001Good evening and welcome to the state of the district event. Thank you to everyone, family, staff, and community members for being here tonight. The purpose of tonight's meeting is to hear from our superintendent, Dr. Huff, as he shares key updates about our facilities, enrollment, finances, and staffing across Elcart Community Schools. Before we begin, just a couple of quick notes. Dr. Huffer present the state of the district and you can submit questions using the forms provided. These questions will be answered at the upcoming meetings on Thursday, October 16th and Monday, October 20th, and later shared on our website and board meetings. Our goal tonight is to provide clear, factual information and to make sure everyone leaves with a better understanding of where we are as a school district and where we're headed next. With that, please
002join me in welcoming Dr. Huff. [Applause] Thank you, Mrs. Wood. Appreciate it. Good evening, everyone. As I said before, my name is Dr. Larry Huff. I'm the proud superintendent of Elcart Community Schools. And today, I I'm going to need your help to remind me to slow down so I am not just up here going through very quickly. But most importantly, I'm glad I'm here and have the opportunity to share this information with you this evening. Before we begin, I would like to thank our board of trustees. I would like to thank our teachers. I would like to thank our administrators. And I would like to thank our staff. But most importantly, I would like thank you for coming out tonight and sharing listening a little bit about the district. First and foremost, I am very
003proud. There are a lot of amazing things going on in our school district. Not just this year, not just last year. We have a history of doing great things in our school district. Very proud to be an Elcart Lion. And so tonight's state of the district is just not about slogans. It's not about platitudes. It's about how do we make sure that we are celebrating all the great things that we do for children and do for families and do with teachers and do with administrators, but also make sure that we are doing those things dealing with our current reality for preparing for the future. I said we had a lot of things to be proud about. The first thing that I know that I'm proud about is that we are number one in the state
004of Indiana of a large urban school district that had over 10,000 students in iid growth this year growing 16.2% triple the state average that was no small feat. Hats off to the teachers. Hats off to the administrators. But you know what? We also got to give a huge hats off to the kids. Believing in the our students that they can do it, that they can do hard things, and that they can do amazing things will put them on to a different trajectory. It was phenomenal to see how proud those kids were when they passed that very important assessment. But to be number one ranked in anything, it was huge. It was an extreme honor to speak down at the IDOE on Elcart about our progress in early literacy. I hope that every one of you
005are proud of those moments too because we all have a shared responsibility and that parents thank you as well for supporting your child in that in those endeavors. Also last year in Elkcart again showing that we can do things that are new but not new, right? We transition our middle schools. We have our sixth graders making history. They are in west side. They are in North Side. They are in Pieran. And you know what? They're having a great start to the year. Just not to sixth graders, but all of them. So, I just want to say thank you to the administration team for getting it off the ground. I know that that is something that has been talked about in the district for a very long time. And it was actually to see those things
006in fruition. First of all, those kids needed to get out of elementary school. We we know that, right? Those sixth graders had to go. They're about 8t tall. We had to get them out of there. But secondly, it's much more developmentally appropriate for them to be in middle school. So I'm very glad that we were able to do that. We should be also very proud of our graduation rate. Last year in 20 the 2425 school year, 94.5% and I am proud to share with everyone this year that graduation rate keeps going up. It is an anticipated graduation rate of 95.49% this year. Not only the highest in the county, but one of the highest in the state of Indiana. So I'm very proud of the work that Mr. Anderson, your team, and that you left
007a legacy great at the high school, and we will continue to make sure that we soar um for future years to come. So, I'm very proud of that number as well. We also have the number one career center uh in the state of Indiana and I is he here, Mr. Eekens? I think he's here. He's back there hiding somewhere. He is an outstanding representative of our of our district. with our career center wi-i which we are in a consortium with 16 other school districts. They send their kids to us because the quality of service that we provide here in Elcart Community Schools. That is something that we should be extremely proud of. We also had great years in arts and athletics. Um just last week we hosted the Connor uh Conelman event here, summer event
008here in Elcart. But you hear our bands all the time and if you live close to the high school I know you definitely hear them playing out late in the middle of the night. But we should be very proud of our arts and athletic achievement. Last week we just won the Nick Championship in soccer. Last year we had a great year in football. We had a great year in our spring sports. Very proud. Do you know how many students we serve in athletics in Elcart? One out of every four. Over 2400 students participate in an afterchool activity related to um either athletics or in the arts. Very proud. And lastly, but most importantly, you're a strong community. A strong community that has can do, like I said, hard things. A strong alumni base of people
009who are very proud to wear that Elcart E around our amazing city. We have a rich history and that history will always continue. But I think a lot of us don't know how large our school district is. So, I just want to share a few facts tonight about our school district. We are a school district that that covers 80 square miles. That is a lot. Uh it's a very large area. If in a one year our buses travel around the earth, if you did the if you did the routes 12 times, it is a large large district. We have over 3.14 million square ft of of of buildings in our district of actual inventory which is worth 1.1 billion in assets. That cost us $20 million a year to make sure that we maintain at
010a minimum. Actually, we just did a facility study um by PSI um maybe two months ago and that to get us up to operation over the next 20 years, it is $561 million just to maintain our facilities and keep them up to code. That is a huge number. My brain can't even comprehend that. And actually, it can. But I wanted to make sure that our community knows that we have a lot of assets in our community, but it also takes a lot to maintain those. We also have lots of buildings in our district as well. We have over 23 schools and inside those schools, we actually have schools of studies as well that make up to 28 individual entities inside of our school district. We also have a fresh I'm sorry, we have a career
011center. We have a farm. We have a one district office. We have two alternative programs. We have a transportation depot and we have an adult education program. So, as you can see, we cover the gamut here from preK all the way to adult ed. We also last year at this time and those are last year's numbers. We had 10,500 students in 2024 25. And students are our greatest gift I think that we have. We have outstanding kids in Elcart. I tell people all the time, we have the nicest kids at our high school. They're greedy. I had a chance to meet with them this morning with our student advisory committee. They just want everyone to do well. And our kids, we led the state in dual credit attainment. We had some of our kids uh
012attend the top university. I hope that you were able to get that um brochure this morning. U Wendy Wood, I just want to tell you thank you for all your work that you did on that last year. That that brochure actually is going to get nominated for a national award. Hopefully we win, but we submitted it for it. Wendy did a lot of work, but if you get a chance, look at it. It will tell you all the accolades in one year that our kids have done. So, I hope you get a chance to look at that. Um, we also were an ISMA state finalist. Um, we have been voted the best uh one of the best music communities for the six year six-year running. And then we also have multiple D1 athletes go to
013on to play in college sports last year. So, again, are we meeting the needs of our students? Yes, we are. last year with our high graduation rates and the places where kids go after they leave us. I think they're very well prepared for whatever they choose to do um after they leave Elcart Community Schools. But I also want to make sure that you know about our staff. Last year and our staff, we had over 2,000 people employed in our school district. We had 64 district leaders and that's just at the building level. That is not including our our cabinet level. We also had counselor of the year in our district. We also have ramp certification certified schools in our district. We had two schools, the only district that I know of that had two schools
014that was identified for by the IDOE as familyfriendly that has a designation that says that not only are they achieving academically, this is Monger and Riverview, but they are also meeting families where they are to make sure that they are they are well prepare preparing their children and that we are very inclusive school district. So, I'm very proud of that. We had the rise award winner from the IDOE. That is for a classified employee. And last but certainly not least, we had our our football coach. He won the Nick championship of the year. And also we were state champions too with our unified track team as well. Todd Chile is doing a wonderful job leading that. So when I talk about our school district holistically, we provide a lot of things for our community and
015is a great return on investment. I hope that you see that in your kids and in their future and you see that Elkart is a great value for our community. But I also think it's important to not only look at our district, but also to look and see how other districts that are like us, how they are um comprised. And so one of the things I charge my team to do is look at our school district in prep in preparation for this event to see how does Elkart stack up. So I'm going to give you a couple minutes to look at this chart and I will explain it to you. I don't have my readers on and I know my team is probably not going to be happy that I don't have them on but
016I'm going to look at this in front of me. Oakart is like I said 80 square miles. This year our total enrollment is 10,100 on ADM day which is October 1st. We are 10,100 students. Our neighbors to the west pen this is looking at their last year data because we can only pull from the dashboard. That information is not public. So I want to make sure that you all know that this is based off their information from last year. Penn is covers a larger area than we do. I think they go all almost all the way down to Breamman. Um they are 127 square miles. And then I had to find go all the way down to Indianapolis to find districts that are kind of like us in size. So I went to Pike Township,
017Warren Township, and Wayne Township. They have larger student student um enrollments than we do, starting from 10,600 all the way up to Wayne that has almost 16,000 students. But one of the things I wanted to point out was the number of buildings in which they manage. We manage 23 buildings here for only 10,000 students. The other districts have quite a few fewer just schools than we have. Penn with 16, Pike with 13, Warren with 16, and then Wayne with 16. So then you look at the number of elementary schools. You can see, and I don't want to go through each line by line, but this will also be sent out to our staff in our community as well. You can see that we have a lot of inventory in our school district. And then inside
018where you see that miscellaneous building six, that is our school of study. Inside of the high school, we have five different schools of study, but we also have a um um the Elcart Academy is also included in that number as well. So I want that's where you see six there for us where the other districts don't have that and so they just have one high school that they're managing and I think Pike also has a CTE center but it's included on their high school campus and then you can see the building configurations. We actually this year we are at a K5 a 68 and we have a standalone freshman division and we have a 1012 building. You can see the other configurations around these like school districts next door K5 68 912 K5 68 912
019Warren Township a little bit different they have a only goes to fourth grade at the elementary schools and then Wayne Township is also a little bit different they had a similar setup than what we had here last year but as we're looking district comparison we also need to look at the employees that make up that district as Well, last year, well, this year we have 1,519 employees. And the reason why that number dropped um substantially, part of that has to do with through attrition, but we also we outsourced our food service this year. That was approximately 200 employees as well. Um and that's we landed on 1519 this year. You can look and see what our neighbors are doing with Penn has almost 2,000 more students than we have and they're at 1226 and Pike
0201315, Warren 1502 and Wayne which has 16,000 I'm sorry 16,000 students almost 6,000 more than us. They have they're at 1870. But I want to spend a little bit of time looking at our average enrollment. Uh the our average elementary school size here is 360 students. Penn has 469. But there's a there's a little caveat with Penn. Penn has a very very tiny school in their school district. I think it's Madison is the name of that school. It's on the very southern end of their um school district and only has like 100 student there. So it skews their numbers a little bit. And as you can see other school districts 558, 471, 714. So we have very small communities across 13 different schools. Our middle school average size is 760. And then you can look
021across and see the comparison with other school districts. I did include our studenttoteer ratio. We're at 14 to1 compared to other school districts at 19 to1, 16 to1, 16 to1, 15 to1. Back in 2016, we were at 16-1 with an enrollment of almost 12,000. We're now at 14 to1 with an enrollment of 10,000. And then I also put building administrators to each of the students as well. We're at 177. And inside those brackets are the total number of at the building level administrators. There's 58 of those. And you can see the rest of the districts. Penn they have 39, Pike 44, Warren 51, and Wayne 57. And then the district level administrators, those are the ones who are at central office. There's 20 here in um Elcart. And then you can look and see across
022the other um districts. I think it's important when we have these conversations that we have these conversations in context so you can see okay this is what we have but what does it look like when you're looking out at a district that's kind of like yours. So I wanted to be very transparent when we are doing this work that you can see that I don't I don't want to tell you which you should see. That's the whole purpose of this meeting. But there is some differences between how we are configured compared to how other school districts are configured. But again, we should be very proud of our academics and I will spend in that in your pamphlet. You have all this information there. But we have some things that are very unique to us here
023and I want to just take some time to highlight those. But again, I really want to just thank take this as an opportunity to thank our educators and our administrators and our families for the outstanding experiences that we are able to provide here. And this is just a small snippet of things that you can see here in in the Elkhard uh orange graduation rate. I went back five years just so you can kind of see a trend. Five years ago in 2021, we were at 88% graduation rate to where now we're at a pretty strong 95.5. So that is an amazing number. One we should be very proud of. The high school team is really doing an outstanding job of going kid by kid to make sure that we're getting kids across the finish line.
024And it takes all of them to make sure that that number um not only is as solid as a 95.5, but that number means something for our families and our kids. I read that was a major focus for us last year. As you can see in 2120 going back to 2122 we were pretty stagnant as a school district. We were at 66% 64% 64% and then last year we um we were able to as a collection of us and all the hard work of our teachers and administrators we were able to actually get across that 80% benchmark which is very important. That was our district goal. We exceeded that. But again, as I would like to share with us, number one in the state of Indiana in growth for a large school district, 16.2%, triple
025the state average. And so I just again, I don't think that we can ever undersell how important that is because for children, because we want to make sure that kids not only have the confidence, but the skills that are required of them to do advanced work in all classes, not just for a test. We want to make sure that we're creating readers for life. And I think this is just one of the uh lagging indicators that shared with us that you know what I think we're are moving in the right direction. So tonight I'm going to tell you a little bit about school funding and how school funding works. So on this slide here it kind of breaks down a little bit how we're funded as a district. State funding makes up 53% of our
026funding. This year we put in a budget for what $97 million I think so that we're going to anticipate when we probably won't get that amount but that's what we're going to advertise for. And then we receive federal funding that 2% that sounds good but you know that the federal government is kind of going through some things currently and that is something that you cannot depend on. So federal that makes up only 2% of our funding and then the rest is local funding that's through taxes and through um when we collect taxes based off our net assessed value. And so I also put on some operational definition definitions as well. We utilize a couple different funds. We utilize an education fund that supports salaries of our teachers, our educators, our instructional assistants and so forth
027and our textbooks. And then we have another fund too that's called an operation fund and that supports like the day-to-day things that we that require um support to make sure that we are up and running. So our transportation, our administrators, front office staff, custodians and so forth. We don't have a referendum here, but the reason why I had this on here, we did have a referendum fund that went off last year. We approved a referendum I think in 2014 here if I if that's correct. Correct. Yes, Mr. G. Unessa, you're shaking it and we got and it's finally has rolled off. So, I wanted to let people know that is a funding mechanism that schools can utilize, but we don't have that here. And then lastly, a debt service fund. That's how we how we
028build new facilities. We'll have a health and strength center and we'll have um we do work we did work on our middle schools. We utilize our debt service fund. So, um, and we utilize that here pretty often to make sure that we are able to keep up with the needs in our community because kids should be entering to very safe, clean environments and sometimes we have to make some adjustments. Mr. Gess, he probably knows better than I about those things. So, he's done a wonderful job with a facilities audit. He's looked over every classroom in the school district over the last year working with an outside organization. But I wanted you to see how schools are funded and then just hear some local tax terms. In the news, you probably have heard some like, "Oh,
029you're going to get if you're a homeowner, you're going to get $300." Who has heard that before? Okay, that sounds good. But that's what that's being proposed. But net assessed value is how school districts are are that's our taxable value. And we're going to talk and I'm trying to familiarize you with those terms because we're going to talk about those a little bit later. Tax deductions. If you're a homeowner, you should be familiar with that. Some credits that you receive. The school establishes a tax rate based off our net assessed value and the differences of what it takes to operate our school district. And then the tax levy, the monies that we actually receive. Last year there was, no, not last year, last July there was some major legislation. And it was called Senate Bill
030One. Who? You may have heard about that. It is now law as Senate enroll Act One. You may have heard the city talk about these things. You may have heard the library talk about these things. You may have heard um other school districts talk about these things. And you should have heard our school district talked about um um SEA1. It will have a tremendous impact on our school district, not just this year, but for moving forward. So, as you can kind of see, and I he said I could Oh, thanks, Jake. I appreciate it. Up here this year, we were anticipated. This year, we're we're stagnant. Typically, this goes into your operation fund and it grows up by eight by 4% each year. There will be no increases to that. Matter of fact, as net
031assets value goes down, the money that we're able to collect goes down as well. These are in millions. And then in 2028, I want to move over. This is this is harder than I thought, Jake. Um, that is a very key year. We will start sharing part of our operation fund with school districts that receive a hundred or more of our children. So, I'll just give a for example, if we have 100 kids that go to um a charter school, they will receive part of our part of our operation fund. And currently right now we have four schools that we will have to divide up and rece funds to our op to u from our operation fund. That is devastating for our school district. We won't see a rise in that funding stream until 2032.
032And so this is just not an Elcart issue. This is a state issue. and Senate Enroll Act One for that $300 that we said that we were happy to receive as taxpayers. This is what the ramifications for the school system. So, I just wanted to remind this is not something that is just unique to Elcart, but I wanted people to see how this impacts Elcart. That green line is what we would traditionally would have received. Oh, I'm sorry, I went backwards. And then again tax calculations very very simple. How do we receive money? Well, it's based off our ADM. ADM is our average daily membership. And right now our ADM is 10,100. That's what we submitted to the state for reimbursement and times the dollar amount set by the state. The state sets a dollar
033amount each year. It kind of changes roughly. This year is around 8,000. Is that correct? 8,000. And we're down 465 students from this time last year. And so I will and then our operation funds as well. And one of the things that you should be able to do from your operations fund is transfer money from your education fund to your operation fund. We haven't been able to do that for a very long time here in Elkcart. I think this year we're able to do $1 million. We should be able to do 15. Is is that correct, Miss Ross? Um and then lastly, our debt service, which is our net assessed value times our tax rate. So I share with you and I can't share with you enough what does this mean for Elcart Community Schools?
034That means reduce expenses and potentially reduce services for students. We have to raise more money for taxes. So for example, we can raise the tax rate and still receive less money because your net assessed value is going down as well. There is not because our school district our our buildings are worth less. they're being able to be taxed less because this the the new laws now say, "Hey, you can only tax this much of the building in businesses." So, if you haven't familiarized yourself with this thousandpage document, I would advise you not to. It's very depressing, but I will say that it does have real life consequences for all schools around Indiana. And then lastly, it increases debt by increases debt and other maintenance we're currently for paying for cash. This year, I don't think
035we'll be purchasing buses this year. We have we have plenty. We have 141. If you saw Mr. Smith's presentation yesterday, he did an outstanding job. We have enough buses, but typically we have a bus plan to replace them all the time. This year, um, I would expect us not to do those things. And then the summary of the bill, I just wanted to highlight 0% increase where we typically get a 4% increase at. And then also we have to do potentially have to raise our taxes to um our community if we want to receive the same level of funding for our operations fund. And then just a quick history, this all started back in 2009 when we wanted to shift the burden away from from mainly the taxpayer and they cap taxes. And so you
036saw like, hey, 2% tax caps. And then further funding issues came across with the charter schools and so forth. And then lastly, Senate enroll one act will reduce services for students at a time when school obligations are growing and need for new programs is increasing until funding is restored. We've seen an explosion in charter schools. It is they are actually the highest um receivers of increases in funds by the state of Indiana. Public schools were not. So, if you have paid attention to any of the things that are happening um in that area, you have noticed there's a shift in the funding stream for um charter schools. But I want to bring it back and I want to talk about Elcart Community Schools. And what does this mean? You gave me a very high level
037overview of center act one. I kind of want to talk about some challenges that are that are significant to us. This ends in the 23 24 school year. And the reason why I couldn't fit any more on the screen to be honest with you, but I can also I can give you that information. If you look back in 2016, we had 1,700 employees and we had 13,952 students. The blue line represents our enrollment. The red line represents our staffing. There's been a gradual decrease in enrollment since 2016. When you're a good steward of a school district, your enrollment matches your staffing. Our enrollment went down pretty steadily, but our staffing was different. And I wasn't here during those times, so I'm not going to try to guess why. I don't know why, but I can
038tell you it has not kept pace with our enrollment. And if I you remember before, how are schools funded? They're funded by the students who show up on your doorstep. And right now, we have 10,100 students in our in our district and we have 1,519 employees, which leads us to classroom occupancy. Classroom occupancy is very important. We went I said Mr. Gessie and his team went around, we we looked at all our elementary classrooms. We have 371 elementary classrooms around the around the district. Only 214 of them are currently occupied for instruction. When I say for instruction, that's a teacher who would be typically in front of a classroom full of kids. Not someone who is utilizing the room for maybe some um small group work occasionally or a storage room. These are just rooms
039that we're utilizing because they're empty. Does the heating change? Does heating cost change because that room is empty? Yes or no? Some Well, no. Jen, you're Are you being obsent? No. No, it does not change. We still have to heat the building, right? Right now, we're at 58% of occupancy across the entire district, but that's not equal across all the schools. That's just when we calculate all our classrooms. That is a very low number. So I wanted to also go back if we talk about enrollment and staffing. I wanted you to see what other school districts have done compared to what Elkcart has done over time. Again, all this information predates me. But you know what is our responsibility to be good stewards and make sure we take care of whatever issues we take care
040of those things. now. And so you can see back in 20 2016, Elcart started to see a pretty I don't want to say significant trend, but we started to see a downward trend when it came towards en enrollment, but staffing went all over the place. You see, we increased our staffing by almost 25% in 2020 for whatever reason. And then it's starting to it started to go back down again. Pen This This is weird. Um, Penn's enrollment, which is the black line, increased, but their staffing did not. It took until 2022 for their staffing to match their enrollment. And then Concord, our our neighbors to the south, goodness, this is a little harder. Same thing. their enrollment increased and their staffing tried to match their enrollment and to the point where actually they are considered
041technically to be a little bit underststaffed. And so I wanted you to kind of get an idea of what that looks like. And this is from the 7074 which is a educational website that tracks every school district in the state. This is not something that I created. This is out there in the world for you to look at at the 74.org org and they track every school district in the United States. And so I wanted you to just see three familiar ones to us so we can kind of compare how does Elcart compare. At the beginning I share with you that we have approximately 30 buildings 29 like build 23 buildings that we're using but we have like 29 entities inside of those buildings. They're designed to hold 17,000 students. We have 10,100 students. That
042is a 40 almost a 40% difference. So, we're still paying for as if we're educating 17,000 students, right? Your utilities, your costs, and your staffing and all those buildings, but you only have 10,100. And if you remember, how are schools funded? They're funded by how many kids that are enrolled inside of your district. And I want to just go back to look at I don't know sorry in 2016 the height of the district was 13 9 I'm sorry 13,952 and you start to see that decline happening in our school system to now where we had 10,500 in February of this year and now we're at 10,100. If you were around in Elcart a few years ago, they had a feasibility study. And that feasibility study was um was a look at the the the enrollment
043and the demographic trends inside of our school district. And it kind of projected out, hey, where would we be if our enrollment stayed the same? Life is very different than it was back a few years ago. We now have universal vouchers everywhere. We also have a our political climate is a little bit different than it was back then. And we also have people the birth rate was already slow back in 2022 2023. It is very very low here in Elcart County. I think this year um we will have the smallest um graduating class I think Mr. Anson that we've ever had. Is that correct? And then our kindergarten class is also low too. And the reason why I bring up this feasibility study, it's a good piece of work. They spent a lot of time
044and a lot of energy in this and this is actually was the playbook which we utilize our sixth grade transition on. We we took a lot of those recommendations and also some of the things that I'm going to be talking about over the next few months. I'm going to utilize that same feasibility study because it's good work that was done previously. But I want you to see well if I can work this me this year on the low end the demographer stated that we would have at the very low end we would have 10,435 students. That was for this year. That was their projection. Now remember that was two years ago. We actually are here at 10,100. We're on the high end of where they said we would be in 2028. So at the worst
045case scenario, we're three years ahead of schedule as far as the enrollment drop. The best case scenario that I can find is that we are two years ahead of schedule. The district has to do something because you cannot continue to operate in the same manner or there will not be the district that you love and you remember. So, I just wanted to let you know the difference between what we had this year and last year just in dollar amounts is on the low end $3.4 million when I said we lost 465 students. It's on the low end is $3.4 million, but on the high end it could be up to five because there's something called complexity dollars. If you have students who receive um u special services such as our ENL students and our students
046who have an IEP, they receive what they call complexity dollars to kind of help you to make up for the additional cost he or she may need in order to um have access to school. And so that is a huge number for Elcart. That is a very crushing number for our school district as well. But looking at this feasibility study, we are much further ahead than where um they anticipated then. And even if we brought in a new demographer now, I don't think that that would change these numbers on this page. These are small prints, so I would really wish I had our readers. But it's just not the student issue. is also how you manage your resources is very important as a school district. I only went back to 2023 for this presentation, but
047you can see on here you have cash flow, you have revenue, and you have transfers in. So, we have revenue, we had a revenue of let's say 27,000. Our expenditures, we spent 118,000 in that year. And so, our total cash flow was 130. We over spent that year in 2023, and that was based off 2022's budget, $3 million. 2024 happens, which is 2023's budget, which shows up in 2024, we overspent by $10 million. And then, as you can see, so far and so on, if you don't change what you you're just your district cannot handle that. It it's not built for that. And so you can look and see on this screen. I wanted you to see what the projections were if the district didn't do anything. But I want to assure you tonight the
048district what I got here the last two years with my team we have tried to in not tried we've strengthened our internal protocols. We've had to make some really tough decisions with attrition and contracts and also looking at some we outsourced our food service. We have tried to slow those things down, but we still have one fundamental thing that we haven't looked at, which is looking at the amount of buildings that we have in our district. You cannot peacemeal your way out of this situation. $1 million here, $1 million there is not going to change the trajectory of the school district. It is going to take you really looking at how are you going to best address this to meet the needs and provide a high quality education for our kids because they deserve that
049regardless of who's running this seat and who's in front of them. All kids deserve that. But how do you do that when you your staffing and your enrollment do not match and also you have some spending issues that you've as the district has had over the years. So I wanted to be very honest and transparent about that that these aren't just issues that have landed on the doorstep this year. Not because I'm saying because I'm here. I'm saying that all of our community suffers when we're not good stewards. And that I do plan to end on my watch. There's a dog here. So I I'm I'm trying to focus. I tried to give you a very much easier to read. Again, the assumption is here. If nothing has been done, I can assure you there
050has been quite a few things that that have been done already to kind of talk about um to to to stave this off. So you can see back in 2023 the ending cash balance. That's is how much money you have in millions of dollars at the end of that year. And then you can see what it is with your rainy days. It was $33 million just in 2023. Look where it is today. It's down to 10. So in two years, and remember a budget is built a year ahead of time. In those two years, we burned through $20 million. And again, I'm not going to play Monday morning quarterback and try to I understand what happened, but you you you can't go back there and try to figure not figure out you can't go back
051and change what happened. You just need to deal with it. Now, if we did nothing, the district would not have anything next year. And that is very hard for me to say, but we do because we have really and thanks to my team and and our people at the building level, they really understand that you know what, our district needs to tighten our belts when it comes to a lot of things. But we also have to do a lot more belt tightening. This projection is based off if we didn't do anything. And remember, I said in 2028, it's a very different year. in 2028, we start sharing our monies with charter schools and other entities that um receive a 100 or more of our students. So, it's imperative that we get back on track so
052we can keep our kids here in our school district. So, I want to talk about what some of our next steps are. Last night, the school board um authorized me to begin a consolidation study. And what that is is me looking at all of our facilities. Um looking at elementary schools, looking at our middle school, looking at high school, looking at our previous feasibility study to begin that work. Looking at anywhere between two and four buildings to look at over these times. That work will be very it will be very quick and we'll definitely make sure that we have input with the community and I have a timeline on here too, but I want to just make sure that you hear from me. I take this very seriously. We also will be very transparent. My
053team is working on a financial dashboard so you can see at any time of the day what is happening at all those buildings and you can see the historical enrollment. I think in this day and age either people are going to get the information from you or people are going to create the information for you and I want the information to come from me. I think it's important to be phys fiscally responsible. We have to be good stewards. Superman's not coming for your school district. It's just just not. You need to manage your resources that you have and manage them well. And then lastly, our goal is I still believe we have the best school district in the state of Indiana. We have we have the potential to be that. But the one word that
054I did not say in this in this document that I quit looking at a long time ago, I didn't use the word innovation. We need to innovate too, right? The world that we're sending our kids out into, there are many things that they need in order to be successful there. And so, what do you do today to make him or her ready for that world? You can't continue on the same path. You have to be good stewards now so they can innovate later. We all had a great experience in school hopefully. Hopefully, if you're an Elcar graduate, you remember lots of great things about your experience. The kindergartenner who's in those doors, they're also owed that experience, too. And so, I think it's important for us to make sure that we rightsize our school district
055so they have that same opportunity that we all had. So, I want to talk about our consolidation timeline. And I'm not going to just blaze through this piece. I think it's very important that people understand in a perfect world this would have been done over multiple years. I'll be honest with you, I wish I had more time, but we do not have the gift of time here in our school district. Some of these I don't want to say decisions. some of this work to consolidate schools. It will be very quick where I will take feedback from the community, update the community, take feedback from the community, update the community and we will do it in three phases. So phase one is establishing a pairing process. That is where I'll be working with my team and
056just looking at the different schools and scenarios of hey, what can we do to pair off some of our schools? Some of our schools have enrollments as low as 250 kids and they're designed to have almost 900. So we will look at that. I will work with district leaders and staff. I'll work with our school staff tonight. I'll work with our parent community and then our community leaders. Getting your feedback is critical because then I will present a policy to our school board. Well, a protocol on which we will use to determine which schools would be the ones that we would consider for consolidation. As you can see, all that's happening and it's happening now. Next month through January, probably in late November, I will come to the school board and I will make a
057recommendation of these schools. These are the ones that we should look at for potential consolidation. And that's when I expect people to man their heartstring. Why my school? Remember, it's not about being worthy because who's worthy in the school district of a great education? Everyone. So, we can't say you chose this school. No, they're worthy, too. You can't say you chose that. They're worth every kid is worthy. So, I will come up with a protocol over this next month to explain to the board this is why these schools were up for consideration. And it won't be because academics is driving that. It'll be a list of factors that will work with my team and present that out to the community. But I also want community input too. What do you value as well? So in
058that second phase, there's a lot of things that are happening. We'll follow we'll finalize policy recommendations. I will present the board policy uh another policy recommendation. I did that last night. It was actually a resolution and then we will communicate those throughout this process and then we'll make a decision and then my goal is to finalize that by January 26. actually I want to do that before Christmas break and then we will also make sure we get communicate these decisions out through our website directly to you and by having these inform these meetings. I just want to tell you all thank you for your time tonight. I mean I'm not done but I just want to tell you this is very important. You being here lets me know and lets the whole community know that
059this is not one person's decision. It's all of ours. Our district's future needs to be in our hands. it. I don't want it in the hands of anybody else. I want it in our hands. And then lastly, the last phase is in February 26 into August 26 next year. My goal is to bring a recommendation to the school board either in March or in April. I wish I had more time and I can do it over a couple years, but I don't have that much time. And so, we will develop a plan. the community will know that you'll have an opportunity to um to to how does that impact my child, you know, the parent, you know, the transportation, you know, all those things. And then we'll talk about well, what does it look like
060on the other side for those for those pairing of schools? And so again, supporting kids, supporting the staff, supporting the family, and that last piece, that's how we're going to make sure we take care of people the entire way. But that's phase three. We definitely need to make sure we take care of the people and the students. So, this is a time to learn more. P the board meetings we've been really talking about maybe probably since maybe June something each month about our fiscal health, about our buildings, about our staffing. Those are great places to get factual information. I'm always available if you well not always but most of the time if you email me I will gladly meet with you to talk a little bit more about hey these are some of the things
061in our district um but also we're going to create a couple things on our website too so um you can look at our finances I think and our also our buildings as we go through this process and then there'll also be a FAQ from what I understand about to collect all these questions but one of the things I know that's missing from our website that we that we're working on It's called a transparency dashboard. You should know like, hey, this is where our money is going in real time. You should never have to guess like, hey, what's their cash balance? Like, you shouldn't be hearing that here. You should be be able to look at that and where that's updated. And we should make it easy for you to find. And so, that is something
062that our team has been already working on. But what I'm glad and and I'm very appreciative of you supporting our schools. We love you for that. And we can't have enough people championing out here at Elkcart schools. We need to protect our investment, our young kids. I mean, this how how can you look at this kid and not want to go to bat for him? You can't invest in the young people, the grandchildren, and ECS. Make sure that they have the same strength that the other um that the other that we had. Um I think strong schools build strong communities. So again, we an excellent Elkcart, a physically sound Elcart will attract families as well and support local businesses and enrich life. And then opportunities to engage. We today I had an I had an
063opportunity to go to the Amazon ribbon cutting out there in Bristol and they talked about how important Elcart Community Schools was to their plans out there for students and and they were very glad to be a part of our community. People come to our community because we are a generous community, but we're also a hardworking community and we're a resilient community, too. So, I don't have low expectations for people through this process. I have high expectations for people through this process because you know what? I hope you have high expectations of me and we're going to get this work done and we're going to get this work done well. But again, it's an opportunity to engage you on what this process should look like. And there will be more engagement sessions coming up in November
064because you know we love doing this on at night after work after all day. But we're going to do that next month and we'll December we'll take off but then January there'll probably be something every night until we get through this process. My goal is to answer in the future months every question that someone asks me about this consolidation process. So lastly, but certainly not least, I want to get your feedback. And this is where you can whip out your phone and you can hit that QR code. And what what do you think our major concern is? I want to hear from you. I think you had an opportunity to get a little sheet of paper and you could write and leave something with our um communications director or you can list on this website.
065At the next board meeting, we will go ahead and make sure that we kind of tally this information and let you know what the overall themes are that we're hearing. But you will see an answer to every one of these questions anonymously on our website for on our FAQ. Um, but I want you to think about these things. What considerations do you should my administration team consider as we develop this policy? What does the district need to consider as we undergo this process? and then what questions still need to be answered um throughout this from this presentation. So, I just want to tell you first and foremost, thank you for giving up your time, your expertise, and your willingness to stand alongside us, Elkcart, as we make continue to make this an excellent school district
066for all that that it impacts. So, I just want to tell you thank you. And at this time, I'm going to turn it back over to Wendy Wood. [Music] Again, [Applause] we want to thank you for coming out tonight and we'll be collecting the questionnaires if you'd like to leave those with us throughout the as you exit and please let us know if you have questions. Thank you. [Applause] Um, tell me wherever you want me to be. Get a drink of water. Question. You understand the problem? [Music]