001Everyone, it is 6:30 p.m. on April 28th, 2025. I would like to call to order the meeting of the finance committee for the Lyall Community School District 202. Item two on our agenda is public comment, and I see that we have one today. Are there any others? just the one. So, Mr. Hmel, if you would come for forward, go to the podium. Um, just as a reminder, we uh try to keep public comment to about three minutes. So, if you'd keep that in mind, I appreciate it. All right, I'll try to be I should hopefully get it in. Uh, my name is Tom Hmel, 82459 Street in Lyall. I would like to comment on the upcoming TIFF joint rev joint review board meetings on May 13th and June 19th. I would like the school district
002202 to request that the boundaries of the two new proto proposed tiffs on East Ogden Avenue tiff and the route 53 tiff be scaled back from what is being proposed. These two new tiffs cover a lot of land in the commercial corridor of Lyall School District 202. This is on top of the existing downtown tiff. This also doesn't even consider the vill's floodplane property acquisition program which over time will permanently remove many pro properties from the tax roles. The reason for concern my concern with these proposed boundaries with all these parcels EAVS being frozen for at least 23 years and the permanent removal of floodplane properties from the tax roles. This will shift shift the tax burden to the existing residents of the school district. I'm not opposed to a tiff on the Lockformer property,
003but there is no reason to put a tiff along Ogden Avenue on the recently approved Quick Trip gas station, the Speedway gas station, or Bill K Chevrolet, which has to be one of the village's largest sales tax generators. I'm also not opposed to a tiff on the vacant property south of the Hyatt Hotel on Route 53 across from the Honda Volvo of Lyall, especially since that project that that is project specific and may be ready to go soon. But there is no reason to include the Hyatt Hotel which has a large EAV and freezing that EAV for 23 years in a tiff. I also see no reason to include the BP Amico gas station as well as other properties along Route 53 in the TIFF. Finally, I would also ask uh school district 202 to
004advocate for no new residential property to be included in any of the new tiff boundaries. Um because if that the new residential properties generate new students, those folks won't be paying taxes into the the system and they will pay impact fees, but they will not be paying any of that additional new property tax revenue into the school district. Um I thank you for your time and consideration in this matter. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Hmel. All right. Now, so uh item three on the agenda are the minutes from the March 24th, 2025 finance committee meeting. Does anyone have any questions, changes, concerns about the minutes? No. All right. Excellent. So, we are in agreement the minutes accurately reflect the March finance committee meeting. Excellent. All right. So item four is the classroom lease
005agreement for summer 2025 for the school association for special education in debage SASID. Information can be found under item 7A6 of the regular board meeting packet. Mr. Wilson, if you take it away. So the first action item uh related to the SASID lease agreements that's included in your consent agenda tonight is for the summer 2025 lease agreement. Uh Sassid is requesting to lease four classrooms at Shisure Elementary School for their extended school year program uh which is expected to run from June 23rd to July 17th. Uh two classrooms will be for their uh supported medical needs program and then two additional classrooms for their uh special needs program. Uh the lease mirrors the structure that we have in place for our current school year lease agreement. Uh that includes that within the rent it covers
006all utilities uh janitorial services. We provide uh the cleaning for them through one of our employees and then also kind of general maintenance for the building. In that regard uh we do have a stipulation within our regular uh school year lease agreement that our um uh cap on major repairs of the building is limited to $50,000. And so we did structure this lease agreement, the summer one, that if we have to make any uh repairs to the buildings that would fall under kind of that major building repairs, it would go towards that $50,000 cap between the two leases. Um so again, that's just to protect us from any major thing that's going wrong. Uh it would not be worth fixing for the building long term. Total rent for the summer lease is $6,750. that's set
007by SASID. They have um obviously they lease classrooms for many districts and so they as a uh board of directors set their own lease rates for classrooms and so it follows that schedule and so that's included in the consent agenda for approval this evening. Excellent. Thank you very much. And on a related note, item five is the classroom lease agreement for the school year 2025 uh 2026 for the school association for special education in Dupage Sassid. That information we found under item 7 A7 in the regular board meeting packet. Please continue. I did break these out into two separate action items, but they're both included within consent. This is for the renewal of the classroom leases that's over there currently for the 2425 school year. This would renew for the 2526 school year. They're Sassid
008is requesting to continue using six classrooms over there as well as one um office space over at the Shiser Elementary School. Similar to last year, they're aware that, you know, we don't have any regular staffing over there other than the um custodial services that we provide to keep their rooms clean. And obviously, they're also aware that Chesterton continues to lease a portion of that building. As I mentioned in the last agenda item, uh major building repairs are again limited to $50,000. So that's incorporated into the lease agreement. And then um following their set amounts for the classroom leases, the lease amount would remain at $150,000 for next year. And that once again is inclusive of all utilities, maintenance, janitorial services, etc. So that is also included in the consent agenda for approval. Any one question
009I just thought of. Do we have any idea of how many more years that would like they would like to rent out our space? And similar to the conversations we've had with Chesterton of saying we have one last contract with them. I can't remember we got two more years on that. Um so we're excuse me we're going year to year with Sassid. Sassid has a committee of board members right now that are looking at options because they're hoping to consolidate right now instead of having leases everywhere. they would like to have everything in house. And so they're looking at the possibility of buying a building. They're looking at the possibility of adding on to a current building. Um, and so that will impact probably the lease with us, but this started in the first place
010because some of the neighboring school districts were having renovations. And so if the classrooms are available in those buildings, they'll return to those schools. Specifically, Downers Grove comes to mind. I know they've got a big amount of renovations going on. And so I don't I know for sure Sassid would rent from us this upcoming school year, but I wouldn't be surprised if they move back to Downers Grove the following year. Thank you. And in regards to Chesterton, they're they have two more years left as you mentioned. Yep. Any further questions? Oh, good. All right. So, that would bring us to item six, the special educ education transport services contract extension. And that can item that information can be found under item 7 A9 of the regular board meeting packet. We touched on this extension briefly
011during I think it was the January finance committee meeting. A a group of member Sassid districts were talking with Sunrise about extending the current contract. Um in the group overall was looking for a three-year extension. uh that would continue through the 2728 school year and would also bring the agreement with them to the maximum 10 years that's now allowed um under the uh cooperative under the uh new school code basically that speaks to uh transportation contracts. And so this agreement includes 4% annual increases for those three years. That's what was discussed at uh at the finance committee meeting in January and that's what was settled upon. uh looking at next year that would increase our uh special ed transportation cost by about $55,000. But I would again remind uh the committee that the state of
012Illinois does reimburse a portion of those costs and so we end up getting back about 60% of that. So that 55,000 is kind of the gross costs, but then once we go through the process of submitting the claim, we would get a little over half of that back. And so, uh, that's included for approval in the, uh, in the consent agenda as well. And it's just, uh, uh, formalizing what was discussed back in January. Can I clarify something just what you were just saying? So, you said that the 55,000 represents like the 4% increase. Um, so when we get reimbursed from the state of Illinois, is that only for the increase they will pay 60%? No, they'll pay like I think our overall I'm just going to ballpark it here, but let's say it's 1.5
013million. We get 60% of that 1.5 million. This would just go from 1.6 to 1 I should have picked a better number, but 1,655,000. Perfect. Okay. All right. So, that leads us into item seven, the regular student transportation services bid. That information can be found under item 788 in the regular board meeting packet. Once again, Mr. Wilkinson. So, we did uh I think it was either January, February, it's all blurring together at this point, but we went out for bid for regular transportation services. Um, we had just we're finishing up our 11th year with Westway Coach and um the law did change as I mentioned in our our last end agenda item where um school bus operating contracts are now limited to 10 years. When we looked at this last year, the attorney said, "Well,
014they just changed the law on us. We could extend for one year because it's so late, but we really should go through the bidding process um this current year that we're in for next school year." So, we went ahead and and uh put out a bid publicly for transportation. We ended up getting proposals from three vendors. Uh North American Central, which um if you see some of their buses around here, they typically say Illinois Central School bus on there, which actually was our provider before Westway Coach. Uh Westway Coach submitted a bid and then also First Student. As you can see from the uh the results, First Student was significantly higher than the other two. the other two were actually extremely close. Um, when you actually look at it and you include the optional performance
015bond that was part of it where if you're concerned about whether their services are going to be good and you want kind of some protection, you can get a performance bond. When you included that in the cost, Westway Coach was actually the lowest bidder, but if you elected as a board not to take on the performance bond, uh, the route rates for Illinois Central were actually just slightly less. So they ended up becoming the lowest bidder. Fortunately, with transportation, it's not just based on price. It's actually also based on factors such as safety, stability of service, uh reliability, and those things. Um, but because the bids were so close, I did uh do my due diligence and I um called Illinois Central's references. I looked at their proposal. I got more information from them. But
016ultimately when we kind of uh evaluated the two choices whether to go with Westway Coach or Illinois Central, we just felt like the stability and the fact that Westway Coach, we've been their partner for 11 years. They've been our partner for 11 years. They know our routes. They know our kids. They know our buildings and we felt like um they would be the best uh fit for the district at this point to continue with them. And so we're ultimately recommending Westway Coach. Um they already have the buses. they wouldn't need to go out and procure new buses. They already have the drivers. Um so they wouldn't have to find new drivers. They have the infrastructure in place. And so we just felt like for that stability of service piece, it was worth continuing with Westway
017Coach at least for the three years that's covered under this initial bid. We can obviously then extend from there on all the way up to 10 years if they continue to provide the services that they have in the past. Dave, yes. Do we generally have the same drivers year after year? Should they still be employed with Westway? We do. Yeah, obviously things were a little bit of a challenge during CO. Yeah. Um, we came out of CO and had some some struggles there for a year or so, which was not unique to Westway or any other providers, but we have seen a number of the drivers back on a regular basis. I know a few of them are retiring and so we have been getting some new drivers to replace those individuals that are retiring,
018but we do typically see a lot of the same drivers from year to year. The second question of we had a um attendance incentive with Westway. Was that factored into the calculations and or even consider because and has that been successful? So um I think it was successful at first. It's it's um I think it's still helping but there have been more drivers not getting that attendance bonus for month to month than when we first started it. I didn't include that in the bid documents. Um, it's certainly something that we can include. It It's not going to be where it's over $35,000 or exceeds the bidding threshold. So, it's it's something I'll discuss with Westway. I don't know if we'll continue it or not, but I didn't want to um uh include that in the
019bid up front because I wanted to have that flexibility if we decided to do it or not. Great. Thank you. Um, I did also get a question about uh if you'll see on the detailed bid tabulation, there's a Bennett driver's ed shuttle. And so this has been in place uh since I've gotten here, but uh we as the public school district where Bennett is within our boundaries, we're required to offer our driver's education program to Bennett students. Um obviously if there's costs for that associated with us, we build the resident districts and they reimburse us for those costs accordingly. But as part of that process, they actually attend the zero hour course over at Lyall High School. And so their parents will drop them off at Lyall High School. They'll go to zero hour and
020then we actually provide a bus that takes them from Lyall High School to back to Bennett Academy after the course has taken place. And so that's what that cost is for. How many students Bennett students do we typically have? I don't have the exact numbers. I could ballpark. I mean, probably 10 students, 10 to 15, 10 to 20. I mean, that's it. It it fluctuates from year to year. Yeah. Yeah. I'd imagine. Okay. I knew we had to legally do transportation in Lyle. I didn't realize the first time I noticed that on there. I'm sure I've seen I'm sure it's been there all these years. Yeah. I was just cur curious how it was for driver's ed. So, whether or not we're required to provide that bus, that's kind of a gray area, I think.
021I don't know that it specifically says that. But I think as we unpack more of these transportation costs in the coming months, I think that will be one that we'll certainly have a discussion about as to is that something that um is a while taxpayer expense or not. I don't know. And and being that they're starting at the school, it' probably be no different if they're at their home, you know, busing from their home. If these are students that are within Yeah, we do run obviously um one bus for Bennett students. that bus runs within the Lyall District 202 boundary. So any Lyall residents who want to attend Benon Academy have transportation provided to them. Um whether or not we're required by law to run a shuttle to take kids from driver's ed, I've looked
022at the the code and I would say it's it's a gray area. It's a gray area. Okay. Thank you. So, uh three-year contract total is is about $4.3 million. Uh the first year increase is a 6% increase from last year. So about an $80,000 increase in costs. Uh and then 4% increases are built into the subsequent years uh through the prices that they provided. Once we get past 3 years, then we would negotiate any extensions, but they are capped at no more than 5%. All right. Any other questions? No. Okay. Thank you very much. So, let's see here. That brings us to uh item eight, the lawn and landscape maintenance bid. That information can be found under item 7 A10 in the regular board meeting packet. So this is the school district's first time going
023through the public bid process for lawnmowing services, fertilization services and then also we have now included landscape bed maintenance services uh kind of to get the trifecta within the the bid documents. Um you know why are we going through this process? Uh if you recall a few intergovernmental agreements before uh the park district actually provided those services for us. Uh they actually ended up outsourcing most of those services to G&G which um we'll talk about here in a second. Uh and then as that agreement has evolved, we ended up kind of bringing it in house and handling some of those things in house like the landscape bed maintenance, but we haven't been able to keep up with the demands with just one person. And so we've had to outsource to G&G for some of the
024lawn uh mowing services uh except with the exception of the junior high and field 7 because those are mowed a little bit more frequently with Wildy Field. And then also the the fertilization was handled by G&G. And so when we looked at those two costs, they were approaching that $35,000 bid threshold. And so it was time uh to go through the bid process and have a competitive process for that business. And so G&G Lawncare did submit the lowest responsible bid. We had three biders and they came into the lowest. As I mentioned before, they have they previously serviced our park our properties when the park district was doing it. We continued to use them because the costs were below 35,000 and we were very happy with their services. Um and so we've had this ongoing
025relationship with them for a number of years consolidating uh not only the the lawnmowing but also the fertilization in particular the landscaping services. Um we're expected that that actually will end up saving the district about $40,000 annually because our plan is to uh reassign the groundskeeper to a custodial pitch position over at Lyall Elementary School. So by outsourcing all this to G&G, we won't have that position expense anymore. And so we'll actually save about $40,000 over the course of a year. Total cost for the 2025 growing season is approximately $61,000. We can then extend with G&G if we're happy with their services for up to an additional four years. And those uh costs will increase based on CPI. question from the board member uh from a board member about pest control. Um grub control is
026included as a service uh that can be requested and there is a if you look at the bid tabulation there's actually a price for grub control services across all of our sites. We have had uh some grub issues in the past. G&G has applied that in the past and so we did include that in the bid documents. There was also a question about vos. I'm not super familiar with VO, but I did reach out to Jeff Hinton and he said we have had some issues with VO at the high school as well as uh Field 7. So whether or not that's included in the grub control piece, I'll have to work that out with G&G when the time comes. But we do have grub control services. And with that, uh recommended for approval in the
027board packet. Thank you very much. Uh let's see here. We are up to uh item nine uh the fifth amendment to the intergovernmental agreement for joint purchasing of managed information technology services. That information can be found under item 7A1 in the regular board meeting packet. And I gather we will have a guest speaker. We will have a guest speaker. I will relinquish the microphone and go quiet for a little while and Linda will uh share this one with the board. Great. in your packet. Obviously, we're um hoping you'll consider the approval of the intergovernmental agreement with Precient Solutions. We have been working with them since 2016 and have been thrilled with everything that they've been supporting us with. They under this agreement, we do have two full-time precient um ser service technicians working in the
028district. Um we have one primarily assigned to the district and one primarily assigned to the village. However, they cross over, they support each other, they pick up where the other person may leave off or have a vacation days, things like that. So, we're very very pleased with um having both people available to us. Um since we've been using them, we've been able to make quite a bit of progress on our network. Um obviously Trent is works very very closely with them and um he has grown so much um in his skills actually working with them. Um and it they're they're a great team together. So this uh agreement in front of you is about a 3.9% increase over the current year and we're asking for a three-year agreement with a floor of 3% and a
029ceiling of 5%. Um, again, we're very, very pleased with all that they're doing. Any questions? Okay. No, no questions. Okay. The agreement, did the village microphone? I'm sorry. Did the village prepare the agreement initially? It was their language and Yes. Okay. They were the original um group that contracted with Preciant. And so when we originally came on as the intergovernmental piece, we literally latched on to the agreement that they had um with all of the language. Okay, great. Thank you. And I know you were very happy with their service, but I know a few years ago we had an incident. I assume that's all good and they're on top of monitoring and awesome. We have made um great progress um since I would say that false alarm. Yes. Thank you. All right, thank you very
030much for that. Um, where are we? Okay, item 10 is the Lyall Junior High School security camera purchase. That information can be found under item 7 A12 in the regular board meeting packet. Mr. Wilkinson. And so we're very fortunate to have two guest speakers this evening. uh the esteemed Trenshock is joining us and he's going to share uh some exciting news about the junior high school camera purchases that we're uh looking at implementing here very shortly. So with that I will pass the microphone to Trent. Hello. Um so looking back a little bit um back in phase one of the renovation it originally had slated for security cameras to junior high. going through that process, working with like talking internally, working the engineering firm, we kind of took a step back and we're like, this
031is kind of a this is a larger discussion than just like what cameras were putting in at the junior high at that particular time. So, we took that back and kind of, you know, had some discussions because this was like going to be the future of the camera. This decision was the future of the camera system we're going to use implement across the district over the coming year. So, it was a much bigger decision than in that moment. Um, so that's kind of how we got it pushed to phase two, which we're looking at, you know, we're looking at completing that work th this summer. Currently, the junior high has some cameras inside, some pretty good uh coverage outside. Um, but it's lacking that kind of comprehensive coverage that administration has needed over there to
032support the learning environment. Um it's very important nowadays to have that system because a lot of things are happening in schools that we have the coverage, we have the ease of access to review the footage very quickly. Um it's a system that's going to work reliably all the time or so we you know plan every system to work all the time. Um so we ended up evaluating a couple differenti a couple different camera systems and landed on um a cloud-based uh a cloud-based system. Um it's kind of different than what you would think of a normal um security camera system where it all records to a server uh sitting in in a network room. All the footage is stored there. Um this is kind of more serverless um and and relies more on the cloud
033to facilitate viewing that footage, saving that footage. So for a couple reasons, we decided to move that direction. Um it's it's simplifies our simplifies our management of it. It it offers some very advanced analytics for some movement tracking um some attribute tracking to kind of be able to very quickly pinpoint um footage that that administrators and people reviewing the cameras need to see. And it also allows us to scale very easily. Um with a server, we'd have to size kind of the cameras we have with how much footage to be stored for how long. Um, with a cloud-based system like this, it's very easy just to if we need coverage in an area, we run a network cable there, buy the camera, put it up, and it's and we can scale that to 10 10
034additional cameras, 20, 30, etc. Um, so it's very easy to scale. So once we decided on a platform uh to use, we we we reached out to uh four installers, which are which you see there listed in the in the vendor table uh to kind of help uh spec out the system and also then pro provide the price for for not only the hardware but also for the installation services as we're adding it adding adding new cameras which involves you involves cable runs um installing those in some hard-to-reach places and things like that. So after reaching out to after reaching out and receiving quotes from all the vendors, uh Modern Media Tech out of Lake Bluff, Illinois um had the lowest uh project cost. So that's why uh we are recommending them to um to
035to to complete this project. They they work with a lot of other school districts school districts primarily up north. Um but they also work with some around this area. Um the our primary contact there is very knowledgeable um very professional did a great job walking the building with us mapping out locations uh where those cameras should go to not only have complete coverage but also taking taking into factor the cost of of the cameras and that some things we could do to keep good coverage but also keep the cost cost down. And then also the references um for this installer were were very were very very good and we um are excited to to hopefully work with them um not only for this project but also future projects. There was a question in regards to
036um what's the future for the other for for the other school districts or not other school districts sorry other schools uh because this is kind of looking at this system now for for the for moving to the district over the course of the next couple years. So we're currently evaluating those options on what that sort of what the timeline looks like. Um the high school as noted in the in in the packet uh is about over 10 years old for those cameras and that and that whole system system in general. So we are definitely looking at what we can do there first. Um so we don't have a timeline or an exact plan plan moving forward yet but we are actively kind of exploring those options. There was another question regarding the the the total
037cost of the project which is the approximately uh $84,000 and then what the one-off cost of the cameras themselves versus the reoccurring costs look like. Uh approximately $27,000 of that $83,000 project costs are for camera licenses. Um that's a 5year uh license cost. So that would cover us for five years of licensing for those cameras. And then we would look at then after those five years what those um re renewal costs look like in addition to adding additional cameras at those other buildings depending on what that timeline looks like could also push that that date out further. So we're leasing all the cameras. So if we switched would they have to come in and remove the cameras? So we are we are purchasing the cameras. Okay. Um but then there is a subscription on top
038of that for access to the platform. Yeah, that okay. So if theoretically if we switched we can keep the same cameras and just go with a new vendor assuming the technology of the cameras are still compatible. Unfortunately with the with the platform we chose the cameras are locked in to that particular platform. Okay. um when we were having these discussions, we evaluated uh that I would use the word uh risk of what if we don't like it in, you know, five years? What if it's not what if it's no longer company in 5 years? Um we've been using some of these cameras in at the junior high and at the high school for the last year and a half to two years. Um and have been very happy with it. Um so this wasn't a
039decision that we just kind of picked like this looks good, let's try it. We've been sort of invested in this system for a little bit with some cameras and many school districts have been moving to these to this platform as well and we feel very comfortable with with this decision um even though it does kind of lock us into their ecosystem. Right. So yeah, a lot of other school districts are using this system. We we don't want to mention the system here at a public meeting, but um so we feel comfortable with that. If for some reason that particular vendor ceased to exist, uh they do open up the hardware itself and you can take it somewhere else, but as long as they they exist, we we would be locked into them. That doesn't mean
040we can't use a different vendor for service or support. We're not locked into modern media tech. We can go to other vendors that support this system, but it in terms of the backend, we can't go get a different backend using these cameras. So some cameras for example like an axis camera is is hardware agnostic so you can get it with any server any backend. This is very specific but part of the benefits of that is you get a lot more analytics a lot more capabilities. You get the cloud-based aspect. You also you know like the ones that we have at the junior high right now uh Trent in the maintenance department actually installed themselves. They ran a network cable. They plugged it in and we were off and running which is great. with our current
041system at at the other schools like we have to call out a vendor basically every time we want to do anything with the camera systems which is frustrating and expensive. The other piece is even with our current system while the licensing may not be quite as expensive there still is correct me if I'm wrong Trent there's a maintenance license on those or a software and or a a I'm drawing a blank on the word but we have to get updates and support and things like that. So we're already paying a licensing on our existing cameras. Yes. So this is much more of a subscriptionbased model. Um where our current system there's uh uh I I had I had the word and then you and then I blanked on it. Um but you still have like
042maintenance renewals, you still have licensing renewals, you have that you factor in the cost of new servers every every um five to six years. Uh so all those costs are kind of baked into that subscription cost. that includes warranty replacements, that includes the storage. That's kind of an all-in um subscription cost there versus kind of three or four different costs spread across the system for for more of an on-remise traditional system. Great. Thank you. I was just thinking that we could save money in a in five years of not having to replace the hardware just by the backend services. You know, obviously they need to pay for to maintaining their servers that have all our images on. So, how long do we keep our video? Do we do a purge every uh we have a
043currently we have an approximate 30-day retention window. Okay. You know what it is with the new system? The new system is also 30 days. Okay. Excellent. Thank you. And we're also running into the challenge right now with our existing system where the servers are getting old and so that's another aspect where we won't have to replace servers in the future if we go with this system. So, that was another benefit. I I'm very supportive of a cloud-based maintaining these servers because you know it's I'm in that industry. So it's like you don't have to have you know spend your time on that. It should just work. So and and there was one additional question um on potentially any grants that can be applied to defer the cost of the cameras. Uh the only one I
044am aware of is the school violence prevention program uh which is also called like which is also called the cops grant. It's through the uh uh department of justice. So it's a federal grant. uh program. It is very very competitive um and and it's usually typically awarded uh to districts with a high percentage of free and re of free and reduced uh lunch status. Um so I've not seen at least in the last couple years a district um close to our free and reduced uh percentage uh receive that grant and it's a very I think Dave we've talked about it's a very complicated grant and very thorough grant. Um so yeah, so that's that's the only grant program I'm aware of. I'm not aware of any local programs for that fund security cameras. Excellent. Any
045further questions? No. Good. All right. So, we are at item 11, the quarterly financial update, which can be found under item 11 of the finance committee packet. And just to clarify really quick, that is included in your board packet for approval. I know sometimes with technology, we just ask for authorization. And in this case, we felt like we should ask for formal approval. So that is in the consent agenda. Thank you, Trent. All right. So, our last item is the, uh, quarterly financial update. And so, uh, this is our financial report through March 31st through our third quarter of fiscal year 25. Uh I'll touch on a few of the highlights and then dig into purchase services because that's where uh the majority of the writeup was and I think a fair amount of the
046questions. Also terms of our local revenues, property taxes, as we would expect this time of year, are pretty much at 100% collected. Interest income is trending a little bit ahead of projections, which is good. And so I am anticipating that uh we'll get a little bit more interest income than I originally budgeted at the beginning of the year. As far as state and federal revenues, those are also tracking as expected. We are expecting additional dispersements in the fourth quarter. And so hopefully that'll uh get us closer to 100% of those budgeted dollar amounts. Obviously, we're budgeting that before we know all the final grants and before everything's in place. So we do our best. Um, but we're hoping to realize um all of those dollars as well as we get to the end of the
047year. Salaries and benefits, they're right in line with where we would expect to be at this time, this time in the year. Obviously, it's a little bit lower than 75% because we have the acrruels now that we're a acrruel basis district instead of the good old days of cash basis where that was very straightforward and simple. But we will see um some additional costs there in the last uh month when we acrew those July and August payments to our 10-month staff into the current fiscal year. So, it aligns with when those services actually took place. As far as purchase services, there's a lot of moving parts here. I'll I'll hopefully I won't confuse everybody. I'll try and keep it relatively simple, but uh we are trending higher than last year by about $650,000. Uh you'll
048see that in the write up that I had. There are kind of a few reasons for this model. One or or reasons for this this increase. One is uh Sasset has been going through some billing model changes over there. They're kind of looking at how they do the billing, how they build districts, what that looks like. And so that process has been evolving um over a few years, but a lot in this current year that we're going through. And so one of the big changes is they've actually now all of the overhead for their administrative staff, their office staff, a lot of the costs that can't be associated with any specific programs. They've now estimated kind of an 18% charge for those overhead costs. And they've incorporated that into not only their tuition rates, but
049also their services. And so kind of out of the gate, we're looking at an 18% increase in those costs. While we aren't paying fees specifically for those overhead costs, it would appear that kind of where we are right now, that 18% is more than what we were paying previously. Now, they're going to true things up at the end of the year, hoping we get some money back, but that's um part of the reason that purchase services cost has increased. We also would see that on the tuition side. Terms of our aids, we've actually increased from last year by three. So each aid is anywhere from a regular aid is $55,000 a medical aid is I think $95,000. And so that can have a pretty big swing. We obviously do our best to estimate that at
050the beginning of the year, but students can move in. Things can change in their uh required services. And so based on where we were last year and where we are right now, we're up three aids. And so there was an additional cost for that. I also mentioned, and maybe it wasn't the best use of words, late aid billings, uh, in the writeup. And so, um, at the end of the school year, SASID kind of looks at, you know, who actually was in the programs, what were the aids, and they they do kind of these final billings. So, they pre-buill at the beginning of the year, and then they do a final billing at the end of the year. Um, those bills were I don't know if they were delayed necessarily, but we didn't get them
051until the end of July. they have to there's a lot of stuff that has to take place for them to kind of finalize the school year, finalize all the numbers. And by the time they got out those bills, it it was the end of July. Um, student services had some questions on the bills. They were reviewing them for accuracy, making sure we were being build correctly. And so that took a little bit of time. And so by the time the business office received it, it was actually September, the first week in September. And so when we do our audit for the year, the only thing that gets acred into the previous year is anything we pay in July and August. So it had missed that cut off. And then um so we weren't able to
052put that in the prior year. So that ended up hitting the current fiscal year that we're in. So again, those costs should have been last year, they're in this year. So we're seeing that additional increase. And Dave, will that continue going forward? It seems like they do like true things up. Yeah. Yeah, they kind of finally get when they close their fiscal year, they say what really were these student populations and which members of the SASID program school districts what should be the fair. So this true-up is always going to be pushed into the following year just how timing works. So, yeah, we're there's a few things going on in the business office, but we're hoping to pay more attention to that. And now that we're more aware of it with some of these costs,
053um our goal is just to to be aware that like, hey, have we gotten all the bills? Have they all been paid? Can we get them all in the current year? And uh at a minimum, making sure that if that doesn't happen, we incorporate that into the next year's budget. And not just budget for what we're seeing for this next year, but actually what happened the prior year. The goal would be let's get all those costs paid in August so that we can get them in the right fiscal year. Great. Thank you. Just for consistency. Not to confuse things even more, but there was also another piece uh to the puzzle here where um we've always charged our aid costs even though they're a separate bill. We've always charged them to tuition. And we've always
054been like, does that make sense? It's really a service that we're getting. Tuition is kind of its own object. It's the 670 object and we other other objects. And that's a very specific item, but why do we keep charging these aids um to these tuition accounts? And so as we were moving more of these SASID costs, more of our tuition, more of our aid costs into the IDA grant, we decided to actually carve these aid costs out of tuition and move them up into the purchase service line. So that's also something that is in there this year that it was in a different spot last year. And so kind of a variety of those factors, that's why we're seeing this large increase. Uh when you actually look at our services for AIDS as well as
055our tuition costs, um they're pretty close to where we were last year in total. They might be in different buckets on our financial statements, but in total, the dollar amounts, at least right now, we haven't gotten the final bills, uh they're pretty similar to where we were last year, right around like 2.2 million across all of them. So despite these higher costs, we did we did factor that into the budget. And so when you look at kind of where we are in terms of the budget at this point, we're at 71% of our budget has been spent. I think at this time last year, we were at 72. So we're still trending in line with budget. There's just some factors in terms of um kind of where those costs are being charged. Along the same
056same lines, I did I think I got some questions about kind of explain more a little bit about the the Sassid billing model and and what's going on with these changes. Um I think I mentioned that that there's those overhead costs and so we did increase our tuition budget by 20% because we knew those overhead costs would be included. I think in general um you know Sassid is now looking at kind of their budgeted net program costs and saying what are those costs? That's how we're going to determine what we build districts where I think in the past it was more what did we charge last year call it a 4% increase a 5% increase and so now they're trying to get a better handle on what exactly are the costs of those programs let's
057pre-bill based on that let's look at the cost for the program at the end of the year let's true it up with a final bill so kind of in some conversations with SASID we're hoping that maybe they estimated a little bit conservatively and we'll get some of that back at the end of the year But we won't know for sure until we get to that final true up in terms of um and I I think the overall gist is they want to better in line the actual program costs with what they're billing the school districts. This wasn't something that was mandated by the state. It was a sacid change. They're doing this. They're working through it and it wasn't something that was required of them. In terms of reporting impact, that was another question I
058got from a board member. And there's no effect on the AR AFR reporting with this billing model change. And then I also would not expect it to impact any of the EBF calculations, the evidence-based funding calculations because those mostly rely on kind of staffing data and enrollment data, which isn't something that's being factored in in these billing model changes. Um, so that's kind of the area of purchase services, tuition. Those are kind of the I guess the other one with purchase services is transportation costs. Those are kind of the big ones that we're following as we work through kind of the end of the year. Those are the ones that would probably have the biggest impact uh kind of on where we land as far as our budget as we move through the year. termination
059benefits. While not a significant dollar amount, uh overall, I did get some questions on those termination benefits. Kind of as a reminder, those termination benefits are payments for terminated or retiring employees, but specifically for unused sick days that they've accumulated or unused vacation days, which would obviously only apply to our uh 12-mon staff. And so it's not for any service bonuses that we have agreed to under the collective bargaining agreement. I know that was a part of our last uh contract negotiations kind of changing that that service bonus program. Those are not included in that termination benefits line item. Those are actually incorporated into our salary budgets and will be incorporated as those people retire in the future as they have been in the past. Um although we did get a long list of retirees
060that submitted in this particular uh board meeting uh those service bonuses will be captured under salary. As far as the termination benefits the only thing that would be encompassed is if they have a significant amount of unused sick days that would be paid out. I think it's $25 a day. In order for that to happen, they have to have more than 340 days accumulated because they can turn in 340 days to TRS to get service credit. And so we did have uh obviously that varies from year to year. It varies from retiree to entire. We did end up having some teachers this past year who were actually happen to be over that 340. And so some of those costs are included in the termination benefits. year. This year we did have an administrator who retired
061who had some unused vacation. That's included in there. And then lastly, we've had some resignations this year which also incorporated some unused vacation days. So that's that's what makes up all of those costs. Um and it's why it's slightly over budget from what we originally anticipated. You don't know who's going to resign. You can plan for the retirees. You can plan for that. But when you have resignations, um, sometimes there's not enough, uh, cushion in there to to cover all of those. And so that is my quarterly financial update. A little bit more information than uh maybe is typical, but uh we'll see where the year ends up and then uh have a final uh year-end report for you. I think it's in August. Excellent. That concludes my quarterly report. Excellent. Thank you for that
062summary. Any further questions? All right. So, with that, we are at uh item 12, agenda topics for future uh finance committee meetings. Does anyone have any uh topics they would like to introduce? It's my understanding we probably talk about the TIFF in the May committee meeting. I'll let you in. Do you remember the date in which we have our first meeting with the village? May 13th. Believe it's May 13th. Yeah. Yeah. We'll give you an update at the May meeting. Excellent. Okay. So, that'll be included already. All right. So, with no other agenda items, I will entertain a motion to adjurnn. So, that's uh Mrs. Almond and Mr. Helderly. All right. So, the finance committee meeting is adjourned at 7:18 p.m. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a good night.