001focused work or wrap up, you know, because by then we should be wrapping up. As we look at it. Thank you. Okay. Anyone else wanted to share their thoughts on this? timeline and the work that goes within this. I'll just jump in, Kevin, as we we Dr. Kendrick, as we wrap this this this portion up and say, Oh, go ahead, Carmen. Go ahead, Carmen. Sorry, thank you. No, I was going to echo some of the remarks that have been made, particularly by Dr. Joseph, that this is an aggressive timeline, but then also because if we are going to work within this 90-day timeframe or if there is flexibility to extend. Uh, possibly into July. What is really going to help guide us through is to ensure we have a strong governance framework, and so the
002idea of having the committees, but there being some sort of governing committee chair, uh, and what the communication is between committee chairs either across. Each different group, I think, in order for us to be able to accomplish the massive task that we're being, uh, tasked with, then we'll need to make sure that that governance structure is in place, and that there are clear deliverables, uh, required, so that work is happening, not just right before a meeting, but during the gaps of time between each meeting as well. Thank you. Thanks so much, Miss Lewis. Yeah, it's actually where I was going. I think by the end, when Dr. Bowers comes in, you'll hear a little bit more around our governance framework and what our 3 workgroups look like. We've been a little thoughtful already around what
003the key deliverables are. We're still in the process of thinking about what all knowledge you all will need to be able to accomplish that, but I think tonight you will hear more about what that governance framework looks like going forward. It's not completely. filled out, um, transparently, I'll say in front of a great cloud of witnesses. 90 days was the 1st number that hit my head when I made the recommendation. But I was also being thoughtful around the fact that the board will have to reconcile its Fy its budget. Um, at that June meeting. And so if we had gotten to a place where we didn't get additional revenue from the county. Uh, or we got less revenue than expected, we would have been in a very hard place. If that is not the reality,
004then we'd certainly have more breathing room to be able to do our work, but the initial. guiding principle was that the board would have to respond and make some very hard decisions based on what we see in the proposed budget already. There are still some decisions to be made, but not as extreme as we had perceived. And so. Um, I'd need to talk with my colleagues on the board around an extension of time. I don't foresee that to be a problem. But I think we'll we'll figure out pretty soon how much more work that we have to do. And I think I'm learning as we get in the weeds and and do both education and. trying to do decision making as part of this framework. It's taking us much more time to do it. Dr.
005Kendrick, do you have anything? And then I'm going to recognize Miss Sawyer for a time of question. Nope, that's it. Thank you for allowing me to present this information. Thank you. Amy Sawyer. Yep. Yeah, so just really quickly, I've been very impressed by how thoughtful the information has been coming in just to set up these meetings. What we're talking about now over the next 90 days is not a trivial amount of administrative work on the back end. And so I just want to make sure that those resources are there as well because I think a lot of us have some skills in setting up meetings. and getting documents out, but that is certainly not my strongest suit. So I don't want to overburden folks who have other responsibilities. If anybody could speak to that, just
006who's out there to actually help. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate you acknowledging the workload that comes with this. This is a lot of work. Micah, who is my admin in the board office. This is her new assignment as well. But there's a great deal of work that goes in between agenda building. I mean, Dr. Kendrick and Dr. Bowers and I were on the phone this morning, making sure. We had presentations type Friday. Dr. Joseph, Dr. Collins, and myself. We were on the phone trying to make sure we have a real arc of development, an arc of support, as well as an arc of outcomes and actions. So there's a great deal of work that that goes into making this happen. But I think we have the support there. Um, we've got Dr. Kendricks, we've got
007Dr. Bowers, who… Dr. Bowers is assigned from the superintendent's team to be able to be the overall project lead, and she brought Dr. Kendrick in, and then we have our board office. And so I think you'll see a little bit more around how we've organized ourselves as we go through the meeting, but really great question. This is a tall lift, and as you see us going through tonight's program, we have to step back and reflect and say, where does the committee need to go to be able to make the best set of recommendations? Dr. Joseph is really clear around one of our recommendations on funding streams right and making sure we have. New recommendations for both the State, the county level around where we can get new revenue. And so that requires a lot of
008knowledge and a lot of education. The budget is complex and takes a good bit of time to get through. And so I believe it was Dr. Joseph. I don't want to over give him credit here, but he literally said in our check-in after the last meeting. We probably should provide an executive summary to these folks. No one wants to read all of that. I do it for… I get paid to do it, but they don't get paid. So there's lots of moving parts. That was me. It's 3 billion is a lot to look through, a lot of lines. I wish. Yeah, we know your… we know your home budget is $3 billion, too, but… But, uh, so it might be a little easier, but that's… Missari, that's kind of where we are with that. I
009appreciate you elevating that. And so, in the interest of time, I want to give Dr. Strader time to to do his presentation. We think it's important to contextualize because so much, and you learn this in the first meeting, so much of how we get funded is based on student enrollment. I mean, it is the. It is the hallmark of our budgeting process. And so if you're going to make decisions, you need to have some some understanding of that. Chief Strader, the floor is yours. Dr. Scheder, you're muted. I'm just sharing my screen here. All right, very good. Everyone seeing? presentation. Okay, thank you. So good evening, everyone. Doug Strader here, chief of accountability sharing you a few highlights tonight, looking at our enrollment projections. I'm going to spend a little bit of time looking at
010our history as far as what is comprised our student populations to date. Talk about some projections and some factors that are impacting those projections. I have a slide or two on looking at our current school capacities to get an idea of where the overcrowding is occurring and where we have under capacity schools. And then, last but not least, I'll spend a little bit of time closing this out. Uh, by looking at the financials as an impact of the enrollment projections. So let's go ahead and begin. Ah, so where are we? Unfortunately, our enrollment for 25-26 is down. We've been experiencing over the last few years increases. But for this year we're experiencing a decline of enrollment for this past year, we were about 1,400 students decline, but for a budgetary reason, we didn't feel that
011in the budget due to making up the difference with our lack of immunizations. We were able to get all of our students immunized. So we were able to count. An additional 1,300 students this year, but unfortunately, we lost 1,400 students when it comes to enrollment purposes. So, this year, we had pretty much a yin-yang. We had a perfect situation to be able to compensate for our reduction in enrollment. However, this isn't going to play out each year. So let's spend a little bit of time looking at this. So historically, you can see, starting the 27, 2018 school year, we had an increase of enrollment, a rather significant increase of enrollment within the district, and COVID hit that 2019-2020 school year, and you could see. How the population plummeted down to 2021, 2022. Primary reason for
012that drop? Closing the borders. I'll spend a little bit of time talking about immigration here momentarily. But after COVID, we began seeing that increase, right? The borders opened up again, and we had increased immigration into the district. But unfortunately, the 24-25 school year, we have immigration laws being greatly impacted. And again, the border issue is now we're seeing another impact there and our enrollment is declining. I'm going to talk about two reasons. One of the greatest reasons for our declining enrollment is due to immigration. What happens at our borders? greatly impacts our communities here in Prince George's County Public Schools. A second factor less known for many is our decrease in birth rates. So I'll spend a little bit of time talking about that just a moment. So. Let's stick to that integration piece, because
013that's the now. That's what's impacting our enrollment significantly this year and next year. What you see on this bunch of squiggly lines, but the three lines at the bottom, the orange, the yellow, and the green. These are our U.S.-born students, and you can see their enrollment here pretty consistent. The majority are U.S.-born are our Black African-American populations, but either way, those that are U.S.-born, you can see pretty significant. Even though they're still below the 0%, so there's still a slight decline in this population, uh, but… Pretty significant. Our trends are following them pretty well. These crazy squiggly lines, this is our immigrant population. So you can see how that immigrant population has been impacted over the years. That's really what's causing our variation from year to year of our student population. So what is our
014enrollment again? Looking at that immigration status to this year, you could see. Our immigration for farm-born students in 23-24 was close to 4,500 kids. It was about 4,400 and change kids. In 24-25 that dropped. about 3,800. That's what we experienced this year in our budget, that decline on the students I mentioned. But here's what's to come. In 25-26. This number is significant. Look at where we are. So, we're projecting about a 2300 student decline for this upcoming school year. That equates to over $40 million when we're talking about funding. And we can see this, uh, this is evident, you can see here, uh, when we monitor the Southwest land border crossings, and typically from this time of year, uh, there's over 2 million. Population count, crossing our borders for this year. Currently, it's like 38,000.
015So there is a significant decline in immigration coming into this nation, which again impacts the culture here. Prince George's County Public Schools. So for next year, just to tee that up, so for next year, we're seeing that 2300 student decline. And this is what it's going to look like. We'd have a couple spikes, some unusual spikes. For this year, it's our current fourth graders. For next year it'll be our fifth graders. We're seeing a spike here in that population. That's going to carry through when we look at the trends in the out years, you're going to see this bubble carry up throughout the grade levels. Again, as we go year after year after year, but notice all of the other grade levels, we're seeing. Basically at, or declining counts. We have a little at number
016here, and then the rest of these are all declines. So what is the other factor? Immigration is a factor. The other factor is birth rates. Since COVID, we've been experiencing declining birth rates for whatever reason, folks are having kids later in life and they're having fewer kids. This isn't just a Prince George's County Public School thing. This is a state of Maryland thing. This is a national thing. So this declining birth rate, this impacts all of our students, not just the immigrants, but also the Us. Born here within this district. So we have 2 factors that are impacting our district. Birth rates declining, as well as immigration. So how bad is it going to get? National Center for Education Statistics is projecting an 8% decline in Maryland public schools between now and 2031. 8% decline.
017So this is what it's looking like for us. So you can see the biggest drop is going to be for us, it's between 26, 27 going to 27, 28. You see this significant drop here. This is the immigration piece that's trickling up through the ranks, as well as when you're looking at that declining birth rate. And then we're looking at it, we're projecting it to level off at some point in time. But… And Dr. Strader, when you have a chance, can you also include… so, what does this mean for us money-wise? If I'm jumping the gun, we come a bit, but just help people understand how significant this means in terms of dollars for us in the future. Yep. So every student is roughly $18,000. So for this year, when we're looking at a drop
018of 2,300 kids that equates to a little over 40 million dollars. When you're looking at about 500 students, you know, your difference there. You know, you're looking at about $10 million. So it's it's, uh. Every 500 students, so when you're down here, you're looking… when you're looking at, uh, between, like, 32 and 33, school year 32 and 33, that's only about a $10 million decline. But up here, when you're looking at between 27 and 28. Mm-hmm. You know, you're up to, like, 40 to 50 million dollar decline. But the point of the matter is, we have to assume, uh, for many years, we have been gaining students year to year, we have been gaining funding year to year, but that narrative is completely flip-flopping here, as we project out over the next 10 years. We
019are going to be experiencing declining populations, and again, we're going to be sharpening our pencils every year for the next 10 years trying to figure this out. Now, to your point, Dr. Joseph, I can drop dollar signs on this to give a better idea in the headings of these bars. I can do that when we go to share this publicly. Thank you. So, what does it look like if there's interest in looking at the three different levels, elementary, middle, and high school? I've shared these slides here. You can see, again, elementary, you're going to feel the impact of that immigration status in particular, as well as you're going to start feeling that birth rate hitting. Uh, is that birth rate, again, elementary, they're going to start grade 1, pre-K, K, grade 1, and working their
020way up. You're not going to feel the birth rate issue so much in the secondary schools yet. Uh, that's going to be impacting years out. When we get to that year 6 through 10, you'll start seeing them getting into the upper grade levels. This is what it's looking like at elementary school. In our middle schools, you'll see the little bubble, remember that fourth grade population that's matriculating? That 4th grade spike is working its way up here through the middle schools. After that fourth grade then, uh, matriculates up to the high schools, you start to see the decline. And then here's our high schools. They're going to see a significant drop. As as we look out. So high schools are important because there's that other variable when you look at immigration, we have some schools that'll
021be impacted more than others. High Point, as an example, 45% of the population of High Point is farm born. Northwestern, 40%. Duval, you can see the numbers here, 37%. Bladensburg, 36%. So when we're working these projections, it's a real challenge. After this administration ends, will we have a sudden uptick in immigration? It very well could happen, and that could change our numbers. That totally blows up our trends, right? So we have some more conservative. Rates in the out years. We can't assume it's going to be this bad forever. However, you know, for the next 4 years, this is going 3 years, this is going to be very challenging to predict. And Dr. Strader, why I think this is so important for this particular discussion is because as we look at the programs in these schools,
022as dollars are going directly to schools, um, you know, it gives us foresight into. potential problem areas where we'll need to have solutions to address sustainability, uh, in advance, because we know it's coming. So looking at our pre-K programs, pre-K, just to let everybody know when we're trying to do our enrollment projections for pre-K, they don't follow trends like the other grade levels do, because pre-K has other factors. One, we have a capacity limit in our pre-K schools. 2, when we're filling those seats for pre-K, we take a tiered approach. We have Tier 1 fully funded, Tier 2 partially funded, Tier 3, that's your general, uh, uh, students that are not eligible for any type of subsidy. So, we fill those seats according to capacity and according to parent application in the tiered process. So
023that's a little different than what we're seeing in the rates that we apply for our kindergarten through grade 12 to come up with our enrollment projections. So let's take a quick look. Dr. Joseph, you mentioned school utilization. This is the reality of where we are now. You can see that the majority of our schools up north are in the overcrowded overutilization situation. So if they're identified in red, they're greater than 105% capacity. Those in green are identified as less than 60% capacity. So we have some great variation, but the problem is, it's very hard to overcome this, because it's not like we have an underutilized school sitting right next to an overutilized school, and we can just handle this through boundary adjustments. Uh, if you look at the map, that's just… we've done all that
024kind of tweaking that we could possibly do. So we still have a problem. of needing more schools up north, and then possibly looking at consolidations down south. So the capital improvement program, they're attempting to tackle this, but I just wanted to share where regionally we still have some concerns that we need to work through. So when you're looking at our middle schools in particular. Uh, two-thirds of our schools are right where they need to be. They're well utilized. They're right at that 90% capacity, and we're good. But a third of them, however, we have those that are underutilized, and again, you can see the percentages here, and you have those that are overutilized. And it breaks out again, that north-south component. But this is, you know, to support any conversations that we may have towards
025the capital improvement programs. So in our high schools, again, sharing the north, the central, and the southern, looking at the projection. I mean, you can see what we have here as far as our capacities are concerned, and you can see that the northern area by far is our area of concern. Um, we're considerably overcapacity. High point, um… Uh, hopefully will be addressed with the new northern area high school that's being planned for anyway. So that'll take some of the stress off of that area. Um, the new high school is going to be built. So those are the two major projects that'll hopefully alleviate some of the high school overcrowding up north. But in that southern area, that's where, you know, we have to do what we can do to see if we can move students
026around or whatever to better address the capacity issues. So you mentioned our charter and specialty programs. Here's some fill rates here, the highest under filled rate. I've gone from highest to lowest, and again, those specialty programs. And you can see they're identified here. Overlook Spanish Immersion, 55%. unfilled, uh, to where you go all the way up to the VPA program at Northwestern High School, it's 41% on fill, but that just gives you some idea of some capacities here, and how many students are enrolled in some of those programs. So I heard doc… Yes, sir. Chief Chief Strader, could you clarify for a second if if if unfilled is respect to capacity of the building or unfilled is with respect to capacity of the program model. So could you define unfilled? Unfilters, these are all in…
027You're second. This is the program model. We have capacities defined for these programs. So these programs are under enrolled to the capacity of which we've defined within our our. the space that's been set aside for them. Does that make sense? Yep. All right. So with that, I just wanted to give you a quick overlook. I didn't wish to be too doom and gloom when it comes to our enrollment projections. But the point of the matter is, we're experiencing declining enrollment. So Band-Aids aren't going to work. Chief Howell's been saying this for a while. She's been sweating it, you know, so temporary fixes, it's not… we're not just trying to get over a temporary hurdle here of trying to do short-term savings. We've got to look at the long haul, because we're going to need to
028visit these reductions over time. So that's the last I would share. And again, if you have any questions… Let's start a dialogue. Yeah. Looks like Camila House hands is up. If you want to take your presentation down, Chief Straighter, you can. Yes. Camila House, I believe I saw your hand come up first, so I want to give the floor to you. Yes, thank you, and thank you for pronouncing my name correctly. That rarely happens. So I appreciate that. I have a couple of questions about the under enrollment in some of the southern county schools. And I'm speaking generally, not just about my my children's specialty school. So my question is, um, have you all studied at all the reasons aside from the. Mm-hmm. Um, uh, the two that you mentioned, why the Southern County Schools
029may have lower enrollment than the Northern county schools. Um, does… is there any correlation between performance of the schools outside of those other issues that you've already raised? Like, so corrected for those issues? Um, and the enrollment, um, and then my also related question is, have you considered at all, um, how many actually… I guess it would be census data to some degree, or maybe, um… I don't know how you would collect the data, but based on how many school-age children are living in those areas versus how many students are actually being sent to Prince George's County Public Schools, I'm just wondering what, um, whether that data has all at all been addressed. My second set of, um, question, um. relates to the specialty programs, to what extent in the TAG programs, to what extent
030are, for example, what I have found personally is that a lot of times in the… on our end of the county. Um, folks don't actually know about those programs. Some of them don't even really know that much about their neighborhood schools. Um, and so I'm wondering, for example, when students don't get into some of the fewer… the few preferred. quote-unquote preferred programs, is there any effort to publicize in a more effective way the other programs that are available? Um, to folks. So those are my two sets of questions. I can tell you that, in my experience, there hasn't been a lot of publicity for the schools, and this is from, you know, having a child that got into Valley View. Um, and, um, children who attend Maya Angelou. And having those schools both appear on
031the under-enrolled list. Camila, I'm gonna let them answer both of your questions. I'm gonna coach you all a little bit, because I had to learn this as a board member. I'm always available for 2 rounds, so that you have the most time. You'll probably ask one question on the first round, and then on the second round. you to ask another. I just want you all to be able to get all your things answered. But for now, we'll let you answer all. I'll let them answer both of them with the time that we have, because there are only 3 other hands up. So the 1st one looking at basically your your projections and your enrollment trends down south. You have to keep in mind of of what's happened. If I were to expand those trend lines
032out over the last couple of decades, over the last couple of decades, the majority of the newcomers to Prince George's County Public Schools have come from immigration, and they have settled up north. That's caused the North County to explode. That's what's caused the overcrowding up there, the high points. I shared 45%, uh, you know, international-born. Uh, so that school has been greatly impacted by immigration to this district. The difference between up north and down south. If we didn't have any of the immigration at all over the last decades, would they all look more like South County? More so, right? So that's why you're seeing the real difference between up north and down south. When we look at the projections and the trends for down south, we're seeing stability in the South, actually. So those are
033very consistent. It's up north that seems to have more fluctuation to it. Um, so we can take a closer look as to the why. Another question that's been presented in the past was looking at our private schools. Is there a way for us to see how many students might be homeschooled versus private school? We have numbers for homeschool. For those folks that report to Prince George's County Public Schools. Private schools been a bit more tricky, but we are working with Prince George's County government, like you were mentioning census information. We're also working through government agencies to see if we can get a better understanding of that. But the trends down south have been consistent. It's up north that that we're seeing the ebbs and flows. on that crazy chart that I was sharing with you
034earlier. Your second question of looking at the specialty programs and the advertising of the specialty programs, I'm going to defer that to Dr. White, who sits over top of the specialty programs. And I will get back to you for our next meeting to talk about their efforts and their advertising. Okay. Chief. I'll I'll help you out. We're inviting Dr. White to be the main presentation for our next meeting to talk all specialty programs, how we do all of that. That is our main presentation for the next meeting. Just, I want to share that with the work group. That's our main presentation, then you'll go straight into subcommittees. So you'll spend time with Dr. White for our next meeting. Just wanted to help you out there. So. Thank you. So I'll tee up with her that
035counts. The program counts, so she can, she can start off with that, so you can look at, you know, her fill rates for these programs, and how that's working moving forward. I believe Dr. Kendrick's hand was up next, and then Amy Sawyer's hand, and then Cherise Vickery. So in that order. Thank you. Dr. Shetter, given the declining enrollment that we're expecting to see, especially with our immigrant population, might that impact whether our international high schools actually remain open? since those schools are specifically for multilingual learners, and do we anticipate, you know, issues with those specific schools remaining open with the continued decline in enrollment? So our immersion specialty programs aren't just for immigrants. Anyone can sign up for those schools. So we do have like the Spanish immersion. We do have a significant Latino population
036there. But like Chinese immersion, some of the others, you know, that that's not the case. So that's why we did look to make some moves this year. on restricting some of those programs. But moving forward, yes, that will be part of the projections that that we'll look at, right? The ability to be able to fill those programs. So that'll be part of the conversations next week. for the next meeting. I think, Amy. Uh-huh. All right. Thank you. So I'm wondering on the slide that shows the map of the elementary school utilization that was page 16. I live in the northern part of the county, so I'm not as familiar with development plans that the planning department has going on for the southern part of. Prince George's County. But I know for sure there's a lot
037of effort being put into plans such as along the Blue Line Corridor, um, somewhat related to that, Governor Moore announced a major development near the Capitol Heights Elementary School. I'm wondering if it would be possible to get any kind of. map overlay that would show some of those concentrated development points that are near some of these schools. I mean, it may take 5 years or 10 years for any real, um, housing to come in, or businesses, or metro, or anything else. But to know that there was some alignment that the county is already working on to develop areas where we are perceiving that we're seeing declines in enrollment. Thank you. Certainly, and I will share as part of the process, we do work very closely with the Department of Planning and Zoning at the county
038level to do exactly the type or to exchange exactly the type of information that you're suggesting, where we look at future development in areas. They'll ask us from a zoning perspective. Uh, what our capacities are and what our counts look like for them to make some of their zoning decisions. So that is part of our process. But yes, I'll see what I can do about getting some of those overlays, because they do share some of that information with us. Um, as part of this process. Yeah, thank you for doing that. I'm particularly interested. We've got some new development. I live in the sub. Thank you for your question, Amy. I live in the southern part of the county, particularly in Suitland area, and we've got some new development that's coming. And we've got 2 schools
039that are underutilized on the top of the list, Andrew Jackson, Samuel P Massey. I'm saying this because I've been talking to the superintendent about these two underutilized schools, and they're on the top of the list. But, you know, if the development projects are going to have an influx of folks coming to the area, and Amy, just to your last point, one of the things that I've actually found is. This may be a third, maybe a trigger a bit, and I'm one of those people, I guess you can say. I don't yet have children, but a lot of the folks who are occupying in the Westphalia, the Upper Marlboro area, are many families who don't yet have children who are in the public. So that's actually happening a good bit in a lot of our development.
040So even if we've got large pockets of development happening, it may be folks who don't yet have school age children who are ready to go to school, and that's kind of hard to predict. So an overlay would be good. But thank you for your question. Chief Shady, you want to add something here? Yeah, so again, we look at the state level. Our birth rates are down. So even if we construct, we just don't have the kids going in with these families. We're just producing fewer students, fewer children within this state. So even if they're going to come from neighboring districts, Virginia's… it's a national phenomena. Of which, over the next 10 years, nationally, we're looking at a 10% drop. Uh, and our children. So, you know, this is one of the things that developers are
041getting stuck with, you know, in home constructions. If you're looking at, you know, birth rates going down. Yeah. You know, are we getting ahead of ourselves a little bit in a lot of the development? So so again, we do a lot of studying of looking at what the yields are in the different neighborhoods of children and the ages of folks, because we have a lot of neighborhoods that might be aging out that 20 years ago, you know, they had their kids. If you look at the census information of the ages of those neighborhoods, so we take into consideration a lot of that type of data as well. All right, we're gonna get Cherise and then Catherine. And then we'll move into our financial review and any follow up questions. Thank you. And thank you, Amy.
042Actually, that was kind of one of my questions. So then I'll just move to my second question that I had. I submitted it to the document that we had that Micah put out, and what I really wanted to know, and I hope that maybe you guys can probably bring it back with Dr. White is, are we doing exit interviews? I've had some families leave the school that I'm at, and they do not report an exit interview, and they've left during the middle of the school year. And they have… like, I'm aware of their concerns, but they haven't reported those concerns out. I highly suggest and think that if you do have one, that that needs to be overlaid across the classes to find out why people are leaving, where they're going, and what could happen.
043prevented them from leaving. Um, I'm finding that a lot of parents are homeschooling, and they're pulling out when they get to second and third grade. I'm not sure if you guys have that data, but I think that it would be great to do an equity, just like you do when someone leaves your company, right? You want to know why did they leave. Very good. Um, Catherine? So I've been paying attention. So I've heard a lot of the information that was shared before, you know, at other board meetings and other presentations that have been given. And I am still just not sure I understand how the drop in enrollment is so impactful. I know it's per student, but I guess. the whole thought is that if you have less students than you need less money. So
044I don't know if it's that we have less students and then we're not shifting. the money, because it happens too quickly, or… I guess that's the part I haven't quite figured out all the times I've heard it, like, I get the numbers, and I get, you know, 40 million sounds like a lot, but I'm like, isn't the whole point that you don't need as much resources and staff and all that type of stuff if you have less people? So that's the part I'm not… Catherine, I think that's a good segue for Chief Howell. I'll let her answer as part of her presentation. It's super important. You know, one of my biggest takeaways here that I really want people to walk away from this is that before we went to Blueprint, we were centrally managed. And
045we could decide what we do with dollars to make this system work. But when we come to Blueprint and you've got to save the dollar follows the kid very strategically. It is a lot of movement around, and it impacts opportunities at individual schools because that enrollment is shifting. And I think. Chief Howell can explain to you far better than I can, but that nuance of moving the funds around has impacts across the system, and that's what you're seeing play out in almost disproportionate ways. When you funded everything at the top. And then you've got to send 75% of that to schools. It woefully shifts your accepted wisdom about what you've been able to do for decades. And so I think Chief Howe can explain that a little bit more. We don't want you to walk
046away tonight not having an answer to that question. So if there's nothing else about enrollment. From anyone else, we're going to shift to our financial review and any financial follow-up questions. And as part of this conversation, I don't know when they're going to do it. Jamie might do it, or Chief Howell might do it. Dr. Bauer, sorry. Dr. Bowers might do it, or Chief Howell might do it. But they've given an executive summary of the budget, too, that they've put together. So I'll turn it over to the two of them at this point. Yeah, I was just the executive summary of Micah. We'll send that out as part of the materials after this meeting for committee members to review in the 2 weeks before our next meeting. Chief Howe, it's over to you. All right.
047Thank you. So before I get into the financial review, which is really looking at where we are in 2026 at a really high level, I do want to be able to address the question raised around the impact of declining enrollment, which means declining revenue, which then. How does that impact our our cost structure? We talked a little bit about it in our last meeting, that our largest. costs for the district are people costs. And most of those people costs are at the schools or in direct support of schools, whether it's in classroom positions, school-based positions, or positions that are responsible for getting students to the school or keeping schools safe. Um, and so as we expect the, um… enrollment to go down, you need fewer educators or fewer classroom-based positions, but some of your other
048positions and some of your other activities, you kind of need them regardless of the number of students that you have. So, as an example, I can think about transportation. you know, you still have to kind of grow around and pick up the students in various neighborhoods, and Dr. Coleman can speak to this much better than myself. So your bus might be, I don't know, at. 80% capacity now, but perhaps it might get down to 70% capacity as your enrollment goes down, but you still have to have a bus driver and the bus to get those students to all the various schools, and that's a fixed cost that's not going to necessarily change, because your enrollment has gone down. But you might not need as many classroom teachers. So it is a balance between. you know,
049looking at some of your sort of your fixed costs that don't vary as much tied to enrollment versus some of your other costs that are tied to the students that show up in the building. But you also have your, you know, your textbooks, instructional materials. Um, and other instructional supports that may not directly line one for one to enrollment, which is why it's important that as we see the declines taking place, that we begin to strategically look at. How do we adjust our cost base, our staffing base to align with the direction which our revenue is going to be changing? And then we've also talked about our specialty programs as well. So that's another aspect of this that even though your overall enrollment for the district may change. Um, that may or may not have
050an impact on the number of slots or seats that you have available to support your different specialty programs, but it's also part of the strategic outlook of how we maybe need to rethink. Um, the size of the specialty programs at each of our different schools as the enrollment for the district overall goes down. So lots of different moving parts that does have an impact on the overall cost structure of the district. But generally speaking, yes, as your revenue goes down, your cost base will go down. It just may not be a one-for-one direct correlation. at least Chief Howell, I want to give Catherine a chance before you jump into your presentation, which is going to be slightly different from this question. So I do appreciate you taking the time to answer. Catherine. Did we answer
051your questions here? Do you have any follow up? And I I'm not holding you to your 2 min here. I just want to make sure you don't leave without the answer to this question. Yeah. Okay. Um, I hear what everyone's saying, but I think it's just the county is so large and there's so many moving pieces that, like I said, even though I've been paying attention more over the last like eight months, obviously Chief Howell does this for a full time job and a long time, so… Yeah, you're gonna think I'm annoyed. I'm gonna think you're… I'm a teacher, so you're gonna think I'm annoyed. Do we have you at a little bit of a better place tonight? I know we may not be there 100%, but are you at a better place? And we'll
052walk with you. Yeah, I think the point that she made about that there are changes that have to make, and that's why, like, having the predictions of where enrollment's going so that you can make the changes, so I think, you know, in my mind, I'm like, oh, you see the issue, you fix it, but because it's such a large county, it's like, you see the issue, then you have to plan, and then you have to implement, and. So the change takes time and I think that's one of the reasons why, you know, this group is here to try to talk through and work through some of those readjustments that we can do to realign everything with the changes that we have coming. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Chief Half. I was in my school as
053a principal again. Mm-hmm. and give you a good evaluation. You got her in a much better place, so appreciate you. Will, is your question relative to that? Because I'll get you in now or if not, we'll bring Chief Holland for the financial review. Is it? It was literally that. I am also tracking with Catherine is saying, and while there is with the lower enrollment, I was literally today spending some time figuring out like how does Blueprint and how does the enrollment. tied to the funding structure, because I was a little confused by that. I think one of the things that would be nice to add at some point in the discussion is though there will be a decrease, there will also be efficiencies recognized, and a level of adjunctive services that aren't… that don't need
054to be provided. Yeah. As you see immigrate immigration and other populations decrease. So that there are some cost savings. We're talking about the loss of revenue, but we're not talking about the anticipated cost savings, and I guess that's. kind of what this group is going to be doing. So I think, for me, that's where… that's kind of where it's not necessarily squaring, so I'm tracking some of Catherine's concerns there, but I think. frankly, the financials are daunting. And, you know, in my daily work, I deal with, like, a 1.8, 1.9 billion budget, but that doesn't look anything like. this school budget. It just doesn't. So… you know, there's a lot to unpack with regard to the finances, and again, it's hard trying to square the finances when the cost-saving pieces aren't necessarily. as clear. So,
055I just wanted to put that out there. If Chief Howell can mention or talk about some of that in her presentation. Thank you very much. Absolutely. No, Will, thank you so much, and we appreciate having your expertise on the call. There are not many people out here that manage billion-dollar budgets, so we appreciate you. And Dr. Moss. Dr. Morrison, one thing I jump in on before we move is just to say, you know, what makes school system budgets so complex is, you know, the construction of them with 80 to 85% of it being people. Yep. You know, when things shift, now you're getting into complexities, collaborating with unions and reprioritizing and eliminating and thinking through things. But, you know… There are many school systems around the country just looking broader, where they literally function and
056run their instructional programs through their title dollars and through grants and other things, because the funding that comes from the systems. are just so low, and it's just enough to handle the people that you have, that there's not much, much left. And it's very different from kind of looking at an industry, uh, budget, you know? I mean, like I said, I worked in a… I was superintendent in a rural school district before. And everything we did was off of grants and title dollars. Like, they… it was like blasphemy to touch your local money, because it was just so little, and you were trying to reserve, because, you know, you were so fragile. And many urban districts and urban-like districts face those same, uh, those same challenges, you know, and that, you know, Maryland is a
057place where we actually fund. Yeah. much better than many places, and we have those challenges. Yeah. And I just want to add as chief how you want to bring your slides up so we, in the interest of time here. Also, Will, I think what further? I had the same questions that that you have quite naturally. I think the challenge for us around enrollment shifting or declining enrollment is that it's not. Chief Strader mentioned the potential of high concentration of that, but you don't… it's not all concentrated in one place, and so you're not able to just pull money from one place and be able to have cost savings. I mean, to Chief Howe's point, we may see enrollment 5 going here, 10 at this school. We've got 200 schools. That does not give you room
058to quite naturally eliminate a bus, or enough bus drivers to really have real cost savings. But I think the point is legit, and we should talk about what some cost savings, you know, would happen with declining enrollment. But this is a complex urban system, I think. people in the county often forget this is the 18th largest school system in the country with with 200 schools. And so it's it's really a hard puzzle. Chief Howe. and I don't know that this… I'm gonna front-load for you, I don't know that this part of the presentation is gonna help you feel better either. Chief Al. Wait a minute, I was trying to get the… to the mute button. Is she still with us? Yes. Unmute. All right. Here we go. All right. So this overview is just really
059addressing the complexities that come along with managing a large budget where you have shifts that do occur quicker than you could have anticipated for. When you were formulating and developing the budget. So for those of you who've been following along with our budgeting process this past year, when we've been talking about 2027, we also started talking about the anticipated shortfall. We were going to have for the 26 budget that was already approved. So you, when you recall last week we gave a little overview of our timeline, where we typically go through, and when we're planning for the next year, we will do a high level projection of where we anticipate our overall sort of gaps or challenges to be for the coming year. And when we did that for 2027, we also quickly realized as
060well that we had an issue for 2026. And that was primarily related to two key areas. Number one, it was around the August timeframe or so. Um, where we pulled down August-September timeframe, where we pulled down and did an updated analysis of all of our folks that we had on hand, and did a projection around what that overall value of salaries would be for the full year. and then compare that to what we budget for salaries and wages and benefits for the full year, and quickly realized we had a gap. Um, how would that happen when we just approved the budget a couple of months or a few months before? The primary reason behind that change is what we refer to as salary lapse. And as part of any budgeting process, there will be an
061assumption that is made around positions that you don't expect to be filled, and therefore the budget tied to those positions. will lap, will lapse, and then you will not actually realize that expense. So you've budgeted for it, but it's going to end up being a savings. And so we plan for that savings. In our budget. So, essentially, we don't assume that all 20,000 positions that we have budgeted are going to be filled for 12 months out of the year because we know there's going to be some vacancies, attrition. That will impact that lapse. Lapse can also be impacted by the difference between what you budgeted a position to be filled at versus what the actual cost of that position is. So as an example, you could have an employee that has been here for 30
062years that's retiring. And then you replace them with a recent grad who just came out of school. There will be a difference between that incumbent's salary and the person who's retiring, and that has also lapsed at its experience as well. So historically, we've developed a budget, we make an assumption around what that lapse is going to be. Um, and actually, our actual experience, or the savings that we realize ends up being greater than what we planned for in the budget, and then we typically use that additional savings throughout the year to fund other unexpected activities or impacts that result during the year that you didn't know about when you were building your initial budget. That's kind of a backdrop between the financial review. What we do as a district is we go through and do
063a financial review several times a year, but usually the first one does not occur until we're halfway through the fiscal year, and the books have been closed, and we have. actual expenditures activity for half of the year, and then we do a projection of what we are where we expect to be for the remaining half of the year. So we knew coming into this that we were going to have a gap because of salary lapse, and we also knew that we were going to have an issue with not having enough resources to cover some of our special education services. So we knew coming in in the fall that we were going to have about a $50 million shortfall in the 26 budget. Typically, we're able to go through and identify enough savings to be able
064to address unexpected needs, but this was going to be a challenge that we were concerned that we would not be able to find enough savings to cover. So in the financial review that we just presented to the board last week, we gave a high level overview of where we stood after we got through this first financial review. That financial review involves a review of all of our different division organizational areas. To see where we can identify savings in order to address the anticipated gap that we knew that we had coming into this fiscal year. So, as I stated, we were. initially estimating around $50 million shortfall in the August-September timeframe. So that was the target of what we were working towards to be able to identify enough savings. Throughout the district of around $50 million
065to cover that shortfall. When you look at, kind of, the middle part of this chart, you'll see down below that district-wide savings of around $45.9 million were identified. Um, so not exactly 50, but we were getting close to our target of where we needed to be. But when you look at the very top major funding requests of around 64.5 million. That included the lapse and then the special education contracted services. The actual cost for that, or that gap came in higher than what we initially anticipated in the fall. We thought it was going to be around 50. It ended up being around 64 million. So that gap even widened further. And again, a lot of that was due to having less vacancies. So a great job to being able to fill many of our positions.
066But the fill rate was much higher than we anticipated, and a much lower attrition rate. Then we have historically experienced. In addition to those 2 items that we knew about coming into the year, there have been other. you know, other needs that have. come up during the year, which is typical in any given year. Your budget is your best laid plan that you know about at that time, based off the information you have available at that time. But operationally, things will happen throughout the year that you didn't anticipate. And we always have a reserve set aside for those unexpected items. Um, but we had $20 million worth of unexpected items that we were not able to fully cover with the existing reserve that we have. Those included overtime higher than what we had already planned
067for, and then we had some higher costs tied to retirement, life insurance, some of our other benefit items tied to having that smaller lapse that I mentioned before. Our utility costs ended up being higher than we anticipated. And then there was also an adjustment related to pre-K revenue, but there was an offset for the expenses for that as well. So that $20 million was not anticipated. So when you consider the $64 million and the 20 and the 45. We are upside down still, but we don't have enough savings to cover these additional items that were not included in our original budget. A gap of around $38 million dollars. I miss Chief Howell, I want to clarify something before you go to the next slide. So when people were asking midyear. Why is it that we're
068having a spending freeze? Um, or why were we telling schools or looking in the line item to see what money schools have left over, um, or why were we having spending freeze mid-school year? Was it because… could you clarify for people, it's because, um, our expenses were greater than what we anticipated because of some of these costs, and so we needed to institute that, um, because people were like, I'm confused. Why are if you pass the budget, you pass the budget. But you have these unexpected things that happen, so I want to make that clear. When parents were calling me, like, my school can't use this money, they can't do that. Well, it's because of this. Um, and could you clarify the overtime around the school bus drivers? Because there was an issue with school
069bus drivers potentially not being able to get overtime. So we had to control for that. So could you just clear those two things up with this slide, if you will? Sure. So within the 45 million dollars that savings that we were able to identify was related to 2 major efforts. One was a central office hiring freeze. We still allowed for hiring to continue at the school level for instruction and non instructional positions. You know, such as transportation, security, maintenance, we still continue to allow those positions to be filled. The second major effort was around a spending freeze of our discretionary dollars. So those are non-personnel related costs, and that was across the board, school-based as well as central office. Again, for school-based, we stayed away from instructional discretionary dollars, but non-instructional discretionary, those dollars were
070cut, um, as well as across the board central office, um, and that was really in the effort to try to be able to slow down spending. Because we knew we had this gap. There were other savings that we were able to identify as well, in addition to those two major efforts in order to reach that overall reduction of around $46 million. With regards to overtime being one of the other funding impacts that we did not anticipate, we added, or we had a request, a need for an additional 5 million dollars of overtime in our budget above and beyond what we already. considered in the budget. 2 million of that was directly tied to the continuation of what is referred to as a plus in overtime program that has been afforded to our transportation workers since
071the pandemic, where we had a. huge bus driver shortage, and we had bus drivers covering multiple routes, and this was a way in which, in addition to what was allowable within the negotiated agreement to provide additional coverage or plus-in of overtime eligibility. Depending on the additional routes that drivers had to pick up. Now you sort of fast forward as we have been able to continue to fill and significantly improve our fill rate of our vacant bus driver positions, particularly this year, the number of vacancies that we have has substantially decreased. And so, we were looking to phase out that plus-in program, which was something that was really agreed upon with management in an effort to try to help support the needs of the operational needs of the district, but it wasn't embedded into our negotiated
072agreements, and so it was always intended to be a short-term. Solution, and as one of our measures to be able to kind of help close the budget gap, we were winding down that program around the last quarter of this fiscal year. However, a decision was made to allow that program to continue through the end of the. fiscal year. But the impact of doing so was an additional $2 million in overtime that's tied to that program. Now, I do want to be clear that our negotiated agreements still allow for transportation workers to be eligible for overtime, but this plus end is sort of an accelerated opportunity. to get additional overtime in covering those routes. And so that was a decision that was made to allow for that to continue through the remainder of the year, and
073there is an impact that is tied to that. Yeah. So this is an overview of our fund balance, which we don't talk about a lot in detail, but essentially this is the district's savings account. So in any given year, when we have expenses that are less than the revenue that we bring in, that difference. falls through a fund balance similar to your own personal savings account, where you have a little bit of surplus left over at the end of any given paycheck. Collectively, cumulatively over the years, we had a fund balance that was much higher than this. It was north of $300 million, and we have been strategically spinning that down over the last several years, particularly with the implementation of blueprints. There were changes that we knew would be tied to Blueprint and the
074implementation of those amounts per pupil amounts that we get for the different funding streams for those to sort of ramp up. Um, and keep in mind, when we begin the implementation of Blueprint was right after the pandemic as well, so enrollment was also going through an adjustment period as well. So, a decision was made to utilize part of the fund balance to help stabilize, um, some of the financial operations of the district, namely some of the negotiated agreements that have been settled. Right around the same time that we were coming out of the pandemic. Um, and so that, um, strategic use of fund balance, though not typically set aside to help support ongoing costs, was used as we were trying to stabilize the impact of Blueprint and the implementation of. of the hopefully the increase
075in enrollment as well as the per-pupil amounts tied to those funding streams increasing. So we've gone from north of 300 million spent down nearly 40, 42% of that. In 2025, ending the year at around $217 million. $175 million of that is assigned, so it's set aside for a specific purpose. And of that 175, 95 million is in the 26 budget as a. means to help cover the district's operations. The other $80 million was really set aside for a lot of the uncertainty that we knew that we were going to be facing this year due to the federal and local economic environment. The other 35 million that you see here is our unassigned fund balance, so that gives us a lot of flexibility in having that available for other uncertainties that may come up during the
076year. So this is our fund balance at the end of 2025. Now, when you consider the financial review that we just went through, which included a request to increase the use of our fund balance from 95 million up to 134 million. So that means that unassigned fund balance that we saw previously that was around 35, $36 million has now been fully utilized, and it's been moved up to the assigned fund balance category. And we also had to tap into that $80 million that we said we set aside for economic uncertainty. That now drops down to $77 million. So overall, our assigned fund balance now is around $211 million. We have nothing in unassigned, and we do have a little bit that's tied to non-spendable, which I didn't speak of earlier. That's basically inventory that we've
077already paid for that's sitting in the warehouse, so we can't spend that. But it is an asset that has a value to it that's tied up in our fund balance as well. So as we look forward to 2026, so this is now sort of looking around what the fund balance would look like based off of the changes that we just went through in the financial review. And if we spend everything as we're planning to in this fiscal year. We anticipate our fund balance now to drop down to a little bit over $77 million dollars. So we would assume we would spend the entire $134 million that's sitting in assigned right now. And then, if you recall, it was 77 million that was sort of sitting in the reserve for economic uncertainty. of that amount that
078did include 5 million dollars for purchase orders, which is basically a commitment to procure goods and services that are going to liquidate this year. So that kind of dropped down from 77 to 72. Um, so this is a. Incredibly low fund balance and position to be in at the end of this fiscal year. The use of fund balance is never something that you want to be able to dig into, just like your own personal savings account. You have to replenish it. And so, as we're planning for 2027. Part of our goal is not just to be able to be in a better position within our cost structure for 27, but ideally be in a position where we can replenish the fund balance and build it back up to a level that we have at least
079two months of operating expenses to be able to support the district. Going forward. Thank you, Chief Howell. I tried to warn you all that this this wouldn't make you feel any better. But it the importance of our work. And I thought it was important for you all to have this presentation tonight as we. spend as you spend next week going through the budget, coming to terms with all of this. For our next meeting that's gonna really set us up to go into these groups to find some of these ways to move forward given this cost structure. Uh, for the work that we have. And you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you, and I'm not doing this to put two bodies or entities against one another, but I'll ask questions. I'll offer questions.
080Last year was my first year on the board, and I went before one of our bodies that we partner with to do work. I won't tell you if it's the General Assembly of the Council, because I don't want to create friction. But what was said to me is PGCPS has way too much money in its fund balance, and you all need to start spending that fund balance before we can give you all more money. Well, it's clear we've been spending our fund balance, and we've got to do something different. And so when we had to actualize $150 million in cuts. What that means is you don't have it in fund balance. You don't have enough to keep going. So this board, this superintendent, we could have not cut anything, and we would have been on
081TV for not for not been able to make the school system function any day. So I'm thankful this leadership decided to say. Now we've got to come to the table. Any questions about that financial review are any follow up questions. I know it's a hard pill to swallow, and you'll have a week to digest these things and the executive summary before our next meeting. But do you have any direct questions for Chief Howe? Yes, um, Ashley Kearney? This is the councilwoman from the city of Seat Pleasant. Yes, and thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for the presentation. Very, very informative. I was particularly intrigued by the transportation issue wherein the program is going to be sunset already planned, but it's saving like 2 million, which I… based on what you were saying,
082it's about, like, 100 students, so you got about like 2,200 students to make up for in something like that. My question would be, do we get reports like that? Or are there reports existing about the impact of programs like that on workers? Say, for example. You take away the $2 million. Is that impact on COLA? Can you expect drivers to then say, okay, you may have a shortage again and then have to make up their costs? And my other question is, I think it was mentioned that put dollars on top of the enrollment so we can see it. I'm curious to know if there are other charts. In terms of, like, the retirement, where the student enrollment over time was showing. Is there similar graphics around retirement over time to be able to see some
083of those projections as well? I'm gonna let, um… Yes, I'll start with the transportation piece. And just to clarify, as I stated earlier, within the negotiated agreement, our drivers are eligible for overtime, as any worker would be if they work in excess of 40 h within a work week. The plus-in program would allow, if they're picking up an additional route within a certain amount of time, they would automatically sort of be the route, for example, might be a 20-minute route, but it would automatically get rounded up to a minimum pay of 30 minutes to cover that additional route. So that's where kind of the plus end comes into play. They still have to reach 40 hours in a week, but to get to that threshold quicker because a 20-hour route that they may have to
084double back and cover now is rounded up to a 30 minute route. So it gets them there quicker. So the impact of what we captured in the financial review was not a savings. We actually had to. bad money in the financial review to pay for that additional overtime that's being realized with the plus and program that's in play with that program being sunsetted as we go into next school year, you know, we anticipate continuing to be in a better posture with our. positions being filled and not having to have drivers double back and cover multiple routes. So the need for that, the operational need for that, no longer exists going forward. I will turn over to Dr. Edwards to talk about the retirement piece. Good evening, everyone. Thank you, Dr. Moss, and thank you for
085both questions. I'll start with the bus drivers. As of last week, we have approximately about 48 bus driver vacancies, and that's huge for us as a district. Every week, it continues to go lower to the point of where we're stabilizing our operations, and it's important that we continue to hire. It's important that we keep training our bus drivers so that they're ready to go ahead and drive those routes for us. And so we will continue to hire throughout this year when we have those vacancies. Second question or first question, I should say, was around our, uh, just, uh, retirement overall as a staff, I believe. And let me make sure I have the question correct. Was it more about teachers, or was it just overall retirements that we're seeing in the district? overall, and it
086was about the ability to get visuals like the student enrollment over time with the funds attached. Okay, so for the next meeting, or as a follow up, if we send out a follow-up, I can include some information just around what we're seeing as for retirements over the years with our different staff groups. And of course, one of the things impacting that is typically it's cheaper to hire a first year teacher, but there aren't that many of those out there. And so typically you have cost savings when you hire a teacher who's, you know, newer on the staffing wrong. But all of those aren't even out there. So. But we appreciate you. Cherie, you're gonna be the last question on this, and then I am going to hold you all over a little bit tonight so
087that Dr. Bowers can set us up for our next meeting properly. So, Miss Vickery. And I'll upgrade is, um… Dr. Mom directly. I started going through the budget document and just because it's so such a behemoth. And I just have some data requests for next time of our meeting. Kind of looking at your facility and your vehicle reimbursement baselines, you have a 0.0% change. Um, from FY25 to FY26 and to FY27. When you do the thing where you consolidate buildings and vehicles together, which doesn't quite give you a clear explanation of the amount that you're. Then we'll give you a quote versus your facilities and attendance. So just requesting that at the next meeting, if we can have a breakdown over the last 24 months of the split between building versus vehicles plus bills versus
088collection. And especially what I'm looking at is, like, the… The facility rental. I'd like to know who's renting from you guys, like the. the amount of money you're taking in, who's at net 30 for payment, who's at net 60 for payment, that 90 days. And if you have any continued places that are reserve in the facilities over and over again, but they're delinquent right on payment. And if you split those two things out kind of what your vehicles look like versus your facilities. And then, um, Dr. Moss knows this, um, but I'm really into Medicaid billing and making sure that you guys have that correct, because your counterparts in MOCO, HOCO, Baltimore County, Fairfax, they're all building these state agencies. So do you guys also have a third-party biller? Are you set up to do
089that? And then in your. I know Mike is like, so I'll just put it in the bank. Send your in your, um… What did they think? Your Rfp that you put out when you did the school base, do you guys have to cover their internet and their facilities and the capacity of that. However, it is in linguistic type where you say that the school-based health clinics have to bill Medicaid, but then you also say you guys are supposed to do it. So I think you have leakage in dollars there because you have some language clarity that you need to fix there, and that might be handing up. Some of your money as well. I'd like to have Nevada around that, so that we can kind of break that down and look into that and future
090meetings. Thank you, Cherise. I actually, Micah, could we schedule a meeting with them and Cherise to go over the Medicaid billing thing? It's come up a couple of times. A couple of people told me that like we're leaving dollars on the table. I don't know that I fully understand it. But perhaps if somebody from Chief House team and. Cherie can actually have a meeting. We can figure out where we… I don't want to overshare, but this is what she does, you know, for a living every day, so maybe she can tell us the backstory around how we can, you know, build in a different way. But if we could just schedule a meeting with those those 2 teams, that'd be great. We'll get the 1st questions answered, too. In the interest of time, I'm going
091to turn it over to Dr. Bowers. I want folks to be clear around where we're going. Again, these 1st 2 meetings, we wanted you to get really clear around our financial outlook before you start going into work groups. Dr. Bowers? Good. All right. I'm always in the position of closer, so I'm gonna. I'm going to try to do it justice here. So I want to first thank you for the participants that completed the survey for us, looking at your overall themes for subcommittees. What you think about our purpose. So two big themes emerged from the survey. Number one, the committee wants to focus on strategic allocation and program effectiveness. So some of the key things they would like the work group to focus on are resource allocation at the school level. Ensuring funding is tied
092directly to student needs, examining equity in staffing and materials, and a deeper analysis of our program effectiveness through an academic return on investment. The other key theme that emerged was operational and initiative alignment. So some of those focuses in that area would be improving operational efficiency, reducing redundancies, eliminating low impact initiatives to minimize non-instructional burdens on school-based staff. So with that, we also looked at what are the key themes? that each of you recognized as being of critical importance in this workgroup. So, three themes emerged, which was the analysis of current district expenditures and budget allocations is something really important to take a look at during our work time together. Evaluating how existing academic programs and specialty programs can be sustained and strengthened, and Dr. Strader shared some data on the utilization and enrollment of
093those this evening. And then the third focus that emerged was assessing the alignment between resource allocation. and key district priorities. So taking those three foci's, we met as a group and decided that those would help us inform our three subcommittees that we will be forming and starting next week. So our 3 subcommittees are fiscal review and resource alignment subcommittee, and each of these subcommittees have a specific purpose. So this purpose of this 1st committee is conducting a comprehensive analysis of our current expenditures. And ensuring alignment between resource allocation and district priorities. And then on the next slide, you'll see what are the core responsibilities of this workgroup. I'm sorry, the smaller work group, and what are the key deliverables this subcommittee will accomplish? The second subcommittee is looking at revenue and sustainability. So, their job
094will be to identify, evaluate, advance sustainable funding strategies that strengthen the district's long-term fiscal position. So right now in this work group, we're really talking about our current fiscal status. But the targeted responses that we want from this district are going to help us in planning for future long-term fiscal stability. So that subcommittee will work on that. Our third subcommittee will be the stakeholder engagement and policy recommendations. This is more of our communications, uh, how we are communicating our recommendations and our policies from our work group. So they're going to be ensuring transparent, inclusive engagement and translating the findings that we are coming up with in this workgroup into actionable recommendations. Ensuring that they align to our current fiscal reality with the need to maintain academic and specialty program integrity. And in the essence of
095time, these are our 3 subcommittees broke and bound by what are our core responsibilities that we're asking each of those subcommittees to focus on, as well as what are the key deliverables that we would like each of those subcommittees. to engage in and produce. So I'll give you a minute to read that. And last but not least, what is our plan moving forward for our next meeting? So we are looking at 3 key initiatives for our next meeting in 2 weeks. Number one board member Moss already shared that Dr. White, our chief academic officer, will be here giving a presentation. So we're going to have a little bit more education around our academic program expenditures and our specialty programs review to help inform step number 2, which will be, we will begin our subcommittee work
096that evening. So our three subcommittees will meet in separate breakout rooms. and begin looking at their core responsibilities and key deliverable tasks, and then move on to step 3 is. Did we define those core responsibilities and key deliverables as those subcommittees see, or do they have any edits or feedback for those? And then we will each need a lead for each of those subcommittees and to develop milestones. Um, or a roadmap or a timeline of some of those deliverables that we will need to have those three subcommittees create. And that is all I have. And we also spoke today about how we will be recommending our larger committee work group into our subcommittees. So hopefully by the next time we meet in 2 weeks, we will have based on each person's role and responsibility, and
097what role they play. Um, in their regular job, uh, assigned to a different subcommittee so we can begin that work in two weeks. and I will turn it over to Dr. Moss to close this out. Well, Dr. Bowers, thank you so much. As you all see, lots of careful and thoughtful planning has come into this. We won't, you know, we won't stop doing that. Like I said, we meet each week, even with the superintendent going through what this time with you will look like. I hope tonight has been good for you, um, and that it's been helpful. Continue to ask questions. I don't think we meet next week. Micah, we meet the following week, right? We have an off week. So in that off week, um, you should be taking your time to really be
098clear about the budget. There is an executive summary that's coming to you that summarizes the budget. And Jamie, how many… Dr. Bowers, and how many pages? I got it down to three and a half. That's good. Alright, it's like you got it down at 3 and a half. So the budget will come to you in three and a half pages. Always as committee members, if you have questions in the interim, reach out to administrative questions, content questions. Don't hesitate to reach out to me. Um, or Micah, include Micah on that email, and we'll try to get a response from you as you're trying to figure these things out. But again, yeah. Principal Parker. Uh, Mr. Moss, uh, yeah, I just wanted to. Yes, sir. Yeah, I wanted to, um… Make sure that I'm counting in
099the attendance. I wasn't up. feel when you started. But I was here about 15 minutes after you guys started, and I didn't… I had some questions, but I'll hold them. It was very informative this evening. Glad to hear quite a bit of information that was shared. Uh, but I do have some questions, obviously, and I'm looking forward to working with the group in two weeks. I appreciate you, Principal Parker. We got you recorded. And it… Uh, hey, uh, it's, it's, it's executive director, you know. I am a former principal. I'm the executive director of ASASP. I was a principal for years, and I appreciate that. Y'all… y'all should just know I get in trouble, uh, with Jeffrey Parker all the time. You're good. All the time. It's okay, it's okay. Yeah. Let's take. Well, we'll
100take good care of you, though. We'll make sure Micah got you recorded and you're good to go. If you have questions, you know, hit us up. If you need us to answer them before the next work group. And that goes for everyone. You'd like us to, um… to answer them before the next word grew. But again, it's been a pleasure to be with you all tonight. Are there any other questions? comment. What I was gonna ask you real quick, and you don't have a little section up here for, like, the check… for people to type in questions or whatever, I, you know, the chat section. Okay, we can work on that for next time. on the screen, you know, like, you can actually type in a question up here. That's what I was… that's what
101I was thinking, that's what I was gonna ask you. But, um, otherwise, I'm good. Thank you very much. Okay, we'll get that added, uh, for the next time where people who want to ask questions in the written form over the the verbal form. We'll see how to make that work. I'm so sorry, we do have a tracker that's been established. I think I sent it out in the first, um, follow-up, and I'll also send it out again after the close of this meeting. So if you have any written questions, you can always submit it at any point to this tracker. Okay, well, it's been great seeing you all. Enjoy your spring breaks. If you're actually springing in this pseudo spring break. I hope you all have fun this week, and we'll see you all in
1022 weeks. All rightAll right.Good nightThanks.Thank you, Prin