Saco School Board Meeting 7-20-22

001e e e greetings and welcome to the Saka school board meeting for Wednesday July 20th 2022 call the meeting to order it's 5:00 pm I'd like to invite you all to join us on the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge ALG flates thank you very much item three on the agenda this evening is approval of school board meeting minutes dated June 16th 2022 is there a motion to approve the minutes Mr Mayor School Board member Truman I move we approve the school board meeting minutes dated June 16th 22 motion's been made is there a second second second second by School Board member L Fortune any discussion on the minutes roll call no discussion but I think it was actually Jeff that that came in before me my apologies roll call votee on the minutes School Board

002member Archie yes School Board member Preble yes School Board member Richard yes School Board member Le Fortune yes Schoolboard member Gail yes Schoolboard member Truman yes motion passes 60 to approve the minutes that brings us to item four adjustments to the agenda any adjustments this evening seeing no adjustments moving on to item five there seems to be no correspondence in the packet uh that brings us to item six public session if there's anybody who would like to address the school board please please come forward and be heard please keep your please state your name and address for the record and keep your comments to minutes seeing nobody seeking recognition moving on to item seven superintendent report superintendent Ray okay good evening everybody uh good to see you all again it's been a few weeks uh

003as we get a chance to enjoy a little bit of the summer out there uh several updates and some of the stuff that I normally would up update you on is in the packet tonight um so I'm not going to uh talk about things twice um as we end this year's budget cycle Jason has closed out uh starting to close out the books uh there's a memo in the packet of what we anticipate for year-end expenditures and what that will look like um while at the same time uh very proud of this board and the and the group of people uh that we worked with last year because not only did we take care of several Financial items uh we've got Mike working real hard on making sure that we've had some uh big additions

004to our school uh schools updates uh and Mike's going to get a chance to talk about some of the school construction stuff at the end of this um last week I had a great opportunity to be in Washington DC uh and to meet with our state elected officials um it's just really cool being able to go to your Senator's office in in a building and see the plaques on the wall of who they're by um but we get to talk about uh several key items uh in a face Toof face and one of those is about Federal uh special education funding back in the 70s the federal government passed idea that is to be funded at 40% and currently that funding level hovers around 15% and in the next budget cycle um if things stayed

005the same because of it of the changing in in costs and whatnot that would actually go down to 133% so we had very supportive uh from King and Collins's office to understand that if loc if federally Ida was funded at the level that the law uh talks about that would mean another $1.8 million that uh would come to the city of Sako so really discussing with them is like you understand that 40% isn't going to happen in one year but how do you develop a plan to ramp up to that level over X number of time so that that's a big piece um also you know while it's not necessarily as big of a challenge in this part of the State uh talking about access to broadband uh and how many schools in the states

006when they went remote couldn't really go remote because they didn't have Broadband in those communities uh and so that was uh great topics and then you know more importantly talking about and giving thanks to the bipartisan Bill uh on school safety um that just got passed there's $ 13 billion dollar Nationwide and we'll start to see some of that roll out and that's done in two ways one is about uh making sure that facilities are safe but number two investing in mental health services and some sustainability in training for those services so while we've gotten no information uh those will be future conversations that we'll have summer schools and wreck are often running and doing really well um I know this will be probably one of our more challenging weather weeks uh for those uh

007but it's great to see the kids in the building and all the activities going on which on the other hand not necessarily what Mike loves to see all the activity going on because it does make us very nervous every year about how we start the school year and have rooms reies and hallways Ries for teachers to get back in the building um and days like this are not necessarily the best days for doing floors um when the heat's at this level um just reminder to to any of the parents out there that have not registered your kiddo for kindergarten it's really important for us to have those numbers and as we see um an increased population growth that's going to occur um here in Sako it's even more important for us uh because it's going

008to be essential that we look at our classroom sizes on both sides of the city uh and make sure that we have room to be able to move kiddos around a little bit um as we begin to see and have families move into the comfort in um we have a lot of planning and adjustment that will need to be make because that's not going to be a um easy situation where we know numbers at any point in time and I'll talk about more of that and when we discuss that situation um jeie and Mike are working on the new bus transportation program as they're starting to get that piece to come forward the hardware is in they're starting to install all that and then they're working on the initial upload of what the transfer of

009students to go into that system would look like and then that's when all the fine-tuning will come so be interesting to see what kind of details we'll get so that hopefully early this fall we're able to um roll out more of the interactive piece for parents that will certainly be a slow roll and not something that happens on day one um but as we get into the fall being able to look at your phone and see where your bus route is at uh will be helpful to parents uh throughout the year um I'd like to ask Mike to come up at this time and just talk a little bit about The Young School building and how that's going and couple of the other summer projects that we've had going on [Music] Mike second set up

010here right good evening everyone uh I me it's been a super busy summer so far and everything's going well we had the uh State Police invest uh testing or or inspecting our buses today and stuff and everything went went extremely well there's a couple of issues we got to deal with but nothing that's going to interfere with with our operations uh I've got a ton of projects going on this summer so like superintendent said I'll just go over a couple of them and then I'll answer any questions about any other projects that are going on in any of the schools and and just kind of let you know what's going on uh this is 4500 foot building our auxiliary building at Young School it you can see it's got four classroom five bathrooms a couple

011of office spaces uh right now they're they're a little bit behind schedule there's a little few still a few more things that'll happen that maybe we can catch up a little bit of time but it looks like it's going to be kind of finishing up about the same time School ready to start so we'll be we'll be working with them to make sure we get everybody kind of in there as soon as we can and hopefully we'll start right on time and it looks like we're we shouldn't have any problem with that uh if you're going by the building right now it's kind of interesting because they're putting some water control uh material around the building that stuff is about the same color as the building is going to be so if you're looking at

012the building from Route 112 that's pretty much what the building is going to look like uh roofs on windows are in doors are on order they haven't haven't shown up yet uh they're starting to do the sprinkler system and the duting work inside so there's nothing right now that's holding anything up everything's going around just like it just like it should be uh so if anybody get questions on on that building I'll let you know that the next project is coming up okay I mean Great Falls has been wonderful to work for so far and we we just have a good relationship now also we've just about 99% complete with re-roofing two sections of the middle school we broke it down into five sections the middle school that are 30 years old that needed to

013get re-roofed so we've done two now and as I said most the materials now are they they've been finishing up and getting rid of all the extra stuff that was on the roof so we'll be done with that within the next week or so and then I've asked them to give us a quote for the three sections remaining that we still need to do that are that are older and Mike when we discussed that quote for those section of the roof we believe that with the money in the next budget and a little bit in the following budget we could have that roof totally replaced correct we could I mean it's going to be about the same we I think this one was 300 little over between three and $400,000 for these two sections so

014for a little bit probably about 500,000 we'd finish up the finish up the roof I mean that would working with this company they they were they were so quick and so you know just they jumped on this and got it all done this this this early in the summer season it'd be nice to do that next summer and get it the whole thing completed so we wouldn't have to worry about it and then when we talk about painting that will occur at the middle school that will happen uh in off hours during weekends in holidays there was a sign the company that uh quoted us offered us a significant Price Break by not doing it during their Peak summer hours and it was significant enough to say yeah we can we should take that because

015we'll just be able to get more done um in that it will just you know we like to have the front entrance done at the start of the school year and those pieces um but some of the other projects will take care of vacation weeks just pushing it for this summer and to be able I think we Sav like $20,000 that we'd be able to invest into other parts of the building that just seemed like a good decision to wait you know towards those weeks where they can bring a crew in uh and it's not their busy time of year so no sense to pay the premium also want to say thank you for supporting the uh the second maintenance person I got him working now he's been working for a couple weeks we got

016him up to the middle school just working in all the classrooms getting he's kind of learning his way around uh we'll probably be looking at setting him up with his right now most everybody that works for maintenance and we kind of use our own tools and stuff and so hopefully we'll set him up so we can go ahead and start having our own stuff the school you know belongs to the school and stuff and we can set him up with a vehicle so we can get back and forth and around so I just kind of guess expect that request I guess in the near future but thank you very much i' appreciate Mr Joel Dalgo he's doing a great job and he's fitting in pretty well any questions for Mr G see no questions thank

017you very much okay thank you superintendent Ray do you have anything further in your superintendent's report I'm finished any questions any questions for the superintendent no questions moving on to items eight chair's report Cher of Fortune thank you yes I do have a couple of of things um to report out on so earlier this week um Jeremy myself the mayor and the city administrator sat down to uh talk about some items that Jeremy sort of alluded to will be coming up later in this evening's agenda around um the budget implications of um the influx of refugees and also as it relates to the building that was just discussed um we asked to see if we could get onto the council agenda a waving of any of the permanent fees that go with the building since

018it's a city building and uh that is something that that should be moving forward um onto an upcoming Council agenda um so those two things were covered in a meeting we had on Monday morning um and then the other item um if you had not seen it was that there was a council meeting this past week and just to make note of um the potential for a number of Charter amendments that are coming around that may be returning for a sec for a first reading uh related to to school board and um the election cycle impacting all of us so if you haven't seen that um go back and look at the agenda from previous week for Council and that has the details related to that but I just wanted to relay that that had

019been something that had come up recently thank you any questions for the chair moving on to item nine uh staff reports there seem to be no staff reports in the packet this evening uh that brings us to item 10 board subcommittee meeting minutes uh for the Strategic committee the next meeting is to be determined for the finance committee the next meeting is to be determined infrastructure committee there's no meeting scheduled at this time and the Personnel committee there's no meeting scheduled at this time uh that completes the board subcommittee meeting minutes uh brings us to item 11 old business there's no old business and so that brings us to item 12 new business we have several items beginning with item a which is new hires uh board in your packet there is a memorandum for

020new hire superintendent rate does that require a vote if does require a vote so is there a school board member Truman I'm going to apologize in advance in case I butcher anybody's last names um I move we approve the nomination of Aaron didado Sako Middle School composite teacher Michael carestia Sako Middle School alternative education special education teacher Stuart Platt Sako Middle School alternative education regular education teacher Margaret rigny CK Burns third grade teacher Katherine Doyle Sako middle school science teacher Kenneth lamb Sako Middle School Humanities teacher Suzanne Rondo Sako Middle School RTI math teacher and Rebecca Sadowski B CK Burns school counselor and issue a contract for the 2022 2023 school year second motions been made by school board member Truman second by School Board member Johnston any discussion and for the record uh there's

021no relation to Katherine Doyle uh with me any uh any discussion on this item see no discussion roll call votes Schoolboard member Archie yes Schoolboard member prebble yes School Board member Richard yes Schoolboard member L Fortune yes School Board member Gail yes Schoolboard member Truman yes Schoolboard member Johnston yes motion passes 70 looks like there's some transfers requiring no action in your memo and then there's also uh appointments requiring ing no action any questions regarding this Memo from the board there is also um a number of resignations that do require motions I think we're we're on item a we haven't got the item B yet item a was the new hires oh okay we haven't got the item B yet I thought you jumped ahead as well if there's no questions on the new higher

022memorandum we will move on to Item B which is resignations there was a memo in your packet on resignations uh several requiring affirmation by the board isit School Board member Johnston thank you Mr Mayor I move we accept the resignation of Rebecca Anderson suo Middle School special education teacher Alessa fley Fairfield school special education teacher Abby Alden human resources manager and Danielle bardis Fairfield teacher motion's been made by Schoolboard member Johnson is there a second second second by Schoolboard member Truman any discussion on accepting the resignations of these four teachers I just want to add that um thank you to all of them for working here in Sako and um wish them the best thank you any further discussion roll call vote on accepting the resignation School Board member Archie yes School Board member Preble

023yes School Board member Richard yes School Board member L Fortune yes School Board member Gail yes School Board member Truman yes School Board member Johnston yes motion passes 70 there are also some uh resignations in there that does not require board action uh any questions on the memorandum uh of no action okay moving on item C the esa ES a public comment good evening every year we receive federal funds through title grants and those funds change year to year so we have our final allocations and are preparing our Grant application for the state of Maine just a highlevel overview we do have increases in all of the titles and what I will do is just briefly go through each of those titles and um summarize our planned spending for those title one is designed for

024supplemental instruction and Fairfield is the only title one schoolwide program for Sako schools we spend those funds in three different areas supplemental instruction for Literacy for students who are struggling to meet benchmarks supplement instruction in mathematics for students who are identified as needing that instruction and then the third project that's required is spending for homeless students our spending on supplemental instruction is primarily salaries and benefits for staff that provide those services to students and then we also allocate funds for homeless students and those are generally spent in transportation with mckin vento we have to look at best interest placement for students which means that both the sending district for a homeless student and the receiving district for a homeless student have to determine where a student's educational needs are best met and then transportation services

025are split between both districts so if we have a student that was attending school in Falmouth and is now considered homeless and residing either with a family member or um unfit housing in the city of Sako and they wanted to stay in Falmouth we would be responsible for 50% of those costs so the the title funds uh some of those are allocated for transportation in that area and uh other items that can help ensure that students experiencing homelessness can have access to their education so if there's money needed for school supplies poster board that sort of thing we try to ensure that they're able to access their education equally to students who have those resources available title two allocations are around teacher quality and Andor professional development we have utilized that as a class-size reduction

026at CK Burns and use that towards salary and benefits to ensure that we have uh lower class sizes there title three funds are um allocations for instruct ction for English Learners and immigrant students we have had quite a fluctuation of those funds because they look at differences year-over-year in identified students so we either have it or we don't and we have also um had access which they don't allocate until September or October if there's a dramatic increase in an immigrant population that's an additional allocation so we will certainly be looking to have those funds um in the last school year that those funds equal just over $7,000 and so while we do anticipate that again we certainly can't count on that until we actually see it um we will be looking to support a program

027called elevation which will help to provide isaps which are individualized language acquisition plans for students and better manage those across schools as well as connected resources that are part of that program and we also are looking to coordinate with community-based organizations so that we can have uh some immigrant specific services that will be funded through that and lastly is title four funds which we have in the past and will continue to transfer to title 2 which will support that classroom reduction there are also private school allocations so if you look at the attached memo you can kind of see the different allocations we work in Sako with Thorton sweetzer and Margaret Murphy to help them as the Fiscal Agent and determine where they will spend those funds and then we uh write the checks out

028through those title funds to ensure that they get access to certain titles so that does reduce the over all Sako public school department allocation from the original allocation to the city of Sako there is an attachment on that a form link on that attachment as well if anybody would like to submit any comments or feedback as to how those title funds are allocated and we will certainly take that into consideration as we develop the grant questions School Board member Gail just a a couple of questions just um in the past do we get much public comment or questions about the [Music] allocation I don't necessarily have this historical knowledge here um generally speaking there is a Grant application team that also consults with community members and classroom teachers and that's where the bulk of that

029comment comes from I would not imagine that there would be a bulk of community input from this but we certainly welcome that sure uh and then in terms of the the the funding it looks like it I can understand and and thank you for how you've laid it out I think it's really easy for for me and and the public to to grasp on some of these like the title three funds I can certainly understand why there's fluctuations in those allocations but um just that like high level what makes These funds fluctuate um between the fiscal years is it it's driven off of data like student data I imagine right so there are a couple of different fluctuations there's what the federal government decides to allocate to the state of Maine and then there's also

030how Maine decides to allocate what the state of Maine has received from the federal government to individual schools and that yes is based on variety of metrics from enrollment to um a really important one that we urge All Families to take advantage of is that uh free and reduced lunch which has been a particular challenge for us in the last couple of years while we're grateful to have free lunch available to all students that certainly decreases the incentive to complete that free and reduced lunch application which in turn drastically impacts our Title One funding in particular Schoolboard remember little Fortune the only thing that I was going to add um was probably more of a comment around the question that that will had asked about feedback and that I know in the in years past

031and it came up last year we've had times where we've been presented the numbers and you know we've had a meeting agenda item around it and then other years where we haven't really talked much about it I really like this format and I'm you know probably more so not just the format but all of the details around how it's used because it's I mean just from the standpoint of not just the general public but it's really educational for the school board to really know how these funds get used and the things that we we use them on and just just a comment that I'm you know I'm happy to see this back on back on the calendar again of of something that we cover thank you thank you any further questions board member Gil and

032not to believe but I I Echo that I mean this since this is the first time I've seen this this is laid out really well and it's I didn't mean to drill you with like but it's it's very informative and thank you for putting it together okay if there's no questions we'll move on to the next item thank you very much that brings us to item D an equity assessment in your packet there's a memorandum from superintendent Ray um on the 2021 2022 Equity assessment superintendent Ray will you be presenting or will so just as an overview for this this piece um as we know we will have a very changing Community this fall um and part of our work is to always review historically the data and the trends that happen in our school

033department um and we felt that it was very important uh knowing that we would be in anticipation for such a change to really make sure that we took a snapshot of where we were prior to this and I know that in some of the data the co year really throws things off but as we move forward and we look at the work that we need to do with equity and inclusion and making sure that all children are treated equitably and equally throughout things um this is just kind of a highlight overview that will inform some of the decisions that we make throughout the school year uh and so Meg I'll turn it over to you thank you to piggyback on that high level overview one of the ways in which we try to understand if

034we are equitably applying different uh practices across demographics is to look at the percent of the population that is white and the percent that is non-white and then look at a variety of factors to determine If the percentage of the general population matches the percentage of the application of of different metrics to those populations we are also hopeful to be able to expand this in the future to look at the elll population as another demographic of this look at socioeconomic status as another demographic of this and do some of the similar comparisons that you'll see here so those Baseline demographics have us just hovering around 10% for non-white students and that's kind of the metric that we will be comparing to as we look at the uh other items so we have first IEPs and

035504 plans and again there's some variation year toe and we do see that uh currently there our students of color are slightly less likely than their white peers to have an IEP or 504 and the literature is a bit mixed as to whether that is you know good or bad if there's an underidentification or not so uh we will continue to keep an eye on that but we are glad to see that there is a pretty close match in terms of those percentages when we look at uh discipline data again this is a year where our 2020 21 data is a big anomaly in terms of the overall numbers because uh looking at in school and out of school suspensions during a hybrid and remote year looks very very different so I would you know

036use caution when looking at that 2021 data um we see that sako's data has a far better picture than the National Data with respect to application of disciplinary procedures but we certainly want to continue to look at that very closely and um had a slightly higher percentage for in school suspensions of our non-white students and a slightly lower percentage of out of school suspensions so those are just some areas that we see we had a a late addition the access to data for Thorton Academy is is a bit tricky as compared to publicly available data the state reporting system and the way that the state Reporting System utilizes um multi mple sending schools are multiple main residents not just Sako residents so we apologize for the late ad on that graduation data but we're able

037to get that today and we see that the graduation rates for white students and nonwhite students are very close which again is uh promising data and we will continue to look at that a couple other areas that we look at as we're assessing our own uh equity policies and procedures are professional development so some high level overviews of things that we are continuing to work on our policy manual audit allows us to kind of have a new lens and ensure that policies are in line we have uh social studies curriculum to ensure that we're looking at instruction equitably across the prek through 8 Spectrum we've worked with inclusion main we have talked about a large catchman area for hiring and recruiting we're able to go to the Boston area this spring to look outside of

038just Southern Maine to try to diversify our uh pool of candidates and we have also had our administrative team work with heart of bord and their Dei work on some webinars that we've been able to participate in and lastly we participated as a full staff in a welcoming newcomers professional development that was provided by the main doe that pretty much covers where we are now and I'm happy to answer any additional questions any questions for assistant superintendent Parkers School Board member Gail in terms of the rest of the state um 10% non-white what is where do we rank within the rest of the state in terms of that population I don't have that specific data but I can get back to you with that percentage any further questions seeing no further questions thank you very

039much moving on to item e the building project update uh E1 was a site selection memo that was that is in your packet superintendent Ray do you want to go over this thank you um so as part of the process here tonight we have um to start planning for what would be a straw pole in the fall so as part of the process the straw poll is in a meeting where an informal poll will be taking about which site is prep preferred as we move forward now there is a lot of work that has to happen to get to the straw pole piece we've had several uh three Community meetings at the last community meeting um it says in there what the recorded vote was off uh of 30 people in favor of the Sweetser

040property to one in favor of I believe it was the middle school property um and so that gave us an indication on how to move move forward and so what I first would like to do here before we you know talk about this memo a little bit more is I'd like to ask Norm uh and representatives from oako to come forward to just rehash for the public all of the sites that have been talked about and some of the reasons and thought processes that went into this we've been talking about uh possible sites uh as a committee since August of last year year um and we're getting into the point where um we really have to start moving forward because also when we talk about funding and timeline there are some interesting things that we

041will have to deal with over the next year to make sure that we are ready to vote um in June of next year and so uh if we could get Oak Point to come up and uh talk a little bit and move to the um the slid um that they have uh available for us sure uh for those of you who don't know me I'm normal from oakor Associates I'll start with the the timeline um based on where we stand right now and moving forward as as Jeremy said towards a referendum and I'll let Jonah De our civil engineer give you some details on the site selection so so based on the fact that we've we've identified the preferred site we have tasks that we need to get through this summer and you can see

042listed as June through August of the summer we're working on site selection items we we're currently looking at traffic scoping and we we've done traffic counts at intersections around around the site we're having Wetland delineations done on the site where we've just contracted to have a an environmental site assessment we'll be moving forward with some geotechnical information once we know exactly what we're looking at for the portion of the site that we need for for the building we'll be looking at property appraisals and then any other state agencies we need to deal with as part of the process meanwhile um kind of concurrently with the site selection piece we've visited some of other school facilities to get an idea of what whe other buildings are out there and how things are laid out for great

043configurations that we're looking at we're developing the educational specifications actually your Administration is working on that and we're figuring out the space allocation for the the school buildings based on doe guidelines and we'll be working further with them to understand how big these buildings are and what what you have for rooms within them so moving on at as we get that information on the site we'll be doing more conceptual looks at looks at the the site layout Jeremy mentioned will have a a straw poll so once we know all the information on the site and ready to move forward with State approval we'll be meeting with the public presenting all that information to to you and conducting an informal vote show of hands to to show that the state show the state that the city

044of s supports this site that we've Chosen and that allows us to present this to the the sub the committee construction committee from the State Board of Education and then finally in front of the whole whole board for site approval again concurrently with with that process we'll be starting on the design of the building a conceptual design and laying that out and also creating the budget that will be presented at the referendum we expect that to happen um we'll probably have an October approval for that piece and then moving forward to the concept approval for the State Board we'll be looking towards a Janu January approval for that again a similar process for the public we'll have a a Public Presentation of of what we're looking at for the building and a straw pole um

045to to show the state that the city of Sako approves of the direction we're heading in and that will allow us to proceed with a a referendum vote in in June of next year and then just a little bit of information on the buildings that we're looking at Norm Norm can I just interrupt you for one second one of the things and and this is something that between Bill and Norm could you talk a little bit about as we were developing the timeline we've put a timeline uh in there that lists all of these key dates we had some unique features in Sako about how something gets on the process and the number of meetings that Sako had to have to get something on the ballot that pushes us into the there's a a rule

046that as 6 months from concept approval to a public vote I think it was a little less than that but yeah it's quite a quite a process and I think Bill would be uh the one to be able to to walk you through each of those steps a little more clearly there there's certain um number of days between each step in the process that's that's required so through that piece and and we can talk about that more it's important for us to understand that because of the requirements for for the postings in the number of days and it's laid out in that timeline of what needs to be done it appears that we are going to get one bite at the Apple for voting meaning that the I believe the law says six months from

047concept approval by the State Board of Education you have to have a positive vote if you do not have a positive vote according to the law you're done you're off the list money goes away so it's important that over the next few months we as a community get on the same page on what happens here in this situation and get support behind it because we're going to have one chance and based off the number num here that's that's almost like a mega that's almost like a power a good Power Ball ticket that the community is hitting um as far as what would be paid for for a school so uh that's very important piece when we talk about uh funding and the options that come here tonight sorry to interrupt that's right very it's a

048very important P for us to understand so the program committee looked at different grade configurations as as options and um anywhere from a mega school for all your grades to different breakdowns of for grade levels and the the options that Rose to the top were a two building configuration one for pre kindergarten through first grade and one through second through fifth grade and you see the numbers in front of you that those are very preliminary cost but gives you an idea of the relationship between one option to the other and these uh are based on the enrollment projections that we've received so the the peak enrollment for these different grade levels are listed in this in this table the second option and just and just on that piece on the enrollment piece the state does

049give us a 5% buffer above those enrollment projections that are figured into that number so so the numbers you see are are 5% above what we were given in the report that we were handed so second option would be a pre kindergarten and kindergarten school and a first through fifth grade school so th this would allow a a smaller school for the younger kid uh children which seem to be very important to to the committee the third option would be a large school um prek through two and then continuing the use of burn school as as it it is configured now so in each of these options the the state will be supporting the larger building uh the costs of construction and the and all project costs and then the the local community would most

050likely be covering the cost of the smaller building so this information gave us the opportunity to understand what we're going to need for a site um to support these buildings so that leads us to to the selection of the site that we will look at now thanks nor I am Jonah dewaters from Oak Point Associates I'm a civil engineer we've been working really closely with uh Jeremy and the folks from the school department on this uh for about 9 months now um kind of going to walk through the process here so you can get a sense of how we ended up at uh where we're at um first thing we did was take a look at potential sites this is based on a combination of land ownership property size sellers that we knew were interested

051and kind of looked at this at a 100,000 foot level um you can see they're all over the town all the red all the red uh properties um as we continued to investigate the sites we kind of ended up narrowing it down to three uh potential sites um and the way we do this is you can there's a lot of information on here apologies but the way we do this is we start looking at different features of the sites such as where they located what sort of traffic impacts they might have utility availability site size environmental constraints physical constraints um try to really figure out which site checks the most boxes um in doing that we ended up at three different sites um one of them is we're calling it The Clare parcel It's a

052combination of land owned by the city and a piece of land that uh is owned by an interested seller it's over on uh off of Route One the corner of Route One in milbrook Road um the next one is we're calling it the sweetzer site this is a wooded piece of property behind the sweetzer administration building on Pendleton Road it's kind of between the sweetzer building and the uh Public Works building that was recently built and then the third one is the back portion of the Sako middle school property um this is behind the fields so it's the wooded area behind the fields it's worth noting the fields right now there's a land and water conservation grant that those were put in with so there's a bunch of deed restrictions and development restrictions associated with

053disturbing the field area so this is the the wooded area behind the fields um you want to this is where the three sites are in relation to each other so you can see number one the top right that's the CLA site number two is the sweetzer site and number three is the suck Middle School site and the what's what's colored in on these is the entire piece of property this isn't necessarily the whole piece that would be developed for each of these this is just to get a sense of the scale of the entire site including areas that aren't necessarily developable for one reason or another so this is site number one this is the CLA site I was talking about you can see the red on the uh the plan there is the property

054line the larger portion to the north is the portion that's owned by the city and then the portion to the South um is owned by an interested seller um as you look at this you can see that we have two access point potential access points onto the site one is is from milbrook road on the south and then one is from Route One on the west um the purple areas with the dark shaded shapes in the middle are kind of generally what the schools might look like what the schools kind of shake out like there's a solid chance actually guarantee that the final shapes of the schools will look nothing like that this is just kind of to get you a sense of give you a sense of scale the purple area around those is

055more or less the developed area area when this is all done so each of these sites will include the buildings field space parking circulation areas for service um playgrounds hard courts there's a lot of other site elements that at this point we haven't quite worked out um so this is how this is how this sweetzer site looks you can see that the site itself is about 80 acres but the buildable area is more like 25 and this is because of some some streams and deep areas and there's quite a few Wetlands on here um but this is kind of generally how it might shake out if we put schools on this site this is there's again a lot of information here but really the the big the big points are the good things about this

056site are it's close to an existing Road Network that can support a high level of traffic in Route One um it's more or less flat for a bunch of it the part where we could fit the schools um we didn't find any significant environmental constraints like vernal pools or a big one streams that we would have to work near anything like that um the cons to the site are there are quite a bit of wetland areas the way the site is shaped makes it really hard to develop in a way that gives you a lot of room for expansion which is really important when you look at these schools because you're designing for you know a a long-term solution and if you have to do anything like add onto the schools add parking change circulation

057it can be really tricky if you've squeezed yourself into a spot where it doesn't necessarily fit um and then there was some you can kind of see it in the bottom picture here there was some evidence of previous development or maybe some sort of dumping on there that may indicate that there might be some envir some uh contaminated soils on the site um it's worth noting on all these sites as we narrow down to the final site and start really looking at it one of the things we do do is soil testing and environmental assessments to make sure that we don't end up on a site that used to be some sort of hazardous waist dump or anything like that that's part of this process um so at this point as we walked through these

058sites we're really more looking at anything that jumped out at us you know as we walked around wasn't necessarily a comprehensive look this is the szer site which we're calling site number two so you can see Public Works buildings to the North in this picture the szer administration building is to the South West um there's actually two possibly three access points to the site one is from Pendleton Road one is from Spring Hill Road which is the road that the uh new Public Works building is off of and there's a third access um off of Industrial Road um in between a few of the developments there's an existing easement that can be extended onto the site and this was this easement was something that was worked on as part of the construction of the uh

059Public Works building to kind of maximize different access points and different ways to get into the site um you can see here the big red outline is actually only a portion of what the S what sweet are owns back there and we wouldn't necessarily be approaching sweets are about purchasing the entire red area this is just kind of the area we picked to put the shapes on um as we move further in this process we would be working with sweetzer to to uh pick a spot that works for us and works for them with fut any of their future development plans similar to the uh the CLA site we walked around on the site took a look um there are quite a few nice features about this site one is that it's fairly large and

060wooded which meant that felt more secluded than it really was which is kind of nice because you get access from a lot of different areas to a site that still felt like it was far away it didn't feel like it was right next to the turnpike or anything like that which is really kind of positive because you get the advantage of having all these high high capacity roadways dumping out in a one spot um but at the same time don't necessarily feel like you're in the middle of anything um some of the other nice features here are the the size we have a lot more wig room on the site to fit things where we need to we have three possible access points which is really nice the schools we usually do you don't quite

061have that many that much availability for Access um and there's plenty the utilities are all available there it's right near uh transport right near the Public Works which is where the school buses are stored so from a transportation convenience standpoint it's really nice um there were some some cons the site there are a decent amount of wetlands on it and it's not really near any residential areas which is similar to the CLA site so that limits the potential for walkability um and then the other one with this is because of where it is there's a chance that we might have to do more offsite improvements here than others um this is something that we've hired a traffic consultant to investigate so we don't know yet what the extent of those offset improvements are but we

062will prior to this going to the referendum and any off any set improvements that are required by the state by the Department of Transportation would be rolled into the school project and supported by the Department of Education accordingly this is the third site which is the Sako Middle School site um you can see here the Sako middle school is to the north the uh green area in the middle is the back fields I was talking about earlier and then the area to the South is where the schools are um as we looked at this site it's it the biggest Advantage here is the whole site's already owned by this by the city um so there's there's not the land acquisition is less um but as we started to dig into the site we noticed that

063the uh green area in the middle was built using um Land and Water Conservation funding which basically puts a deed restriction on it that doesn't allow you to develop in it without without rebuilding the the field somewhere else which really kind of limits the amount of developable area on the site and pushes us into into the wooded area to the South um also back there and the Orange is a CMP Corridor uh so there's some high transmission lines through there it's pretty wooded back in the back in the um pretty the topography in that wooded area is Pretty Tough uh back in there and there's quite a few areas that the kids in the Middle School worked pretty hard putting some trails in back there that we were able to use as we walked around

064one of the other things you can see on this is uh down in the southwest corner there's a big red circle that's a significant Vernal pool so significant vernal pools require a higher level of Permitting and um there can be some fees associated with impacting those which uh is highly likely that was something we would have to do if we uh decided to develop schools on this site you can kind of see the dashed area on there gives you a sense of it the whole site is 105 Acres but the buildable area are is probably more like 24 as a reference point for both of these schools together ideally we'd be looking at 30 minimum 30 more like 40 acres um to develop the schools so it really it really makes the development tricky um

065the other thing on this site that shows up on the next plan is as we started to look at the traffic knowing that currently the access to the site is off of Route 112 which is heavily trafficked and currently in the middle of a lot of uh traffic improvements and Turnpike interchanges and a lot of stuff going on on Route 112 um it became clear to us pretty quickly that it wasn't realistic to think that this school could also be accessed from Route 112 which made us look at other ways to access the back part of the site um route five which runs along the the bottom of the screen there um there's a huge there a large piece of property that's owned by a private land owner we we approached them about um acquisition

066to see if they were interested in um any sort of acquisition of the Southern piece between the property line and Route 5 and they indicated us that they were not interested in that at this time so what that meant was as we look at trying to figure out a way to access the site we had to go through existing city-owned city-owned property and easements to get back there um and that's what that blue line is there that kind of starts on the all the way to the west and kind of runs in a weird weird uh route to get there and that's through an existing easement that the city has onto some city-owned property and then out and around across the stream and then through a through a subdivision the city had uh retained an

067easement through the subdivision as a possible way to get in there it's pretty long that's well over a mile to get in there and it's through some pretty rough terrain um so as we looked at it more and realized that that makes access really really tricky um so that's kind of a big con for this site that makes it a little less desirable than it looked on the face of it when we started this uh nine months ago this is a more comprehensive list of some of the pros and cons as I said before it is near high capacity Road networks um it's nice that it's adjacent to the existing Middle School it's nice that there potentially is some city-owned property nearby that we might be able to figure out a way to access um

068the back piece of the property between the Vernal pool and the fields didn't seem to have any significant development restrictions other than this like I said the significant Vernal pool on the south and the land and water conservation grants to the north and it's already owned by the city and it's near near um residences which is is nice but as you start looking at what it would take to develop on this site it starts to become less desirable like I said the the significant FAL pool the access from route five makes it tricky um not necessarily having enough acreage to develop these schools in a way that both fits with current programs and fits with any future needs is tough um looking at impacts to that land and water Land and Water Conservation Grant funded

069uh field area makes it very difficult to develop on and then um further the only utility availability is on Route 112 so there's a large utility run that you have to make from 112 all the way back through the site to get to where the schools would go so after we looked at all this and went back to that Matrix that was had a lot of information on it and ranked all these sites um it became pretty clear to us kind of look at right there the bottom part it became pretty clear to us that the uh most desirable site was going to be the sweetzer site um this is the site that uh Jeremy prepared the memo about and this is uh the discussion we had at the previous public meeting we had the

070informal vote on it and it seems it seemed like there was quite a bit of public support for this as well um so that brings us to where we are now which is the sweetzer site um I think there's another that's it so that brings us to Jeremy's uh memo which discusses how he ended up there um and I'll turn it over to Jeremy now and review his review the conclusions so again now we're at the point where as we start to line up and move towards setting up for a straw pole we need to make sure that we have some clear Direction ction uh from the school committee to either move in looking further at the sweetzer site or to stop in our tracks and do something different um because in order to meet

071that timeline of next June we need to keep we need to keep moving uh and so again straw pole can lead you in a very different direction but there's a lot of things that need to happen or should be happening simultaneously so that we can hit our Target in June so discussion for the board any discussion from the board School Board member L Fortune I didn't have anything I saw your hand ready I thought you were gonna ready to go any discussion Schoolboard member Gil I guess just a to kick off the discussion here um just at a at a very high and base level um my understanding and in talking to some folks um when they ask about why why are these three sites selected initially um essentially we are handicapped a little bit

072by accepting these fed these State funds because the state has requirements on acreage for for Parcels that a a new school could be developed on that make it almost impossible for us to find a location that's more in a more neighborhood setting is is that right so yes there are there are several um layers of requirements that come there from the state with the first and foremost being the simple piece that you start with 20 acres plus one acre for every hundred kids that would be in the state approved project and so as we started with I believe we started with the possibility of 27 is some odd properties in in town you as you start to go through all of that piece Plus three-phase power water sewer traffic as you sift all those properties

073through your filter some get pulled out pretty quickly um when you think about the current piece of land that's at Young School you're only looking at about 10 acres on that site and I'm I may be off an acre high or acre low when you look at the current site of where fairfield's at when we studied that site just to see if we could add another grade level of of students it quickly becomes not possible um when you look at Burns and we were saying we were studying the burn site initially and you have the same restrictions on the field out back on a very tight site and then you started to look at where there was large acreage available and now you're really looking at noro way out nor Sako or way down Route

074One now this was also a very condensed version of the slide deck that was presented uh at the meeting uh in May where you could look at the heat map of where students were located in the city and also thinking about possible growth now we could have possible growth in noro uproot one um there's been some other areas about growth and then that turns you to thinking about future traffic Andor traffic pattern discussions and thinking about how do we access how will cars come in and you know again when you started to think about one of the key features of the sweer property is high density roads three possible access points um became you know one of those pieces I mean there's just not a 25 acre 30 Acre Site sitting in the middle of

075a neighborhood um right now that's available and uh that's the other piece of this is that properties sell so quickly here that developers have you know any of those open sights they're just not available so so then I guess the second part of that then is if we don't accept these State funds or it doesn't pass the referendum the alternative is we could we could find another location for a school but we would have to bond it using City funds right I me that's that's that's that's the decision that we're at is correct if we want a neighborhood School we're going to have to buy it ourselves correct and so um when we talk a little bit more about the financing piece when we get to the financing part of this we roughly as a

076placeholder started to look at what what does a 20-year Bond look like um and so in a even with a 20 million a $25 million bond for the local schools you're looking at and again those this is a placeholder because your bond Council will work on and your advisers will work on how that refunds in in the payments but you know you're going to be at the one and A5 million plus or minus heavier on some years and lower at the end uh and we're going to talk a little bit about a strategy of what's in our current budget of how we might be able to absorb some of that moving forward so if you were looking at a situation where all of this work was hitting the local taxpayer um you can add up

077a $100 million pretty quickly there um and that would not be a number that we would love to see hitting the mill rate and one of our biggest challenges is that you know we're putting a fair amount of money with a plan to you know we know that Sako middle school is going to be standing at the end of all of this uh and as we look at our other situations we have a lot of need and that's that's what challenges our community a little bit more than than others just one one last question on the the cost estimates um so it let's just say for for both of those schools I mean it's looking like it's $100 million basically right for those two configurations those two options um were those cost estimates do we

078feel good about those cost estimates one and the second part of that is um if there are cost overruns at after we go to the state and they approve us for whatever it is they want to be on the hook for are they is there a mechanism for them to to help with cost inflations or cost inflation or is that does that fall back on the locals on us to cover any sort of uh cost increases so I know that in many of your projects when you start to have those um prices that either go up or down you try to work within the project to make that hit the hit the budget um whether that's additions uh uh subtractions to things doing value engineering and doing things a little bit differently um and I

079think what makes it tough in this situation is that and this could be good or bad is we have experienced very high price building cost right now that doesn't necessarily mean that those are the same building cost through 3 years from now depending on where the economy is uh I came on the very tail end of the bitterford high school renovation and that was a very lowcost construction period of time where we didn't actually borrow all of the money that was approved because of materials and other costs that doesn't mean that will happen in this project process it could go the other way um but you're hoping that you're working within those budget numbers I guess just the from some of the state projects uh that I've worked on that have a federal money we're

080in a situation where through obviously no fault of our own with covid that you know project cost increased 20% and the FEDS are saying oh sorry we gave you that money we approved it three years ago there's nothing you know you're on the hook for it so um just something as as we move forward to to um keep in mind I guess from a historical perspective in 2016 2017 then Council uh voted 43 to not go out to bond uh for a couple of school projects that were proposed in favor of putting asking the school board to put uh our name on the list for contention uh in the state construction process which Young School ended up number four out of a 100 uh all four of our schools ended up up somewhere in the

081100 but young young school being number four so just for historical perspective School Board member La Fortune it was actually covered by the discussion that we just had thank you any further discussion board member Richard do we know when we we might find out when the or what the cost potential costs of the MDOT offside offside excuse me improvements might we might find out about that or so that would be done through the traffic study piece of what would need to be made and again those offsite piece correct me if I'm wrong are tied into the state support for those projects for the project correct so anything offsite would be part of state funded part of that project um maybe we'll know a little bit more early fall is what we're hoping for I had

082another question would it be worth looking into I mean I guess we'll we'll hear back the costs associated with each entry point would it be worth potentially looking into utilizing each entry point if it's valuable as far as you know traffic getting in and out I don't know how that would work but yes that that piece will be played part of a scenario at some point because again I think that whatever option we we choose and no matter what happens with any building whether you're talking School residential whatever traffic tends to be a very popular topic here um um and so we'll want to look at ways not only for the parents who are coming in and going and staff but the biggest piece you know that I I worry about because it's part of

083our job is to think about how do you drop students at x amount of at X hour at any location go back down towards the shore and out to North Sako and around in the most efficient way and then bring back to the middle school because one of the things that we're going to work really hard over the next year for the middle school and this was part of the we talked about with Mike last spring is that historically there's kind of been this like flow of a 20 minute period of buses coming and going and we want a situation that when buses arrive buses arrive and kids drop and when buses pick up here we go we dismiss and we're out the door um because when you look at our instructional day uh for

084staff and teachers one of the things that has always been a pet peeve of mine is the bus dismissal process of saying that is such a waste of teacher time to have 15 to 20 minutes of a bus dismissal process whether it's either transferring into instruction or kids or planning time or PLC time that's a big piece of this process that we want to get right I just I'd be interested if there's any other schools Across the Nation too that or any other jobs that you guys have done uh that might utilize um you know a school that has more than one you know place where students come in and they depart from in my history I mean I've only ever really seen the one and to your point I mean as parents and teachers

085I mean it's a little bit of a a Time suck so well I think actually when you look at one of the sites that you visit visited which has been was an oako project uh is looking at the Falmouth campus that has you have some access and Norm you guys could speak way more more intelligent than we but you have some access out of that Falmouth campus in several different patterns um that allows traffic to move pretty smoothly there um when you look at Sanford High School which is a state-run project they have two different uh entrances and exits so that they can send traffic to different parts of Town um when we look at at this particular site um you have the ability to send people to the interstate either through the industrial park

086or going up Route One to to another part of town um and I think what is interesting when you think about the potential for this site is that while you may have a friend in town that only lives a mile or a mile and a half from you from each other um you would talk about how you would get there and you may take very different routes to avoid different uh you know traffic patterns throughout the city Schoolboard member Johnston uh thank you I just wanted to add a little bit of historical perspective on the work of the um School construction committee I've been serving on the this committee currently and also on the program committee or program subcommittee but I want to reflect a little bit back to the first days of the construction

087committee um I don't know was it eight years ago 10 years ago it's been a while now and the progress there got thwarted by a variety of of events and concerns but I think what I want to reflect on is that what we learned even way back then was that there really aren't very many options in terms of a site for this school even back eight or 10 years ago it was pretty obvious that there were a limited number of parcels that would be appropriate or or appropriately um positioned in terms of traffic and access to the roadways um of course the question are whether or not anybody wanted to sell the property that might be a available so there were a number of concerns and it was really clear back then that we had

088very few options and the committee that's currently been working on this has gone into great um depth to try and pull together the best site that we have the option of having um short of going to you know basically the border of Scarboro or something else there there really isn't much that's sort of centrally located so I guess I'm just trying to reflect on the fact that the state's helping us with this project financially is very in my opinion very beneficial but even if they were not involved I don't think we would have a lot of options of the best place to site this so I'm very much in support of the sweetzer site I think it is our best option I I think it it's a pretty good option and I don't think we

089have too many others to have the state on board to help us with the cost of it is a great benefit and I I just want to see us moving forward with this and fairly quickly because as the superintendent points out we do have a timeline that we really need to be adhering to and we don't have much time to waste thank you thank you any further discussion let's go M Richard I'd just like to also add that I'm in support of the szer location as well um I'd be remiss if I didn't didn't state that um are we going going to have like a vote on moving this forward or so what I'd like to have is that again the only thing you are voting on is to move the the sweetzer location that

090we've recommended in the memo to the straw pole process haven't committed everything we're moving towards that process um because we need to start getting as many uh things lined up so that we can move forward and stay within our timeline because when you think about uh the site process if you go back to uh item number one in order to hit next June's timeline we need to be at planning uh board uh building and site concept design uh uh sorry site approval state board sometime in October Schoolboard member La Fortune so a followup to that so in terms of the straw pole what we're talking about tonight is really moving forward with the sweeter site and the straw pole is a straw pole of the three options that were presented correct it is a straw

091pole for that site which if you got there at the straw pole and it went down Norm I'm you you've done a lot more many more buildings than I have when we get to the point where we have the straw pole we will know much more about the site and it'll be to say this is this is the site for our school we'll have all those studies completed we'll have ideas of of costs for developing the site and it it won't be a matter of a b or c it's this is the site and yes we agree or no we don't agree that this is what we want to move forward with so in terms of the the question that that Jeff had asked are we also looking this evening to not only move forward

092as we support the sweetzer site but we support the sweetzer site and say option two as the as what we're ultimately straw polling and the option two being the the two buildings A prek through k and a one through five with the state picking up the one through five that that's what I'm wondering about is the straw poles purpose is the site yes but there's also does the the configuration come into the equation or is that something that's later the the gr configuration did drive the selection of the site so yes okay we we are I believe we are looking for your support on that as well that is correct because there will be a second straw poll for the concept development that comes um in that November to January because once you have the

093site selected then you'll go to the State Board again for the concept approval correct is that how it goes so to round it out then what we're talking about is a straw pull for just the site which supports all three of these configurations and then we'll cover the which of the three we land on at a future time correct correct okay Mr Mayor member Preble I'm gonna make a job at the motion if I can get this right I'm going to give it a go I move we move forward toward the process of the straw poles for the sweet your site second motion was made by Schoolboard member prebble second by School Board member Le fortune and close second School Board member Truman uh and to move forward with the site selection of the sweets

094or parcel any discussion I just want to I just want to say Truman I just want to say that I'm excited about the getting this moving and um seeing this come to fruition um so yeah Schoolboard member of Fortune yeah I I would Echo that having participated in the earlier attempt at at doing this several years ago and knowing how difficult it was to not only fit something on the existing sites we have as well as find a parcel that is as good as this one um I this is is an exciting prospect that we potentially have a piece of property that may become available to us for a school centrally located in town um it it's that's a really exciting prospect so I'm I'm looking forward to this moving forward thank you any further

095School Board member Preble um I was just going to say after attending all being on parts of um the building selection committee and also attending all of the um the updates to the community meetings I'm in support of the sweetzer side as well I think it's a wonderful opportunity to explore I think we can certainly learn learn more about that site and kind of go from there but I'm in support of it as well so far thank you any further discussion School Board member Gail just following up on um School Board member prebble's comments I think it's an interesting site to explore as we move forward I think it would be helpful um again as we move together as the council and the school board so that this you know generational investment uh can be

096successful for all users folks who want to drive there folks who want to bike there walk there um but that'll need to happen in Partnership so I hope we can continue to move forward with that as we explore this option thank you any further discussion roll call vote School Board member Argie yes School Board member Preble yes School Board member Richard yes Schoolboard member L Fortune yes School Board member Gail yes School Board member Truman yes Schoolboard member Johnston yes motion passes 70 uh so that uh takes care of I think the site selection memo uh item E2 the oako update uh item E4 the construction timeline and now I think we'll hear about E3 the funding presentation uh from Drummond woodsom good evening Mr Mayor and school board members I'm Bill STM from law

097firm of Drummond woodsom um my practice I'm the head of the Public Finance practice at Drummond woodsom and I work on school construction projects both locally funded and state funded all over the state as well as um other projects by municipalities for all of their needs am I coming through okay yes okay great what I thought I'd talk about is to give you some idea of how the state funded um School construction program uh works uh in my view it's probably one of the Cadillac programs in the country once you get approved uh which is a arduous task because um uh they're not making enough money for everybody so uh getting your project on the state funded list is the is the hard part um but once you're on the list I think as we

098go through this hopefully uh the take-home will be uh really an understanding of um the state support for the grp grade 1 through 5 school okay so in simple terms not only what will it cost but what will it cost us right so uh next next slide um just by way of background uh superintendent Ray asked me to um focus on plan option two um you know as a sort of a working number working model illustration and let me emphasize here that what you have here are what I call working numbers these aren't yet estimates I mean no one has really applied hard numbers to construction markets and everything but you know one thing I've learned over the years is just because you don't know what a number is doesn't mean it's zero right so

099for illustrative purposes this is a very helpful exercise okay and I was asked to use the numbers uh assigned right now as working numbers for plan option two and just by way of review for K to K School 25 to 30 million is the working number and for the grade 1 to 5 School that I'm going to focus on um the working numers in purple is 76 million of which what we call the state local portion is 71 million and the local only portion is is 5 million and if you find my colors confusing uh just think in terms of blue being like water and therefore relief state subsidy red being something we do need to be concerned about will require some effort and purple of course is when you put red and blue together

100that's the overall project so that's how my my mind works and if I were better at PowerPoint I'd have fancier diagrams to do that but you get what you get what you have so what will the $76 million project cost us the grade 1 through five school next slide please um so by way of background first we've talked a little bit about these approvals um and just to review what they are site approval while you've just taken a major decision towards um moving towards sight approval The Next Step being the the straw poll of the voters to demonstrate to the state that there's voter interest in the project at that site uh and then site approval by the State Board of Education then uh concept approval that's the stage at which the project budget and

101the project concept is is is set um and let me just address uh a question that came up about does a state help if everything goes off the rails and costs are way too high and superintendent Ray was exactly right that the um the state will put you through a ringer a little bit and force you to Value engineer the project and get it down but I have also worked on projects in extreme situations where there's actually been a second Bond referendum on supplemental costs this happened up in Caribou uh something slightly different happened in Sako but Sako had a second project coming through and some excess cost from the first project were deemed close enough to be part of the second project to be added to the second project so there are extreme instances

102where the state participates I would say that one of the really admirable things about the the State Department of Education are the the dedication of the people in this project I'm sure they uh try to drive as hard a bargain as as they can with um with you and with your architects who are you know pressing your case for for State support but they genuinely are invested in seeing this program be successful and I think that's why in these very extreme situations theyve actually conceded that more more money needed to come in they don't want to see a any school in this in this U program fail um so I'll say that so the project budget get sets at concept approval and then uh within 6 months um your supposed to have the the referendum

103uh by the city voters in this case sorry I should have edited that City voters and with and that's the authorization of the project financing right first in your so what's unique about not unique but what's different about Saku is a charter municipality and so the the order of bonding is the reverse of a school district so the state program is set up really more for a school district where after concept approval the school board might immediately call a referendum of the voters and only after the referendum would would the school board approve issuing the bonds well here we have a city the council issues the bonds it has a bond very typical bonding process under its Charter where there are public hearings in first and second readings and that takes a certain period of

104time and the referendum comes afterwards but the state process contemp really is more built towards the district process it's just not a great fit and not a great deal we can do about it either um so the what will happen in Sako is after a concept approval we'll first have to get Council approval of the project bond amount and to send the project out to referendum and then get to that ref local referendum approval that's how it will work here following that uh it following the referendum is really when most of the design work occurs um and that goes to the state board for final design and funding approval uh at which point the completed design is approved to go out to bid and then um this hasn't been a problem these days but um

105in the old days when bids came in low uh there was a little pot of money for the local schools to spend for some extras for the project at State expense and the state tightened up the process a little bit and if bids comes in low well that's why I say it hasn't been a problem lately um you could have the funding reduced uh to meet the the lower bid U by the commissioner of Education that so that's a a little tweak to the budget after the bids are are in so those are the state the state approvals along with the major uh local approval um next uh slide so um in terms of establishing the project budget after site approval what will happen is the school department the project architect uh norm and the

106folks at oako and the Department of Education will develop the project budget and it's concept approval the state board will approve that budget and those are the two portions of the budget that I mentioned the state local portion which our working number is $71 million and the local only portion and our working number for the grade 1 to five school is is $5 million um local only includes such things as most typically um the state will will participate in the cost of real estate up to and not in excess of the average of two appraisals some owners won't sell the property for the appraised value if that happens there's an cost increment that would be a local only cost uh very commonly uh the school district wants a larger gym or other facility uh than

107the state will subsidize that's another example of a cost that might be over on the local only uh portion um and then finally and not too often sometimes there's a need for an emergency shelter which is more of a a city a city need than a school need uh they want to attach it to the the buildings so something like that so those are just some examples um the current working number for local only in Sako is 5 million uh which is uh 6.6% of the working number total of 76 million next slide so the three sources of funds for the new school as you progress through the first is um you have to fund the project you have to pay the primarily the architect for the design costs and engineering and related studies um

108and at this point uh under the state process it's early to fund project costs with with bonds so uh in order to um get to a referendum vote get to council approval in this case and a referendum vote um there has to be some sort of funding source whether that's the school operating budget whether that's Reserve funds whatever that might be uh but importantly it's important to recognize that uh done properly local funds may be paid back from amounts borrowed okay for the project so you can reimburse uh the accounts used alternatively for the if you have money that you want to use to reduce the local only portion of the project ultimately um those that early money uh can be expended for the early project costs paid back and then be used to red

109reduce the local only portion of the B of the of the bonding so you have some some options there after the referendum the city can issue temporary notes which are called Bond anticipation notes or banss so notes um issued in anticipation of a permanent long-term Bond so the acronym is is is bans after it's approved at referendum the city can issue those temporary notes um and again those temporary notes can be used to reimburse local local funds expended and to pay project cost going forward until the city issues its bonds uh for the state local portion of the project the bonds are required to be 20-year bonds the city has more flexibility uh for the um local only portion of the bonding uh some FAQs uh next slide please uh so just for you know

110most people uh what are bonds and bands um so these are obviously debt obligations when we say that they're General obligation bonds uh what we mean is it's supported by the full the city's full faith in credit which essentially means it's authority to raise taxes so surprisingly to some people the collateral if you will for the repayment of bonds is not the school if the collateral is the city's promise to raise taxes which turns out to be a lot better collateral than real estate because you don't have to figure out what to do with the real estate right and of course the city is going to pay its bonds uh bands as I mentioned provide temporary financing uh the bonds will repay or refund the bands including the ban interest so when we say that

111bonds are issued or bonds are sold all we mean is the money is borrowed right okay just different terminology Saka has a city advis a financial adviser that advises the city on the method and timing of bond sales as well as how to structure the bond sale to uh mitigate some of the budgetary impact of initial Bond payments um just one aspect of the state supported project the bonds have to have equal annual principal payments so we're all familiar with our mortgage payments right those are equal monthly payments okay that's different from equal principal payments all right equal principal payments pays down the principal much faster we've all noticed when we're paying off a house how long it takes to pay down any principle at all right that's because we have equal Blended payments for

112the state supported portion of the bonds those are going to be equal principal payments which pays down the principal much more rapidly thereby reducing the total interest cost of the state local bonds but creating a higher initial payment so the payments on when principal payments are equal the payments each year go down because the interest on the declining principle is less and less typically so just a few points about those bonds uh next slide please so what will it cost us so let's look at our hypothetical example a hypothetical City e uh issuing hypothetical bonds for a hypothetical project which has a state local share of 71 million and and 5 million and so what will the cost be and what's the budget impact of those two Bond payments and I'm not really going to

113talk about the prek Tok school but you know I just didn't want to forget that piece that obviously is at uh local expense also and if you're really good at math you'll know we're talking about the 5 million piece for the local only portion of the grade 1 through five school and 25 million for prek Tok is 5 Time 5 million right so you in the back of your mind you're wondering what the prek KDK school you know multiply the 5 million piece by five or six and that'll be the 25 to 30 million for the pre 5 school but I wanted to focus on the um the grade 1 to five school because it's really an understanding of the funding formula that I'd like to convey for you here tonight okay so let's uh

114go to the next slide so here is our hypothetical construction budget uh a state supported grade 1 through five school we have a state local share of 71 million we have a local only share of 5 million and a total of 76 million uh Al together and just for percentages so we're looking at uh the state local share being 93.4% of the total bonding and the local only share being only 6.6% of the total bonding okay again we're not talking about the prek dekay right now so there two impct there's a budget impact and a tax impact and those are two very very different things a budget impact increases your budget but to the extent you have state subsidy there's no tax impact right so budget can go up but if the subsidy goes up

115no tax no local tax impact so it's important to distinguish between those two things and to understand this remember I said that the payments step down starting with the initial principal payment on the bond with the interest on the 76 million next payment is paid and it's interest on a smaller amount so the payments go down each year so to get at the at the budgetary impact we want to look at the first year of principal repayment on the 20-year 76 million bonds for our hypothetical grade 1-5 elementary school that's the Maximum Impact and based on uh some numbers that the city's financial advisor sent me the total budget impact the maximum that would be the year of the first principal payment that's 7,220 th000 but again that's the budget impact not the tax impact

116okay we have those two things straight so how much will it cost us next slide and the answer uh well again the state local portion is 93.4% of the total so if the first Bond payment of Maximum Impact is $ 7,220 th000 the state local portion of that bond is $ 6,743 480 using our 93.4% so how much will the 6 million so that's the debt annual debt payment the first big annual debt payment when you have your first principal payment how much will that piece of it the 93.4% piece of it cost us and the answer I think is on the next slide and the answer is zero so how can this be so I was doing this a few weeks ago for sad 49 up in Fairfield and Paula graell and the Department

117of Education who's the school finance manager was kind enough to send me an email uh in which she wrote the addition of debt service at this time only increases the total cost and the state contribution with in the case of s49 four towns currently at the mid expectation amount there's no increase to the required local contribution Saka likewise is at the Mill expectation amount let me just tell you a little bit about what that means cuz I know you see these computer spreadsheets or it's like a mystery to most people so you have a certain Quantum of costs that qualify for State subsidy right and then you have costs that don't your additional local funds piece of your budget right but the EPS costs the essential programs and cost are the ones that qualify for

118subsidy and the state runs a formula and you have a certain level of cost that qualify so the state says well in the first instance you're going to pay for it so imagine a graduated cylinder and you got to get up to this line okay but what the state says you start filling with uh water okay because oil floats on water so you start filling but the state has a mercy rule it says at a certain level that's a maximum tax effort you're required to pay towards those EPS costs right so how does the state make up the difference it pours in money for funding that's the oil right and so I believe in in Sako you have about $36 million in EPS costs and you're roughly a 50% receiver as it turns out so

119the at the Statewide mill rate that's all you can be required to pay towards the qualifying costs well if you add a $6.7 million Bond payment to the $36 million now the graduated cylinder is much taller so that's a little scarier all right we got to fill up that graduated cylinder another 6.7 million but watch remember you are already at the maximum tax effort you don't have to pay another dollar towards the state local cost all all other things being equal it's just more water that go more oil that goes on top of the water in the formula now at the end of the day will you still be paying a percentage of the state and local costs sure so in that sense yes you're paying a share of that Bond but the dollar amount

120you're paying is exactly the same as you were paying beforehand it's a lower percentage and I think that's a more fair way to look at what's happening here that as far as Sako goes because you're not anywhere near a minimum receiver okay you're at a 50% um State funding contribution the fairest way to look at it is the state is matching that portion of the bond payment dollar for dooll by a subsidy increase okay so but we're not done so we still have on the next slide uh well to sum we're not done we're to summarize um Sako is already paying the maximum tax effort so when you add state approved debt to the approved EPS costs so those are the debt payments that doesn't change the maximum the maximum is still the Statewide mill

121rate times your property valuation and there are some assumptions but I can tell you an awful lot would have to change incredibly radically for that to stop being true in the 20 years of the bond payments um so as long as that remains the case under the current Formula they could tweak the formula it have to change an awful lot for this to be impacted the impact of the state local debt payment will be zero on the Saku taxpayers for the 20-year Bond term oh one more assumption we worry about curtailment right we hear about these what if the state decides it can't afford to support schools anymore this happened uh I believe in around 2000 I think it also happened around it's h it seemed to happen about every seven or eight years in

122my experience since I don't know 1993 or four every time the state has you know this is when the state announces oh by the way in February we're cutting your state subsidy you know x% everybody you know now what do we do well every time it's done that it has not cut The Debt Service payment to municipalities it is preserved that because again I think the doe is highly committed to that school construction program so in and this has happened I would say five or six times in my career I'm aware of curtailments so that's extreme stress on the state the state has maintained subsidy of of the um bonds that are outstanding for state approved projects so let's look at the local only Bond that's all we have left to do so we're using

123again a $5 million local only bond in our hypothetical which I said was 6.6% of the $76 million total and at at the estimated interest rate that the city's financial advisor provided the principal payments will be $250,000 a year for 20 years and the interest of the first year of principal payment will be 225,000 that's the year of highest payment the tax impact therefore is400 $75,000 that that will be the so that will be the maximum tax impact and because the tax impact of the state local portion was Zero that is the tax impact of the grade one to five school and that will go down each year as principal balance declines and the city the school department and the financial advisor I'm sure will all be working together to figure out ways to mitigate

124even that Maximum Impact next slide please okay so so what percentage are we talking about so this year uh these are your tax dollars going for Education local share VPS additional local even adult education 29 million plus the first year bond payment is $475,000 that's a tax increase for the grade K through 1 through five School a $76 million School tax increase in the year of Maximum Impact of 1.63% next slide so just to summarize total bonded debt is 76 million the tax impact of the 71 million State local funded piece is zero in Sako tax impact of the $5 million piece is $475,000 State ends up paying 93.4% of The Debt Service and the tax impact in the year of Maximum Impact is 1.6 3% I think Jeremy the next slide is yours yes

125so again as you look at budget strategy over time and you know that you're going to have a possibility of looking at a consideration of a 20ish million doll Bond if we were doing the E the local portion of the prek school on ourself it's really would be wise of us as a school committee and as a city council to begin to think about the timing of when those payments come on and I have been in a situation where when the local Mill payment uh in bitterford hit hit the budget as they worked at the high school that was while everybody was very excited about having a new school you have the school and then the payment comes in just kind of like when you buy anything in life and you get excited about it

126and then oh well now the payment's here every single month um but some of the things that we can do here uh as a group is continue on some really good decisions and Partnerships that we started this fall and again between this board and the city council to think about Debt Service in the last two budgets uh uh not Debt Service but uh Capital Improvements in the last two budgets is something that we really should plan for thoughtfully because we have a unique opportunity here to have a state funed project possibly another new school and have the ability to ramp up our Capital spending at Sako middle school so that when you come out on the back end of this you're in a situation where okay now we start to look around three buildings and

127we're feeling really good about them and so as you look at this slide a couple of things can be in place and I I I want to say that not all of these would be the same titles and not necessarily all of these would be expenditures but they could be budgeted items they could be budgeted items for a future capital reserve account but if you look at the half a million dollars that we have in capital projects right now we know that we're fixing the roof we know that in a couple of more cycles of the budget process the Sako Middle School roof will be renewed we have revolving renovation funds that cover a majority of the uh the air handling upgrades at Sako middle school but because they have a $1 million project limit

128we know that there's some outside of that that we will have to work on by ourself the council was outstanding in looking at new furniture and painting for Sako middle school and certainly we won't need new furniture and painting every year but they've put $400,000 uh 600,000 this year and in future years if we were disciplined enough to put $4,000 into other upgrades or Capital reserves to keep that budget number stable when we come to the time when the bond payment would hit that's how we we cut back on some of those things to help offset that uh piece when we look at totle in toddle in has three years left on the prek lease and so you can look at that as 262 267 272 those are not all and there's other costs on

129top of that in that I put as $150,000 and that's probably on the low end and that's just from extra busing cafeteria maintenance facilities Staffing that gets paid for on the totle in piece now on the end of that fac facility we will have choices of a community you have a you have a the ability to reup for another 5 years which you wouldn't need the building that long or you think about some of the local pieces we have four classrooms is currently being built at Young School that certainly we're going to need for extra classroom space this year but that may not be the situation in the future so as we move towards the end of that lease we can think about how we use that space and maybe some other spaces in the

130city that would alleviate the need for that payment at the same time thinking about the city council school committee working together and again not maybe 100% putting that all into capital projects but to putting that into Reserve accounts for future pieces you can easily see that there is a pot of money as we move through the years and you're looking at $1.3 million in FY 27 if you kept those budget figures the same that could be freed up and removed from your general uh local budget and replaced with the local Bond payment for new cool construction and that would be done with leaving still $300,000 in a capital line and I suspect that closing of buildings and the other buildings and the reconfiguration would actually be higher than $200,000 I'm just using very rough numbers

131because when you go from four buildings to two buildings you're going to have savings and that comes from phones internet power uh cleaning supplies all of those pieces that that add up um can add up pretty quickly and so the work that we will have to do on this group and and with the city council together is to think about where we are each year tax commitment wise and developing that strategy so that if this goes through and if we make these investments in our building to put Sako into again a great Capital infrastructure space we may be able to do this by creating a lot of improvements at Sako middle school possibly having a capital reserve account and being able to have major reductions from local spending on issues that could be put towards

132that Bond payment um and not see a big swing in the mill rate throughout that process and that's ideally what will happen uh in a situation is that you won't get a swing you will have pre-planned this well enough um to provide some relief initially um and then down the road so I know that's a ton of information about the financing of schools but we felt it was very important to start having some of those discussions uh and certainly uh bill or myself could take any questions that the um board may have any questions Schoolboard member Johnston I'm sure there are many questions that we could ask but one very simple one my question is about the 20year bond is that typically is this typically a 20-year Bond or for the state local piece it

133it will have to be a 20-year bond by by rule and for the local only there will be some flexibility you know obviously the longer the bond term the lower the budgetary impact but the higher the total interest cost so those things all have to be balanced any further questions seeing no further questions thank you very much that brings us to item F on the agenda which is the ELA word study memo Sr funded was in your packet we'll hear from assistant superintendent Parkers thank you thank you this memo just outlines the work of the ELA curriculum design team this year in looking at word study resources for our K through five teachers to utilize the conclusion of that committee was to do some pilot work in this school year with two different resources one

134of those resources is only available for K2 students and that's the units of study Phonics that dovetails with the units of study reading and writing resources that are used for K5 students that program does not extend to the third through fifth grade grades at this point in time so the committee is recommending that our three through five teachers look exclusively at piloting fontas and panel word study which in a review of over 23 different resources seem to be the overwhelming choice of the teaching staff and in looking at uh what was available on the market this is considered a pilot because we are still feeling as a curriculum design team like this is such a critical piece of foundational skills for students that we kind of want to utilize these resources for a full year

135before we commit for a longer period of time to utiliz Iz in either one of these resources and and there was quite a bit of discussion on the committee with respect to the benefits of having the units of study which is consistent with our reading and writing at K2 versus the benefits of having a word study program K through five that was consistent across the Spectrum so we would like to utilize this school year to really dive more deeply into those resources and then make an informed decision about long-term impacts because foundational skills are uh so critical and we're part of some of the learning loss that was experienced during the covid-19 pandemic the funding of the pilot program was written into the Esser Grant so we um already allocated those funds through that Federal

136grant prior to determining which resources we wanted to use it's a really high level overview there's more detail in the backup but I'm happy to answer any questions any questions from the board see no questions thank you very much thank you uh that brings us to item G the refugee resettlement update and that is superintendent Ray okay I think that one of the processes that you guys will continue to see uh in every board agenda for a while will be a memo that continues to build um much like the one that's in there um that talks about any of the updates any of the new things that we are learning throughout the process um with welcoming uh the newcomers into our into our community um every Thursday morning at 9:00 a.m. and bills on some

137of those meetings with us we tend to meet uh as a fairly large group of representatives from York County Catholic Charities city of Portland doe um governor's office about uh all of the things that are happening so what I can update you on this week is that the first 40% of families have started to move into the hotel rooms um those families are coming from the comfort uh the Best Western in Yarmouth um um and in that number Stacy ran numbers for us the other day um and there's like 22 high school kids and then approximately you know nine kids at one grade level six at another um challenge becomes housing and that at any point in time some of those families may find permanent housing which would then remove them from the hotel and

138new family Ames would come now what we do know is that with this first 40% that has has is settling here this week um we will receive another 40% of the population on a starting on August 19th then the plan uh as it sits right now is to re receive the last 20% uh of the population September 19th tomorrow morning we're going to have a discussion about how September 19th is not a good plan for anybody it's not a good plan for the for Sako schools the city of Sako or any of the children who possibly would be starting a school in another community and then changing three weeks in and we need to figure that piece out because our teachers deserve uh the opportunity to start school with the kids that they know will

139be in their classrooms and we've got to work really hard to do that even if that means that we know who the 20% is and we're sending a bus somewhere to make that happen because all of the pieces um about getting a classroom up and running is very important foring those first couple weeks of school now that doesn't mean that we will make really good plans and things will change um as of even today I know that one of the hotels that had possibly been in on the list of for from a community to come to Sako um there may be some changes in that as some housing may come online in that Community which would mean kids who had started school in that community may go into some permanent housing and we may be

140looking and and receiving uh different students there's a 100 rooms that are available um and it seems like uh a situation where throughout the year they will definitely um have families who will be moving in and out of Sako we had a meeting with uh Bill the other day uh and Brian to talk about we know that there are many unbudgeted costs that will go along with this and in the memo you have a sketch of what some of those costs may be um as we move forwards and it's a very rough estimate and will be a moving a moving Target throughout the year um we will need to have a meeting with the city council to look at a special budget amendment for consideration because certainly we've had situation where we have an approved

141budget here and we're not without some sort of emergency or non-e I am not quite sure Bill if we understood whether this is an emergency situation or how that works um the city administrator is checking with legal councel uh to see how uh this works with the current Charter situation of section four and section six and so we'll need to uh look at that piece uh to figure out how uh we fund some of those situations other challenges that we have that we are starting to begin to work through uh is there been some generous support from whether it's our own faculty or uh local churches and other uh businesses who are stepping forward um trying to make sure that our kids have some access to Recreation um that will be there uh look at

142how we uh bring our staff to the um hotel to start the registration process is going to be very important uh Sue worked really quickly and uh was able to get the hotel to be a summer uh lunch site uh which is going to be important because we're going to be able to feed kiddos uh this summer um but we have a lot of challenges and opportunities in front of us uh that we'll be working through I think what can be the most frustrating part is that even the best laid plans will probably require a lot of pivoting throughout the next six to eight weeks and throughout the year um because things change very quickly um one of the pieces that we will have to consider is it's it's not a situation where all kids

143that come are evenly spread between each grade level throughout and we know that we uh currently it appears that based off the information that that we are going to have a bump in grade one um and so we've got to talk about that situation at the same time uh early in August we will be as we move through and get more information about the families that are coming we'll be running simultaneously class sizes at young school and Fairfield school so if we have a situation that says okay five kids or or 10 kids added to grade two creates classrooms of 22 let's say while looking at Fairfield and saying well oh the class sizes are only 17 we may want to have some opportunities for whether it's uh existing uh students or new students to

144have some balance because I think one of the pieces that we need to be uh very thoughtful of is just the impact that it will have on our teaching staff and really trying to do our best to keep balanced class sizes to the best of our ability at our elementary schools now when it comes to burn school that becomes a little bit more challenging for us because at the end of the day we just don't have extra classrooms there um and we would like to do everything that would be humanly possible for us to not have to create another classroom because that means that things like uas and others piece may be displaced from in their room and that's not good for anybody uh either so there's so much to this um with a lot

145of moving parts and we're going to do our best to keep you as updated as possible um looking I think uh bill when we spoke the other day we were talking about that meeting I believe you said we were thinking late August September some point to have that piece roll out uh and I would certainly take any questions um either I can answer Meg or Chris um about where we're at from the board any questions from the board School Board m l Fortune so it's not necessarily a question it's more of a comment from based on the numbers that are in here so at this time the estimated costs are costs that we will be shouldering on our own as in there's no plan for additional funding coming our way correct so yeah that that's

146kind of correct uh bill has reached out to the governor's office uh I have been in constant contact with the doe each and every week and uh on our Thursday morning meetings at the end of every meeting I think so far I have reminded them about the cost that this has to the locals and that we have to be more thoughtful about that now there's a half a million dollars that is available sitting at the doe and there has been been some talk about uh maybe some relief funds that could become available however those definitely a half a million dollars for the entire state is not going to go very far because when you look at the number of students that would be coming here which would be approximately 120 to 150 and the city

147of South Portland had 480 last year um that that were Refugee movein um so a half a million dollars is isn't going to go very far yes these are upfront costs and it certainly will not replace that but it will be important for us to to recognize that over the next three years of eps funding you will have a higher student count that will figure into the three-year average now will that bring back this amount of money no actually it will probably only soften the decrease that we get from declining enrollments and higher property values um through that process but from the mayor's office to the superintendent's office we are trying to work with the state for any possible way to help them understand the unique situation that Sako has with a 9 through2 school

148that is paid on a tuition basis uh versus um where it's kind of like a different prek through 12 full setup system um we operate differently we have different costs associated with that um and that creates a unique situation here in this community any other questions on this item Schoolboard member Johnston um thank you Mr Mayor I guess I'm I have a couple of things the first one was I wanted to ask the superintendent because I may not have understood this correctly in terms of classroom sizes or in terms of sort of re moving students around in order to accommodate the smaller you know keep the the classroom small enough I'm sorry Mr superintendent but I the thought that came into my mind is that the students that are already enrolled and have been told

149who their teachers are going to be for next year does this somehow affect if we're moving kids around does this affect them at all or how would you suspect it would so Beth we had those convers conversations with uh principles this this spring knowing that this was it you know no parent or child is going to want a phone call um saying hey you have a new classroom teacher uh in the fall so a couple of things that that we've kind of anticipated through this process is one any students who have moved in in to the community or moved out we have kind of held those slots and not assigned any new students to a classroom yet looking at again what we have for estimated enrollments based off the data that we have will then

150funnel that piece into it at the same time we know that teachers sometimes come and go during the summertime so when we have a a teacher who has um you know resigned their position or moved on or retired or something there hasn't been a teacher to assigned yet we're kind of holding that looking at okay how do we create the least amount of movement for families because again it goes back to nobody wants to receive the call in August to say this is what's happened so we're trying to minimize that impact as much as possible throughout this also paying attention and as you can see based off the numbers that we have on the memo uh looking at what average class size districtwide would be and so if there's a scenario where young schools class

151sizes go way out of proportion and if if there are some uh lower spots at Fairfield that's when we will look either towards the newcomer population or there may be some situations where it just works out really good for an existing young fam Young School family to say you know what it this would work out for me to free up the spot and head over to Fairfield because I can it works for my daycare or or something so we may have some abilities to provide some options to minimize that piece um but we try to put some for Sight into making sure that we didn't have to switch 200 kids teachers assignments uh throughout and uh certainly I know what parents would feel and I know how it would go over at my house uh

152as well with my child and my wife uh as we talked about that piece so we're really going to try to not do that if at all possible and there may be some parents who say Hey you know it's okay this works out for us and if there's a parents who are out there listening to help us with you know some of these obstacles please reach out to to the principles um because that would be really helpful to us well thank you for that it sounds like it will be a challenge perhaps in any case um I guess another question that I had was it seems it it is how do I put this um my curiosity is around how it actually happened that Sako is Tak taking apparently the the students that are coming

153to us are coming from other communities around us and I was wondering how it is that they aren't staying in the communities that they were in before or what mechanism you know has brought this situation to us I know that's a complicated question perhaps but I think the community as a whole is probably going to need to understand that better is there some sort of an answer that won't take you forever now you know me Beth you know all of my answers take a long time um no I'm not saying that at all it's a complicated situation I'm joking with you about uh especially if you ask a budget question because you know that's where I really like to go um but in this situation um this is not necessarily a local decision of anything

154that's happened here you have a property owner who had either availability want what business property owner and the resettlement issu issues to my understanding and again this is my understanding and this what I believe in bill you might be able to add into parts of this is that these are managed by the city of Portland when we are dealing with any of the data we are dealing with the city of Portland who executed the cont contract I believe the city of Portland executed the contract for the state of Maine with the soo property owner um and in simplest terms Beth that's kind of what it is um there was a there was an amount of money that was and is managed by the city of Portland um any of the the all of the information

155that comes our way is coming from the city of Portland here what happened at other locations I don't know I'm assuming that at some point in time there was a financial decision of where to place kids capacity uh families Etc that came into play um my understanding is that any of the general assistance pieces that goes along with this stays with the city of Portland um but the schooling piece um become something that we now take take on operationally I think um your statement that the city of Portland contracted with the in and Sako is is a very interesting piece and that I think that I'll just leave it at that but I do have a lot of I guess questions around how how the procedural issues I guess of this situation um but I

156I think I'll leave it at that for now thank you yeah and again I just I don't know any more other than that and also Meg Chris correct me if I'm wrong then the city of Portland also contracted with Catholic Charities to be the overseers of the hotel right essentially and this is not uncommon uh the city of Portland has done this in other communities as well uh so it's it's it's I wouldn't say it's common but it's not uncommon School Board member L Fortune so just following up on that that's that's the part in all of this that I'm probably struggling with the most is the procedural part and and I and I know you're the messenger this isn't this is not directed at you but the the idea that the city of Portland

157has done this other in other places is should not be taken as any kind of comfort in this um I'm really struggling with how one municipality can reach out and impact another like this without actually having a municipality to municipality conversation um that's I mean I I I understand that there's a lot of Shifting Sands with this and it's really hard to un you know to rep arms around it but I don't think that it's at least from the outside looking in and I say from the outside looking into the thought process that you know either the state or the city of Portland have gone through with this understanding how they could look at doing what has happened and thinking that it is going to work for the community of Sako or any other community

158where where this has occurred but more importantly to all of the people that they from my understanding uprooted with very little notice to move them to Sako like with a day's notice I just I'm looking at this whole picture and being like how did this happen this way it's just I that's the part that I'm struggling with is just the process of somebody somewhere thought that just doing this was somehow going to check a box and problem solved move on it just it it's mind-blowing to me well I don't think my self nor superintendent Ray nor City administrator Kane WTH can uh look into the minds of other people in the city of Portland OR the governor's office and tell you why uh they chose this hotel versus that hotel or this community versus that

159Community uh the the long and short of it is two months ago they came to us and said hey we're coming to your town and we're Contracting with this this business who wants our business that's that's the long and short of it there's no I don't know that there's hidden motives or hidden agendas that's that's just the way it's worked out sure we would have liked more notice uh as we ended one school year and went into a budget session and went into a referendum on that budget with the local community members sure we would have liked to know more information uh up front but uh unfortunately that's not the the deal that's presented itself and we have to deal with the issues as they come so board member and I just I would just

160like to say with that I think the hardest part for me on all this is that with more engagement upfront we could do such a much better job like that's the piece to me is to say that it's hard on what we at the 20th of July to know that six weeks from now I really don't know how to program and I know that Meg and Chris uh had great conversations with some of our staff this week about you know all the pieces and people are anxious and want to know things and just don't have a lot of answers um out there other than we will make it happen we'll do the best that we can and we will be successful but I supect there will be some Growing Pains um during the process School

161board member Gail just a quick question do we know if um there are any other hotels or establishments uh that have signed up I guess there's some list or something that Portland has or uh if there's anything on the horizon uh in addition to this location I can tell you that I'm not aware of any other hotels in the current mix superintendent Ray are you aware of any other hotels in the mix I am not but that would definitely create another one of those pivot Points for us um and so I don't believe so I I it and I would answer this question the my answer would be we have met every single week and I would be extremely disappointed in any transparency if if that happened uh with the relationships that were building and

162I think we've got a we've developed a you know a good working relationship be it on Zoom with a group and so that I I hope that wouldn't be something that would happen because again planning just the planning School Board member Archie I I think that you guys have been doing really great uh considering the time frame um I'm frankly shocked that another M municipality has the audacity to do this to us um but do we have an understanding as to how long the contract is with comfort in I believe it's one year one year 100 families for one year and I believe they have a an intention of keeping it full at all time correct right that that is our understanding that's why superintendent Ray said earlier as one family may move out to

163get uh permanent housing uh that the city of Portland would bring in another family uh into that uh spot rotation and I think what makes it what makes that really difficult for us and we've had some conversations with Jeff today uh at Young is that the original the data that we have today shows the major increase at grade one which would theoretically require additional Staffing and we have to be able to balance that between both schools but that doesn't mean in December that that is the same um that doesn't mean that in December that the 19 kiddos are going to require the teacher in first grade and that seven of those families need and then the next thing we know there are seven kiddos sitting in fourth grade that's going to be the real hard

164part in this about adding additional teaching staff directly to a one classroom situation we may be in a situation where it's best to think about supports and and staying pretty Nimble throughout the process in the year and saying hey it makes sense that right now here's the bump and here's where the support goes and that in December that could shift that's one option that's on the table um just you know I guess we're going to we're going to be adjusting a lot and making decisions throughout the process um and be as Nimble as we possibly can yeah I mean there's not a lot of housing here so the families are more than likely going to move somewhere else and so it's probably going to be a revolving door so it's really hard to anticipate where

165to have the faculty and and the resources when it could be sporadic with grades correct I mean I think that's that's the piece here is that in order to find some sort of permanent housing here whether it be Sako bitterford uh Old Orchard uh scarber right now that's pretty difficult um in one of the communities it appeared that uh I I got an email the other day that and they didn't let me know which Community but it appeared that 50 um units were going to become available or permanent housing situations I don't necessarily see that happening for us here in say December that 50 where's that coming from um and so I do think that we are in a situation where there will be a revolving situation throughout the year any further questions on this

166item again this will be a ongoing uh agenda item moving forward uh to be updated as we get more information okay moving on to item H which is the estimated end ofe financials you received a memorandum in your uh packet um with the expense forecast for 20121 to 2022 uh any questions on the expense forecast superintendent Ray do you have anything you want to say on this item and again this is um an estimate situation because you still do have bills that will come in and we've estimated $200,000 in remaining expenses uh when you look at um what would be left uh of $573,000 plus additional Revenue um at the end of the year we're hoping for a fund balance of $857,000 that includes our ability to pay back the $995,000 that the school department

167had in um a deficit to the city so we will be able to clear that piece up still have a fund balance to apply to the next budget or to some of the other costs that come our way uh and so we should be starting in a pretty good place as we start budget season next year any questions School Board member Gail one quick just clarification and kind of some of the other previous conversations um the 300,000 reduced to go towards New School construction um as we move forward with that that's going to get get reimbursed corre future years we're it just sets us up even better moving forward right we've got 300,000 that will be sitting that will be part of the state project that will come back to us thank you moving on

168to item I we have uh many policies this evening first reading of policies uh policy CB CBI evaluation of superintendent CB school superintendent CC administrative organization CHD Administration in the absence of policy uh and then a policy to strike policy CBC superintendent hiring Authority and then policies to recode uh bbbee and expired term fulfillment vacancies policy CBI E1 and policy CCA is there a motion to uh first reading of policies School Board member Truman I move we approve the first reading of policies CBI CB C CC CHD BBE and oh no sorry BBB cb- e and CC c-e second motion's been made by school board member Truman second by School Board member prebble any discussion on the first reading of policies seeing no discussion on the first reading of policies roll call vote School Board

169member Archie yes School Board member Preble yes School Board member Richard yes Schoolboard member Le Fortune yes Schoolboard member Gail yes and Schoolboard member Truman yes motion passes 61 60 that brings us to item 13 uh other information I don't Mr Mayor I got to make one more motion um School Board member Truman I move we strike policies CBC and BBB e-r second motion's been made and seconded by School Board member Truman School Board member prebble any discussion on striking policy CBC and policy BBB R see no discussion roll call vote Schoolboard member Archie yes Schoolboard member Preble yes Schoolboard member Richard yes School Board member L Fortune yes Schoolboard member Gail yes School Board member Truman yes motion passes 60 I believe now we're on to item 13 other information uh there's nothing on

170the agenda anyone have anything okay moving on to item 14 there's no executive session tonight brings us item 15 I'll entertain a motion to adjourn um we'll go uh Schoolboard member of Fortune then Schoolboard member Truman for the second uh any discussion roll Clause you rejourn School Board member Archie yes School Board member prebble yes School Board Richard yes Schoolboard member L Fortune yes School Board member Gail yes Schoolboard member Truman yes motion passes 60 to adjourn at 7:32 p.m. have a wonderful evening everyone