0013 2 1 Here we [Music] go. All right. Welcome everybody. Thank you to everybody who's been in the waiting room. We see people coming in now. Thank you so much for joining our webinar for this information session. We will get started momentarily and we will also be recording this session so that um we can share that recording and people can have access to the presentation and the discussion uh response to questions that are shared. [Music] So, Mark, do we are we ready to go ahead and get started or do we want to give it another minute? Uh, why don't we give it one more minute? Well, it's now one more minute. 602. So, can share the screen. Okay. So, great. Thank you so much. So, um, welcome again and good evening everyone. Um, we are
002thankful for those of you taking time to join us tonight who may take time to watch this recording um, at some future point. Um, we've really been enjoying the opportunity to hold um, so far two of these information sessions. Uh, one last week at Pierce, one this morning at Kolycott Cunningham. Um, we're happy to be having this session right now on Zoom and then we will have one more of these sessions next week at the high school on Monday evening. Um, we've had some really good, respectful and informative discussions with members of the community who've attended these sessions and we really appreciate everybody's engagement. Um, so I'm Lizzie Carroll and the chair of the school committee. I'm happy to sort of get us started here and then I'll be handing it over to our team
003including u Miss Katie Blake, Dr. Peter Burroughs and then um school committee finance chair Mark Luring who will be sharing a com um a presentation that will be as brief as possible to allow time for the uh questions that we hope you all will submit. um when we conclude the presentation or as we go through the presentation um please use the Q&A feature on your toolbar at the bottom of the screen to submit questions. Uh that will allow us to get through as many questions as possible. Uh we will read the questions out and um be able to have the appropriate person respond to answer your question. Um, if you for some reason have trouble accessing that feature, um, you should also be able to raise your hand on the Zoom and we can, uh,
004make sure that your question is able to be asked and answered. So, with that little bit of housekeeping, I guess we'll just go right ahead and get started. Um, this is the agenda. This is just what we plan to cover this evening in this brief um, as brief as possible overview presentation. Uh we'll start a little bit with our values as a district just for some foundation. Talk about how we got to this point with our budget, what the budget request is looking ahead to next year. Um that's in the context of the override of course will provide some context um for sort of the fiscal situation we find ourselves in and we'll provide some next steps and further opportunities to engage. So in uh beginning around our values uh we we have really been
005grounding these conversations in um our mission as a public school district in Milton public schools. Um the mission of our district of the Milton public schools is to educate, challenge and empower all students to be productive, caring and contributing members of society. And of course, we can never remind ourselves too much of the reason we all show up to do this work every day, whether we're employees of the district or volunteers serving on behalf of the community. It is to provide our children with the best possible educational experience here in Milton. Um if you can move to the next slide, Mark. Um, we want to just always keep in mind when we're discussing our budget that the numbers we are talking about have uh real meaningful human sort of uh consequences and purpose attached to
006them. uh whether we're talking about our students, our staff, our broader community, as we go through and talk about various numbers in the budget request, uh we need to keep in mind that there are people tied to the end of all of these numbers. Um that when we're talking about the budget, we're talking about what we're able to fund as a district. That translates to positions to programs that we're able to offer or that we're not able to offer. Um and so we just have been working to keep that sort of top of mind here in our work on school committee and of course um day in and day out in central office and throughout Milton public schools. So just with that little bit of context to kind of frame our time and get us
007started, I'm going to hand it over to Katie Blake who will s sort of begin with some of the context how we got to where we are today. Thank you Katie. Thank you. Good evening everyone. So tonight I am going to be providing some more information on our recent um budget history. So in starting with um some context and information on fiscal year 24 leading into fiscal year 25. Um, and so in May of 2024, so almost a year ago, the fiscal year 25 budget was approved. And the budget was approved at town meeting. Our fisc year budget, we run and operate under um the fisc year budget, which runs from July 1st uh to June 30th. So July 1st, 2024 is when the fiscal year 25 budget began and the budget lines were appropriated
008in accordance with the budget proposal that was approved um during town meeting last May. Later in the month of July of 2024 was when we identified that um fiscal year 24 was ending in a deficit position. Um, and so that deficit was addressed uh by using one-time funds. And so we were able to balance the fiscal year 24 budget utilizing a number of outside revenue sources including um some special education reimbursement program revenue which is referred to as circuit breaker. We used um some of the funding that we had available in a Medicaid account um and then we used funding that was available in some of the other school revolving accounts um earlier in this year. So in January of 2025, uh after the second quarter financial report was presented to the school committee is
009when we initially um started reporting out that we were projecting that we would end the current fiscal years which is fiscal year 25 in a deficit position. And so what that means is we um earlier or earlier in the year in January when we looked at the expenses that we had already incurred for this school year and then when we also took into account the expenses that we knew we were going to have for the remainder of the school year. We estimated that those expenses were going to be in excess of the budget that was appropriated to us last year. And so when we looked further into some of the areas that were causing uh the deficit for this year, the projected deficit for this year, we identified a number of accounts that were operating
010in a structural deficit. So just to provide some more information when we talk about a structural deficit around what it truly is and how a structural deficit can happen um within a budget. A structural deficit means that reoccurring expenses are consistently exceeding the reoccurring revenues or the budget appropriations. So in the context of the school budget, it just simply means that the expenses that we're incurring on a daily basis to operate the school district are in excess of the budget that was appropriated to us um or the school operating budget. Structural deficits can occur for a number of different reasons which include um having a budget that is based on past budget numbers and not based on actual expenses. A structural deficit can also occur due to rising costs um when we realized the cost
011of inflation and also demographic changes. So when there is a change to the to the student population and different needs um that can lead to having a structural deficit. So when we talk about some of the budget history, it's really important to realize that the school department when we operate and we when we administer a budget, we're never just looking at the budget of the current fiscal year, but we're always operating essentially in three budgets. We're looking at the past budget from the previous fiscal year to look at the actual um realized known expenses. We're looking at the current year's budget to see where those expenses are and any increases that we're realizing. And we're also looking forward to the future and seeing how is the budget that we're currently operating in. How will that
012look in a future fiscal year in the next few fiscal years? And what adjustments will we have to make in the budget to make sure that we're able to cover our expenses? And so knowing that there were different areas in the budget for the current fiscal year year that were operating in a deficit, we were able to make adjustments into the fiscal year 26 budget. um to be able to base uh base those budgets on prior year actuals and projected increases and essentially reconcile the structural deficits. So when we talk about the budget development process in ref referencing fiscal year 26, the first step in our budget development process is very much to project out what our level service budget would be for the upcoming year. And so to provide more information on um what
013a level service budget is. And I just want to be very clear that in some instances we can confuse the language between a level service budget and a level funded budget. And so the budget that we will be referencing and talking about tonight is a level service budget. And what that means is the level service budget is the amount of money that we'll need next year, so fiscal year 26 to provide the same level of services that we're providing this year in fiscal year 25. The school department has hundreds of budget accounts and they're typically um grouped into two general areas, salary and general expenses. We review each account on an annual basis, but typically what drives our budget increases from year-over-year is fairly consistent. And those budget increases generally are driven by salary increases
014due to bargaining agreements, any fluctuations that we may see in our outside revenue sources, whether it be grants that we receive or any um fees that we collect, any of our mandated expenses that we're required to provide um either by Mass General Law or by a mandate that is set forth by the state and then also taking into account any inflation adjustments. So this um this exhibit will provide more information on the specifics of how the fiscal year 26 operating budget is built. I am not going to go through the exhibit line by line, but I just want to um point to the first portion of the exhibit and you can see the overall increases to the budget are largely driven by salary changes and salary increases. So at the top of the exhibit, you
015can see that our starting point is the fiscal year 25 budget and then all of the increases are built on top of that budget number. And so a large portion of that is truly driven by salaries. It's also driven by increases because of special education services. We are seeing increases um in the cost of providing transportation to our students both in district and students that attend um schools that are outside of Milton public schools. Um we are seeing an increase in some of the facilities expenses that we have. So that is due to um some of our utility expenses. And then we also are taking into account any miscellaneous adjustments. So if there are increased cost to curriculum materials to any of the textbooks that we may purchase, any of the curriculum software um that
016we purchase on an annual basis. We're taking all of those factors into account when we're costing out um the fiscal year 26 operating budget. And you can see overall taking all of those factors into account, the level service um budget for fiscal year 26 is projected at an 8.4% increase. Thank you, Katie. Appreciate that. Um so Katie walked us through a lot of detail within the budget process. I just want to pull us back for a second now to talk about the budget for the schools at a high level. So the school budget increase for FY26 is 5.7 million. That was set uh through the select board's vote when they established the override number uh which for the town as a whole is 9.5, but the school's allocation is 5.7. Um that's a decrease from
017the school department's original ask of 6.4 million, which might be a number that folks have heard before. Excuse me. Um, so we will be seeing a slight cut in programming next year because as Katie said, the level service number of 6.4 was designed to sustain programming as is moving into next year. With a reduction in that amount, we will need to reduce programming uh slightly to to accommodate for that uh $700,000 cut. Um, so uh the school department is seeing a cut to uh level service funding. Um the other thing we are doing is we are looking to reallocate some funding within our own budget. So we're going to remove some things in order to uh invest uh in some critical areas that we've identified uh to help improve the experience and and learning for
018our students. Uh the first of those uh investments is funding for new ELA curriculum. That's a critical need we've been looking at for for a couple years now and uh are reallocating things in order to fund it uh going into FY26. The other is a slight increase to staffing to support English language learners, our students who whose first language is not English. That's actually more of a mandated cost because we we need to increase the FTE in order to meet minutes requirements for for our students who require those services. Uh but that's another place where we we are going to reallocate in order to address that need. Um and then also just to name there's been again obviously concern that that we've expressed when we presented the select board and the select board has talked
019about and many residents have talked about just like the sustainability of this uh override ask. Uh the town is kind of oversees that select board town administrator in terms of how they are trying to lay this out over time. So I don't mean to speak for them, but the goal and the joint goal of the schools and the select board is to kind of carry this through and ensure this override lasts us um through FY30. Uh unfortunately with Prop 2 and a half, it is you know uh an inevitability that at some point Milton will ask need to potentially come back to the taxpayers again to ask for another override, but that that is not something that is is sustainable for taxpayers on a regular basis. And so the FY30 um time horizon is kind
020of what the select board has set. Um want to just name that for framing. Uh getting back into a couple details here, the budget reduction. So as we talked about, there's a $700,000 cut to level service funding. And in addition to that, we need to make room for some of the reallocations we discussed. So uh these are kind of some of the various things that are going to be done at the school department to um cut back in order to meet those those costs. First is kind of reduction based upon some enrollment project enrollment attrition for next year. Uh we are going to need to eliminate one of the school buses we were able to add last year. Um so that is a programmatic cut just some general expenses again a staffing position here in
021terms of family liaison some uh programmatic changes within the special education department specifically around the neck program um some nursing sport which is um uh utilized at one of our schools. We are looking at needing to increase athletics fees and so that is something we'll talk about more at our next school committee meeting. um we've talked about at our finance, but those fees will need to go up slightly for FY26. Uh and kind of when you put all these things together, uh it gives us brings us to about a million dollars, just under. And then when we look at the additions, uh these are the two things I mentioned before, the ELA curriculum and the ELLL teacher uh FTE. And so putting those two things together gets us to around $300,000. The ELLL staff is
022not a full-time FTE. It's a.3 FTE, which is why that number is so low. Um, but those two things together is around 300,000 million plus the 300,000. That's what brings us to about the 700,000. Uh, want to pull back now even further outside of Milton and just uh talk about kind of the fiscal reality context here, some of the big drivers around the override. Um, first and foremost, it's Prop 2 and a half. That's a law in Massachusetts. I I think many of you probably know, but for those who don't, uh, was enacted back in 1980 that limits the amount that, uh, revenues that, uh, towns are able to raise on property taxes in a given year. Uh, creates this levy limit. And, um, you know, so that that is a hard cap on towns
023every year. that limits how much they can uh increase services or um uh adjust for uh cost of kind of rising cost of things through inflation. We obviously know that inflation over since our last override has averaged around 4% a little bit above. So those are are real pressures that are being felt obviously within Milton but also within the town I mean within the state as a whole. That's kind of the second item is that these structural deficits uh and challenges around budgets um that Milton is seeing is something that is being seen across the state. There are many many towns going for overrides within the current year that happened last year that are planning for next year. So this is this is a a reality of the current place we are um as a
024state. And so Milton is is experiencing that. there are these coalitions um that are looking into kind of some of the issues around state funding particularly around educational funding um within the state because uh of just how widespread this pain uh is being felt across municipalities. And the last thing we just want to name is there because people have asked is there is just right now uncertainty around the future of federal funding. Um, and so there are potential impacts that that could come down the pike related to funding for education or health and human services or or other things which ultimately uh could impact either the town as a whole or the schools in particular. And those are things we just don't have a lot of clarity in right now. Um, and so those are
025things that as a town and school department uh we'll need to monitor and and pay close attention to and and figure out how to manage uh as they come down. Uh next just want to take a a couple moments to talk through some of the process changes. We've gotten the question uh several times um around you know what you know obviously what is the cause of the current year fiscal deficits which Katie talked about earlier but also what are we doing moving forward to um help address that and make sure that that doesn't happen again. Uh so these are some of the things and I'm not going to talk about every single one of them here. Um, but I do want to highlight a couple. And the first one is that very first bullet point,
026which is the FY26 budget work that is is key in addressing what Katie mentioned previously, those structural deficit line items, um, where historically we just have not built into the budget what it actually costs to do some of the work. And so parading that uh addressing that issue within the FY26 budget to make it sustainable and make it uh operable and be honest about um you know what it's actually going to cost us to run electricity across all of our buildings because this is what it cost us this year and last year and the year before. Uh that's obviously a basic principle of budgeting but a really important one as it relates to how we are fixing the financial issue um that that we have been kind of dealing with within the district. The second
027one is this idea of a recasting of the the budget. So after the budget closes in July, using the endofear budget to see what our actual expenses were for the year and comparing that against the approved budget from town meeting. One of the issues just with the budget process overall is that it starts very early uh in a in a year, right? It starts in October, it's approved in May, but we actually don't finish out the expenses until July. So, taking the time in August um to look at what our last year's actual expenditures were, compare them to our uh current year budget at that point, and see are there any places where in July and August we should be concerned as we're going into the year because it looks like um expenses are going
028to outpace what our budget was for that. and look at those line kind of line by line um assessment and figure out, you know, is there a reason why we expect that cost to go down within the current fiscal year or how are we going to kind of move things around in order to accommodate for that? That's much easier to do earlier on in the the fiscal year obviously than it is uh to start dealing with it in January. Um so a couple of these things again are all important. I also just want to highlight the posting of our finance committee meeting recordings. Those are on the MATV YouTube channel. So again, appreciate MATV for for posting those. So folks have uh additional interest in kind of more of the finance conversations and things, please
029um go to that as well. And then the last two kind of process changes want to highlight are more um interconnected between the schools and the town as a whole. And so the first one is uh an idea that we've talked about with the town administrator that we're um excited to support uh with his efforts around bringing in a financial best practices consultant to look at finances, budgeting, HR, the technology around these systems that that the town and the schools use in order to figure out how we can um improve those processes, how we can do them better, more efficiently, uh create more up-to-date reporting mechanisms to to identify um just how we are, you know, better stewards overall as a town with the the tax revenue that is being taken in. And so, uh
030excited to work with the town administrator on that in order to kind of get um improved practices. I'll highlight just again the work that that Katie has done and a lot of the members of the team internally this year around bringing some improved practices to the school department but really uh excited to partner with the town and look at that holistically uh using kind of a third party outside eyes. And then the last one is this establishment of a a townwide finance committee. Uh you know this year schools obviously have a finance committee. Historically, we've met with the select board finance committee to have kind of ongoing conversations. That didn't happen this year. Um the select board did not have a finance committee this year. Communication has been um less less than ideal. I think
031um both we would say and the select board would say. And so figuring out a way in which we strengthen those bonds is you know we're one town, one budget, one uh one community. And so this idea that the town administrator uh proposed that we are very supportive of around you know bringing together members of the select board, the warrant committee, the school committee to meet on a monthly basis to regularly review budget reports uh projections, work uh to improve kind of long-term financial projections for the town, talk through how we are communicating that out publicly and sharing that information in a clear and transparent way. Um, so that that is a uh establishment that is looking the town administrator is looking to do next year that we're we're really excited to partner them on.
032Uh, now I'm going to pass it over to Dr. Burroughs who will talk about some of the impacts of the the failed override. Peter, I think you're still on mute. Thank you. You you'd think I'd get that by now. Good evening everyone. Uh yeah, so I wanted to share a little bit about the process that we've gone through um to come up with this uh non-override list of reductions. Um I can tell you that uh every one of these positions is essential to the operations of of the district and to supporting students. Um we had actually a question this morning at our um our budget forum at Colott Cunningham. Um, you know, and the question was what what is the impact um at the elementary level of losing all these positions? And and there there's
033just kind of no question that in in losing these positions, one, we have a lot of work to to redesign our structures and systems very quickly. And two, we're not we're not having the level of staffing that we need to support our students. So, there is an impact on the the student experience. I just wanted to kind of start off by by sharing that um one of the things that guided us in our work at um at determining what the reductions would be was a a lens in looking at student impact and making sure that we were to the best of our ability. um putting positions on this list that that potentially did not have as much direct student um student impact. That being said, um you can look through this list and see that
034there are many positions that do um work directly with students. There's no way to cut this many positions from a budget of our size without having it be impactful. And that and that's what you see here. Um to learn a little bit more about what these positions do, you can go to our website. We do have a information about these individual positions at impact that we couldn't fit on a on a single page that um going on to the the top of the website, you'll see a link. And um I I would suggest going going there. It's um really helpful in terms of of better understanding um what the role of each one of these positions is within the school system and the impact um that that we will experience um if if these positions
035are lost. Great. And as we're approaching kind of our last couple slides, just uh reminding folks to if you have questions, please put them in the Q&A feature and at the bottom of the Zoom, click that, please submit it, and when we reach the end here, we will go through and and answer um as many questions as we can within the time to the best of our ability here. Um did want to also just uh for a framing standpoint reorient the idea of this like non-budget override. Um the non-overbud nonoverride budget is uh not a sustainably built budget. So um essentially what the town administrator is doing within the budget is is kind of using a lot of the free cash all the free cash I should say that we have this year in order
036to mitigate uh the loss of services within next fiscal year if the override does not pass. So, while we again completely agree with that, in order to kind of lessen the impact to to students and to the community as a whole with other services, what that means is that without the override, we can expect not just cuts in FY26 that Peter showed on the last slide, but there should be there will likely be further cuts in FY27 as the use of that free cash goes away and we have to hit a place that is u more sustainable. So, this is going to be kind of a multi-year devastation. uh is kind of the the best word for it. Um and so just wanted to make sure that that that was clearly understood. Uh last thing
037is just to highlight some of the resources out there for folks to um learn what you'd like to to uh kind of access things with your own fingertips. So we've tried to make the MPS web page uh as useful as possible and put just everything we can up there. it's probably a bit too much and might feel overwhelming. Um, but if you have any questions, you can always reach out to us, email us, we can direct you to the right place, but that web page does have uh almost everything in terms of the current year budget details, prior year budgets, all the presentations we've done to select board warrant committee. Uh the this presentation will be up there, the recording of this zoom will be up there. Um, so an FAQ document where we've been
038adding answers to uh all the questions that have been submitted through the Google form. So lot lots of stuff on that site. Um, we'd also direct you to the town's website. They have information on the override FAQ themselves as well as kind of a tax calculator. And then um also flagged uh the organization Milton United. It's a separate entity that is campaign working to support the override. Uh they have information on that page as well. I think mostly taken from kind of what the town and school page um have and they also have a useful tax calculator for folks to understand what is the the financial impact uh for them that they'd see based on their home value. So those are some resources. Uh, also highlight we do have one more of these information sessions
039at the high school uh on April 7th at 6:30 p.m. So if um you don't get your question answered tonight or you just uh think you might have more, please come visit us or please tell your your neighbors, your fellow community members to come out and see us at high school. That's that. Thank you, Mark. So, we have a couple of questions that have come in already. Um, I'm just going to help us start um with the the first one that was submitted. Um, as Mark said, please continue to submit your questions. Um, so this question asks, are the outofdist placements and transportation costs for our special education students figured into the per pupil expenditure? And if so, can you refresh for us what is that per pupil expenditure? Katie would Katie uh does the
040reporting for um the state where they pull the per people expenditure and so I think she can walk through just all the different things that are included in that number. The short answer is yes, but I'll let her walk through the the detail. So the per pupil expenditure includes all of the expenses that we are um incurring as a school district. It includes expenses that we're paying for directly um through the budget operating budget appropriation. And so that does include um the out of district tuition expenses, transportation expenses, any expenses for our teaching staff, utilities, kind of all of those costs um that are funded through the school operating budget. Per pupil expenditure also includes um the costs that we pay for from any of the grants or the um outside revenue sources that we
041receive. And so all of that information is going into those numbers. And then we also report out a number of expenses um that the that the town is incurring on behalf of the school department. So there's an allocation for some administrative costs that are reported in the per pupil expenditure uh portion of the town's liability insurance. some of the um health insurance expenses. All of those costs are reported on the end ofear report and that report is the information that's submitted to the state and that is what creates those per pupil expenditure numbers. I know we do have information about um sort of Milton's per pupil expenditure relative to other towns. We don't need to get into that now, but if there's further kind of curiosity about that, we can speak to that. Um yeah,
042I can share that. I forgot that was part of the question. Um per people expenditure is a lagging um number that the state provides us. So it's done it kind of released every Januaryish uh for kind of one and a half calorie years ago. So the most recent information we have for Milton and for the state as a whole as they the state calculates it is 2023 that year. And what the state does they release two numbers they release an in district per pup people expenditure and then a total the total is the you know obviously total costs uh that um districts spend on students per pupil. Um but our in district expenditure is 17650. Uh our total cost is uh n just under 19,000. Uh for our total cost that puts us in the
043the 30th percentile. U 30.65 uh is the percentile rank that we have. So we fall in the bottom 30th percentile in terms of based upon that number. Let me read the next one, Lizzie. Um, any insight into what other similar towns are doing to overcome similar budget issues? Certainly sounds widespread across the state. So, what are others doing that we might be able to learn from with or without an override? Uh I'm happy to share a bit on this. I mean what most towns are doing or I'll say at least many many towns are doing is they are looking to seek an override. Right? They're coming to their residents to say the you know costs of providing these services has gone up faster than we've been ability the ability to us for us to levy
044taxes uh under Prop 2 and a half. And so if we want to continue services or expand services, this is the cost. And that's the conversation we're having as a town now. Uh you know, in order to continue with the services that we are providing the students this year, um this the cost is going to be this amount um for next year. And so towns as a whole are having that conversation and figuring out if that's amount they are willing to invest in not just the school services but also obviously the townwide services. The override supports kind of all departments. Uh it is not something the school committee uh is putting out. It is something being put out by the select board in order to support the schools but as well as kind of all
045town departments. And so that that is it. If the override fails, there will be just significant significant impacts, negative impacts on on students. Um, and the district will need to figure out how, you know, collectively we pivot and do the best possible um job to to support students even within that reality because that's that's the job. But it will make the job incredibly difficult. And there will definitely be a lot of kind of lost uh lost opportunity, negative impacts and and again a lot of additional work um on remaining staff too. Just a lot of additional pressures and lack of support for for the teachers who who are remaining. So not just the staff who are who are unfortunately going to be forced to depart, but the ones who remain their job will become much
046more difficult. Those are all the questions that we've had submitted up to this point. So, we'll just give people more time to submit other questions. While we wait um to see if other questions come in from anyone else here on the panel, were there other pieces that you wanted to highlight or pull forward? um from the slides. I know um Mark the the scatter plot was wellreceived I think it and and people had shared that they would like to see that in the presentation in the future that might be helpful to share. Sure. Just for everyone else listening in, this was um something that we did spend some time on this morning at the Collott Cunningham presentation in response to a question um from that a parent brought forward. Yeah. And it's also something we
047we talked about with the warrant committee uh talked through with them. So essentially um we you know are able to have a scatter plot uh which is this screen right here which kind of shows performance of every municipality across the state and it plots them based upon on the y-axis is their um per pupil spending uh percentile rank. On the x- axis is their um kind of consolidated MCCAST uh performance percentile rank in grades three through eight. And so that's kind of every town and the red one is is Milton. And the framing for this really is like thinking about right we want a a highly efficient district. Uh we want a highly efficient town and town government. Uh but as it relates to the schools we want a highly efficient school district. And so
048how would we define that? And I think the way in which we talked about defining it would be you know first and foremost high academic outcomes for our kids. We want our kids to have the absolute best academic experience, have the most possible growth and learning um that we possibly can. And then the second is what does it cost us to you know create those high academic outcomes. So what you know efficient would be kind of low dollar investment in order to get those high academic outcomes. And so that is essentially what this scatter plot chart tries to show of plots everybody based upon where they are in both in spending and student outcomes. And so that yellow box is essentially all the towns that spend less than us that you could say maybe are
049more fiscally efficient than us because they just spend less per pupil. Uh you can see the vast majority of towns uh spend more than us. That bottom 30th percentile is is what uh spends less. And then uh again the other side is uh student performance. So who actually is performing better than us? So you can see the vast majority of towns are performing worse than uh Milton is. Milton students are but uh that kind of top 10 percentile. Milton's in the 89th something percentile um in this metric. And so uh that's kind of where we stand. So in terms of efficiency be the overlap between these two things, right? Between the the towns that are actually performing better than us on the MCAST and the towns that are spinning less than us um in order
050to get those results. And so it's that little corner you'd look at and sort of blow that up. This is the those are the towns. So there are only three towns in the entire state of Massachusetts that spend less than us and have higher student outcomes. Now there are a couple other towns that are like right around us that maybe you can argue are um you know comparably efficient or slightly more efficient based upon what you value more in terms of lower spending or higher student outcomes. Um but kind of we're right in that area. So Milton is absolutely in the top 10 in terms of the highest efficiency school districts. I'll say again, there's only three that actually spend less than us and achieve more than us. And then we've uh been able to
051map it as well. So this is all the towns in red are the ones that spend less than Milton. You can see there's a nice big kind of white area right around the Boston area. So we are one of the lowest spending towns uh within kind of the Boston metropolitan area. Most of the towns that spend less than us are further out. And then these are all the towns that actually perform better than Milton on the MCAST. And so if we put those two graphs together and see where the overlap, those are the three towns. So um so I think you know based on this information like Milton is just a tremendously efficient school district. We uh the teachers and the staff do amazing things with very limited resources. And this is really a a
052testament to kind of the amazing educators we have within the town. Just the fantastic teaching staff, support staff, uh principles and school leadership staff in order to kind of help us achieve these outcomes for our kids. Uh with the fact that, you know, we are um underresourced by kind of the the most common metric used. Um, and then this is just one other thing we showed, which is just the change of our um, per pupil percentile rank, how much we're spending on our kids versus other municipalities, and how that has changed over time. And you can see historically in 2008 is the first year that this data is available. So, historically, Milton's been kind of around that 40th percentile. Uh, in the last four years, uh, again, 2023 being kind of the last most recent
053year we have this data. last four years, the four lowest years in terms of our percentile rank, our spending compared to the rest of this state, um the four lowest years in Milton's history. And so we've we are luckily on kind of a rebound coming up certainly if an override were to not pass that that trend line would would drop down. We we would assume. But um we are still again you can see quite low and even low compared to kind of where Milton has been historically. So that was those were the the slides we kind of talked through a little bit. Thanks Mark. Um so just a reminder if you do want to use the Q&A feature to submit a question you're more than welcome to do that. Um if you're having difficulty with
054that and would also prefer to raise your hand. Um you can also do that at this point if you have a question that you would like to ask in the moments that we have left. As Mark mentioned at the conclusion of the presentation, you know, we still have um upcoming chances to be in contact with us to share questions with us. Of course, we still have citizens speak at our school committee meetings if you would like to also share your point of view with us there. Uh we meet tomorrow night um as well as two weeks from tomorrow um April 16th. Um you can always also email us your question. We will respond. But I'm not seeing any hands raised at this time or further questions submitted in the Q&A. So, we'll just sort of
055give that another couple of moments in case someone's formulating a question right now. Don't want to cut cut that off. Not seeing any more questions coming in or hands raised. So, um we will take that to mean that we've answered the questions for now. Um and again we look forward to continuing this process of um doing our best to keep everyone informed and to um you know just continue sharing important information as this process goes forward. Um so anyone else have any final last words? I just once again want to really thank those of you who've taken the time to watch to be here tonight to listen in um to watch the recording in the future. Thank you very much for your engagement with this process. It's really important. We really appreciate it. Okay, I
056hope everyone has a good evening. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you everyone. Please email us with any additional questions. 3 2 1 Here we go. [Music]