VCS BOE Meeting January 14th, 2021

001and we are live good evening everybody and welcome to our january meeting of the victor board of education we welcome you as you can see we have many guests with us tonight and we hope that you stay with us through the end and a lot of great information coming in about things going on in our district before we get started um i'm going to first take a moment uh before our pledge which will be led by miss tricia turner to offer a moment of silence to remember those who are have been lost and send thoughts to those who are struggling and a moment of silence to reflect on many points of gratitude a moment of silence i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it

002stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you very much and again welcome for those who just joined us um so many visitors um and they will be introducing themselves throughout our presentation tonight so uh thank you again we'll start with uh the second point of our agenda which is the approval uh of our revised agenda so i'm requesting a motion for someone to approve our revised agenda first by tim by tim and seconded by dr parks thank you so much my apologies um i'm going to offer any discussion regarding our agenda dr terra nova some additions to the agenda you can have all right miss elliott we added a letter i to the consent items number six which is approving employees for student attendance purposes i believe that's the

003only addition to the agenda thank you dr terranova is there any further discussion from anybody regarding that edition it is in red it was the rev the revisions are in red so if there's no further discussion on that i'm going to ask all those in favor of approving the revised agenda as written to say i i i i i any opposed there are none so approved thank you so much moving on in our agenda we are at dr terra nova's update and i will pass it to him thank you miss elliot uh so i want to welcome everybody to 2021 uh we are very hopeful about this year coming up uh compared to what we all went through and what um you know just the the challenges that everyone had in 2020 i'm going to

004give four real quick updates i don't want to monopolize the time but i did want to uh update you with the covid situation as you all know we're back in school uh we are continuing with the hybrid model along with a percentage of our kids who are 100 virtual and uh the teachers and staff have done a fantastic job moving into now our second week uh since the december break we are dealing with covid cases but dealing with them very successfully overall as a district we are and i put this in my uh daily code or my copic message from yesterday we're going to shift our updates we're not going to lose transparency but we are going to shift the number of updates because we've been doing almost daily updates around covet we're going to

005shift starting next week to uh once a week messages to the community updating our numbers to the community in letters around covid but we're going to continue with our covid numbers on a daily basis on our website so the chart that we've been using the past couple months will continue to be in existence it's going to be on our website updated daily uh by our communication staff and so if people are interested in finding out the individual daily numbers of covet both active cases and past cases all you need to do is go right to the website victorschools.org and there'll be a site right there where you can see the updated chart and then once a week probably on fridays i will update the community via memo on the updated cases for the week so

006we decided to do that instead of sending letters every day or every other day at this point trying to scale back the number of communication and number of letters but the same time not losing the transparency around the the situation we're dealing with we're also working with our staff on vaccination opportunities as you probably know we have been able to new york state has really focused itself on on vaccinating uh what we call 1a workers which in our case would be our health depart health health office staff and our nurses along with our speech and language teachers uh physical therapists and occupational therapists and then our one b's which is pretty much our entire uh education staff working with kids right now uh that is voluntary on the staffs uh from the staff's viewpoint it's

007not a mandatory thing but i know that many many staff members are greatly interested in becoming vaccinated as soon as possible uh some have already become vaccinated we're working hand in hand with our county health department to try to set up and again the vaccination supplies are limited at this point but to try to set up some sites right on campus to deal with the vaccinations and get as many people and in terms of our staff vaccinated as soon as possible i don't know what that date will be yet we're supposed to have another conference tomorrow with our health department so uh hopefully it'll shut some light on the amount of vaccine we have available but i know there's people out there that need it and i appreciate the work that ontario county health department

008is doing on that so that's a covet update uh i want to just a quick announcement we're going to do another virtual town hall wednesday next wednesday which i believe is the 20th of january that town hall will have a special guest miss angela afranti our director of technology and we're going to talk about all things technology and and the in the utilization of technology during this uh during this covid situation and the hybrid and 100 virtual models so angelo will be a uh a guest of mine on the town hall next wednesday from 6 30 to 7 30 and then certainly we'll have some updates and try to take as many questions as we can from facebook live either that night or certainly answer those questions in the next couple days after that we

009are setting up monthly town halls we think that's important for the transparency between the district and the community uh a big shout out to the victor foundation uh i went to my first meeting last night as a representative of the school district the victor foundation is a group that i believe was founded in 2014 to to really raise money and support the school district in areas that might be outside the budget uh some incredible people working in that group they started with uh raising 27 000 in 2014 and as of now they have above 400 000 raised and they continue to raise money for the victor central school district community uh and the relationship with the school district some of the areas they've utilized that i think they've given over ten thousand dollars in the

010last few years to support our school district whether it be in library media music uh recreational purposes stem or technology some examples were were make buying the library books for the early childhood school the primary school uh some definitely unique musical instruments like the string bass and potentially ukuleles for musical classes a significant number of classroom supplies standing desks for kids who need them portable projectors patio benches and vinyl arbors to support the district and the outdoors and just tons and tons of science supplies a lot of work with stem from this group so again they're an outside uh agency a not-for-profit organization that is made up of some really dedicated members of this community and pla i'm really impressed and glad to be a part of it and i will give you updates throughout

011this school year on the work they're doing to raise more money and support our students and staff especially in areas that are outside the budget and maybe even could be used potentially as seed money for items that over maybe two to three years later could be potentially picked up through our general fund but a great job by the west by the victor foundation and excited to be a part of that group and my last thing i want to mention is that we are setting up meetings right now with our legislators summer brook who is a state senator newly elected as well as jeff gallahan i believe a state assemblyman i know maureen our board clerk and superintendent secretary is doing a great job setting up times with both of those individuals because uh you're going

012to hear in a few minutes of budget update you know the reliance on taxes that we have to have at a school budget but we are going to work very hard to advocate for more reliance on sales tax potentially through the county as well as certainly uh trying to shift that state aid formula that significantly hampers victor central school because we don't get credit for the enrollment increases in the last 15 years and that's where samra and jeff we really are hopeful will be strong supporters of and can advocate in the state government to potentially do some work with our state aid formula and work with our county uh around sales tax so i just wanted to let you know that we're setting up meetings with those legislators and we're certainly going to invite the

013board to those meetings to uh to join me in having conversations with our legislators that's uh that's my superintendent's update uh miss elliott so thank you thank you dr terranova i appreciate that and we look forward to those meeting times for those legislators hopefully helping us in the revenue column uh the there are no formal recognitions at this time but i do want to let the community know that some of our committee work for our hall of fame uh graduates of distinction they are still meeting virtually and there will be some announcements forthcoming but uh we want you to know that there's a lot of things going on that are recognizable but uh not not at the at this time so it moves us to number five in our agenda which is the public participation

014piece and because of our virtual meeting there's no live public participation but i do want to continue to encourage anyone who has any thoughts or comments for the board or for dr terra nova or any concerns that you might have to please forward those to dr terra nova's email i'll give that to you it is terra nova t-e-r-r-a n o v a t for tim taranova t at victor schools that's plural victorschools.org and all of those emails that come in will be forwarded to the board and we receive all your thoughts and welcome your comments and they are part of our discussion uh we thank you again in advance for identifying who you are and please forgive us we will um it is not our practice to respond to those who forward information or notes

015to us with anonymity so thank you for your consideration in that moving on to number six um is the acceptance of our consent items so i'm going to ask for someone to please make a motion to approve our uh consent items a motion from someone please mr eckhart seconded by i can seconded by dr parks forgive me i'm gonna take some notes dr parks and uh at this time if there are any matters to discuss specifically about those consent items you know dr chernova brought up one part of the revisions of the consent items at letter i um but if there's no other further discussion please chime in if you have something thank you i just wanted to mention being a member of the audit committee that item h the acceptance of the extra classroom

016report which is the extracurricular clubs running the district um another outstanding report that just speaks to the great work at all levels being done at victor schools no in no material weaknesses significant internal control deficiencies and i don't i just would be remiss if i let us just gloss over that that from the you know district office business office to the central treasures and the schools and the advisors that just a great audit it's uh just speaks to uh how well we operate here so thank you mrs elliot and thank you for your dedication to sitting on that audit committee is there anybody else that'd like to add anything yes miss elliott if it's okay i just want to highlight our personnel agenda real quick and uh we have two we have many important hires

017but two i that i want to highlight tied to what actually mr eckhart just talked about is uh we are bringing forward a uh recommendation to hire mr derrick velis as our new assistant superintendent for business uh derek is a fantastic candidate uh is currently the assistant superintendent for business at the albion central school district and we're thrilled to have him come over here and pick up the reins for mr stutzman who's done an admirable job as an interim assistant superintendent since august and i know those two are going to collaborate together significantly in that transition in addition we're hiring a treasurer uh matthew demarel uh a school district treasurer who's coming from the churchville child high school district as treasurer we're thrilled to have matthew uh who will be taking over for lynne lubaczewski

018who has been just a stellar stellar treasurer for our district for many many years and is going to be incredibly difficult won't be able to replace her but um but we know that matt is going to be a fine addition to that department and matt and miss lubachesky are going to have a lot of collaboration together as well so we really solidified our financial team moving forward which as you know is very critical in this day and age so i just wanted to highlight those two individuals from our personnel agenda thank you thank you dr turnover for being so vigilant in that as well as the rest of your your district leadership from the standpoint of that is critical con considering all the landscape that we have from a financial perspective both past present and

019future so thank you welcome is there anybody else with anything to add if there's nothing else to add i'm going to ask board members to please unmute as we go into our vote all in favor of accepting the consent items as written please say aye aye aye aye any of any opposed abstentions so moved the consent items thank you so much so moving into our number seven is um a real highlight is to get a spotlight on our campus news so i'm going to turn it over to dr terranova who is going to introduce some of our leadership and sharing some of our campus news thank you miss elliott and uh i think i'm going to throw you off mr siesto i think i started with you last time but i think we're gonna start

020with you again you okay with that i'm good with that mr brian siesta our high school principal please thank you dr terranova um so i wanted to acknowledge uh tonight uh the difficulty that some of our students have had and are having uh with this year in many realms um tonight i'm going to talk a little bit about academics learning has taken on a new form and some of our students have struggled and we have some academic data to show that they're struggling so at the high school we are trying to implement some support structures to help students who need some academic help so a very big thank you to our national honor society and key club for helping with a peer tutoring program that we started last week so if a student needs some

021extra support or some extra help in a particular subject area the student now has the ability to sign up for a virtual meeting with a fellow student who is willing to help tutor any student who might need some extra help in a particular subject and we're also starting to bring back some students for some more direct interventions particularly on wednesdays we have a live document of students who quite frankly are not passing classes and we're now using that list to bring in students for extra support while maintaining proper social distancing working with families on transportation and making sure that students complete their required health screenings so these are students who are in very true danger of not passing multiple courses this year uh students who may potentially not move on to the next grade level

022so we've had i think this week we we had close to 35 students coming yesterday and we're going to try to keep that momentum going in the weeks to come and lastly i had an unexpected delay in coming back from the holiday break due to a quarantine so i really want to thank four people in particular for their help while i was out my assistant joan randall and our assistant principals carrie goodell amy shannon and carl dibash i'm very appreciative for everything they did to help me my family our staff and our students the last couple of weeks so those are the highlights from the high school thanks mr siesta appreciate it mr ghee from the junior high how you doing very well how's everybody else doing so i'm going to focus a little bit

023on some of the professional development as as you probably know or or have been hearing we're going to be shifting our instructional model starting on february 1st into the second semester to create more opportunities for kids to connect with their teachers and so this last month and a half we've engaged in quite a bit of professional development our teacher center has really been instrumental this year and really pivoted to provide great support through book studies and teacher teaching teacher type programs so that's been a big highlight each wednesday we've been able to gather support through boces to provide specific tech tool training for teachers based on the things that they requested that they needed some support with just today we had angela's team over at the school helping work on systems to create better audio

024and better visual representations for our remote learners so our teachers are learning quite a bit and we talk often as educators about being lifelong learners but the amount that they're learning in a very short period of time and how how adept and adroit they're getting at new tools and new technologies very impressive so i want to thank the folks who've helped kind of put that together but also the teachers themselves for really you know digging in and being willing to push themselves far beyond what they probably thought their comfort zones would have been you know six months ago and it's really it's very fascinating to see and we're also starting to shift the conversation to a post-pandemic world we know this is a temporary situation and so what's happening right now is we're beginning to

025take a look at what have we implemented that we want to try to retain and keep when the pandemic is over and we have kids back on campus five days a week and i think that's an exciting conversation for us to start to have to look forward to a future where we can take what we've learned and apply it when we have the kids there in front of us five days a week so a lot of pd a lot of teacher hard work and we're getting excited to start seeing some kids a lot more frequently than we've been able to up until now great thank you mr g appreciate it uh turn it over to kevin schwartz hi mr schwartz from the intermediate building uh thank you dr terranova um first i'd just like to

026share an update um on some instructional work that we're doing um in a few weeks we're going to begin round two of our nwea map testing and for those who are not familiar with nwea it's a universal screening tool that we introduced back in october it aligns to new york state standards and ela and math and it provides authentic data for students which we can then use to drive targeted interventions and um we were a bit apprehensive about trying to get this off the ground back in september because of all that came with covet and the management but we're grateful we decided to proceed particularly given the fact that our last new york state assessment data goes back to 2019 so we thought that was important what's unique about the nwea assessment is that it

027norms to student responses so for instance if students answer questions correctly they become more rigorous and if they do not answer them correctly they norm to their abilities so what this really does is it helps pinpoint specific areas of strength or or improvements we're going to conduct these assessments three times a year for all of our students and we believe this is a perfect time to introduce it because of the many impacts of covid the closures uh students learning remotely and those remote students will also be afforded the opportunity to take the assessment we think it's going to assist our classroom teachers as well as our ais teachers would be more targeted with their work creating groups with similar needs you know providing extensions for students and planning for needed staffing so just thank you

028to stacey thibodeaux and michelle maloney our assistant principals who are instrumental in getting this off the ground and organizing all the logistics with technology and related supports and then lastly i just wanted to thank two groups of people uh the first is our music staff they have been working really tirelessly to create you know create collaborative ways for students to come together and perform even though they're no longer preparing for concerts so whether it be recording individual kids and creating virtual group performances partnering kids up virtually sharing performances with parents with technology organizing many performing cohorts which played throughout the building during the holiday season i know our orchestra department right now is working to connect our intermediate kids with mark wood who's a visiting musician these efforts have really helped to maintain enthusiasm within

029our kids even though they don't have that ability to showcase all their hard work in a traditional concert setting this year thanks to them and lastly just a thanks to our clerical staff our nurses and our assistant principals we've had a very busy week this week with uh quarantines and the related needs for contact tracing uh you know having creative sub coverages and lots of questions lots of communication and despite all of this they just continue to be resilient professional and positive i just feel it's important to acknowledge them because they're helping with all of this work in addition to carrying out all the tasks that they're typically charged for doing so thank you to that group for allowing our ability to continue to function successfully every day thanks guys thanks mr schwartz appreciate it

030i'm going to turn it over now to uh our next two principles are technically known as interim principles but they're absolutely way more than that and danny dean who is a legendary principal in our district from for over 20 years we are thankful that she is able to come back and support our primary building for the rest of this school year so uh thank you danny and uh if you want to give a quick update that'd be great sure hi everybody it certainly feels like i'm coming back to a a place that is like a well-worn shoe i have to say that out of the 19 total days and 16 of those days have been when the children and the staff have been there a significant amount of my time has been connecting with individuals

031and various constituencies to first get my head wrapped around all that's new and primarily that is around understanding the framework and the processes for both the hybrid and the remote models that are being implemented i've also spent a significant amount of time gathering background information and understanding all of the elements to make a quality decision for the framework if we were ever to go to 100 percent remote um so that 100 remote plan is nearly finalized um all of those constituencies include individuals and groups of people i'm most excited about meeting with the building council tomorrow which will include a parent perspective and um and recognizing that that voice is just as important and critical in all of these conversations as well there are a number of systems in place for supporting so many elements

032of that have come to life during the pandemic for both the children and the staff and i i've spent a lot of time as well in classrooms meeting children reacquainting myself with old old friends and of course most importantly the new staff at the primary school and as my colleagues have already reiterated i have to really applaud the entire staff for all of their evident dedication and commitment to creating a quality environment during this very unique time in just so many different varied ways and it's great to be back it's nice to see so many friendly and familiar faces right here thanks danny appreciate it uh and then last but certainly not least uh at least uh monica macaluso are uh again titled interim principal at the early childhood school but much more than that

033uh monica comes to us uh with significant experience in a great leadership experience at spencerport central school district we're lucky to have her again for the rest of this year uh as dorothy d'angelo shifts over to the assistant superintendent for human resources so monica thanks for being here appreciate it and uh if you give a quick update that'd be great sure well like danny i'm counting how many days i've been in the district so far and i think it's a nine and seven total or something like that so it's been really busy just trying to navigate my way through the school learn all the faces even though they're half covered um learn a little bit about how to be a school leader during the times of coronavirus because i've not experienced that before but i've

034had a chance to meet a lot of people including the the building council and grade level coordinators and many of the administrators and district office staff everybody has just been so helpful speaking of the ptsa i was told that they brought in some great treats in december that the staff really enjoyed those treats and that they lasted for for days and really you know brightened the time just before the holidays um working with the council we're trying to do some work on the website we're hearing from parents that sometimes they need just a little bit more support with the at-home learning because they don't have some of the background and some of our strategies and some of our instructional resources so i met earlier this week with sheri lasky and we're going to be doing

035some work with the website to make sure that it's just a little bit more helpful for parents with all that at home learning that they're doing i did want to mention that one of our kindergarten teachers kim galena is working on collecting mittens and gloves for the victor farmington um food cupboard she's collecting through the end of january so if you have any mittens and gloves that you want to donate if you can find a way to get them to school it would be great to add them to our collection um and i think that's about it so far but again i appreciate how helpful especially my assistant principal melissa goh she really has gone above and beyond and um answered all of my questions the big ones and the small ones but the staff's

036been great thanks so much monica appreciate all the work of five principals are doing uh leading our district and appreciate this campus news so that's it for the campus news miss elliott i love this district i love hearing it that's my favorite part of the meeting is hearing all the great things going on in our district and welcome to those who i haven't met i hate this virtual thing but uh we're so glad you're here this is elliot i just say one thing yes monica thank you for coming in and being so diligent during this time it's it's very important so welcome welcome to the family and danny welcome home thank you so on to uh agenda item 7b which is um a bit of an update of our capital project things going on construction-wise

037around our district i will welcome i'm going to send it over to dr terra nova who has some introductions for us i think i see george spineris there george are you there yes sir i am friendly amazing because we didn't know uh whether you're uh technological system was working about 20 minutes ago but you have figured out a way to come back you have some camaraderie let's call them friends and work mates there with you in case you need help alex and dave but uh i think i'm gonna turn it over to you now right to do the uh update on our incredible capital project that we always want to make sure the community knows in terms of our progress excellent went through three computers to get on here but i'm glad i'm here and

038nice to see everybody tonight um i need somebody to actually share or flip through the slides if i could trouble somebody to do that i i can do it george okay share screen or you have it dave yep thank you all right so here to talk about again the 2021 capital improvement project there were two phases as you know so i'll talk about both phases flip slide please so the approved referendum was a little over 29 million dollars phase one construction value was three million six one six uh incidental budget for the project was a little over five million dollars the construction budget after phase one was a million six little over and the available funds for phase two construction as a total is 1873. so that's the combined so during phase one uh there

039were actually three projects that were completed at the primary school we completed the roof uh project which is was a total tear off so these are just some of the photos just to you know show everybody where uh the project and sequence of events so this project was completed over the summer months and went into a little bit into september but these are the photos of the new roof system next slide please thank you second portion of it uh during phase one was the intermediate flooring replacement project so up on the far left you can see and on the bottom left you can see what it looked like after we ripped up the spaces the center photo how it came out and then the carpeting install on the right side so it really did jazz

040up all of the classrooms and we got rid of that old junky carpet throughout the whole school and now we have a beautiful rubber norah floor which is easy to clean and easy to maintain so that's a beautiful ad to the school itself next slide and the third portion of phase one was the intermediate school playground um and it's just a beautiful facility and i'm hoping after colbot and everything else is done the kids can really enjoy so that concludes phase one portion so phase two um sequence of events is in november uh 18 the referendum was approved august 31st we submitted drawings to sed we anticipate the approvals sometime in january approvals are now pending so we we hope to hear any day now and and and have approval so that we can move

041forward to the bid phase and we plan on bidding sometime in february towards the end of february uh and then we plan on awarding the contracts at the march board meeting construction then after the successful bidders and approval by the board for the awarded contracts would then start march 21 and go through november of 2022 uh november uh and december of 2022 we'd be closing out the project so that's the sequence of events so hopefully we'll have sed approvals within the next two weeks uh there will be six contracts site contractor general trades contractor roofing contractor heating ventilation air conditioning hvac electric contractor and plumbing contractor so we're gonna actually spread it out quite nicely so that we can get the most bang for our dollar when we put this out to bid so a

042quick synopsis of everything that will transpire within the schools in the early childhood school there'll be a classroom addition which is third level third floor so it's one over one um additional uh toilet rooms access from the exterior so by the playground towards the back of the building underneath there'll be uh toilet rooms that will be put in place and then we're going to be ventilating the actual crawl space down below and there'll be a total tear off of the ecs roof which goes into the business area primary school cafeteria serving line will be renovated there'll be some new kitchen equipment uh added basement ventilation there as well and then the playground will be replaced and we have some renderings that dave will present later on junior high school new senior high we have renovation

043of addition to the high school locker rooms um we will be exhausting various rooms hvac equipment and air handlers will be replaced they're old so they'll be updated and we will be repairing the track surface and the existing bus garage um there's going to be a few interior renovations and the plan is to move the copy center and the records room into this building creating more space in classroom space hopefully in future transportation building it's actually a new building there'll be a few renderings towards the end of the presentation district-wide improvements basically drainage on the east side of the campus and some asphalt repairs so it's just a synopsis of all the work that we'll be transpiring this spring going through next year so this slide pretty much shows and i'll be quick as the

044proposed project areas so in the ecs the crawl space ventilation will start in the summer of 2021 construction of the classrooms we plan on having the third store actually enclosed before school starts so that way again students can come in down below the product it won't be totally finished but it'll be enclosed next slide please so this is a rendering or a drawing of the classrooms that will be added to the early childhood school which again is one over one so uh again this week in uh interject here don't read too much into the room names yet they're just temporary um and what grades are going where that's totally uh is in flux right now so it's just purely to have grades levels on there for state edge this is the placeholder yes sir okay

045thank you in the end it would all be a district decision of what classroom what grade level goes in that level of that the addition there so this is uh um very simple rendering of what that third floor is going to look like uh it's just going to be a mirror image of what's below it so we wanted to show you one last time i know you saw something similar back when we were talking about the original scope um so just a little graphic representation of what that will look like in the end uh the rest of the building won't be shaded out like that just purely to show you what part of it's the addition uh and this is the serving line that will happen at the primary school so there will be modifications

046to the existing serving line so this is uh a graphical rendering of what the primary school playground will look like at the end of the project very colorful completely accessible to all students and a little breakout areas and play areas the blue you see is a rubber surface it's similar to some of the rubber surface that you see at the intermediate school playground we specifically designed that to be in some of the we'll call them fall zones or swing zones um so the students were if they do fall uh or jump off of something they're landing on rubber and not wood chips which is what the beige material is that you see in the renderings the blue material that's that's like like a rubberized track area so it's yes shredded rubber there no okay i

047don't know why um that's exactly what it is uh mr parks dr parker so it's not shredded rubber like like rubber mulch it's actually no no rubber laid down okay correct it's a poured it's a poured rubber material it's the exact same material that or the design is the exact same materials that the that is at the intermediate school currently um if you wanted to see exactly what that looked like but yes it's a poured rubber material it is not rubber chipped thank you it is a lot thicker so it does give um how long would that does that last before it has to be replaced how does it hold up with weather yeah good longevity yes it does i mean it's going to be a product that'll be down there for a number of

048years that the district won't have to worry about unlike wood chips it doesn't deteriorate it doesn't have to be replaced and not replaced infilled as the students use it and so it'll last a number of years without a problem is there a maintenance on it no ma'am no okay it looks great all right so this slide represents represents the work that is going to transpire over the junior senior high school which is basically lock room is up on the top left corner that's the majority of the work uh this is also a drawing of the locker room edition dave do you want to comment on anything on this or uh no we just worked with the district uh staff to to come up with the best solution what you're not seeing here is some of

049the renovations that are happening in the uh existing locker room area to accommodate the fact that the team spaces are being moved out of the student locker room and that is being renovated and replaced with lockers that are appropriate for the students not not the athletes i they could be used for athletes if needed so this is just a it's a black and white rendering but uh essentially uh this is the fitness center above on the second floor and then this is going to be the addition that we're putting in um obviously not a lot of windows because this is a locker room and we don't want windows in the locker rooms so just a simple graphic representation and you're not getting rid of the bathrooms that are on the exterior no ma'am nope still

050accessible around that corner yep this is the the scare tower to get to the second floor now and the bathrooms are tucked behind that right now and we are not um affecting those so those are still usable for spectators and they're not part of any of the renovation those are single use right those are singles stall okay yes ma'am will they will they still be accessible during the renovation george i have to look at the site safety and logistics plan i know that we took quite a bit of space over there but we left the egress the door so that students can come out i think whichever has to happen to be compliant is understandable it's just a matter from from a district planning standpoint for you know mr weimer for phys ed health education

051any outdoor activities so that they can plan okay thank you we will work with him and if we have to move the temporary fencing we'll make sure that he has access to anything that he needs right the door to the stair tower needs to be maintained at all times for egress from the second floor so you know george and i will work together to make sure that that portion of the building is accessible thank you you just addressed the next question was that does not affect code compliance as far as evacuation egress not it'll affect it a little bit and we just need to work working through that with campus on the first floor from the gymnasium right but it's not going to affect the second floor egress and it's only during construction would it

052be affected it's not a permanent um problem and just to let you know we did thank you we did put a site safety logistics plan to get together and that will be included in the specifications for the contractor so they know where to put up their temporary barriers same uh issues that occur over at the ecs so there are you know we maintain the means of egress by fencing um that poses a few additional challenges there but we do have overhead protection since we'll be laying brick and if there is an emergency where students need to come out they will be protected at all times so all of those items are considered and again they're put on paper in the spec in the spec book so that the contractors know where and how we have

053to protect the students and staff at all times so it does so does the district for the building does the building evacuation plan need to temporarily change no as of now it does not because the means of league rest are maintained thank you the uh exterior is a the brick for continuity yes ma'am it's going to be by design the same brick that's currently on the building uh this is just a drawing of the existing bus garage so there'll be some minor modifications within this structure itself i'm sorry was that that was the new bus garage was it can you go no that was the existing bus okay so this is just the some of the additional that are going to be constructed the records uh storage room uh in this uh in this building

054itself i apologize this is the new bus garage there we go there's the baby uh there's a few renderings that they will be um showing you uh the next slides but we intend on breaking ground or starting to work uh on the site uh march of 2021 going through june of 2022 so there's quite a bit of work to be done in this area and it's quite exciting it's always fun to work on a new build and this certainly is a beautiful design and i'm really looking forward to working on it so this is uh um if you can envision where this is on the pr on the property this is to the the buildings going to the south of the current bus parking lot um pretty much right next to adjacent to where the

055um the road from the access road from the upper loop road comes into the bus property so you're standing right now kind of where the buses park just to familiarize yourself a little bit um so what you see to the left of the building is the uh wash bay which is a drive-through wash bay and then there's five maintenance bays that are sized appropriately for the future and for any bus size that the district may pursue later on and then to the far right is the we'll call it the office area of the transportation building where um the direct darren and others would be housed during the day here's a uh image what you're standing in right now is the new parking lot for the staff and any visitors to the transportation building um and

056the where you see the young lady and the young child uh walking in is the main entrance to the the public entrance to the bus garage there is a driver's entrance that's along the side um that they would have direct access inside the building dave is that going to be a secure entrance yes ma'am um this is just a shot looking from uh loop road uh the upper loop road pretty much uh behind where or right adjacent to where the construction trailers are located currently um just to uh give you guys a point of reference there so we tried our best to capture as much light and data and windows so that the as you're working in the mechanical bays you can view out over campus and participate with the campus that way and that's

057all i got for pretty pictures if i may note alex schrader will be my assistant project manager on a project and i know he's on a call so um he's going to be a great asset to the project sorry my my audio dropped for a moment is that uh is that built you may have discussed this is the building a fob in or scanning you know what i mean okay yeah i thought um i think miss baylor had that question uh well that's secure from a standpoint of people have to go through and get cleared but the district employee can just the but the badge will get them in yes yes it'll be very similar to the rest of the buildings on campus where there's key fob to get in just like the other buildings

058thank you dave i have a question yes sir were you able to uh paint the go bills uh insignia on the roof of the uh transportation center like i asked yeah yes sir we'll figure that one out don't worry should be go blue devils you're right thank you so much for um that presentation and again we invite the community if you have any specific questions regarding our capital improvement project please forward those to dr terra nova we can get those to our construction team and answers back to you if you have anything in regards to that uh without any delay we're going to move to 7c in our agenda for the evening which is a presentation by miss devrilay uh regarding our instruction leadership analysis process dr terranova did you have any other introduction yes

059thank you miss elliot so as uh dr lay it puts up the powerpoint i want to introduce her she is uh she is a incredible addition to our district uh she originally worked as interim uh associate superintendent or acting associate superintendent i apologize uh when kristen swann was out and and now that we have kristen back she is acting as a consultant to our district which we greatly appreciate uh significant experience as a superintendent a highly successful superintendent of wheatland chili before she retired and before that she had years and years experience as a assistant superintendent for instruction and teacher in multiple school districts across the state so we're really lucky to have deb lay here before i turn it over to her i want to remind everybody around the strategic next steps that we're

060taking as a district after dr lay presents mr stutzman and i mostly mr stutzman will present on the budget process as we move forward in the month of january so that's our first big step the long-term financial planning that's occurring now between now and february as we approach the budget process in march and april uh what deb is going to talk about is an analysis and recommendations for instructional leadership structure she's going to talk about the process she's going to utilize to go through that uh that process in terms of looking at our leadership structure especially as it pertains to our instructional leadership structure and then over time she will make some recommendations to myself which i will then uh present to the board of education later in the school year around uh what the

061most effective leadership structure would look like and then afterwards in the summer we're going to really dig into our overall district strategic planning process that should take place between july and december of 2021 to really focus our district on the essential objectives of what we want our kids to know be able to do and what we're going to be about as a district that will be a huge uh huge event and a huge process that will involve significant community input and leadership so we're looking forward to that so i just wanted to give you a sense of where uh this particular process falls into the bigger strategic planning that includes finance and of course overall district strategic planning so at this point i'm going to turn it over to dr lay who will talk a

062little bit more around the process she's going to utilize to analyze our leadership structure well thank you dr terra nova and thank you to the board for providing me with a few minutes this evening just to talk about this proposal so you can see the objective is really to review and then make recommendations on the instructional leadership structure we're going to really focus on efficiency accountability and cohesiveness and certainly making sure that our focus is to continually improve student learning within the district and as dr terra nova has shared this is a review that he's requested and he's highlighted some of my background i have worked in at greece central clarkstown as well as most recently at wheatland chili and currently in the district really helping to support the hybrid learning and the 100 learning

063that's occurring so the scope of the work um we're going to take a look at the current structure and look at how the supervision occurs the planning and the decision making as well as that information flow between and among the administrative and the teacher leaders for the purpose of the review the instructional leadership will be the administrative positions as well as the teacher leader positions and all of these positions are referenced in collective bargaining agreements and in board policy so in terms of the actual review we'll first of all start with documents which i've had a chance to review many of them in my time that i've been in the district and so this will be policies the collective bargaining agreements as well as the job descriptions i'll create questionnaires to complete individual interviews of

064administrative staff the administrative staff will be all of the district office staff so the assistant superintendent associates superintendent all of the directors as well as the principals and the assistant principals in the district i will also be preparing a questionnaire to do uh individual interviews for our teacher leader staff and so in that group we do have five standards leaders in the areas of math science social studies and english there are five instructional coaches in english and math as well as two mentor teachers and i will also be interviewing the um vta president uh in terms of the teacher leader staff we do we have nearly uh 60 i think there are 59 teacher leaders in various different positions throughout the district so i'll be creating a survey to gather information from from that group

065and these are really people who are school-based leaders and they're supporting content level and grade level leadership within the district finally i will be comparing victor to similar districts and in order to do that we'll take a look at the combined wealth ratio the enrollment in the district the percentage of students with disabilities the economically disadvantaged children as well as the actual uh budget amount i'll be looking for several districts in the finger lakes area and then depending upon what the analysis has to show there may be one or two districts outside of the finger lakes area so by march i will have general findings from the interviews and i just want to share that all of the interviews will be confidential so there will be no mention of any individual but rather aggregate findings

066i'll also take a look at the survey results from the teacher leaders again preparing a summary of that and then do a summary of information collected from comparison districts because we're looking at um structures and what might be occurring in other districts that are very similar to victor and then finally we'll be creating recommendations based upon this information the final report will be completed by april so the preliminary uh information will be available and then the final report will be prepared in april so that actually concludes the overview of the proposal i'm wondering if you have any questions okay deb just when you do comparables to absolutely include ontario county absolutely you okay well thank you very much for the time i appreciate it and as i'm working through the process i'll be working closely

067with dr terra nova as the questionnaires are designed the surveys are designed the template i'll be gathering documentation from the similar schools in addition to gathering information so i'll be working very closely with him and keeping him apprised of where we are in the process so again thank you for the time i appreciate it thank you so much dr lay appreciate all your work and our there's a great deal of confidence in your efforts thank you so much well thank you very much i feel honored to be in the district so i appreciate this opportunity thank you so dr taranova i'm going to bounce it back to you with mr stutzman to talk a little bit about our budget updates yes thank you miss elliott uh i'm going to [Music] share the screen i believe

068uh there we go so um this is our second budget presentation uh we started the process in december i'm going to review uh just a few slides that are the same as the last presentation because for continuity purposes we really felt like we want to center everybody back to where everything starts right started back in june 17th 2020 when this community did an incredible job of overriding the tax cap with a super majority vote and uh our statement to the uh to the public at that point which we've shared many times doesn't doesn't uh shirk any responsibility we continue to be in a perilous financial situation that's been building for years we will need to collect the wisdom of this community to continue to move forward uh reminded everybody that in july dr rick timm's

069a financial expert especially with school districts uh came up with some very strong recommendations for the district around needing to develop a multi-year strategic financial plan needing to stabilize spending throughout the year and end budget modifications that have been occurring mid-year he had significant concerns over our lack of reserves and built in fund balance and knows you know was very clearly pointed out what we all know right now that we have some uh challenging revenue issues around state aid sales tax and certainly local taxes that led to our financial philosophy moving forward where we need to continue to offer a high quality comprehensive education but also balance those needs of our community members especially at a time like now where many people are struggling financially uh people are losing their jobs small businesses are in

070are challenging are in challenging situations as well and we need to be cognizant of our community and then lastly before i turn it over to mr stutzman just a reminder around the budgetary goals that are certainly tied to our philosophy we've got to maintain that comprehensive education that makes victor stand out and makes it special and supports all of our kids at this point we are working very closely with our administrative staff to refine what we are what we value in our district to look for efficiencies in spending in all areas and really prioritize what is most essential in what we offer next year versus what's nice to do and what's important because in some cases we're going to really need to focus more on the highest priorities versus what's nice to do and important

071even though those are important things but we don't necessarily have the money to spend on everything so we're really they're doing a great job with multiple meetings over the next actually over probably a six week period to really get some efficiencies figure out where we need to spend more money where we need to spend less money where we can save money to separate to really close the gap to what mr stutzman's going to show you in a second which is a reminder of that initial budget gap we want to close that as much as possible but continue to offer that comprehensive education which will then lead us over the next two to three months to create that multi-year financial plan through the board of education's leadership which will allow us to stabilize reserves develop consistent

072budgetary practices again maximize those efficiencies generate aid for future years and certainly uh continue the transparency that we we have set around our financial situation with the community so those are our main budget goals that's our budget philosophy that's where we came from in terms of last year those aren't going to change uh what will change and be adjusted is what we what we finalize as we move through this budgetary process so i'm going to turn it over to mr stutzman who's going to take us through more specifics uh remind us about the rollover budget and then certainly talk more about reserves and fund balance thank you tim uh the reason why uh when tim and i talked about how to start this presentation tonight i've always had the philosophy that it's important to re-emphasize

073why and how we're putting this budget together and those were the slides that dr terenova reviewed with you as far as the rollover budget again salary and fringe benefits increases based upon contracts uh fringe benefits are linked to the projected rates for the retirement systems and uh health and dental uh is pretty firm what the retirement rates are going to be the health and dental uh we will be having a meeting uh sometime i think it's in the next couple of weeks to finalize the rates for next year uh same with actually workers comp is tomorrow and as we as we get closer then we'll start modifying the expenditures and the goal would be at the budget workshop is to provide you a up-to-date ex spending plan on the expense side that will take into

074account some of the efficiencies that we've been starting to realize uh over the last couple of weeks and again we're the goal is to maintain uh our current programs but also comply with all the mandates that are out there uh debt service will increase uh we will be working on the workshop on the 28th fiscal advisors will be with us to review with you our debt service projections over the next five years uh we factored in utility increases in gasoline for a while i was thinking that i may have been too uh maybe too aggressive with the rates of increase but i think the gallon of gas has gone up from 250 where i'd buy it to 239 at night so i think i'm in pretty good shape there uh private school tuition rates will

075definitely go up boces uh this is mrs afrante and myself we actually met with the computer centers from both the wayne freeway's boces the monroe one boces about a week and a half ago there's some pretty firm numbers that uh we feel very positive towards so those numbers are starting to finalize hopefully by the end of next week we'll have final both these rates the cost structure for the following year we've already put together a sprint deal i got to plug in the numbers and the goal would be to give you on the 28th day more definite what we will be spending at boces for the 2021-20 school year moving on this has not changed yet but it will our current expenditure increase is 4 million 428 uh it will be less than that i

076will tell you that right now the hard part and i'll get into it when we start talking about next step is the revenue side so that's that's where we are as far as the expenses but there were a couple slides during uh dr terra nova's portion of this they talked about fund balances debt services and service and reserves uh when i listened to dr tims in august i started to scratch my head a little bit because i got the impression that we did not have uh reserves or if we did they were what we had was limited so that's the focus of tonight's presentation so reserves come from fund balance and what fund balance is it's the amount of surplus that is generated during a fiscal year due to revenues coming in greater than projected

077and our expenditures being less than what we had budgeted and really that is the goal because it's extremely hard to budget a penny and within a 78 million dollar budget uh i don't think that is a good sound fiscal practice the appropriated fund balance is the amount of surplus you allocated towards next year taxes and you'll see in a future slide that has been at 529 000 at least since 2013. the goal would be long term would be not to use any appropriate any form balance to lessen the taxes okay if we can stabilize our spending patterns uh they may be able to go away and that 000 could be used to uh put additional funds into your reserves the unappropriate fund balance is the surplus that is carried over to the following school year

078to in the case of anticipated ordinary contingent expenses and the debt service reserves are funds generated from this fir surplus remaining when we close out a campaign of the time you do not spend the entire amount so that money is moved into the death term it's fun and a few years ago you refinanced and because of the what they call discounts that the successful uh financial institution gave us we were able to generate some tremendous surplus that we were able to put in the debt service fund the debt service reserve can only be used to lessen the debt of the district so the eight year history of the fund balance and by the way this is one year added on to a document that uh mr schickler did for you guys last year uh back

079in 2013 you can see that our debt service was at two million four seventy nine again the the appropriate fund balance is 529 but the unappropriate fund balance back in 13 is 2 256 000. currently in 2020 at the end of june of this past year the debt service reserve was 2 million 310 000 the appropriate fund balance is 529 and your unappropriated fund balance was 3 million and 130. f3 130 represents what is the left after money got placed into reserve funds at the end of the year and in june uh you were presented with a memo with amounts not to exceed which would go into the various reserves and that would be the same practice we would use uh this coming june uh the inappropriate fund balance for those eight years with the

080exception of 2014 was that the four percent limit that's commendable okay you should be proud of that uh and then the fiscal year 2014 we didn't hit the 4 when we were 3.8 so from from the standpoint of budgeting you are doing fairly well and then we'll you'll see how the reserve funds grew and you were able to use them during that eight year period of time as we move on question so far okay that's good okay so here's our current reserve fund you have an employee retirement reserve ers uh and that is used to minimize the amount of increase on a yearly basis due to increases in your retirement cost for your support staff same concept for teachers retirement system this is new we were not allowed to have a trs reserve up until

081the last until 2019 what it is it's one reserve for retirement broken into ers the prs capital reserve which you've used which is now almost depleted is used to offset the local share of any capital project that you may undertake the unemployment reserve is to help defray the budget impact on unemployment claims which for the 2020-21 school year uh there may be somebody sitting at this meeting who will tell you the claims are astronomical we're fighting every one of them but we're making some progress but our unemployment bill for the current year will be far greater than it has been in the past employee benefit accrued liability is used to pay accrued employee benefits upon retirement we've used that religiously throughout the last few years and will continue to do so workers compensation again is

082used to defray the workers comp costs uh i will know tomorrow but it looks like we may not have a rate increase for the upcoming year a tertiary is to pay uh claims from assessment challenges and again uh we we just uh had a uh there was a decision made on a kind of vendor it'll be small but it will come from the tax tertiary so we don't have to budget for that again if there's money left over we like to restore that we try to get the reserve amount for what our legal exposure is and our liability reserve is used to cover property and liability claims let's say you you had a major loss of property well the liability reserve could be used to pay the deductible portion of what insurance doesn't pay so

083as far as your uh your reserves are concerned back into the beginning of 19 you had 265 000 in the ers reserve between interest and what we contributed here now at 569. trs you started at 533 we add the interest we we allocate the interest based upon the balances it's prorated out at the end of last year in june you contributed 525 000 but that's over a million dollars now the capital reserve as i said is almost depleted but in 2020 you took two and a half million dollars to offset the local share of the 29 million dollar capital project the unemployment reserve we we used 65 000 last year but we were able to replace 200 000 so it grew from 481 it decreased a little bit uh so that's that number moving on

084we have uh the eblar reserve we it went down a tad bit because we used a little bit more than what we put back in that's what you try to do with the with the uh unappropriated fund balance workers comp has been relatively stable we put in 75 last year tax cert we were able to put in 300 000 so at the end of end of 2020 you ended up with unappropriate fund balance of three million two well actually you take the three two and add the 1.6 million to it your unappropriate fund balance at the end of june was actually 4.8 million and you used about 25 of that to put into your reserve funds so you are you're getting closer to what you want to fit the uh reserve fund history you can

085see over eight years what happened as you see trs did not start until uh 2019 but the ers reserve has been relatively stable uh you can see that from 18 to 19 you used a portion of it to offset the increase in the uh retirement contributions uh you can see the capital reserve is still there's now only 176 000. the unemployment reserve is down roughly 70 000 80 000 over eight years ago uh the repair reserve we had a repair reserve here and it had a thousand bucks them i asked lyndon lubaczewski what was that for and asked he was in existence when she took over as treasurer and it's been a thousand dollars forever they find we finally moved it to another reserve uh i understand the reason for it but it was never

086used so we no longer have a liability reserve so you lost one the angular reserve uh we've actually used about seven hundred thousand dollars but again that pays for benefits upon retirement which again helps your budget because of the tax cap uh workers comp that's been going down uh for whatever reasons uh tax cert we're moving back up and as far as the liability reserve again you've used that over the course of years to pay whatever liability claims or may or not may not have been now here are your reef reserve fund goals and i took this uh for the presentation of the document they created last year the unemployment the employee retirement reserve should be three years of work to pay currently there would be 3.7 million dollars we have 569 000 origin now

087i want to say this just because you're not at 3 million seven does not mean you cannot use it okay you want to get to that number it's going to take time but you also need to use those reserves to help offset taxes each is retirement it's your five years of payroll multiplied uh by ten percent uh so that would be the balance would be a million we have a million sixty six but we're about a third of the way there the capital reserve again is limited i i put a note there for every 10 million dollars of capital work you do but it's you need three three million five hundred thousand dollars below share of that thirty five percent so if you do a thirty million dollar project you should really have ten million

088five hundred thousand dollars if you wanted not increase taxes pay for that for that capital pride but again that's a goal but that gives you a clear understanding as you look towards the next capital project which you may think about doing with your capital reserve uh the unemployment reserve should be 1.04 percent of payroll uh which is 560 000. we're at 425 the employees benefit uh it should be about a million six we're million six we're in a million dollars one million six thousand dollars the workers comp uh is really uh three years of our compensation bill so it's about a million dollars and right now we have 296. the tax cert we should have approximately our current exposure is 2.6 million we have 753 but every year our auditor takes a look at uh

089that would be uh our external auditor takes a look at what's pending over the last few years and we adjust the tax cert to meet that number they help us create what we should have and that was the number that uh our auditor came up with was a seven 753 their liability should be three percent of the budget which is 2.4 million those are the goals okay uh i put this out there and this is as of actually it's not even as of january 14th this is as of last thursday at about 10 30 in the morning okay i need to be very very clear about that because this changes all the time currently it looks like we would end up with a surplus on the revenue side of 250 000 however there is a

090huge caveat to that reflects there is a zero take back in state aid we have gotten word that we could be hit drastically in transportation aid and we found out late last week that our excess cost for stack claims for one-to-one teacher aides we may have to reduce the teacher rate cost by 35 because they did not really function as a one-to-one aid from march 15th to june 30th i think this is the state's way of doing a state take back without taking back saying they're taking back whatever percent so that could be a huge hit we don't know what that is it's all up to the legislature so when you meet with a legislator legislative group from the region you have to pontificate because we were told we need to maintain those costs now

091they're saying we can't get eight on it so that's i'm being very open honest and transparent the projected expenditure surplus right now is about three million i think it's higher than that matter of fact i know it's higher than that but for a number i wanted to put that there so we would end up with about 2.2 million dollars which is about four percent of our budget but i feel very confident that as we get closer towards may we'll have a real good handle on what our expenditures are think about it we have not had field trips this year so there's ex there's say there's surplus in the transportation line item until we can get our and i'm gonna call them winter sports going because i don't know if it's phase one phase two or

092phase three we're not paying referees for basketball and wrestling there are savings because we're not we're not having activities so that number would fluctuate for the positives but until we know what the state aid is going to be it's extremely extremely difficult to give you any kind of number um i said that about the major caveat we don't know any dollar they take away or we lose the state aid gets taken away from our surplus and the goal would be february 11th at the february 11th meeting we would have a better handle on the 21-22 state aid i worked i worked today with uh mike vespi from forecast five who's one of our consultants to help us build this budget and i asked him i says in all the work you do throughout the state

093with schools what are they doing on the revenue side of the budget nobody's talking about it because nobody really knows and they don't want to put a lot of effort into it until we get a much clearer direction so i'm focusing on the expense side with the revenue side once we know state aid it'll fall into place pretty quickly all right so at the end of the year if you have money that we can put in reserve number one you have to put money in the capital reserve if you want to start stabilizing your debt your dead it's imperative that you defray as much local share of that debt by putting money into a capital reserve this would be a new reserve and i'll do this another slide but dr tim's talked about it as

094a plus purchase reserve i don't see us getting to a point where we could go out and spend 900 000 a year cash for buses but if you if you take we don't spend this but let's say a million dollars on buses every year if you have 350 000 in the bus reserve every year you will not have to raise taxes to pay the local share of that bus the bus purchases technology reserve that would be another new reserve but you put money in there and every year the board can say you can allocate funds in the technology reserve to help defray technology expenditures which would could help you enhance and reach the final go to your one-to-one uh initiatives and technology and then depending upon where you need money that's how you afford the

095rental reserves uh now in may i would recommend that you seriously consider first off you definitely have to redo the capital reserve it's what they would call end of life and you would have to have another resolution to extend it for either five or ten years and then put it a dollar max on what you can put in it okay and by the way if you if you have a gold if if the max is 10 million and you take out five you can only put five more into it can't go back to ten so it's the total contributions over the course of the life of the reserve i would recommend establishing a plus purchase reserve i would recommend establishing a technology reserve this one i use this we had this in east rochester it

096was great because whenever we had to go out and buy a lawnmower or we had to buy a maintenance vehicle or uh there was some piece of a large expenditure in the instructional side of the of the equation for equipment like a large machine for your technology depart uh i'm gonna call it industrial arts going back i'm going to age myself but i think that clears it up for a lot of us though you can use that reserve to offset that so what you do is if you have to spend fifty thousand dollars on a lawnmower you could take fifty thousand dollars from the reserve what's the impact on your taxes zero so that's an option to consider now our next steps uh we continue to work with the superintendent of the personnel office and

097the rest of the administration about staffing uh we're working with the revenues but i'm really relying on forecast five to help us with that i've already talked to both uh county assessors as far as the payment in lieu of taxes what does that look like for next year but again state aid makes it problematic we're going to continue to work with both boces uh not only for uh you know the other programs but especially in the area of technology as i said i think we have a pretty good handle on it uh and then we will continue to work with the program and building administrators to work on their uh equipment supply and contractual line items which right now it looks like they're going to remain flat on january 18th we have a budget workshop

098we will provide a deeper review of the revenue hopefully in expense areas but mainly focused in on debt service boces and the other types of expenditures but i highly doubt if we're going to be able to do any type of revenue but i also i will be able to give you a tax cap calculation as of whatever the minute and date that i do it okay uh but again there's some things that i got to talk to dr terra nova about as to some of the factors that go into it you know the growth rate in victor is 1.0111 and we know the cpi for tax cap calculations is 1.023 so we do have those numbers which is good okay at least we have that done and then in february we're going to meet with

099the thought partners and we'll review the budget as we have it i would like to review the reserves with them uh go through the tax cap go through what we're thinking about as far as technology and really communicating the fact that we're doing everything possible to maximize every dollar we can generate by spending money at the right places so with that said we turn it over to questions and i try to do this in 30 minutes or less there's got to be a question just one question you you mentioned uh a penalty that we're paying uh that we may be paying for having continued to pay one-to-one teacher's aides during the beginning of the the pandemic but you also mentioned that we're we've got astronomical exposure to unemployment claims and having a hard time reconciling

100those two things uh if we've continued to pay people we haven't had furloughs haven't had staffing reductions a lot of it happened yeah uh that's what we're arguing okay but at the end of the year we give people reasonable assurance letters but for some reason you know and and by the way we're not alone mr vetter every district that i've talked to i mean it's astronomical they're starting to reconcile it a little bit uh some we win some we lose but the problem you got is is the the aid where it's not getting penalized we're going to get aid taken away because the way the aid laws read in order to get let's say transportation aid you actually actually have to transport kids okay in order to get money to offset the cost for high

101cost kids you actually have to provide a service so yeah i agree they don't go hand in hand but they do but it's the way the laws are written and they're going if if we're going to get any uh any help you're gonna have to modify the law for one year and i don't know if they're gonna if they're willing to do that so i'm just uh confused about where the additional unemployment claims came from is it that we didn't send out the reasonable assurance letter no we did we did and then people went filed anyways and now we have to demonstrate that we did do it so then those people would hold back the unemployment yes we did we did everything we were supposed to do how successful are we in recouping some of

102that payback something you win some you lose it's still early would we be up for liability if some of those um employees who did that were not invited back as staff probably it's an unfortunate situation yes it is yes it is i'm just being clear i mean there's where we are first and foremost thank you for the thoroughness of all this this is extremely helpful the when we hear about you know certain savings from whether it be coaching you identified you know obviously we're not paying referees fees because of the absence of sports of certain sports etc i just want to make i want to be clear though that it's not misinterpreted as all of a sudden okay we're having these savings and we hear that and say well that's good news but i want

103to make certain that there's not a perception that well we have these savings so now the district is flush with cash well because i'll explain that real quick okay because i just because you know we're looking at all these things and then obviously facing putting another budget together just if a little bit of specificity around that please thank you uh we're all worried about the unbudgeted covent costs okay as of a little while ago uh currently currently our unit unbudgeted anticipated coveted costs or a little over 360 000 150 of that is for the extra cleaning so if you prorate that out over four months we've spent approximately two hundred and sixty seventy thousand two hundred sixty thousand dollars on covet so the savings we make where we're not spending money goes offset those covet

104costs so it's close to a wash the other thing is is early in december i applied for to get a fema number and we went through the process and we didn't hear anything uh up until before the holiday well the week between the christmas and new year's we actually got a call from fema and wanted to set up a meeting we met with the fema people online last week last thursday we have a state fema rep and we will be able to go back and cl and at least submit all of our covet costs from january i think it's january 21st which we didn't have any but let's say from march 15th up through september 15th including the two weeks of wages that we paid for the extra cleaners including their retirement fringe benefits we

105can't go beyond uh september 15th you take away if you take away the extra staff okay we're probably at about two hundred and ten thousand dollars of covet costs i would have to say that at least 180 of those 180 000 was spent from march until september 15th so there's a possibility again it's a possibility that we could get back a significant amount of that through a fema grant so we're going to be in the process there's a couple of things we got to do first and then we're going to spend the last week in january first week in february to submit all these claims and we actually have a phone number of a person who will help us every step of the way i was very impressed with the with the with the group

106that was presented to us and what we have to do to do to get this money back we're going to try so first off thank you for that effort of trying because that's what we need the i want to be clear though the savings that we've had in the different areas kind of cobbled together a little bit here a little bit there are still outweighed by the additional costs that we've had through this process but as a district you're spearheading with fema an attempt to your point to try to get reimbursed obviously there's no guarantee but at the end of the day let's say optimistically great that's awesome news and then we're in a different position if it doesn't happen though that's still a negative delta of what it's been costing the district versus what

107we've saved thus far so whatever we say let's say let's say we saved three hundred thousand but we spent three hundred thousand so it's a wash okay i'm asking is where are we are we at the wash at the end of the day because i wanna make sure we're not stepping over you know we're not stepping over dollars to pick up a penny i can't i can't give you an exact number we're close okay all right i'm gonna put it this way i'm not overly concerned okay uh i just need to get a we're just trying to get a real good handle on where we are with fringe benefits and actual salaries paid versus what's in the budget that will be huge in letting us know where we are with with surplus we're close we're

108getting very close and we need to get we need to get it as as accurate as possible to do solid budget projections for the 2120 school year okay i just i want to make sure the community understands when we start the word surplus means different things to different people surplus could mean hey we're we're in great shape you know we're in the black we're not in the red versus surplus is getting us back to the wash that's why i make sure just people have a good understanding or a handle ourselves included as a board right as we go into the budget process so i i appreciate all the work and the explanation that you're doing i'm trying to make it as simple as possible to uh you know i mean that's why i wanted to

109define what the reserves are uh i really it's my sincere desire or hope that you do consider establishing those other reserves uh i think it would be even if you don't fund them for a couple of years at least they're on the books yeah opportunities yeah i would just add thanks dick uh remember that for years the district budgeted without with almost zero very small surplus each year if any uh which caused our reserves to significantly dwindle which is why as you see these slides there's many of our reserves including now the capital obviously after the capital project that need replenishing i'm almost looking at it as a series of factors christopher to your question so we're going to have increased covert costs because of certain reasons we're going to save some money because of

110other reasons we hope in the best case scenario that that's a wash between those two but we're not quite sure yet we hope to get federal aid fema aid to support our revenue for because of the covet crisis but we're extremely worried that we're going to get state aid taken away this year and potentially next year which would offset the fema aid so those four factors you know state aid versus federal support if we get our complete state aid and the federal support that's a game changer i think that helps a ton if we can keep our losses uh due to or our expenses due to covet increases in line with what we can save that's a very helpful thing and hopefully we're going to have more answers as we move through the next couple

111months as we start to really get a defined expense and revenue situation in front of us my goal would be at the february 11th board meeting to be able to share with you what our fema submittal was or is okay at least you have an idea any other questions thank you very much for that mr stuxman uh i know i took some notes and each time we do a presentation like this i gain a little bit more insight and it certainly is um is not it it's like a big puzzle and all the pieces go in come out and uh hopefully we'll have more clarity as we move closer to that budget date the um was there any other discussion anybody with that no okay so uh if i may moving on to the next

112item in our agenda which is 7e which is the first reading of a policy number 5010 on student gender identity there was a little conversation um in our planning about just a quick uh just a discussion not discussion but kind of a learning about how readings go for our community members that might have questioned this is uh dr chernova did you want to take this yes that'd be great thanks miss ellie let me just give you a little background so as as we look at the research in the the state ed department in july of 2015 uh put a strong statement out around guidance to school districts for creating safe and supportive school environments for transgender and gender non-conforming students and said that they are committed to providing all public school students including transgender and

113gender non-conforming students with an environment free from discrimination and harassment to fostering civility in public schools and to ensuring that every student has equal access to educational programs and activities then in 2018 based upon the united states department of education who confirmed that it would no longer investigate civil rights complaints from transgender students especially specific to access to bathrooms consistent with their gender identity not only to the state of new york office of the attorney general but also the new york state education department came out strongly to say that both of those groups find it imperative once again to remind school districts across new york state that irrespective of federal government's recent announcements they have independent duties to protect transgender students from discrimination and harassment in their schools and at all school functions they also

114said that the federal government's announcement has no bearing upon school districts independent duties under new york state law to protect their transgender students and ensure those students equal access to all school resources and all school programming so because of that uh and some of the research that we did we felt like it was imperative that we have a student gender identity policy not only to protect all kids but also to give the district and the board of education guidance to follow when situations develop so this is going to be the first reading of that policy i'll just highlight a couple thank pieces to it at the beginning it says all students need a safe and supportive educational environment to progress academically and developmentally developmentally the district is committed to fostering a safe learning environment for

115all students free from discrimination and harassment on the basis of sex gender gender gender identity gender gender non-conformity and gender expression the policy then is focused on key terms related to student gender gender identity record keeping names and pronouns utilized restroom and locker rooms physical education and sports processes other activities and dress code and team uniforms because it's a first reading this is the initial update to the board and then board policies that are brand new to the district will have again a first reading with the board of education after they have been and then vetted by the board after the first reading we will then send this policy to constituent groups with a deadline for their feedback these groups include district council building council senior high school student council and as well as bargaining

116unit presidents across the three bargaining units and parent organizations including ptsa pi and voice we're going to get the feedback back from those groups and then uh bring that back to the board for a second reading uh a final approval will come with the third reading so it's a pretty extensive process around policy development in our district and this is the first stage of that process any questions from the board regarding the student gender identity policy and the process we're going to follow um yeah this is tim i have a couple of questions um number one i was impressed with the read i mean it's very complete um i'm wondering where it was originally generated is it something the district did our legal team did or did it come from nisbo or state ed uh

117a combination actually uh so we utilized monroe boces who has a service for policy development but we also utilized some of the experts among us including multiple retired superintendents who brought together policies from their districts that have already been put in place we're then vetting this policy with our attorneys to make sure it fits the legal legal requirements that uh that we need to have so it's a combination of those and because most districts do have this policy in place okay and then my final question is at the very bottom of the policy it's got 5 000 students is that just a placeholder yes thank you you're welcome other questions from the board okay so uh again we'll follow this very i'm very impressed with the victor central school district policy review process it's extensive

118um and it involves significant constituent feedback so i think it'll be very appreciative and turn and make sure that this ends up to be the strongest policy we can have and the most effective so thank you thank you dr terranova for that uh overview of how policies are are considered number eight in our agenda for tonight is um an update on the meeting reports we'll start with any from the monroe county school board association committee and i usually hand the baton over to mr delucia any updates there sir sure i'll talk about the legislative committee meeting that took place on january 6th the discussion was about planning legislative priorities and advocacy for the 2021 legislative session so i'll just read a couple of highlights here members agreed to send a letter to the us department

119of education secretary to introduce the association and represent the needs of public education in our area they also want to highlight they wish to highlight the impact of charter schools on public education they also discussed meeting with newly elected legislators to acquaint them with the association's function and priorities new legislators need to know the associate that no the association can function as a resource for them regarding any legislation current proposed related to public education and then members would also like to re meet with uh seated legislators as well to work with them on priorities for the new legislative session including funding for schools you know there are concerns that exist regarding changes to or disabling to foundation aid formula um a definition of the budget schedule and school boats such as absentee voting allowances and

120format as well as candidate petitions uh vaccine logistics and uh local control and mandate relief those were the highlights of the legislative priorities from the committee on january 6th thank you a other i i attended an executive meeting uh just last night and without getting into the details just on some ideas of topics that were discussed among board presidents and vice presidents across the county uh there's discussion about uh information coming in about elections in may how those will be rolled out um conversation around advocacy like mr delusion was talking about a task force regarding vaccinations staff and personnel school personnel vaccinations was a topic of conversation another one was on health and welfare mental health of staff maintaining positive morale and then um just keeping up with the cost of just sharing uh the

121costs of covid um and working together on on that so that was just a you know reiterating some of the same uh topics and concerns that many of our community members and constituents have and those conversations are happening and we roll that back out to the public so the arts hall of fame we will be meeting virtually on february 10th that's the update there okay thanks for that i was just about to call up any other uh committee updates and then i do have one more thing uh from the information exchange committee they're looking for suggestions on topics and they asked us to talk to our boards to find out if there are subjects that you would like to have presented let me let me list the ones that have been suggested so far uh

122gates chili had suggested a possible presentation on dyslexia um members also requested an update on webster's start time conversion however in the current environment that's probably not one that will be taken up right now rush henrietta rush henrietta had suggested they could present on the changing role of the communications director which might be interesting based on budget and advocacy challenges that that lay ahead in the past greece has offered to talk about community schools and then um they were asking for any other topics that this board might be interested in submitting as an idea or a request so if you have any i you know don't expect an answer tonight um but think about it and if there's something that you think would be of interest for the information exchange committee pass it along and

123i will bring that to the to monroe county school board association thank you thank you very much um so in number nine of our agenda back to any public comment let me just uh invite the community again after seeing our presentations tonight uh despite the fact that there is no live public participation we continue to invite you to extend your thoughts or comments through email to dr terranova at terra nova t victorschools.org and again all of those emails that come in dr terranova shares with the board and his leadership and we thank you very much for that please again your name so we can reach back out to you otherwise we will not respond to comments made in anonymity and to just highlight some upcoming events we have a budget workshop on thursday january 28th

124um the next board meeting will be on thursday february 11th and then another board uh budget workshop on february 25th so starting after starting in this month because of the hard work that we're doing on the budget we will be basically work you know reaching out to our community every two weeks so keeping track of that calendar as well does anybody have anything else to share for the greater good well if that's the case thank you dr parks ahead of me so anyone to second that motion to adjourn our meeting mrs turner thank you so much um have a good evening everybody stay safe and stay well um we wish you all the best and thank you for joining us have a good evening