001won't have the numers to publish 48 hours prior to what I guess excuse me we can make an emergency except I guess what we could do is put in the estimated number that's where I was going and then uh attorney STM would let us know after the board met and uh we could as you suggested you could amend that if you wanted to and then you would have an accurate number to advertise for the public hearing on the 9th because we can't just wait till that right and I may not I may not have totally understood the point you originally made my consternation about amendments applies later in the process if you were to amend at the meeting for the first reading I would not have a problem with with that that would be allow
002us to publish because we can't wait for the state and then meet there's no time right for our agenda setting there's a solution I was just member I was just going to suggest like couldn't you publish a number and then say TBD on the actual date or something along those lines like we'd probably put the numbers in because they're really not likely to change um and if they do change they're not likely to change by that much and it's probably easier also to amend a number than to amend a TBD or I was just thinking like putting in the number and then like that number would be like somehow put a footnote in there that that number would be confirmed on on the 10th I don't know but so I think it's important that we
003had this discussion in detail uh couple weeks ago what I think is important is that uh we will for the agenda publish the estimated number uh if we start the meeting at whatever time at 730 p.m. or whatever it is hopeful that attorney stock will contact somebody probably me uh and let us know if that number stands or if the uh state school board has amended that number and if the state school board has amended that number then the city council can amend the first reading and then we can hopefully pass that and then we will be publishing on the 11th an accurate number correct perfect yes I'll be notifying you confirming or letting know of any change as well Michelle yeah Jeremy will already know I assume so and prob and probably for the
00410th we'll have to start the meeting uh later what time did they meet Jeremy the state Rob did they meet in the morning do you know typically oh they okay so okay we'll know by then okay timing should still be the same Norm says they usually meet at 1 in the afternoon so more time compression what are you used to it any other questions or comments okay thank you very much thank you all okay so hey Item B exterior building preview so we move on from the real exciting stuff uh to now an opportunity to uh welcome Oak Point uh to come up because obviously uh it's one thing talking about the bonds and all the excitement but it's also uh very fun to start dreaming about uh what we are hopefully able to build
005for our community here uh as part of that and to talk about some of those features uh so I'm going to turn it over to Rob and oako at this point thanks thanks Jeremy so this as much fun as I've just had listening to all this um and it really was great to listen to GL it wasn't part of the conversation um this is the fun part for us so hope hopefully it works out for you too um the this was was the site we've been talking about for a long time now and talking about traffic and everything to do with the site now we get to talk about the the building itself Okay so oh it's slow okay it's slow um so this this is the site with the building uh the buildings on
006it uh the one on the right is the the uh one through five school and the prek-k is the one on the left um the main access is is off milbrook road and uh the secondary access for buses primarily is uh off of Route One we had a lot of conversations many many conversations with do and I think we're at the point where we're very comfortable with this U You' believe you've seen the the floor plan we're not going to spend a lot of time with this but this is the floor plan of the uh of the one through five school that's the second floor okay now now two okay it's a slow JY okay Square fo that is that is the square footage that is a local option in the entire building uh and
007so that it's drawn out uh and you'll see uh from the totals that you're looking at 5125 uh as the local piece at this point out of 157 square foot building so uh the this the elevations uh it's it's a pretty efficient building and the way it's come together and we work very hard with your administrators and your Educators to come up with a great floor plan and and to come up with the building will work well within the site parameters that we've got so this is uh the elevations the the the lowest piece is the is the front door and the cafeteria to the left and music and art to the right the um next one up is is the back facing the woods and then you've got the side facing the parking the
008south side if you would uh with with the gym on the left-and side the classroom Wings on the on the on the right and up above is the um is the uh classroom on to the left and uh Industrial Arts um with the stem area to the right and additional classrooms up where the brown is so working through with this the majority of the building will be masonry uh the brown is a manufacturer product that looks like wood um it's a lovely site that we we're able to go into and it's it's a wooded site but honestly a lot of the a lot of that's going to be um removed put to put the building in but we're going to retain as much of the wooded areas we can and this is a 3D rendering
009so you can kind of see how it comes together uh the the the top is the 1 through five building the uh to the right of it is the uh the classroom two of the classroom wings for the pekk building the next one down you can see the front entrance way better uh in the art and music to the right and then the uh to the left is the pekk and then uh the lowest one is the the classroom Wings the the gym is to the left with the classroom Wings coming out towards towards the woods um so it's it's pretty efficient but when when you make it when you come up with a floor plan works as well as this one does we then have to come up with an interesting elevation so that
010it's not too busy because it's a big building but interesting enough that you're uh um you have the the kids are constantly seeing something that they may have not seen before um we were working very hard with uh with the state to to get to this point and to with uh with the admin Educators as well some of close-ups the the top is the front door the blues that were picked were were kind of off of your um Sako documents the Hues might be a little bit differently but but the the Sak the blues that show up in your uh and your um and in the logo so and you can see the the the brown wood likee material the left um and the the uh the the blues are also a metal product most
011of the other things are are are masonry and the middle one is is the the entrance way for the for the kids coming off the bus and the the top one again is the the main entrance way for everybody else and then the bottom part is looking into the courtyard and then this is the other elevated the the floor plan for the prek-k school with the kindergarten on the top part two different Wings we've modified a little bit since the the last time we showed this to have the the library type spaces um on the corners the the the the the beige Corners that you see on on the the wings and uh the the prek K is the one uh the two Wings on the lower area and then the the public areas and
012excuse me public areas but the commun communal areas within the the school is the uh the part in the middle and this is uh was developed after we looked at a lot of buildings with with uh your Educators and U this is the pekk we wanted to have a little less a little less of an Institutional look to it um it's actually your your city administrator might recognize some of this uh we did the uh the the the same the St Patrick's School down in Portsmouth which didn't look exactly like this but some of the things that we did down there were done uh and liked a lot by the educator so we kind of took took from some of those ideas and and modified them a lot and then this is the three dimension
013kind of a drone shot if you would and that's that's it again this is a kind of a glimpse as to what we've been working on for quite a while which you've seen until now is mostly traffic traffic and Tra traffic and in some site we've been working on this for about a year and gone through a lot of different um generations and and different ways to get to this point and the people we' been working with seem to be happy with the direction that's gone great thank you so much okay next item is Ed 279 School subsidy presentation thank you guys all right so we are at the point of time and know we're shifting gears here tonight and um we have to shift our mind over to school budget because it's early February
014and you guys are working on the town side uh City side of things and we're working on um our budgets on our side and um probably normally in the meeting this would have been a school department presentation of 279 and also kind of a review of the first budget memo but you're sitting here you're going to get this information at some point again so it seemed to make a lot of sense to me to do it all at one time um so that you you didn't kind of get a a repeat of everything that was going on so I think that where I would like for us to kind of start and we'll be referencing both both documents throughout is looking at the one that is spreadsheet type form which is your state subsidy formula
015um it's really hard I I put this on paper because it's just sometimes hard to read on a screen especially in a situation like that but I want to talk to you uh tonight first and foremost about what makes up school subsidy how do how the state gets to that number uh in some important pieces uh for us to consider so on page one of the document uh the first thing schools do every single year is on October 1st we present uh to the state it's required for us to do student counts we know that during uh covid that certainly there were times where our population left because some uh some people chose to homeschool during that time thinking about safety and our numbers dro at this point in time uh two things have happened
016in our community since that is one a lot of kids uh back in school parents put their kids back in school additionally we know that our new neighbor population is around 85 students give or take on every day so students who have joined us uh who are coming from the hotel uh have added about 85 students districtwide to us um so that pushes that number up a bit more uh from the last year so what they do is they take an average of the two years and for our elementary population we're at 1999.5 students now why that is import important is because then they take that number of students and they begin to sort and create ratios for number of students towards teaching staff Ed techs Librarians uh Health officials principles etc etc and you'll
017see that in the next big red block is that when EPS was designed and again the name essential programs and services they're saying this is kind of like the floor of what you should have for staff in your building unfortunately when we look at how that translated to school budgets Town budgets in the communities a lot of time that gets kind of read more as a ceiling than a floor um which can make it very difficult so so as you look down through what it does is there's a matrix at the state level that assigns a salary to every employee that's in the district based off education and experience and if you're at 1.0 there's a certain amount of uh dollars that flow into the formula if you're under it's a percentage of that uh
018and you can see those in the second bigger box Regional index that's the third box on the page what the state has done uh over that time is they've assigned regions to the state of Maine that said based off what their expected cost of living in that region is you can kind of either get additional weight where you can see that we're at a 1.09 because they're saying that our region in southern Maine is more expensive to live in than the average so if you're a superintendent in this level of the state and you're at a plus more than one you're saying okay that's a good thing if you're a superintendent in Washington County who has a less than one weight and you're actually getting penalized in that area you're probably not quite is for
019that um but when you take all of these costs on the first page and you add them up you get what is called per pupil rates and so for our community here we have have a calculation that is a per people rate and then our second number because we tuition our students to Thorton Academy and we don't build that information you get a state rate assigned to you any questions on that first page okay second page the second page and you'll see at the top again starts with student counts and these are your subsidized student counts this includes your high school students so now you can see that that number has grown uh and then over a two-year average we're at 27665 uh students on our subsidized rates and what happens with these numbers is
020there are many different factors throughout the 279 that assigns a dollar value to each student that you have in the category so an example you can look at prek students and you will see that 8,314 times 127 gives you a number and that follows down through the first part looking at your student counts now your second is your weighted counts okay looking at the same percentage of students and now there are some additional factors that they give uh an extra amount of money for the first one is your disadvantage trates that is talking about in what prior to the state providing um free and reduced lunch for all kids in public schools that is where you would get the how how how you'd get that number would be classifying students based off free and reduced
021lunch our free our disadvantage rate in the city is 28% 28% of our students are reported to in that category is disadvantage which is an increase of 2.77% from the year prior that 28% is multiplied by our population of students and each of the students in those counts gets another point 15 factor and you can see the the additional money that is added down that column the second box that's important uh or the third box on that page when you look at weights is our multilingual Learners which are um ml students um that live in our community and as you can see we have uh got a line through the middle there uh over 200 uh students in our community and those students are provided an additional half a weight um as part of the
022formula and you can see the dollar amounts of subsidy that's added in that category as you continue to move through this from targeted funds for assessments uh in other pieces what the numbers are building is an operating allocation for the school department so the higher this number is based off student counts is what starts the process of building what your total allocation is that is then put to a mathematical formula for valuation so as we go to page three of this piece you have some expenditure driven um kind of parts of the subsidy formula which are your other subsidized costs that are based off expenses gifted and talented education there is an amount that we spend in code for gifted and talented there is amount for special education there's an amount for high cost out
023of district there is transportation there is approved bus lease purchases so when we apply in the state says hey we're going to allow you to purchase a bus based off um a five-year lease purchase and you have seven buses and it adds up to an amount amount of money that's where you get the money back for Approved buses so that's while you'll hear in the budget um that I may have two additional new buses put into the budget for lease purchase hoping that later in this spring they'll send us the email that says great you've had two more funding funded we pay the first year and then five years in the rear you're getting an amount of money for those buses the next piece is your teacher retirement and that's the amount of money that
024we put towards teacher retirement out of um payroll tax as you continue down the page um there are two additional numbers first one lease space if you remember a couple of years ago um when we filled out the application form for uh toddlin we were able to get at that time it was $8 a square foot that was like an $81,000 number last year they've increased the square footage lease piece and that's up over $100,000 now uh I believe next year is our last year that I can do that um through that piece because there's only so many years that you're allowed to lease a space where that they say as a school department you need to have had it figured out by that time um that they would reimburse for that do they allow
025for extensions for example hey you're about to build School no not on that one they're pretty they I think we were pretty lucky that uh we were already in the building and then we were able to pull that through um with some help from the Department on that piece um but at the end of the year we're hoping that we're we know that our lease Runs Out in a year two so um wouldn't be subsized we'll have to make decisions as a school community of what's going to be the next best steps for that the second number on that page is IVF which is insured value factor that is part of our contractual uh agreements with Thorton Academy the state reimburses that at 6% we pay 7% um and that's in that number so all
026of those three pages adds up to what your total allocation is Page four is where you take your total allocation plus your Municipal debt which is in this case is IVF and Lease space add those together for the total Municipal allocation and now we bring in property value into the equation and what I would ask you to look for as we talk through this is if you go to the memo and you look under valuation you'll see the chart of where we have been as a community since 2016 valuation at the state level is a three-year average of property values set by the Secretary of State in conjunction with your municipality and as you can see if you look at 2025 and our three-year piece which we came off an increase of $221 million in
027value in Sako that number is multiplied by the state mill rate which is a required mill rate for uh education at 6.62% and that number says to a community in order to get what we're going to give you you must raise that amount locally that's not a problem here raise more money than that number um but that's a number that has increased from the prior year um for subsidy pieces that's looking at like they're requiring um an extra 23 uh 2,000 to be raised in order to get through this process you take what you're required to raise subtract that from your total allocation and that is your prek through 12 12 subsidy so city of Sako is getting $1 19.5 million um in state subsidy from this page when you turn to the last page
028on this sheet you'll see that there's another $129,000 um that is received for being part of an educational service center they pay a dollar per amount per student for being part of one of those that was signed into law uh about seven or eight years ago ending up 9.63 million in total State subsidy which means State share from educ education in this community is 4993 and the local share is just over 50% so it's it's kind of a half and half situation when and I'm going to say when we vote for a state approved building project on page three you will see a cost of where all of that money would come in for a state approved project so it's going to um kind of inflate what the state share from for education is because
029they're going to be playing a majority of that Bond that's how it's run through the formula in that now why I asked you as we talk about that and we talk about valuation the reason I asked you to turn to the valuation page of the budget is because we can go to the Secretary of State website right now and we already know within you know a few of what our three-year average picture will be heading into next cycle and you can see that again valuation in the city on that three-year average is going to jump more than it did this time around you're going to be adding another over $110 million more to that what how does that mathematically work for us more valuation more cost shifted to the local taxpayer and so that's an
030important piece for us um to talk about so before I head into the memo piece of it I just want to go back and answer any questions about the formula piece that you may have any questions for superintendent Ray okay formula piece is done when we go to memo that is the budget that is now sitting in front of every school Committee Member here tonight uh finance committee members you get a little bit of a thicker one with every single item rest of the board I've saved a little bit of paper for you um and you'll have more of a line by line one but either of you guys will be able to go to the website click on the detailed budget and scroll through I don't know seven or 800 pages that are there
031of items of everything that compris in our budget schools typically are no different than anybody else where the cost of a crown is more than it was last year same thing for a glue stick same thing for all of the cost um things like insurances not only health insurance but your property casual insurances are where you're seeing increases but when you look at the funding uh as a total this is kind of an easy cheat sheet for for everybody is when you look at this gray box and you can kind of look at the pieces of where there were changes whether that be for State subsidy local subsidy Etc when you look at the bottom line of what we got for State subsidy more we actually did pretty good $1.4 million that's a pretty good
032day um especially knowing that our valuation has gone up one of the things that I would say that in looking at the chart of kind of everybody in in across the state of City values and all of those pieces is that probably the fact that Sako property values had been a little bit higher over the last couple of years softened the blow of the increase you're actually you were actually kind of right at the state right around the state average you weren't above that I tend to think that and I certainly haven't spent the time of looking at every municipality in the state and doing the calculation yet of what it will be like based off the three-year average based off what I see there I'm I'm thinking that it's going to be higher than
033the state average next year um and again location water all of those Southern Maine all of those pieces are going to factor into those pieces what I really want to start drawing attention to is at the bottom of page two when you think about a budget that is of our size where do cost increase come from because things go up and when you look at it our budget that I'm presenting to you tonight from an expense point of view not including the revenue is up 5.33% and like $2.7 million and four lines categories P the majority of that tuition to thoron Academy salary and step increases for all employees Family Medical Leave Act payroll tax which I want to talk to you guys a little bit more about and health insurance increases and changes and
034that equals almost $2.5 million out of a 2.7 there's not a lot left out there and that hasn't even talked about property casualty fuel parts for buses those types of things that have gone up one of those lines the payroll tax piece would not only uh impact School departments but could as well have an impact on municipalities the requirement is that municipalities and School departments and I think we all who have been in school departments and municipalities myself as we're fortunate with paid lead we have some great paid lead benefits already in place in our organizations 15 or 16 sick days personal days protections uh for a sick bank if you've been in there in the organization for a while Family Medical Leave Act some of those types of things are there what this essentially
035is doing is placing a 1% payroll tax on all of our organizations there is not Clarity at this point in time when when kind of again this bill didn't even get debated it was in the governor's budget at 1% uh that that they had put in there at 1% with an initial thought that this was split evenly between employee and employer which also means that for all of our employees that we have in both of our organizations there's another half a percent possibly of your wage earnings going to this tax so there's a driver of $111,000 that's in the budget on a tax that came our way without public debate that certainly other people will have their own personal beliefs on that but definitely passed on in in our piece every $50,000 approximately in a
036local tax increase is about if I add if I decrease $50,000 I can decrease almost another quarter of a percent tax increase and so John I know it looks like you're ready to say something I want to hand it to you over there well I think just following up on the FMLA issue um so in the fiscal 25 budget um what we'll be doing is putting six months of that in which is about a quarter of a percent for the employee a quarter of a percent for the employer school department City so come fiscal 26 will have to put the full 1% in actually a half a percent from the city school board and uh the other half percent from uh the uh employee uh what the superintendent mentioned is something that I'll be talking
037with the council at some later date uh is strategy relative to we have uh four Collective buying agreements expiring so we'll have to talk about that and and I'll be talking to the city council because as the superintendent said we have a lot of benefits woven into the collective bargain agreements that we want to make sure that we're not paying for and then also paying twice for the FMLA which there won't be any money available under FMLA until January 1 of 2026 so it actually starts paying in on January 1 2025 but no benefits will be distributed until January 1 2026 and the state rules committee I believe now is just in the process of creating rules for this even though we now have to put it into our budgets I might add and correct
038me if I'm wrong Jeremy uh this isn't just municipalities and schools this is everybody you know if you have a business anything so um but we're preparing within our within the city Side to try to look at how we're going to address this from a collective bargaining standpoint okay so as we look at those pieces and to bring those pieces up um you know again maybe an area that we'll be able to slight back hopefully you get some good news on insurance but again you look at so much of your budget being driven by so little as far far as controllable lines this is where uh the challenge becomes it's my job as superintendent to make sure that I present something to the school committee that uh always been probably a little bit more conservative
039in nature than than others and even when I see the bottom line here and the percentage it makes me a little uneasy um but it's my job to make recommendations of what I think uh we can do and certainly as elected offical officials you get to debate those decisions and and ultimately school committee in conjunction with the city council determines the amount that would be funded and it's our job as administrators and school committees to then go back if there's any adjustments throughout the process to figure out you know what would be the effects of that uh so one of the things that I try to do is when when we try to make decisions um that are there we try to look at you know student enrollments uh and I've provided you um student
040enrollments in class sizes that um we're pretty you know I want to say pretty fortunate to have here in Sako um you know if I had my wish I wish that I could lower some of our elementary numbers a little bit more but at the pure fact of the number of classrooms at CK Burns unless we're asking uh a teacher to teach off a cart we don't have a lot of play in a building like that um and I know that at Fairfield school and young school there was point in times where we were on carts and we were able to get our music and our art teacher back into a classroom um and so one of my recommendations will be to look at class sizes um when I look at um when I look
041at some of our neighboring communities such as Community like gorum and uh share what our class sizes are with that super attend in those schools and they're looking at 24 25 plus kids in an Elementary classroom and 27 in a middle school look down and say well we were pretty lucky here um and again that's coming from someone who does have students in the I have my own children in these in these classrooms and 27 and 25 in elementary wouldn't necessarily excite me as a parent as well so I do have some recommendations um and again looking at to the best of our ability always making sure that we um think about reductions in a way that does not impact people uh and jobs and so I will be making um recommendation to the board
042for the first draft of that um we would reduce two classroom positions at SMS um that are unfilled positions a reduction of a young Fairfield technology coordinator um does have a person in that position um but very we do have some other open positions in the district that the person would have the opportunity to move into um we've reduced contracted IEP coverage for state agency clients and we'll be asking Administration to um be a bigger part of those meetings we've looked at general fund summer school expenditures uh and a lot of that is because we have been so fortunate to get uh grant funding through uh Title One reallocation to host so holding that money that hasn't been spent in our budget for the last couple of years um doesn't seem to make sense to
043me the school committee and the city council over the last couple of years has been so supportive about the work that we have done to try to improve SMS uh in our other buildings and we've made some guys for those who got the tour of G or have gone through we've done a lot of different things I think I've seen Phil sitting on the bleachers in there and I think they're a little better than the the wood ones um and so you know we are fortunate enough that with some of uh carryover and what you've got we've had like $600,000 worth of work and uh now we still have plenty of work to do but I think we're at a point where we can start scaling back a little bit also knowing that we hopefully
044can put together a plan uh between both group both groups to say where do we want SMS as we're open these new buildings and how much more work do we want to have done um because not only have we been fortunate to have over a half a million dollars in the budget we know that there's a large operational cost of a lease building that could come into play and what we do with that and knowing that there's at least three more years of possible budgeting before some Debt Service comes on um and I know that one of the pieces with uh carryover that I hope to present to everybody later with a better plan is that we still do have two portables at Sako Middle School we still have an area of the school that
045houses a majority of our special education students that should be further integrated into the regular part of the student body uh to provide Equity it's not the best ideal layout and again sometimes things are done because you do get hampered by con construction of buildings it can be very challenging uh especially if when you think that this was my understanding a school that at one point didn't have a lot of walls um and so it's our job to put together a plan to solve some of those Pro problems over the next couple of years before we move into that but we feel that we've started to take good steps we feel like there's a plan that we can put in place to present to the school committee to the city council using fund balance to
046solve some of those things um because it's important for me that if we're doing those other pieces and we have the money we can create an expenditure and a revenue at the same time so after it's complete it kind of goes away and it's not a an increased budget cost we've looked at supplies um for various departments and then I have one addition in the budget another facilities in maintenance person we currently have a director and two breake fix type people one of the other pieces that over the next three or four years uh and I've started to have some great conversations with Ryan and Pat is that as you saw on the screen tonight and you'll see on that paper there we're going to have these beautiful new buildings and I don't want to
047have us be in the position that three years after we moved in we haven't funded the staff to maintain them Megan I and April had an opportunity to tour some uh through this project tour some buildings and other locations outside of the state when you kind of walked out you're like how old was that building I don't want to be in that situation we need to ramp up our services because when you think of um the agreement that the city has had with the school Departments of Maintenance and 10t outside the building and this when you look at those drawings there's a lot of Pathways there's a lot of plowing there's a lot of sanding It's Our obligation to make sure that we have a good plan in place for those facilities as we move
048forward um while also making sure that we still have three years in the others and a middle school in the process so we're looking at those pieces from that other considerations uh that we'd have in the budget would be uh you know again Capital Improvements continued High Cost of outof District placements for students uh with special services um sometimes because of facilities or lack of space not all students are able to be educated within their Community I think that we have an Administration that believes that all students should have the opportunity for the most for the best of our abilities to educate them within our system if you live in Sako and your kids go to Sako schools that's what our obligation is to try to do our best to make sure that all kids
049can be educated in our schools and not in an out of District placement need to continue to explore energy and fuel costs and certainly one of the pieces um that probably won't allow us to move forward immediately is that we do have a couple of new buildings but can we explore what solar options and other things can happen on that building on a new roof that will lower those costs over time um Equitable sta staff assignments between schools and students making sure that there's Equity um that are there continued refinement of all of the budgets and all the costs that we have examine staffing needs as we transition into into the new building um that's going to be a big piece and kind of um you talk about what those costs is that as we
050start to do things now knowing that space may look different than what we have we have to look at all of those pieces because theoretically when you move from four locations to two there should be some ability to have things that are more efficient from all sections of an organization will that be perfect no because Bell schedules and class sizes will come into play but from an operational standpoint there will be some efficiencies and then as we've talked about knowing that the lease of the prek piece ends in another year and then our hope is that by early fall we have some recommendations for the school committee of where we would program for kids based off all of the factors that we'll need to consider from space busing what's available uh operational expenditure so when
051you go back and you think about um revenues and expenditures uh you can go down through the lines and you can see that the total piece of this is a 2.7 million expenditure increase or 5.53% the next page obviously is the balance of the revenues and the revenues that um go with this and this is where your state subsidy increases come in your local shares that you're required to have additional local um State share of the allocation fund balance that we've had over time that we have a little bit more that we could put in uh than in the past adult education costs and then finally what our initial uh amount would be for an increase to total taxpayers of 1.43 6 million or 4.75% is the initial piece from this point our finance committee
052will begin to look at the pieces of the budget in review the board will have a review of all of those pieces on March 18th I will present again to the city council of all of the deliberations of where we are at that point always important for the council uh to remember that several things can happen one we won't have a health insurance number at that time I suspect there will still be more conversations at the state level about FMLA any additional funding things that could impact us there's a bill um um that I don't think we have a ton of impact on us but it could of uh hourly employee minimum wage but there was a pretty hefty uh Financial note to that one uh that came out of report um so there's a
053lot of moving Parts still at that point by the middle of April we tend to have that honed in a little bit better and having all of those numbers um so that collaboratively we can work together knowing that we are one part of the puzzle City budget is the other part of the P puzzle uh and that we can pull something together that will not only support our students in our schools but also be something that uh again voters will also be going to the ballot on June 11th on a school budget not a city budget they get to go on the school budget while also us making um as a community an ask on the on the building project so a lot happens on that day um and certainly um again we are all
054concerned about abilities for everybody to pay in every single Direction and um that's where we are at this moment thank you any questions regarding the budget for superintendent Reich okay doesn't look like we're seeing any um so that will complete the agenda for the joint meeting with the council we will take a quick five minute recess rejoining back at 908 and thank you counselors for attending this evening I don't want did they give you a c e e e okay thank you all for joining us as welcome back okay so next item on the agenda item number five is the approval of the Schoolboard minutes dated January 24th 2024 is there a motion to approve the minutes so moved second was he didn't speak up okay motion made by councelor Archie second by uh Schoolboard
055member Truman okay let's shift gears here we're back on Schoolboard is there any discussion on the minutes okay roll call vote Schoolboard member Archie yes School Board member Purble yes School Board member Richards I was absent so I'll abstain School Board member roach yes Schoolboard member Gail yes Schoolboard member Truman yes and Schoolboard member Johnston yes a motion passes six with one abion exstension all right item number six this evening is adjustments to the agenda are there any adjustments okay we're not seeing any no adjustments item number seven there were no correspondents item number eight this evening public session if there is any member of the public wishing to speak please step up to the podium state your name and address for the record and you will have three minutes to speak and thank you
056for being patient and waiting for the hi my name is Devon Lewis I'm 40 Wildwood Drive in Sako uh was here at Monday's city council meeting saying the same thing so I apologize Madame mayor but um this is concerning an incident at CK Burns where my child goes to school last week um there was talk of a child having a gun at the school um I heard when my child came home about it she was telling me about it and how this child had made threats and threatened another girl and was removed from his class so I followed up right away about it um I was wasn't able to get a hold of any school staff right away so I contacted the superintendent's office a vice superintendent got a hold of me and then I
057was able to talk to the vice principal of the school however all the answers they gave I wasn't satisfied and I didn't feel safe with um no one could really tell me the school protocol until I talked to officer titchy the school safety officer the next morning he let me know that there was an incident there was an investigation they determined it wasn't a high enough threat uh on their operational risk management to let the parents know however several parents were worried because their kids were talking about a student with a gun um the vice principal had told me that in his experience there's no risk which I found not to be a very good answer to my question um my main point is I would really like the policy adjusted to get information out
058to the parents no matter what the level of risk assessed is when there's talk about a student having a gun I'm sure a student is not going to tell cops during an interview that he does have one if he did there's been 400 school shootings since Coline um if they were determined that they weren't a risk and there wasn't a risk then there wouldn't have been most of those shootings um there's a lot of protocols in the school according to the safety officer that lets people from the outside not come in but if a student brings a gun in his bag it only takes a few seconds for something to happen happen um this incident was really scary whether it was a rumor or not it's based in something and it puts ideas in kids
059heads and I think we need to stop trying to protect a potential perpetrator's feelings and rights and think about all the other students safety and their feelings because I know a lot of students were scared my daughter's 11 she asked me what a Glock was because that's what the boys were talking about him having so if you have kids uh I would urge you to take the policy seriously and not let rumors get back to the parents before school staff gets to the parents and explains to them whether it is or not a risk um whether they deem it so or not um no one has experience in school shootings in Sako uh according to officer ti so thank God I hope that they don't but uh this was a very scary situation and I
060think a lot of consideration needs to be taken in it than uh it wasn't thank you very much thank you any member other members of the public wishing to speak okay not seeing anyone item number nine this evening is the superintendent's report superintendent Ray all right good evening we're late into the evening on this one uh I think we've talked budget pretty much enough in the other session um what we will need to do is the next step on the budget process is as a finance committee pull together some data of when we can review after February vacation have the opportunity for our principles to come in and present to you one of the things that uh we know will go back to is the four different lines each and every time because principles obviously
061don't have um really any say in what a salary or health insurance piece goes up from a collected bargaining agreement I want to put out a big congratulations to our students at SMS uh who were the main winners of the Samsung grant that you got to see last time here um I know that we'll be inviting that group back to school committee and the mayor has talked about uh inviting them to the city council uh so we'll get to learn more about the progress I believe now they have an opportunity where they have like a mentor from Samsung uh for the next piece uh as they move forward so exciting news reminder to parents February vacation is about a week away a week week and a half away and if you look at the weather
062knock on wood I don't see snow in the forecast and we possibly could be making it to February vacation without a snow day uh so that would be uh that's always a great thing because not only do we worry about snow days in the wintertime but going back to the other conversation once June rolls around we start to worry about heat at burn school and and all the other schools uh except for uh Young School currently that does have air conditioning I hope you didn't didn't just jinx us oh I'm sure I you did that last year you're like it's January we haven't used any and then it snowed like crazy and I was like oh no don't say it a good day in March might be nice for the kids um that we think
063about that um one of the pieces that we had talked about uh last time in finance committee that's um two actually two things that are moving forward is looking at a the kind of garage at SMS for maintenance so we actually have a proper place to work on items repair things um starting to move that to the planning board we have to have a neighborhood meeting and some of those processes to go through um but trying to move that forward uh there's actually three things sorry um the second piece being that we looked at Sako Middle School um because we're able to use through our audit for uh the lunch program there was an amount of money that's built up that we have to be able to spend down we talked about new equipment and
064uh one of the pieces is that we will be able to put um windows in our cafeteria that you won't be able to see the outside but you'll be able to see the hallway so it will lighten that room give it a more friendly uh atmosphere but additionally we're going to be able to um use funds to purchase a generator because we were thinking about the ability for you know to make sure that if you have power disruptions that uh we just bought new freezers new Refrigeration to be able to power that piece um when doing the cost analysis of only powering a portion of the building which would would have been like JY main office cafeteria Etc there's almost no difference in the amount of wiring just to power the whole building uh and
065so it would be an option for us to have a generated building in the community um that sometimes Community use for many other reasons uh based off warming centers power outage you know I suspect back when they had the ice storm it would have been really nice at that point in time um to think about those things so um that's a lot finally the other piece that I I do need to kind of start thinking about uh that we need to start thinking about is that you may have seen the governor's uh the doe the commissioner's announcement that the plan uh that is currently in front of the education committee is to transition all CDs services from CDs to Public Schools this is big this is not small um because you're looking at probably upwards
066of 75 additional students who may be receiving Services coming onto the school department responsibilities funding it appears is looking like it's going to run in two different ways one is there will be an allocation that will be outside of the formula and then an allocation that comes through the formula we have not started to get those details they're goal is that it's you know they they have a goal of onethird of the schools will join this year one School third of the schools will join next year and one third the following year um while I'm very enthusiastic about picking up those Services I'm also someone who makes sure I I have all the details first on something like that like because that can impact tax it could impact our budget what's there uh saying to
067uh the doe like yes you've you've allocated this amount of money but what if you're wrong what if it's more than that how do we properly build main care how do we make sure we have the employees to support the services that are in place what do we do about placements that may be outside of your geographical area what that happens with transportation and then finally there is that space concern that we have um to be looking for so there's a lot of unanswered questions while I truly believe that the right thing for students would be to have us running that I think it's important that we go in and have a good plan and that it's done well um right from the get-go because you're also if you're a parent who has a three-year-old
068and it's not well thought out and it's not well planned and you've started to fracture a relationship that you're now going to have for pro approximately maybe 14 more years with the school department I think that we have to make sure that we understand all of the pieces that go into that uh and so we'll be working very hard over the spring to think about what that transition what that financially would look like what are the operational mechanics of the of the financial piece because there's some within the school department some without space uh and then obviously legislature has to approve those pieces but that needs to be on our on our radar screen as a school department um because service levelwise we can't just add another 70 students of services and expect that there's
069not going to be a need for hiring uh or need for administrative support I mean that's 70 more IEPs um and what can be a little bit different about CDF Services than uh school year certainly um when a group of K kindergarteners come you certainly have kids that come and go but when you're looking at threeyear olds you have a lot you have kids who are turning three September one October one December 3rd and so you're picking up those Services throughout the year so understanding how you're going to appropriately staff a situation where your numbers throughout the year you already know will grow um just got to put some effort and real thought behind that um so we're working with the commissioner uh through main School Management's Association to have those discussions really kind of
070ask the questions of have how does this happen and uh I'm kind of being a real real stickler for we need to have answers before we just take these giant leaps forwards um and some of that is just about how to do the funding what happens with main care who does the billing all of those pieces uh that we will work through so um that's what I have tonight and certainly I can entertain any questions that people would have thank you any questions or comments okay not seeing any moving on item number 10 is chair's report Schoolboard member chair uh Preble do you have a report nothing major to report this evening thank you thanks item number 11 there are no staff reports item number 12 is the board subcommittee minutes uh the policy and
071person personel committee met this evening um earlier at 5:30 p.m. the finance and infrastructure committee meeting in next is uh February 28th at 4:30 and the curriculum committee next meeting is February 26th at 4:30 there is no old business this evening item number 14 new business there is a memo in your packet with new hires there is no motion needed tonight there is a memo also for your resignations and there also is no motion needed this evening item number c uh is the new school classroom sizes there is a memo in your packet uh from school board chair kble and is there a motion School Board member Truman I move we support the hiring of 55 total teachers for grades 1 through five for the new school construction project motion has been made by Schoolboard
072member Truman is there a second second second by Schoolboard member roach any discussion on the item okay not seeing it oh School Board member Gail so I guess so the so the memo was already sent on December 12th to the school board I mean not to the school board excuse me to the the doe is that right so yeah so we we'd had that uh our process and understanding is this would be something that would be put forward as part of uh educational specs and they're asking for uh an actual vote vote on public record for this so that the funding of the 11 classrooms per grade level would be in the building for you know what we expect for class sizes in the future so then this is just confirming that the class sizes
073are will be maintained to a to a level of the new building right so we're not shrinking anything we're just keeping everything corre as we talked about with the expansion of right there's 55 classrooms in the in the plan that we would be committing to uh based off the information we have today because we know that things change but with the information today that we're committing towards that um obviously other boards other votes other things will come into play yeah yeah um but what we know today thank you okay okay anyone else roll call vote Schoolboard member Archie yes School Board member Pebble yes Schoolboard member Richards yes Schoolboard member roach yes School Board member Gail yes Schoolboard member Truman yes and Schoolboard member Johnson yes motion passes 60 okay item number D is a
074second reading of policies and there is a list of the policies and two items it to be stricken is there a motion Schoolboard member Johnson um thank you I move we approve the second reading of policies E A EF video camera use on school Vehicles eae f-r video camera use on school Vehicles administrative procedure ik evaluation of student achievement IAB grading and reporting of student progress i l evaluation of instructional programs i j n d-r website and social media guidelines and I J NB student computer and internet use and to I move to strike i j n DC school system websiteweb pages and i j n db- e student computer SL interet use acknowledgement form second motion has been made by counc Schoolboard member Johnston second by Schoolboard member Truman any discussion on any of
075those Schoolboard member roach so I'm new and uh I think fir it's the first policy that's new the video camera is on the bus um can you just explain that a little more like uh costs and um um you know that what what instigated it or is or you know how that all works really so we already had cameras on all of our school buses that's been I don't actually know when that's been in place but I imagine it's for quite some time what we did not have was a policy on the books to further clarify and outline access to those how long they're kept all of those things that are outlined in the policy so it's really just about clarifying our internal procedures and making sure that those are consistent with what is legal
076in the instance of surveillance on school bus is it how long do you keep a day's worth of activity on the bus so this was a good conversation that we had in policy committee the the length we can generally go back a week or so but it's highly dependent on how many runs that bus has taken how long Those runs are etc etc because it starts to rewrite its own memory card if it's if that card isn't pulled and reviewed and maintained for some other purpose so should something be communicated to parents teachers bus drivers that if you have an incident on the bus you know it needs to be reported I mean I guess they can report anytime but there's not going to be video of it after a week if if if they
077don't report it you know that day or soon after we could certainly consider communicating that I think that we've had we've definitely had those conversations as things are reported and generally we do get reports within that window it's it's when parents make reports much later than a week out we run into an issue where it's like if somebody reports that something happened in a window of five or six days on a bus you're talking about like watching 10 to 20 hours of video to try to find one incident so unless they know the specific date and it's pretty close it's it can be tricky to find I like the communication the other way like hey parents we're you're on video here so have your kids be does that answer your question yes School Board member
078Archie hey Meg just a little technology question so what happens if there's an incident the Friday before a vacation I mean is there anything we could do to change the it doesn't necessarily get written over then because nobody's using the buses over February vacation it's not it's not a time yeah it's not a Time window it's a loop record unless we pull that to watch it so ideally somebody is able to email somebody and we can do a lot of that remotely like I've watched videos not sitting in the transportation department and I've watched videos sitting in the transportation department but as as long as we know the date and it hasn't written over itself we can find it cool thank you okay anyone else okay roll call vote School Board member Archie yes School
079Board member prebble yes Schoolboard member Richards yes School Board member roach yes Schoolboard member Gail yes School Board member Truman yes Schoolboard member Johnson yes motion passes 70 okay item 15 is there any other information okay nothing and and there is no executive session this evening that takes us to item 17 and that is an adjournment so moved sir second motion made by Schoolboard member Johnson druman second by Schoolboard member prebble roll call vote Schoolboard member Archie yes School Board member Preble yes School Board member Richards yes School Board member roach Another Touch of Gray yes Schoolboard member Gail yes Schoolboard member Truman yes and Schoolboard member Johnston yes motion to adjourn pass the 70 thank you everyone and have a great night