked about June 17th, but if you guys were around June 10th, if you if we could move the meeting to instead of June the 3 to June 10th, that would really that would really help me. But I don't know what your guys' travel schedules are and and June. The other the other dates, I don't Oh, no. Okay. The other dates, again, we may not need all of these, but we wanted to find time to get through chapter four and five to have a second read and potentially third read. Mrs. Castanos will probably follow up with each one of you individually to make sure we get everything in the policies. But I did want to ask if the board is available June 10th instead

359of June 17th, which is kind of what we talked about. But yeah, I was the reason I had June 17th was just to try to allow more time for the data to come in. So yeah, I hope that I hope the data comes in I and hopefully it will, you know, but I mean based on the information that you provided earlier that you're willing to forgo, then I still think we can still have the evaluation. Um, but I'm not going to feel as tied to that data personally if we're not awarding performance pay in that. And I and I would like that. I I want to continue to get feedback from the board and have an evaluation. I still want to look at the goals and evaluate whether there's any monetary things tied to it

360or not. My ask would just be, are you guys around to do it on June the 10th instead of June the 17th? I could I could be either way. So June the 10th is fine for me. Yeah, that should be fine. As of right now. Yeah, I I'm okay. Um right now, um are we okay for Wednesday? Just a quick time. I think you tell me. I Well, Miss Schmidt, what what time works for you? I'm pretty tied up Wednesday evenings, but it's usually later in the evening. So, um I currently have an appointment at 5:30. So, I just need to know if I have to move it. Oh, so if we did it at 4:30, I could do it earlier or I could do it later, but like 5:30 I actually have as long

361as it's a quick meeting and it sounds like it could be. I think 4:30 would work for me. Okay. I don't know about the rest of the I can do 4:30. Okay. 4:30 sounds like it. Does that work for administration? Uh yeah, we'll we'll make it work. I don't know off the top of my head, but we'll make it work. 4:30. I mean, we could we could do Thursday. I'm not sure that, you know, one day, you know, as long as we're issuing them this week, if Thursday is a better day. I don't think we have to. Doesn't have to be this day. This is a discussion. So, I'm okay with just getting it done on Wednesday. Okay. All right, I think we're going to leave on Wednesday. Okay, any other discussion about the study

362sessions for policy? Okay. All right. Um, we will show that the meeting is adjourned at uh just making sure 4.1 um adjourn of the special meeting at 10:47.