001started, but let me know if let Michael know to keep his phone on too because I'll call both. Okay. Thank you. [Music] Our meeting, we'll call it our meeting. Um, so I just want to clarify for the record um that uh we were notified that there is some illness on the other side. And so with that being said, uh this joint meeting as it was posted essentially um is going to now be called a board of education special. Um and according to uh just our ability to follow the board's rules, that's really important to us. Um we will not be having any action tonight nor any public comment. Um but rather there is only discussion. Um, and at this time I will actually turn it over to board members to determine whether or not we
002have a quorum this evening. Um, if we do then we can certainly proceed. Um, and thank you to our audience members. As we do have a quum, I would like to make this I aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Good evening everyone. Thank you for coming out tonight. I know that is was a quick and less change but again if folks are available we certainly want to make sure that they are better. Um so tonight we're talking about the FY25 current budget and we're also talking about um next year's proposed board of education recommended FY2 budget as well. Um, as you know, on March 31st, which is next Monday, I'll be making
003our formal presentation to the town council in the town council chambers at 7 o'clock. Um, and that will be the board of education recommended budget presentation as you saw at our meeting in February. Um, but tonight since then, since our recommended budget has been out, we've been receiving questions from the public um, and also from members of our town council. And so I would love to be able to answer some of those questions. [Music] recess for recess. So moved. Second recess. St. John in Kentucky. I don't mean it like that. to come out of recess. Second. Um, we do have two members of the town council who are in attendance in the audience tonight. If they would like to join the board of education meeting, they are more than welcome to come sit at the
004table. It's your discussion if you'd like to join us. And again, no motions are being taken tonight. Sorry, no actions or public comment. It's rather a discussion with the board of education. Um, so I'll start by um just passing out some of the questions that have been um coming in to uh to my office regarding just the budget for next year. Just some uh I think regular questions around some of the line items that we have in our board. One of the first questions was whe or not we pay a fee to the land owner where the school buses are parked um and if so how much? Right now our school buses are run by a company called first student and they are located 9 street and we do not pay for any land fees
005or anything of that sort that land is owned by first student and so they take care of any of those costs. We ultimately just have a contract for transportation. Um the next question was we understand there have been additional savings when students have been brought back to Watertown instead of being placed back. Do you have figures on how many students return and what the dollar savings have been? How many additional staff members require? Now, this is a slightly more involved question, but I will just um send out a couple of documents for you to see the context of what's going on there. tonight. So, everyone knows these are questions that came in from town council members. Um, can we share these documents with them? We sure can. So, as long as there's nothing that needs
006to be redacted or has any student privacy information in it or personal information based on HR and we share all of this publicly. Um, but we also want to So, you've seen this first special education on placement data chart before. I know that I've got my handwriting up there for all of us to see. This is a chart that's 2 years old. It was originally from 22. Um, and one of the things to know is that there is no tuition increase cap on any placement in the state of Connecticut. So that means that any kind of special education placement that um we sent out students to can increase the tuition um without a maximum cap. You can see in the top right hand corner that in 23 to 24 we had a minimum of 3%
007increases in many of our places. Um and again that was the minimum. So you had more as well in 242% increases have gone to 6% increases. So you can imagine and for next year 256 will go up in the pages behind me I wanted to show over the course of the last five years. So you will see um a hand up for 242 which is our current 24 which is in the previous 22 23 2022. Now what is not included here is 2020 and 2019. In 2019 and in 2020 we went from 35 students in just out placement through IEP. I am not including parent choice. And in 2020 we went to 32 students who had outments due to IEP requirements and again not including parent choice. As you look at the pages now going
008chronically backwards you can see that we are decreasing in the number of students who are in out. We spiked in 2122 to 45 students. Then in 22 23 we came down to 35 students. And then in 23 24 we came down drastically to 18 students and in 24 25 we're back to 20 students. So you can see that there's an ev how many students are outside student I drop in some of these years is because we have expanded our special education program here in our school district. The reason I've included the names of some of the other places in which our students are placed is so that you can correspond with the special education data just how much tuition would be for these. Um when you go back to years where we have 45 students
009out due to and if the average amount is just under $100,000 per student you can take that times 45 and you can imagine what that number is. So by creating the placements here in school district we still put money out to be able to have personnel in it, but we are nowhere close to how much we would pay if we had that many students. Now, at the same time, we have students who still need to be out and we do. So, you can see from last year, this year we went from 18 to 20. It had to happen because we can't offer these district here, we do have to go to the process of finding place. So it doesn't mean that we suddenly just stop together. It does mean that we're trying to create a
010large. So this is great information for um board members and the general public to see that these are real students. There are real numbers behind the class. And then in addition I we also have students who are out of parent choice. Um and you can see those are the second numbers on those charts. Those have ranged anywhere from 41 this particular year, 41 students, um 50 students last year, 34 students the year previous of that and 28 students the year previous of that. That also es and flows as students choose our specialty schools like Kir Nawes in the parochial schools. and St. John those also come transportation is not part of this cost to point that out. So in addition to these students when they're um sent out out of district due to um special
011needs or parent choice situations we are also responsible for providing transportation to and from correct. Um and for parent choice schools, not only is it um that they're working tuition for them to go to that school, if they have special education costs um associated with the services that they require, we provide special education services at that location as well. So just because they go to a parent school, it doesn't mean that they just disappear from our um so with that being said, the question around how many additional staff members did this require that would go to extension of the special education program over the last four to five years. Um we had entrance and exit criteria for change. We had the opening of tiger. We had the opening of new horizon. Uh we also have
012the green program at high school as well as the new alternative academy WTA1 and WTA2 extension. We also have preschool um self lost the word self-contained preschool classroom as well. Um and so all of that expansion does come with the addition of a personnel um person and potentially a pair educator. But again, one teacher and a couple educators, well, two teachers and a few educators is nothing in comparison to the tuition of 10, 20, 30, 40 students about $100,000. So that's a response to that question. Yes, sorry about that. But on the parent choice, I don't see I don't see the u Okay. Yes. So, the next question that came in Can you please tell us the exact additional staff positions added from last year to the proposed budget and cost involved? So, this one
013I'm going to narrate this one because I'm not going to quite hand out personal identifying markers, but I can certainly get this to the public after tonight's meeting. Um, so there are real names that come with the real reductions. Um, they are not is always through attrition but I just want to give the magnitude of just how many teachers were displaced and reorganized into a different position by using attition. So we had water high school library position. We had a interventionist position time study position. We had a social studies teacher at the high school. We had a library teacher at middle school. We had a library teacher split between. We had math interventionist and we had language teacher. All of those teachers were reorganized into different positions by capturing other resations and ret somebody resigns
014and retires doesn't mean that it just disappears. By us tightening the belt and not feeling those um we do tighten belt quite a bit and at one point we only saw the restored position. In addition we had positions that we did not reorganize. So the de students the chosen positions and two kindergarten classrooms we did not fill. We left them completely open where we saw actual reductions. Again, it's not just your superintendent going and terminating the body like terminator. There are people who find out that the positions will be cut by the end of a certain time. So then they take their family into consideration and they can go find another job in another district. And of course when that happens prior to the end of the school year then often times you get a
015resation or retirement or some sort of adjustment in their status of work. If they went to the end of the year knowing that the position was going to be cut then yes. So for that one we had an athletic director that was reduced by special education that was reduced. We had special education that was reduced. We had a half central office secretary that was reduced. We had a nurse that was produced. We had a special education supervisor that was two techs that were produced as well. So again, they may on the folks come in as retirements um and adjustments. But when people are notified that adjustments are made to their position, they take the initiative to go find another position. So what also that is us losing high school people and then having to rehire
016them at different times. So the next piece that I will um offer is this is just these are public documents the last four years in that have been presented to the board of education that shows there might be little adjustments from whatever these were presented at public meetings as you can see in 242 where every single one of those adjustments came from age next to that is 23 to 24. You can see where those eliminations came from. 22 to 23, we were able to, this is before we really got into people. We were able to kind of sl22 that was my very first year right off the bat without even. So you can imagine that we school districts have gone through reduction fairly extensively each year and yes there are [Music] cases I think that
017the question is not only how many positions have been reduced but I think the differential what's been reduced and our attempt to bring people back or reinstate um positions has kind of or is a part of that that question. you know that well there aren't positions that have really been reduced and now you're adding more you know so how do we help people understand where we're at and even why those you know what might look like additions for new positions are in the budget great question so again I will redact this if you want to put this out to the So um let's say for instance we teach English, math and science at the middle school. If those teachers find another position elsewhere, we now have vacancies in English, math and science, we have to
018hire those positions for the following year so that we can still teach English, math and science according to statute. We cannot use attition to just get rid of the position and not teach those subjects at school. So if people see that you are being hired to teach English, science is probably because someone has vacated a position and we have obligation to teach that subject where there's true attrition and we're not filling the role altogether on our human resources personnel sheet you will see that it's just not replaced and if you have positions that are brand new because we had special education expansion so for instance office that is a brand new position that is a brand new personel um position that was baked into the budget that we did not have because we knew we
019had to open that special education classroom in order to mitigate the output cost that would have been for those students who would have been not able to go to that. So um we have document that we keep in our office and it literally shows who andor If you just flip through just the year examples that you gave us from the years that we have had reductions to refer them, there's 30 full positions that have been reduced in just three years time. What I thought was really impactful too, we've heard about just out of one position, for example, like at the high school level, how many hundreds of students won't have access to that programming. So from one position if we're losing access for 200 students for access now times 30 positions and the amount of
020direct impact that touching our students not to mention touching the staff who is picking up the extra work and having the content re reorganized I mean 30 is just a huge number for personal adjustments correct and it it kind of jumps out at you once you can aggregate everything and that's why this year as much as it looked like we were adding It was a restoration. Um, okay. So, the next question was there are contractual raises for staff. Can you please confirm the percentage and when you show contractual dig? So, you'll see there you can see what contractual bases are for each of those groups. We are at the state regional average of the increase and slightly below. Um, as you know, when we're in negotiations, if we are locally average for the state agent,
021we are taken to arbitration by our contractual groups or by our public groups. And the archer will tell us we're too far off. We need to raise and so I'm very thankful to have discussion. They are certainly heated at times but we come in at average or below and we have good faculty and staff here invest and so there are other contracts. Um as for benefits, no benefits are not included in a contractual raise as it's a benefit for uh faculty to come and work in our school district. And so that is partially paid by employee through their week to paycheck and then partially paid by users as as we negotiate how much we pay in each year to their benefits. The next question is the put $4,000 towardility report when um I was notified
022that there was a want to conduct a feasibility report of all the buildings in the town of Watertown last year and last year I agreed to say that would be wonderful information for our board of education as well. Um I know that some discussion about closing school but in order to do that we need to have information that's at this time um I don't possible really close to school. Um but this is impossible has to be proper research and there has to be proper information uh that we can actually do something like that. Um there are ways to uh to to put money into redoing the buildings or renting modulars and changing the geographical footprint on school building to be able to do things like that. But things have to be up to our students.
023So yes, we have been for over a year now very much. The next question is then how many administrators do we have in our school district and how many are mandated? So a better way to think about that is in short we have 20 administrators in our school district. It's not about whether or not administrator mandated. It's about what mandated requirements are administrators fulfilled in every single one of their positions. So what I will hand out to you here is a description very very simple certain service what our team does. question. The question is what you may need in response to this is a very quick oversight of just what we do as a school district in terms of the black line students and everything them. We have a number of buildings. You can see
024in our buildings that we administry of every single dominition. We don't have that over school. And then we have similar administrators in both and high school central office. You can see that split up top and right now we are special education official. has but simplistically everything has a statuto for for an administrator to complete behind the is and again this is not an exhaustive list. I just wanted to give an overview of some of the things this first page just for special education. This is what we do to make sure that we are in compiance of the law in special education and you know our special education coordinator every single one of those things and we have to make sure that we we can't be taken to a state complaint that we can't be um
025you know there's all sorts of things that can happen the second page to that as well um you can see and again this is not exhausted at all the items that our building also have to be knowledgeable at building level so if you only have one special education person every single one of our buildings and every single one of our students with just think about students according to the law. All of those pieces are the required statuto that building our cabinet positions. Mr. Shuba over any budget school district building maintenance every single morning serving lunch. Um and then of course it is our job to make sure that our students are educated construction and the br although it doesn't line up every single law. This is for new administrators and this is what new administrators
026have to make sure and we evaluate our administrators to know to know to make sure that they are upholding all those students and so when administrator doesn't do those things we as a district. So the question of do we need so many administrators it's not about do we need so many it's about where we put our administrators and are they doing things yes in comparison to also our counterparts we are on the bottom half of the number of administrators that most top four times. Um, and then the last two questions that will just kind of answer themselves when the budget was cut,000, which positions were cut and how long I gave you positions that were cut. certainly that teach. So those were the questions that came in from so I'll make sure available on Um,
027one more thing that we're going to address is because she has been cleaning up our line items very much. So, you obviously find her with every single line that we have in our budget. I asked her to begin highlighting every single line that she has attempted to clean by her, making If something was supposed to be in there, it's in there now. Or if it's not supposed to be in there to move it out. So you could just hold your chest and just show all your highlights. She start This is This is just the certified salary. You can see each line as she goes to make sure that we have fat lines where there's so many So I told her to stop the process. I I thought it would be easier than it was, but
028housekeeping is something that you do daily. you know, you come across something and um when I first came on uh you know, it was really hard even with the medical medical expenses with the lines with you're not budgeting enough, you know, and I was trying to prove it and so I broke medical out to to include the HSA as a separate line to break out the retirees as a separate line trying to be as transparent as we can um because I do think it's important to be transparent and I think it's important for people to understand where you know all the figures are coming from as regards um the staffing and salaries. Um, one of the things I did and with the help of Miss Becketty and even um, those who were in place for
029special ed prior to her was we wanted to make sure that we had everyone who was special identified as such because when we report those numbers to EFS, it affects grant lines and grant monies that were awarded. So, we really wanted to make sure that everyone we just had we wanted consistency across the board, not just districtwide, but from building to building to make sure that we were coding everybody the same. So, you know, when you see a line suddenly drop, it's it's not that, you know, or or increase for that matter. It just means that we move for possibly someone from one line to identify them more clearly in another line. Um, and I thought it would be as easy as just to say, oh, I moved one person from here to there. But
030if literally I have to go back, you know, to last year's records and then compare it to this year's records and I'm like, there's just no way for me to document that. But if somebody wants the specific information, I can certainly provide that if they need it. Um, I just, you know, we've worked very hard. Like I said, I can't say enough about just wanting to be transparent, making sure we're as consistent as we can be. And it makes my job easier, too, for my own selfish reasons because I feel more confident in the numbers if I feel like the lines make absolute sense, you know, to to a common person reading, you know, a bunch of numbers. So, that that's our goal and that's what it's there for. And again, if there's a specific
031expenditure line, anything, whether it's a salary line or an expense line, I'm happy to provide any backup. Um yesterday and this will be the last topic. Yesterday um at our regular board meeting we went through the health insurance that um again we talked about um $1.9 million over in the joint health fund. Um and again that is due to 31 high cost payments at this point. So just in last month moving to this month we went from 26 high cost payments to 31 high cost payments. 16 of them are over $150,000. Um, and about 15 at just over 75,000. Uh, again, a self insurance fund is typically on average a really good situation for about seven years. And at that point, you have to ask yourself, you had seven years, something's going to happen. It
032is inevitable that you will have a catastrophic at some point when you have a fund. uh we had the self insurance funding for 10 years. So being squeezed out two additional years and now here we are in catastrophic year. Um because the intensity of the catastrophe is so large we are doing the insurance move in April April 1 before the fiscal year to help mitate additional costs going out to high cost. We anticipate in April, May and June the additional high costs will come in but at that point we'll be in a fixed health fund um that no matter how many high cost we will be covered by that high cost sorry that fixed rate. With that being said, um I also want to commend that we have overages in special education, but we have
033been frozen so hard in the district and I have our administrator sitting in the audience today. How many times they put a requisition and denied or asked for something as simple as paper or posted say don't buy all the paper just buy two weeks worth. We have frozen it so hard that we are at this time trying our best to cover as much special education over as possible. So really the only thing that we so far change in the moment because special education is so volatile is we have the overhang of health insurance over that but the move to the state plan is absolutely critical. We may not be in the forever, but for now, doc, if um you make a change to the special ed program, it's like we have things all escalating at
034the same time. More special ed students. We kept it internal there and we know the factor transportation is a huge impact too. Um you know do you have any way to speculate just how much of an impact it's like cutting that program like would be? Sure. So if we if we didn't open any programs alternate with no added children going to place which we know is also possible because the last four years children or we have children who are there to come on to different levels that need to be out and so we put them into but let's go back four years and let's say no new wells ever arrive which again is not true. we would had a $4.5 million just tuition bill just tuition. We've spent probably a little over a million just
035under 1.5 creating programs here to mitigate and bring that $4.5 million just tuition. And now when new students come in, this happened this year and last year. We had four students come last year or something like that. six number when they come in now we can put them into program as opposed to they come in. So again and I'm approximating these numbers 4.5 million just to tition by programs. Um and at this point with expansion of WTA2 we actually have tition students question few ones who's paying repaying the tuition for the choice for so who um who makes a decision as to whether or not that's something that's warranted. So that's actually um the statute called shepherd's own um and so a parent has the absolute right to make the sole decision of placing their
036parent. What would be the difference of a student set in kind of set going to one of the Catholic schools and paying the tuition outright and then having How how does that come about? So the parochial schools parents pay the tuition school. However, we service any students who attend school who will have special education. So that's what we Okay. So you're just paying for the the hours that the special teacher spends with that. Correct. Okay. And um the last one is is I mean generally as as as a as as a board or as being a whole system do does everybody really feel that these tuition rates are justified they're often high we started at 190,000 and that was two years ago and ACES I mean I'm not sure what they're doing in ACES I
037know the kids are what kind of mainstream basis too, right? And and again, that was two years ago. So, we're actually finding um the legislature to put a cap on tuition in private. It seems I mean, are these kids that are kid paying that were paying $141,2? And again, that's just tuition. If they receive special services on top of that, we pay for those special services. is that so you can imagine and transportation. That's right. So you can see just how it is and that's why it's so important for us and again we can't keep everybody in this district. Doc what was our average income per student rate approximately? Which year? Uh the year that this is accurate to here for 22. Yeah. Approximately. So we had 35 minutes at that time and I have
038to do an average. Well, I just mean for like water tones. Yeah, per pupil. I'm sorry. I didn't put that right. Yeah. Okay. 22 23 would cost you right around that just under 19. Just just so we can all look at this in perspective there. Okay. Yeah. So if our per people average is just under 19,000 and we're paying tuition upwards of 190. And and ours does not include transportation either or is that No, of course transportation is always a separate bill whether it's for our students in district or you know students going to a parent choice school or out of district. Locally is obviously cheaper. So I guess the connection then to the the recommended budget for board of education coming in 7.9% which sounds like an high number if we are or not
0397.9 that's proposed we're coming in at 6.86 is we're trying to cover these costs. We're still trying to not educational education students as well. Um and we are not totally out of the water in comparison to We are on average everybody either we range from 4.87 up to 10.64 we're at the average so we're not at 10.6 so that's good but we also know that this is and so we are fighting hard at legis for special education so it's it's a multir approach here but there is reason After last night's meeting, I got a phone call and text of parents wanting to know how do they save summer. That's just we are frozen so hard so hard that we're looking for any to cut and so that's why we had to make a very difficult
040decision to cut for our general education population about 80,000 last year when we got a grant it was about 80,000 this year. We were going to do a very paired down version with um a 30 approximate $30,000 price tag, but it wouldn't have included transportation or the camp experience. It would have been the three rotation academic experience for another day. It would have been tight figured out. I wasn't even going to hire a director. I was directing my story in her free time because that was one less cost and one more teacher. So it was just for teachers and nurses and modifies just on that. I mean I think the hard well there's many hard parts but a hard part is just that statement because having worked in the district being connected to the district,
041knowing how many people sit here and say, "I'll just do that for no additional cost." You know, I mean, we're sitting here looking at a room full of our administrators who are here because they would do it at no additional cost. And so to look at being transparent and you know cleaning up line items and asking I know my question was how do you put it into little pots? I mean, I think those are the areas that can't be. And unfortunately, everybody now is like, "Oh, wait. Something's going to get cut and all, you know, that's something that's important to me. Well, athletics are important to somebody else and, you know, special ed is mandated and all like I don't know where and how it gets paired down more. I mean, we're all fiscally responsible,
042but when we look at the needs of our kids and the support of our staff and the love of our town, how do you then say, you know, those kids will be okay. We're saving 30,000 You know, it's so hard to sit here and support that. I mean, these are the things that are being asked parents, you know. How would kids be okay without it? I don't think they I know a number of children who participated last year and just had such a beneficial experience um to you know need some learning [Music] gaps I have a question. So looking at some of the reductions just to bring it down to just 6.86 6 for next year. What are the biggest areas that you see where we will lose out on further cost savings or return
043on investment? What are the biggest areas we won't be able to kind of invest in? So, I think operationally in terms of student choice, we're going to lose that at the high school with a reduction of the CTE teacher and the science teacher. So, again, those are two courses where we have hundreds of students who choose into those programs because we can't fit into So the student experience there is complex in terms of the interventions that I've cut almost every single interventionist um that is required particularly you've heard me say and I say this with urgency but also with balance we do have a student achievement issue like that to address when you want to address student achievement and provide additional support you don't have interventions to do it um that means we will get
044creative I will will get creative scheding and to reorganize our existing faculty and that's hard for they displace their current roles to be able to operate because the priority is not issue to address it. Um and if we don't address it then the issue just becomes worse. Um I think the other part where you will see some continued struggle is our special education program students um internally qualify and we have not increased the industry over those programs and so to continue to grow that solience that goes with it that just means that we're more open to certain places. Um so instead of two special education supervisors to just one it's just we just open ourselves there's so many increase programs um is huge and so like I think that that's the difference between you know
045four years ago and now that we've increase the programs but we haven't increase the oversight of those programs already person who supervises the outpaces. So, you know, there's oversight within the oversight, right? Correct. We have someone who services the PBTs that go along with those placements, but um they are not straight. And doc, do you think there will be traction with uncapping the out placements? It sure is noisy, but because that'll that'll just have to be funded by the state then um pick up differences or just could be or it could be that need to figure out some reasonable way and I see both perspectives because they have some of our most vulnerable children and they're also tricky all the way. Does that include the discussions transportation? Does that subsidies transport that if there are
046no other questions? I just want to remind everybody including our public that this was a special meeting to a special action taken this evening public. So moved second. It is now [Music] 7:52. Actually, we