001[Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] well good evening everybody this is uh tim taranova the proud superintendent of the victor central school district here with you tonight for our budget hearing for the 2223 school budget joining me at the podium tonight will be our assistant superintendent for business derek felice and we're going to give a somewhat brief presentation on the proposed budget for 2223 and then take any questions from the audience and i know this is being live streamed at home so we appreciate that and then after we are done with the budget hearing we will turn it over to our outstanding victor ptsa to run uh board of education candidates night so before i start though this is a really special week for us this
002is not only teacher and staff appreciation week but it's also today was teacher and staff appreciation day so uh just a big shout out for our staff and our teachers and everybody who works with our kids every day over 4 300 students 800 staff members above 800 staff members we can't thank them enough for everything they do to make our district great and to really put our kids first so happy staff appreciation week and happy happy staff appreciation day in terms of what we're going to talk about tonight we we're going to discuss the objectives and timeline of our budget talk a little bit about the impact of our expenses uh derek is then going to actually i'm going to talk a little bit about the personnel additions and then derrick's going to take over
003and review the expenses and the revenue i'll mention and talk a little bit more about the school taxes in terms of revenue and then turn it back over to derek who's going to discuss our propositions attached to the budget as well as the budget vote and school board election information certainly at the end we'll have time for questions if anyone has them so in terms of our objectives let me just give a really really brief summary uh of some background of the victor central school district and its budget so for many years uh victor had some had some incredibly great things happen but some of those great things had a negative impact on our financial situation for many years one of it one of those was a significant increase in our enrollment anywhere from 1500
004to 2000 then jumping to 3 000 then jumping to 4 000 over 4 000 students when that happened uh right around 2008 in the middle of that the state froze the foundation aid formula for victor and for all school districts in new york state it had specifically a very major detriment to our victor central school district because we were one of the only districts that was growing at the time so the combination of freezing the state aid formula which then amounted to victor only being able to get somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of its foundation aid and the growing enrollment caused some real stress in terms of the financial situat situation in victor central school district for many years the uh ended up the per-pupil expenditure was at one point about three years ago
005the third lowest in the entire state we were the district was incredibly low on reserves and many times in a in a few years before this the expenses were actually outpacing the revenue so there was a major challenge to the financial climate of our school district which was mitigated in in three separate ways three separate ways recently the first one was thanks to the community in the spring of 2020 as you know the community decided to exceed the tax cap and increase our tax base which had a significant impact on our revenue for the 2021 school year and that was a major accomplishment and that is still having significant positive ramifications now and it was a huge commitment from our community and uh immense leadership from the victor school board at that time then uh
006and just to to make sure people understand that was not to increase staffing that was to actually keep the existing staff for the 1920 school year for the 2021 school year and then start to build in some contingency money in our budget so we weren't our expenses weren't the same or greater than our revenue we wanted a little gap in there of contingency money so that was really what was accomplished during that particular exceeding the tax cap then uh in the spring of 2021 two other really positive things happened we started to make significant inroads in our advocacy to new york state and decide which decided to unfreeze the formula for state aid which had a huge positive effect for the victor central school district because we began starting the 2021 actually the 21 22
007school year which is this year we began to receive a much closer amount of what we're supposed to receive in terms of state aid in the district and that happened in the spring of 2021 and it really started to take effect for this school year the other thing that happened was the federal stimulus money and that federal stimul millions of dollars for federal stimulus money which is supposed to be spent over two to three years now we have to be really careful we don't want to spend that money on sustainable expenses because that money runs out really we should be spending money on one-time or short-term expenses because it's short-term revenue and that's what we've done especially with our summer programming and as well as some of the purchases and technology but it helped us
008not have to use our general fund money to pay for that so starting back in the spring of 2020 with a tax cap override and then the significant change in the state aid formula thanks to our board of education and boards of education across the state and then the federal stimulus money those three positives have made a dramatic effect on our school district and is one of the reasons we're in such good shape right now overall now as i said though because of those years where we were incredibly lean thanks to you know the state aid situation and things out of the control the districts such as enrollment our staffing really did not increase at the level it was supposed to based upon our enrollment so we were significantly understaffed in many areas we still
009are moving into this year so in terms of the objectives for next year's budget we want to continue to right-size the historically understaffed areas within our school district we want to balance that by continuing to keep the tax rate increase low which is less than 2 percent we want to maintain a strategy of having some contingency money left over at the end of the school year and that's built into our overall budget so that if we have emergencies we can we're able to spend the money on emergencies and not take it out of expenses tied to staff and also if we have some money left over we can sustain our reserves if we have to use our reserves to spend them on this thing specified for that particular reserve and we'll talk about this too
010tonight we want to abolish the debt that is costing us millions of dollars in expenses um over many years so those are the four criteria leading into next year's budget i just want to show really brief the timeline that we've used there have been six public meetings before the april 7th board of education adoption of our budget and those were transparent public meetings where we discussed different aspects of the budget and certainly towards the march meetings the entire budget we just want to make sure people understand that this is a community connection that's really important and we have to be as transparent as possible as we've discussed our budget process for the 22 23 school year so what's been the major what are going to be the major impacts in terms of expenses for next
011year as i mentioned we are looking at right sizing our staff in many areas that have been under staff for many years that's going to be an addition of 32.9 positions we're also going to have our typical contractual salary increases for next year a major expense is going to be a significant increase in health costs health premium costs our consortium that we work with has decided to increase the rates by that much because of the financial situation this consortium is in right now we're working closely with that consortium to try to stabilize these health premiums over time but right now that's going to be a significant increase and then two other areas we're adding 150 000 to purchase new maintenance vehicles and lawn mowers and adding equipment and technology to support our continued focus on
012one-to-one uh tech but let me talk specifically about the first one the addition of 32.9 positions because we all know that that's uh a significant amount so going back to my background remember when we exceeded the tax cap two years ago we weren't able to add staff that was just to maintain the existing staff that was at the time and still is under underserved in many different areas so we started to be able to make some inroads in that for this year's school budget so we added somewhere between 10 to 13 positions for this year's school budget and you can see the areas that are highlighted that we were able to add some positions to for this year they are still areas of need on the right side of this chart along with uh security
013that we weren't able to get to this year at all music and extracurricular experiences and support for our kindergarten classes with teacher aides so we made this mean the ones on the uh that are highlighted we did make some inroads in but based upon really looking at uh state guidance uh national guidance and comparable data with other districts these areas are still significantly understaffed from academic intervention services to social emotional learning support to special education to safety and security to cleaning and maintenance these are areas that over time have become understaffed and we still need to support greater staffing in those particular areas so that led to this which is the 32.9 positions you'll see from the chart a variety of different areas that we're adding positions it goes from in i'll talk just briefly
014about each one so there's 4.1 positions added for student enrollment support that's to maintain adequate class sizes especially at the primary building and the ecs that also includes some additional classes in business at the high school because we have a an increase in students who are interested in taking those courses those are students who primarily either would have had would have had early dismissal or late arrival as seniors or would have study halls so it's a good thing that we're adding some courses to to fill out or especially some of our upperclassmen's student schedules it also includes some enl support instructional curricular leadership i've talked many times about restructuring the administrative group especially in special education and instruction that's not an addition of administrative positions it's a restructuring where we are adding a position as
015a teacher on special assignment to support special education and you'll see the two big ones social emotional learning support a 5.0 fte increase and then 10.0 ftes and special education that includes additional psychologists social workers counselors and additional teachers and teacher aides to support programs such as our 12-1-1 as well as additions to 8-1-1 and the addition of a 6-1-1 program to really meet the needs of students with complex uh challenges and so they're able to support our kids in-house rather than having them go to other settings for their education academic intervention services were have a slight addition to as we continue to increase our one-to-one initiatives we have some additions for instructional technology music art and physical education especially at the elementary level as we increase sections at that level because of enrollment we
016need to increase sections to allow for kids to participate in music art and phys ed the student support 3.0 that's actually the support of teacher aides in our kindergarten classrooms and again that's been something that's been talked about for a couple years that's a real need with our youngest learner so that we can have a teacher and a teacher aid in every kindergarten class for the vast majority of the day which will uh again help our youngest learners uh succeed in kindergarten uh a 3.0 fte in security this is a significantly large campus with one sro at this point we need additional security for the campus it will include a security supervisor as well as two security guards that will support the entire district we have to add some clerical support as well as cleaning
017and some of the things with cleaning that we're doing is not only adding cleaners but we're also changing some of the titles for new hires to custodians and custodial helpers which a can do more have a greater job description than our cleaners and have a slightly higher hourly rate we're hoping to attract uh some more candidates so we our cleaners are incredibly important and they're incredibly valuable uh we want to add support for them because we need to improve the cleaning of our facility so the total is 32.9 with an approximate additional cost of 2.05 million dollars i'm going to turn it over now to mr velis who's going to talk overall expenditures thank you dr taranova so we're going to start off with our most important thing outside of our students which is our
018staff so we're going to be spending about 43 million dollars in uh salary and in addition to the increase in salaries we're looking at a an 82 increase in equipment a large share of this is 150 thousand dollars for maintenance vehicles that dr terranova shared but there we've also had some struggles this year with special education equipment so there's additional money for adaptive equipment for special education our increase in contractuals a lot of related services that we have but also looking to upgrade our floor scrubber machines again to maintain a safe clean working space for everybody we're trying to keep up with the rate of inflation with our supplies so we we adjusted that accordingly by three percent um as software there's a large increase in software about 90 to 93 000 a lot of
019this is going to be right into the classroom used for instruction uh our library materials textbook all aligned with a lot of our our aid which is the instructional material aid tuition this is special education tuition so as we keep building these special ed programs the long-term goal is to possibly see some of those students that are out of district come back so in future budgets that that number could possibly decrease depending on how the committee works um boces the big increase in boces is on top of the natural increase there is that one-to-one initiative we purchase a lot of our one-to-one devices our chromebooks through boces because that will generate future raid which is a goal of the budget and a large decrease in debt so debt is usually paid for 20 years if
020you're rehabbing a facility 30 years if it's a new build we had some debt that fell off so there was a decrease in aid in the corresponding debt payment that went with it and then a large three million just about three million dollar increase of fringe benefits largely tied to the health insurance but then there's also payroll tax and pension costs that correlate with the increase it's a percentage of salary so as salaries go up those expenses go up as well so overall uh on the screen that is our a pie chart to represent our expenses for the current school year and as you can see just under 75 percent is spent on our staff and our people uh between salary and fringe benefits followed by debt boces and contractual intuition so with the changes
021from the current school year to next year it's very similar but there was an uptick in uh and percentage-wise towards staff and a decrease from debt so overall the changes of the budget is pretty standard quote this is an analysis by building uh so this year we went in and did a major overhaul of our budget we went into the weeds and examined where things were budgeted and we found that some while everything was budgeted they may have been in the wrong building so uh with the realignment of the budget this year you'll see a large increase of early childhood that is a lot of our pps our social workers psychologists were originally recorded in the senior high and we've placed them in the right building now um outside of that the large increase of
022distributing instruction is uh the district initiative at a strategic plan and trying to provide professional development for our teachers and staff so uh that is being housed in the district instruction category so as a comparison to our count our neighboring school districts in the various counties says we're part of ontario monroe and wayne we are trailing behind the other districts with this current school year were about eighteen thousand dollars while every other district was twenty five thousand dollars or more well the goal of the budget is not to be the most uh expensive district or to pay more this is a good metric to compare how we are comparing with other districts and services and what we provide to our students so this change in the budget from the current year to next year we're
023seeing ourselves catch up and being able to provide the same services same level of instruction and just emotional social emotional support for our students so this graph is just depicting the strides that we are doing through generating this additional foundation aid and the tax levy so while this is a county view this is a district comparison so while the names of the schools have been omitted this is uh just i took a sample of my closest comparable districts and as you can see we are trailing every district not just on a county average-wide but on an individual school basis so the increase for next year would help us surpass what's monroe number six down there which is the current year's budget so we would assume or expect that that monroe six will still be ahead
024of us but we're still we're starting to catch up and being able to provide the same level of service as the other districts overall revenues our largest revenue is our tax levy makes up about 66 percent of our budget so the proposed tax levy while the budget was going up seven percent the tax levy not the tax rate the tax levy is going up five percent uh the other major change is state aid which is it shows 2.5 million dollars but the largest part of that is four million dollars in foundation aid that we're getting next the next school year and then the following school year if everything goes as planned we should see another four million dollar increase and that's netted against the decrease in building age which is why you see the 2.5
025but that again we lost that debt that went with it so overall it's a it's a four million dollar foundation workable state aid that we can work with so overall it's just like with the budget increasing at seven point one nine percent the revenues are increasing seven point one nine percent now dr turnover will talk about taxes thanks derek um and derek mentioned this the other thing i wanted to talk about is that as we prioritize spending and what the positions we are adding and keeping in the different focus areas it the strategic plan is now coming into effect which is great so the the strategic plan the five-year strategic plan was completed this winter we are now creating a one-year management plan for the 22-23 school year that management plan is tied to the
026first year initiatives from the strategic plan and that management plan is already being used even though it's it's being created and then it's also being utilized as we create that to to and has been utilized to prioritize our budgetary items moving forward so many of the areas especially for example special education has been a high priority in our strategic plan and it fits right into our expenses this is um this is a really important chart because it talks a little bit about and shows the benefit of the victor central school district so as derek said our budget from this year to next year is increasing 7.19 percent however the entire tax levy is not increasing that much the tax levy is increasing 5.19 which is the cap now it's less than the budget to budget
027increase and the vast majority of that 5.19 tax levy increase is because of the growth of the community so the the state allows us to have that cap because we are one of the top six or seven districts in terms of growth potential not just enrollment but growth in terms of commercial residential uh and then the the cost of housing uh that is a huge piece to victor central school district which allows us to have that tax cap that's above two percent but again most of that is because of the growth most importantly though that's the levy that's the overall tax levy but when you look at individual homes and people per 1000 we anticipate the tax rate to be at the highest an increase of 1.83 which is significantly less than both the levy
028increase and certainly less than the budget to budget increase and that 1.83 percent we anticipate to be smaller than that in fact from last year this year despite adding the 10 to 13 positions that we added for this year our tax rate actually went down between last year and this year again the highest it'll be for next year is 1.83 percent in terms of an increase and we're hopeful that that's smaller than that in addition to that we're not going to continually add this amount of positions to the budget each year that's not the plan we are hopeful that this will make a significant dent into our staffing issues and then we can stabilize the staffing increases moving forward which would be the the general plan so that's why this chart is so important similar
029to the per pupil expenditures you'll see how victor compares to other counties the county averages in terms of the tax rate it's still significantly less than our other counties even with the 1.83 percent increase and again the other counties we haven't factored in any increase from this year because we don't know what that is yet but we anticipate those to get bigger so it's it's a real strong comparison in terms of our tax rate compared to other school districts in our area and in terms of specifics you can see the chart um in terms of an increase so if you had a hundred thousand dollar house your taxes would increase uh thirty dollars and eighty four cents for the year sixty one dollars and sixty eight cents for a 200 000 house and 92.52 cents
030for the entire year for a 300 000 house that's with the 1.83 increase although as i said many times we expect that to be less of an increase derek we'll now talk about the separate propositions that are also on the ballot so the first proposition you're going to be voting on was going to be the budget and then the second proposition is the bus purchase reserve so uh last may the community allow approved the purchase of buses for the upcoming school year the 22-23 school year so this proposition is for the following school year the 23 24 school year in which we are looking to purchase seven new school buses for the cost of a little over one million dollars all of these buses that we're looking to replace are over ten years old and
031well over 100 000 miles so the request is just to try to refresh the bus cycle and and the third proposition that we have is uh the goal is to establish a bus purchase reserve this is basically a savings account up to six million dollars one of the goals of the budget as dr terranova shared at the beginning was to abolish that or minimize it as much as possible so the goal of this prop is of this reserve is to at least take care of the local share which is the difference between the amount of aid that we receive from the state of new york and the debt payment made on the buses and as a hot topic that's been around lately the school districts are going to have to stop purchasing diesel buses in
032the next five years so again this is another method that we could try to offset some of those future costs so we have to stop purchasing them in five years kelly klink and myself kelly has been the director of transportation we've been attending webinars and trying to see what type of grants and opportunities are out there to minimize the impact of this change but this is another one a proposition the district is proposing to try to minimize future tax increases the next proposition is another capital reserve a savings account up to 10 million dollars again the community last may approved a 10 million dollar capital group project based on our historical capital project that will get us about a 27 million dollar project since that the community approved that proposition last may the district their
033architect has come through our buildings and examined our existing facilities and found about 27 million dollars in renovations to maintain our existing and as many of you guys know we are bursting at the seams so the goal of this proposition is to add another 27 28 million dollars to create new or redesign our current work our instructional areas to better suit our students today and in the future so you dr taranova will take over for the candidates just one mention on the propositions um no money that we're putting we're not we're not advocating to put the 10 million or the six million in the uh reserves for next year it's the ability to have those reserves set up so that in the future we can put money in there to support the purchase of both
034buses as well as um potentially facilities to add on to if we need to based upon potential increased enrollment as well as certainly our repairs that happen uh every year in our facility so it's the it's the ability your the community would be giving us the ability to create those reserves and have the opportunity to do that and then the last thing is on the proposition we have three board candidates for three board positions that are open lisa castecki timothy delucia and kristen elliott are our board candidates any questions from the audience if you do i think you're supposed to go to a microphone there thank you so the live audience that is listening at home can hear you um just a quick question on the bus proposition does that tie you into what kind
035of buses because like can we make that 23 24 bus purchase be electric or something more sustainable or does it tie you into diesel earth so this proposition actually does tie us into diesel the supply chain there isn't a parking lot where you go and you select a bus so we have to order them ahead of time so they've actually started once we get approval on this proposition they're going to start heading into production so this proposition does currently yes but that's a bummer unfortunately we didn't know about that was coming at the time when we worked with the the bus vendor so it kind of came late on us yes any other questions from the audience okay so um oh wait i have to do the next slide so today was may 3rd this
036is the budget hearing following uh uh by the ptsa's meet the candidates tonight presented by ptsa pie and voice may 17th is the budget vote 6 a.m to 9 p.m in the ecs boardroom that's a new location for this year so just we're gonna have parking and security and and make sure people can get there easily get in and out to vote um again with our budget main focus areas right-sizing our staff and so that we can support the needs of all of our kids we're going to stabilize that after this year that's our goal as much as possible keep the tax rate increase below 2 it's going to be at least at the most 1.83 hopefully lower than that build in some contingency money continue to build in contingency in our budget to support
037emergency situations as well as keep our reserves stabilized over time and again just make sure that we are having a comprehensive education for our school children having the best possible education that we can have and eliminate as much debt you heard that first proposition with the bus purchases we want to try to stop doing that and move into purchasing them through the money from our reserves which again doesn't come out of the general fund those are the propositions in addition to that we know there's the town of victor library vote which is mandated to also be on our voting propositions and that's the town of victor's library vote that's an additional proposition to this budget that's not specifically related to the victor central school district so that's our budget presentation right now and i'm going
038to turn it over to the ptsa for the meet the candidates night thank you everybody um if any candidate would join me at the front find a spot at one of the tables you take your time thank you for staying for the meet the candidate component of the evening we have three candidates running for three open seats tim delucia kristen elliott and lisa kostaki did i say that correctly you did all right good tonight we have some questions from our in-person audience based on some past inquiries but i'd first like to get you started with introducing yourself and explaining a little bit about your why why you're running for this position and please take just about two minutes to introduce yourself and state your why if you're ready we'll start with tim for this one
039start with me that's okay thank you sure yeah uh thanks i am tim delucia um been around for a little while as a board member i'd like to continue i've been a district resident for 36 years a husband wife marilyn a dad to michael and aaron and most importantly a grandpa to five grandchildren which keeps me young and as a board member i'm thankful for the opportunity to serve so i just wanted to say that we are fortunate to have a community to have community members who care deeply about our children and their schools and parents who want the best for their sons and daughters we have dedicated staff all committed to preparing our students for their future i want to acknowledge and thank the school community this community is involved and supportive this is
040evidenced by the positive support of our budgets the many donations given by parent groups individuals organizations and businesses and the many volunteers involved week after week with our students i have served with many talented and dedicated board members i am only one part of the effort that works to provide the best opportunities for students of the district we strive to support the talented people that do the important work providing those opportunities for our students i have been privileged to be part of that for many years we are also fortunate to have a devoted involved and talented superintendent tim who has been a great addition to our team so thank you for being here and for your support of the district you are supporting the future of our community and that's why i'm running for the
041board that's a tough act to follow the prepared statement sir i'm just going to speak from my heart which is typical i think um first of all i want to introduce myself kristin elliott uh this is my third term running for my third term proudly on this seat for the board of education i am a 28-year resident of the district i've had the privilege of having my children go k-12 through this district and literally take advantage of every single opportunity that they could possibly take through this district through their leadership activities and athletics enrichment activities they're all launched into incredible careers and i realized that at the time in my past when i was a board member i was really investing myself in their interest and the interests of the their peers and this community
042and then i realized that my work wasn't done and so my why is to continue the the great work i've kind of had the opportunity to see the struggle that this district has gone through financially in our past and how we were still able to support the incredible faculty and district community and all of those who were involved in moving my children and their peers through incredible experiences but now we are on the threshold of incredible opportunity with a superintendent and a leadership team that is so dedicated but now we have a lot more means and financial opportunity to really take us to the next level we were a premier district now we're going to be just absolutely incredible and i am very proud to throw myself into programs into the strategic plan i've been
043an educator for 28 years i'm on both sides of the fence i know the hard work i've been in the trenches but i want to do everything i can to support the great programs from those who have a lot of need to those who need a lot of enrichment so i'm proudly here to serve thank you and then lisa i'm lisa kostecki i have been a victor resident for the past almost 14 years now my why is really about my kids and about everyone else's kids in this district i've spent 20 years working in the higher education industry and so i know that it requires a very strong partnership with students parents teachers administrators staff i want to bring that experience into the k-12 arena i have a very strong a sense of i believe
044what it takes to have every student feel a sense of belonging have all teachers and staff feel that same sense i think the victor school district can be the greatest just like kristen said we've had challenges in the past and my why is about helping to make an impact to meet those challenges head on and we'll take questions from the audience from the in-person audience hi there i'm cindy riley president of the parent teacher student association and also a parent um thank you so much for the questions from the audience my first one for you is why is the five-year strategic plan so important to vcs give you a couple minutes each to answer that question and we'll go ahead and start with kristin this time shall i pause a moment to give people time
045can i start i i made the commitment to be part of the strategic planning committee which um i took four days out of my own time at school to immerse myself i feel like i'm at a bit of an advantage because i got to see how the whole plan started i have never been more impressed with how deeply the questions and the concentration on what is where are our weaknesses where do we need to grow what are we doing well and we flushed out such incredible answers qualitatively and quantitatively there's data hard data and then there's we had student representatives that gave us such incredible insight as to where they see this district going and then we had educators we've had school psychologists i mean we had community members of what their vision was and
046the five-year plan exposed our vulnerabilities and you know allowed us to say you know we have to put one foot in front of the other it's not a it's a five-year plan i mean ambitiously every committee wanted their thing to be done first and we looked at what was the most critical thing for year one and it became a framework it became a lesson plan and i can speak in analogies you have to have a long-range plan and then a short-term plan and then a daily plan and this five-year plan was so carefully and thoughtfully written that the management plan which is how we roll it out is directs us on our our yearly goals we set yearly goals we set quarterly goals we set weekly goals it drives our professional development and it drives
047where do we want to see our students five years from now and and it makes us authentic and it certainly plays into a high level of accountability because we can look back and say you promised or we we set our goal to be here and now where are we so it gives us a chance to reflect but without a framework it's like writing a paper without an outline you have to kind of know the whole the big picture and proudly i congratulate the 30 plus members that were deeply involved in that thanks i've spent more than 20 years in the private sector i have to write a strategic plan every year for my division for my team for the work that we do without that strategic plan you cannot achieve your mission or your vision
048for your organization for your school district or whatever you are writing that strategic plan for it's essential in order to understand the operations of the district strategies you want to face and you need to look at the analytics and and determine um how you're going to measure whether or not the strategic plan has even been effective so i'm so excited to see that victor has been has been spending time doing this because this is going to allow us to truly lead and drive our mission of vision for the district okay thank you so why is the five-year strategic plan important to the district i wrote down a number of things it focuses our efforts knowing what the path forward should be align resources to achieve the best impact fix what needs to be fixed highlight
049what we do well and align our educational program pre-k through 12. these are all important things that we can accomplish and this five-year plan helps us to do that i don't know how to do this but we had a great amount of input from community members staff professionals that helped us to put this together that provides the map so that we can accomplish this and i'm proud to be part of it i'll learn along with the implementation of it looking forward to that learning i guess you can always teach an old dog new tricks right thanks thank you very much i'm carol prescott with partners in education and ptsa and various things um thank you for volunteering you know i think a lot of people don't realize that you know you're doing this just out
050of the goodness of your heart so thank you our next question is what are the remaining effects of the pandemic on students and how is vcs adjusting to those effects for students and staff and we'll start with lisa i think that we all know the social and emotional well-being of students was heavily impacted by the pandemic and we continue to see mental health issues from it i think obviously you know that's going to take some time to work its way out and we're going to need to support teachers and students in different ways than we ever have before this is unprecedented times and i can't tell you exactly what that means but what i do know is that in order for our students to feel safe inside their environment we need to provide teachers and
051staff with the tools they need to provide that safety you know as i look at my own kids who are you know in fourth and sixth grade at the time of the pandemic started i am now seeing them thrive in different ways i've never seen before but i'm also seeing them scared in different ways i've never seen before and we're going to need to continue to talk about this with our students and understand what we need to do to meet those needs as time carries on it's it's not also just the social and emotional but it's also the academics we know that there were many students who didn't get provided what they needed during this time so i think this is going to be a part of you know talk about a five-year strategic plan
052a five-year plan to really see what we need to do to help these students continue to thrive in our district my turn we we need to reestablish normal right that's um something that has to be done obviously there's the social emotional needs in our budget that you just saw reflects what we're doing as a district to help meet those needs to make sure that the support is here for our students and our staff so that we can continue to re-establish normality um masks you know i know were a challenge for many of us although i was told i was better looking when i wore one so i didn't mind it and and obviously to re-establish connections i mean students are back in school uh they're seeing their friends they're participating in sports and extracurricular activities
053um and we feel as though that's going well so those are the needs that continue to demand our focus and those are the things that we will be challenged with but i'm sure we can meet those challenges we have excellent support staff here and teachers just did an amazing job during this whole bizarre environment that we all lived through administrators also did remarkable a remarkable job um i was totally impressed and hopefully we can get back to looking at that as history not as future thanks so i'm going to take a different spin on this because um it's evident that there's students with student and staff and leadership and our community members that have certainly the demands of of the situation with the mental health issue as a teacher i'm gonna share that pacing and
054a learning gap has it has been set in front of us where how are we going to bridge that learning gap how are we going to remediate students how are we going to get them up to speed some some teachers are like oh we've lost those years you know it'll it'll it's going to take years and years and years to catch up and i think you know we need to just support each other and and drive into that professional development how do we bridge that gap but i'm going to look at some of the positive effects actually because i i think there's some good things that came out of it this district really was lagging behind in technology and sometimes necessity breeds innovation and moving forward i don't think our one-to-one would have come nearly
055as quickly if we weren't forced to do it and i'm very very excited that we we've brought that up to where we are competitive i don't want to say competitive but we're we're in the mix with all of our surrounding districts because we weren't quite frankly um i know that when as an educator i often leaned on students who are so savvy technology wise they would help out so i found that there was a lot more collaboration and so that remaining effect is still happening i think students are are saying you know what this is how you can do this this is how you can do that and i think the whole paradigm of educating is shifting you know we there's questions and i'm not going to open up a pandora's box about assessments and
056state exams but there was almost a relief that those exams were held for those covered years and there's at least been a willingness to look at how do we define what a holistic student is academically in all of all of the pieces so it has challenged us positively that way to look at some of the old traditional things that were happening and maybe we should look at you know innovate and be more innovative that way and i i think parents were thrown a huge curveball staying home trying to homeschool trying to work from home and i think a lot of students became more had a greater ownership of their education and i'm honestly missing that deep communication that i used to have with kids when i had that was the only line of being able
057to work with them and so those remaining effects in terms of maturity of students and communicating and owning their their educational journey um are good things so um i tend to see the silver lining and i and i'm proud of how this amazing district moved forward when we had to on the fly work through it so thank you good evening my name is sherry helmer and i chair our parent group here at the district voice and i of course bring the special education question um my question tonight is could you share your thoughts around the newly announced special education race structure and i think that we're starting with tim right could you repeat the question can you just share your thoughts around the newly announced special education restructure thank you hi first um the special
058education rate structure is that what you said restructure restructuring um yeah unfortunately i'm not qualified to answer this question i i'm at a loss um i would need help to answer the question so i i'm sorry i'm going to have to pass oh the admin the administrative structure okay now i understand thank you for that clarification okay i'm thinking state law and i'm thinking holy smokes i'm not there no thank you um yeah that the restructuring really helps us to refocus and focus better on the needs of our special education students and it does it campus wide you know in the past many of these programs were managed in each building in separate silos type approach we found that there were deficiencies in doing it that way so um from leadership from our superintendent and
059and other consultants we studied what needs to be done how we can do it better and this is a way for us to focus on doing the the right thing for special special education it helps us to focus and it does align it pre-k-12 thank you had a number of outside consultants and you know professionals within our district um really highlight the fact that this is one area of a lot of room for growth with the restructuring i'm going to keep it short that k-12 is going to enhance the continuum of services k-12 in terms of if there's an 8-1-1 in the elementary building it's going to carry i'm not making promises but the idea is that those programs will be a continuum k-12 then there's a continuity k-12 because they're speaking the same language
060and then i'm going to refer back to what mr veliz was saying is in having that continuity in the continuum of services students who are not able to have their educational program in-house in district will be able to have that and then as a result we will there's a budgetary response there's a fiscal responsibility and a budgetary benefit for having students in in district so it's staying in compliance it's meeting the needs of our students having everybody on the same page we can track students k-12 and meet their needs and watch them watch their growth simply put i think this restructure is long overdue and much needed and speaking to parents we have not been meeting the needs of our special education students i think this board knows that i think our district knows that
061this is the first step in that direction in my opinion and it's the beginning step there's more work to be done to ensure that those students are making their way through this district feeling as if they belong and feeling as if their needs are not and it's not just those students it's their parents as well so i'm incredibly excited about this restructure and the staffing changes we are making that were just talked about in the budget forum as it is absolutely needed to continue the strength of this district equity and inclusion framework how will you support this delicate important and oftentimes controversial work here at victor we repeat that it was a little sorry new york state is implementing the diversity equity and inclusion framework dei work how will you support this delicate often times
062controversial work here at victor central schools i think i start i delicate indeed um but very needed work this is a big part of our strategic plan and there was an entire committee that was dedicated to this without speaking on behalf of that committee because that framework again is a five-year plan framework um it certainly is work to be done and whatever the professional development will start there and then certainly creating a culture i mean that was a big part of uh of the discussion in many of the the groups in that strategic planning workshop writing it's about everyone feeling welcome everyone feeling a part of a of a community that supports the diversity whatever that definition of your diversity is and and and we're here and i'll and i'll leave it there i i
063agree with a lot of what kristen said as one of the very few jewish residents in this district i have often felt unwelcome we have had challenges facing anti-semitism i know i'm not alone in that feeling as other groups feel that they have not been welcomed or included it is controversial and it is difficult to talk about but if we don't talk about it we don't get any better so to me this is one of the most important parts of our strategic plan again it goes back to that sense of belonging we want everyone who walks through this door to feel like they deserve to be here in order to do that we need to teach better and provide those tools to those teachers to teach better on these issues students need to have a
064general understanding of what it means to give and receive respect from one another and that needs to start at the youngest of ages so no matter how controversial it is we have to face it head on if we don't we're not doing anything better for this district to make people want to be here or feel welcome okay i i too believe this is important work i mean it's everyone should have a sense of value in any community that that they're part of we want to have a culture that supports we want to have a welcoming community there's work to be done we are going to make sure we keep a close eye on that because we want to do it in a way that's reflective and uh and positive and creates the right kind of
065culture for our district so i'm i i agree that this is very important and potentially controversial but it's work that we're going to do thank you for the question thank you i'm just going to add a little piece i think the the biggest piece is the authenticity of it i just the more i listen to my colleagues it's it's not just rhetoric i mean we are digging in and there's going to be an authentic lens on this and it is hard work it's vulnerable work and i'm immensely proud that it came to the forefront and we're ready for this so thank you for that great thank you kristen added a little extra to that question tim and lisa do you want to add anything else nope i'm good thank you they're good couldn't agree anymore
066all right thank you that's okay too much out of turn but well i think this is going to be our final question of the evening so just in this last question if you just want to say anything else to just wrap up you know some of your thoughts for this evening and just basically is what do you see as your main responsibility as a victor board of education member so that and then anything else you want to say and just thank you so much i always say and as carol said you are the ultimate volunteer and we can't thank you enough and i think we are starting with lisa on this last closure i think my main role as a school bar member is to be a representative and an advocate for our community and
067really prioritizing the needs of our students in the district um and i and you know as kristin just said it's about being authentic and transparent i take that very seriously i want to make sure that i spend you know the first 30 days and more listening listening to my other board members listening to teachers listening to students and staff and administration hearing what the challenges they are facing and what i can do to make an impact there thank you i've always throughout my career business career personal life my mission my major responsibility is always to be a good listener listen analyze determine what needs to be done and take action so my responsibility if i was to say it in one word would be you know be a good listener understand what your community is
068saying what they are expressing what their needs are what their wants are and help to find solutions for the things that you're hearing the last thing i wanted to say as i was listening to my colleagues sitting up here with me one thing i'd like to mention is about the whole covet experience is i think our our parents were the heroes i mean um i lived through it uh because i had my daughter-in-law and grandson living with us because obviously education was remote they're they're from the new york city area and new york city got hit pretty hard so they lived with us during one school year thank goodness i have a retired school teacher as a wife but what i saw my wife and my grandson doing every day online i couldn't imagine how
069parents were doing that when they were trying to work and manage their families etc so my hat's off to the heroes of our district the parents he had his hands full proud papa with his grandchildren um every board member brings a skill set and we have an amazing diversity of skills um on the board and i'm extremely excited to hear about lisa's background and her her skill set that she's going to bring to the board as well but we can't i don't want to be complacent in saying if i'm an educator i just want to speak to education in in as a experience in the classroom so as the main responsibility that i'm thinking is that i need to be a lifelong learner and build new skills and become a financial person even though that's
070not my favorite thing but i've learned more about budgetary process and that skill set has made me a better board member because i've attended budget workshops i sometimes throw myself into committee work that i may not initially think that that was a good match for me but i forced myself out of my comfort to become a bit more adept at being able to have those conversations in areas that were not part of my original skill set um and to speaking to what tim said about being a really good listener and then back to that whole uh diversity equity and inclusion just listening with an uh unconditional and without judgment to whatever people's concerns are or accolades are um and and to be part of that positive disposition and culture that we're trying to create in
071whatever little corner of the district it might be it's shedding light on areas that need growth and raising up and applauding those things that are that we're doing well so just supporting every member of this district and community all right well thank you so much on behalf of ptsa pie and voice we really appreciate you being here tonight and good luck in the election and then just also from ptsa pie invoice we would like to wish all the staff members of very very happy staff appreciation week and ptsa pie invoice plan to give all the staff luncheons throughout may and june so we'll be feeding you well and celebrating you so thank you so much everybody have a great evening thank you thank you remember to vote carol says thank you you