001[music] [music] Um just going to run through the first couple of slides here. If you need me to slow down, explain anything um please just let me know. Uh again, this is no change in in the past couple of weeks here. All right. So, first slide is just what is our gap, our expenditure shifts, our revenue shifts, discretionary. Um, and then we're going to go to our right sizing of staff and eventually presenting you with a balanced budget. So, as we get into this, um, first thing I like to do is just go through the timeline of how we got here. had many many meetings which was the other slide deck that you saw that dated all the way back to December 19th of what we have done to date as it relates to the
002budget. Okay. So, as we stand today, our current gap is $1.98 million. Okay. Again, I'll get into why and I'm going to go over this briefly. If you'd like me to explain it further, [snorts] just let me know, please. Okay. uh big expenditure shifts we saw were transportation and in um health insurance uh in our fringe benefits. You'll see that under the fringes line, the 11% increase and then in transportation the 49% increase. Those are the big cause for all the discussions, the many meetings and and so on and so forth. Okay. Uh the big five here, we did see again, you've got your health insurance and your transportation on there. We did see a slight dip in our retirement which is good. Um the TRS rate contribution rate of the employer did go down
003which is the reason for that dip. Next revenue shifts these have not changed since last time. Again revenue can be broken up into state aid fund balance and to the next slide our other revenues and finally our tax levy. Okay. Al together that brought us to our seven our $37.7 million budget on the revenue side that we now are charged with matching on the expenditure side. Okay. So now to the the meat and potatoes of why we're here, what we're talking about, and that's what is our plan to get from point A where we are right now to point B where we need to be come budget vote day. And that is a balanced budget. Okay. So, the first thing we did is we looked at our discretionary items. Okay? And one of the things
004that I want to do differently this time than we did last time was break them down and provide a little bit more context as to what exactly we're doing with them. Rather than just saying summer credit recovery, what does that mean? Okay, summer credit recovery is not our special ed programming over the summer. We will continue to have our special ed programming over the summer. uh what we will eliminate all non-sp specialed programs over the summer to the tune of a $28,000 savings. Program assistance, these came about about two, three years ago in our athletic department. We are nixing those in the budget. That [snorts] is a $14,500 savings for us. Um into our Boseies lines here, there's two of them that I do want to point out. We've got our request our health and
005safety personnel that we started with this year. We are cutting that to part-time next year. That's a cost containment strategy that we are working with Greenville on where we will have them one Tuesday, they will have them the next Tuesday or using Tuesday as an example. We're basically um getting them every other week as opposed to every week, cutting our cost in half. Next, we have the uh PNW um Putinham North Westchester Boseies. Um we get SC or social studies curriculum through them. We're going to absorb that and do that in house. If we go down to the teacher leader stipens, currently in in the 2425 budget, we have 29 teacher leader stipens, uh approved stipens, I should say. Next year, we're looking to lessen that down to 18 or lessen that by 18, leaving
00611, uh positions open for teacher leaders for folks to apply for and and be assigned to. And then extracurric extracurricular stipens outside of teacher leaders. There are also some things that you'll find uh within our contracts that we are looking to reduce by $50,000. This is not something that we're going to sit up here today and say we're going to cut this club. We're going to look at what what does the enrollment look like? How many kids were were actually taking part in it? What did you know what were the doings of the club throughout the year? Did they meet once, twice? Did they meet weekly? So on and so forth. Next slide. Okay, summer student cleaner help. Uh, one of the things that, uh, eliminating the summer programming allows us to do is to
007also save money in the field of our summer student cleaner help. This is usually we have either graduates or high school students come back. They work with our custodial team to assist them in the day-to-day cleaning in the district. And with that, we we were able to, you know, save another $15,000 because we don't have nearly the number of classrooms operating during the school year. uh in the school during the summer as we normally would. Supply subscription software reductions. So this is an area that we had talked about quite a bit. Um we are reducing the cost of our OIO badging platform from $58,64 to $12,000 from this year to next year. We're also reducing our as a AASA cohort membership from $12,000 down to $2,500 again from this year to next year. In addition
008to that, we're consolidating any redundancies we're seeing in our technology. So, for example, if we're in grade X and we're teaching cursive, if this class is using app X and this one's using app Y, let's consolidate them, do it at just off one app instead of two and find out where our redundancies exist. And Ryan, yes. What are we hoping to maintain by keeping OIO and the cohortment membership? What do we get from that? Thanks and this bill allows us to offer PD uh to our teachers, you know, online PD years to do that. Plus, it's going to also open up a whole series of new opportunities for them to AI and other things like all Okay. Um, additionally, we're going to reduce supply lines. These are the Sorry, you have questions. Did you answer
009for AASA or OI or both ASA? The one cohort just allows us more PD for staff and also can stop right now. Go back to that quest health and safety. Yep. position. Just just review for me currently this school year, what type of activities does that person do while they're here? Sure. So, one of the things that they do is they instead of paying like it's kind of like a um a menu that we have with Quester, right? We pick this, we pick this, we pick this, we pick this. That's what we've done in the past. By getting this person on site, all those pick this, pick this kind of come with that now. But by peeling it back, we are just saying we're going to do more when we're here as opposed to doing
010less with more time, if that makes sense. We're going to we're trying to maximize the time better. So, some of the things that they have done, Bart, are they do our fire inspections, not our fire extinguisher inspections, our fire inspections. They walk through the halls. They make sure that we don't have I'll throw myself under the bus here, that we're not storing wrestling mats in the back hallway. They have to be locked up in a closet somewhere. They want to make sure that we don't have, you know, we're compliance with, you know, paper on doors, that kind of stuff with the um with the fire code. They also submit our districtwide and building level safety plans on the portal. They manage questions from SED for that. Um they work with the workplace violence prevention. Um
011they're working with us to build an agenda because this is all new to us and they've got the experiences of all their districts. And so by building that agenda, we can have I what I would see as a more productive meeting because it's a shot in the dark for all of us at this point and we obviously want to maximize and make sure we're in compliance with what we need to be doing. So this is like a mandated state position. It's not a mandated state position. No. So this is actually 2425 current school year is the first year we ever had. Uh okay. One of the reasons we wanted to bring that in is an extra set of eyes of things that like where where is a where does a newcomer identify flaws in our
012security systems? flaws in our day-to-day operations, flaws in our fire drills, flaws in our lockdown. So, Questar Health and Safety is is probably just behind uh Green County Sheriff's Office, the ones helping us put together the May 23rd active shooter or active asylum, sorry, that we're doing here on campus. Okay. So, so I guess any information that is needed that the school board would need to know would come through you or Randy for request our health and safety. Yeah, you can I I would probably I mean Randy can certainly answer the questions because I think you actually oversee that committee, right? Because currently we don't we don't get a the board doesn't get a report from that. We we don't get there's not generate a report from the board. Right. Right. There's not a report.
013If we'd like to see a year review kind of thing, we can certainly request one as do I need it. So, all right. Thank you. Is it the city person that we that they send us? Yes. Yeah. We we her name is Ari. She's here every Tuesday. Can I ask a question? The summer recovery asked it was uh for the nonsped. You said that was K12. There were some job postings for nonsp. So, is that not part of this or it's it's posted and if we if it didn't end up getting eliminated from the budget, we have a can to pull the pick from. Otherwise, we're six weeks behind the eight and just that's that's all it was. Any other questions? All right. I think I left off with reductions in supply lines. So, we've
014got some underspent supply lines that we will be reducing [clears throat] as well. Obviously, if folks need stuff, uh, we will do our best to get it for them still. Um, and then reductions to cohort and organizational memberships. Just, you know, if we're a member of something, but we're really not getting anything out of it, let's re-evaluate that and and [snorts] um into transportation. Um, we had talked about and we continue to look to eliminate a bus run. So, instead of 15 bus runs plus a wheelchair bus, we're going to operate with 14 bus runs in a wheelchair bus. Instead of uh the players bus that's been wildly underutilized for the past couple of years, uh we're just going to we're going to eliminate from the budget the $21,600 savings. Field trip transportation. So, um
015out of our recent discussions, we we have reduced the cost of field trips. I want to just point out the cost of a field trip is different than the cost of the field trips transportation associated with it. So, you're going to see field trips on here twice for that very reason. One is more of your admissions cost or fees associated with the trip. This one is more your uh your transportation to and from the field trip. So, from that $30,000 budget, we've reduced it by $10,000, leaving $20,000 in the budget for students to attend field trips. Any questions on this page before I move up? Okay. And that's sorry. So that is administered through principles. Yes. Who owns that budget? The we devise it and then the principles kind of will be overseeing it. All
016right. Um mental health services. Currently we contract out with Green County Mental Health and Twin Counties. This is something we are looking to take over with our own staff uh with a social worker. Um, so we are looking to eliminate that because frankly we are fully confident that we can do that and we can look to save $166,000 in the process. And then finally uh conference and field trip just because they do come out of the same object codes in your budget. Uh we are looking to reduce conferences by $21,000 in the 2526 budget and we are also looking to reduce curricular related field trips by $16,000 in the budget which leaves $18,000 in the um in the field trip budget for for next year. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, please. This was
017last night. Is that the same or that? So if you have this Oh, yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, sorry. It's just the way it was laid out. Sorry. Go ahead. Okay. Any other question or any questions on this? Okay. Next, please. All right. So, in summary, all these discretionary cuts that we talked about, um, this will look to save us $622,000 and change, which brings our gap from 1.93 million down to 1.361 million. Ask Ryan, I know it's small, but I know we reached out to First Student. Yep. And they've offered some money. Yeah. So, we we had reached out to First Student to ask them if they could spread out the initial shock cost, I'll call it from this year to next year, which is an $800,000 increase. Could they spread that out? Their response
018to us was something along the lines of we can look to spread out up to $20,000 because other than that we'd be upside down which is where they've been for the past couple of years. So is that in here? That's factored in. Yeah. Into which that's factored in if you could go back one slide for me. That's fac I'm sorry another slide. That's factored into your transportation components. Well, there's three components. I don't Which one? Where would it go? In this top one, eliminate bus run. Yeah. By eliminating. So, it's in there somewhere. Yeah. So, the way we look at it is an individual bus run costs X dollars. Right. Right. So, what we did is we took $20,000 out of our year one total. So, I take year one and instead of dividing by
01916, which was 15 plus one, I'm now dividing by 15. And then this is the savings. I [snorts] had thought the bus run was 124,000. I thought that's what a bus run costs. That's not the case though. Yes. One single bus runs 124. So where's the 20,000? The 20 spread out though. We it it was pushed out. So in theory like the 20,000 but it's coming off. We don't have to pay it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Where is it? That that I'm sorry Mike. That's that's coming out of here. This is our 20 grand savings. Eliminate the players bus. Yes. By eliminating that, that's that's where we allocated the $20,000 saving to. Does that make sense? Well, so that eliminate players bus doesn't really it's not really eliminating players bus. It's it's the first student savings.
020Yes. In the form of the players bus. In the form of Yes. Yeah. That I didn't know it was directly coming. Yeah. That's where you That's where you're using it. Correct. By eliminate by having that savings seems like it's two different things, but by eliminating that $20,000 savings, we can no longer do players buses is the way that I was looking at it. Okay. It's it's assigning the dollar amount to a run kind of thing because it's a flat $20,000 amount. It's not $20,000 per run. Yeah. It's a flat $20,000. [snorts] I thought they were gay. Yeah, it would be more descriptive if it were first down the road. [snorts] But it's like a what do you call it? It's not a rebate, but it's No, it's it's just deferred. Deferred. They're just deferring $20,000.
021I don't matter, but if it were in there, I just be in there so people know that. Yeah. I mean, we first because it was an effort for us to Sure. to call and see if they would be in essence. Mike, just to try to explain it this way, we could have explained this as a $104,000 run without this being in there or this is $124,000 run with this being in there. At the end of the day, it's the It could be just me. I always thought the bus run was 124,000 alone. So, if you eliminate a bus run, that saves 124,000. So I just didn't see where first student was coming in because if you eliminate the players bus isn't that plus 216. It doesn't first student is is not a part of that.
022You're saying it's a part of that the it's it's part of the overall cost and so we pay for the players by by offering the players plus we have to pay for it. Right. Right. And so but if we eliminate it we don't have to play pay for it. Correct. So, but if we're still getting 20,000 deferred, why isn't it 41,000? And maybe just be my because instead of applying Trying to think of how else to explain this, you you don't have to get stuck on it. I just I just think it's you know, we reached out. We did. They did offer a little bit of, you know, the firm and I think we appreciate that. Sure. So, you're basically asking how much did we pay for the players boss, right? You're asking how much?
023Yeah. Right. If it's Were we only pay 1600? That's what you're asking. Well, yeah. Yes. Right. Were we only paying 1,600? I I'm trying to explain that. Let me think. Can I get back to you on that? I'll think about it again. I will get back. I got I know, but I'll give you an explanation. Okay. Did we? All right. Can you go ahead two slides for me, please? All right. So, this is the summary of everything put together. This is everything we just talked about put on a single page. Um, that middle column again is just where it would lie. Um, so again, it's a $622,000 savings and we with that we've lowered our gap to 1.36 million from 1.983 million. All right. So the next part of the conversation is the not so
024fun part. Um, we among along with many other schools are looking at this concept of right sizing, right? We're taking the the questions of why are there three kids in a class? Why are there two kids in a class? Why are there so few kids sitting in our classrooms? And we're looking to rightsize it by reducing staff. Okay, by reducing staff, we're right sizing the staff to meet the needs of our current enrollment. [snorts] Okay, so here's just a quick tidbit about what right sizing is and why are we doing this here? Why does it apply to us? How does this apply to us? Okay. So, we do have a tax cap to remain within. Our tax cap this year is 2.83%. Okay. Any any vote over that would require a super majority or a
02560% vote. Um to do this, we looked at each of our departments, each of our classes, and really dug deep into where do we need to right size? What departments do we need to right size? What grade levels do we need to right size? And if we look at the next slide, this is what we're looking at for our instructional staff. And I will get deeper into the weeds with this on the next couple of slides here. Uh this is what we're looking at. Okay, so with the instructional staff, we're looking at up to nine cuts at this time. With the pair of professionals, up to nine cuts as well. And with the instructional staff, we do have one um one area we're looking to reduce. Okay, that said, we also do have to consider
026the folks that are leaving via retirement or what have you. Um, so we do have three people that are leaving via retirement. We do need to replace those positions. We do need to have a speech pathologist here. We do need to have another K6 teacher here. We do need to have a special education teacher here. And the last two, the special education and the social worker, the special education teacher, that's really um a replacement cost of our current contracts. So rather than us sending kids out, paying for transportation, paying for program, we're looking to bring them back while also maintaining the the quality of the program that they're getting elsewhere, we want to make sure it's a good fit for the kid and we're meeting their needs still. We're not looking to do this to
027change IEPs and and all that other jazz. the [snorts] social worker. Again, uh that is built into the budget. Uh a new social worker to try to come in and be a a Kasaki Athens employee that meets the needs of our kids for mental health purposes primarily. Um and they will likely be stationed out of the middle school. Okay. So, if we go to the next segment back to that. So, I just want to state that when you when you talk about at this time to not position you at this time. I'm going to get into all that. Okay. Yep. Then I'll in preparation for that, but I think the board wishes and I hope I can speak for everybody wishes to remain involved intensely in whatever this looks like, however this comes out, you
028know, with and and to continue to look at the gap elimination items that you're that you've already spoken about. Yep. Then reducing we want to right size. That makes sense. But we want to reduce the uh impact right on on individuals. So I know you'll get over that. Yep. You're saying get over that later, but I think just wanted to say that at this point. Okay. So, the instructional staff, the nine position cuts that we're looking at, two of which we're looking to fill uh through attrition, right? Uh people are retiring, we may not be looking to fill them. Um we've identified some different areas that we are looking to cut um across the 712 spectrum there. Um I don't need to read them to you. They're right there. Okay. We are also looking to
029reduce one section uh one staff member, I'm sorry, to a 0.5 FTE. Okay. And again, just similar to what Mike just said, you know, obviously the goal here is to not tell people they can't work at Kasaki Athens anymore, right? If we have people retiring, but we also have people who we can't fill their jobs for budget reasons, can they shift over? Is it possible to move this person over here? And again, we I explained this a little bit last night is when we when we get to situations towards the end of the year, we find out that folks want to move on for, you know, they want to go work closer to home, they got a job elsewhere or what have you. That allows us to kind of re-evaluate and allow and basically keep
030as many people here as we can. That's what we want to do and I think all of you would like to do the same. I don't think there's anybody here that's happy about having to cut any anybody or anything here. But, you know, keeping people here that work here is the ultimate goal. And that's why, again, I put it down here in blue. You'll see the same exact language on the next slide as well. You know, we want to keep the folks that work here employed here. And sometimes that forces a little bit of maneuvering things around to keep them employed. Okay. Considerations with that I just give an example are teacher A is retiring. Teacher B was told sorry you don't have a job here anymore but teacher B might also be certified at
031what teacher A was certified in. Okay cool let's slide them over and now the cut happened at the cut happened but we also filled the need and that's something we would look to do. And are there still ways for a certified teacher to teach outside their subject area? I know the state had a yes a waiver is that a still well it expires this year but whether they know if they extend it then that'll another reason why we're saying at this time they provide the wave which is more than one look at that as an option try to keep okay and if we go to the next slide the same is true with our pair of professional staff We are looking to reduce up to nine positions. In doing so, we are still going to
032maintain the accommodations that are required for special education. Um, we are not going to change that. Um, and again, if there's opportunities for people to stay because other folks are departing, we will look to do that if we can. Okay. Any questions on this? Okay. To the next, please. All right. So the question was asked why rightsize those particular areas and to me this is why or to us this is why I should say. So when we're looking at total enrollment we see our enrollment going down uh over the past decade in that process or in that time we've seen our teaching staff go up by 5%. We've seen our assistants and our aids go up by double digit percentages. So to ask the question why are we right sizing those particular areas? This right
033here is why we've seen an increase there. We're looking to right size that down. We've talked about the caveat is special. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The reason why those there's no secret that our teaching assistants and teacher teachers aids have skyrocketed 65 and 129% because when somebody goes through an IEP meeting and it's said that, you know, so and so needs a onetoone aid, we don't have a choice. We have to go hire them, right? So, and we're going to go and hire them. That's that's what we're here to do. So, this is not just, hey, my friends in aid, let's hire them. It's we had a need for them. And obviously, we need to continue meeting those needs, but we also have to rightsize the department in the sense of looking at which which positions
034are more luxury items than they are need. It may if you continue to want to use this it may help to somehow peel that out so that it looks like it's quite a hit to paraprofessional staff which includes assistance and aids. So you haven't you're just looking at positions now you haven't looked at any further than where what when or you have I have just I don't want to use names but no that's okay. Okay. All right. So, with all this considered, this brings us to a balanced budget at at $37.7 million. This is gets us to the revenues that frankly I do not see moving. Okay. If $37.7 could become $38,000 or $38 million, that'd be wonderful. But it does I I don't see that happening at this time. Okay. Um the question has
035been asked in the past. I think it was not last year but the year before when the budget was late. Well, what if the governor comes out and gives us more money, right? What that would do is we would look to peel back either some of our um our fund balance that we're allocating to the budget just because again we also we we have to think more than just between now and June 30th of 2026. We have to think about the future as well. So applying that to the fund balance would in my opinion make the most sense. But also again to Ry's point and to the questions that all of you had asked is that also gives us the opportunity to go back and look at staffing and see what can be preserved, what
036makes sense to preserve, what new needs have emerged, those kind of things. Okay. All right. So, here's just some details on the budget vote itself. Uh the budget vote will be May 20th. You'll see proposition one uh asking if the district can approve a $37.7 million operating budget. And then you will also see five names on there uh to select three of them uh for board of ed seats. Residents can vote in either of the polling locations regardless of where they live. If you live in Athens but you're up on the Kixaki campus for a sporting event or you live in Kixaki or down at EJA for a PTO event, you can vote down there. I don't know if there's a PTO event going on that day but yesce I believe at EJA they I
037believe there is. I just the I didn't want to start advertising up here false advertising. All right. And then if we go to the next slide, this is the the whatifs. What needs to happen, right? So, a budget vote is a majority rules. 50% or higher, the budget passes. Anything below that, the budget does not pass. If the budget fails, we have two options. We can go out to we can go immediately to a contingency budget, or we can go to a secondary vote on June the 17th, which is a Tuesday, third Tuesday in June. Uh, a contingency budget would require us to cut an additional $575,000. Contingency budgets by rule don't allow you to increase your tax levy at all. So we would have the same tax levy that we have this year next
038year. And that's where that $575,000 is coming from. If you go for a secondary vote and that doesn't pass, you have to go to a contingency. Yep. And that's a prescribed budget template you follow the state. Yep. That'll be in your budget newsletter hopefully. Okay. And that's it from me. There any questions and I will get back to you on that transportation. Yes. So I just want to say use the mic. So we're voting tonight on this 37.7 million budget. Right. Correct. Yes. Question. how that how that gets implemented and what that looks like is the in the weeds. But I think again we just want to say or I do and if anybody has another thought please join in but we we the finance committee and the rate and the board want to remain
039involved in the certain uh like parameters that we've asked about. One is no reconfiguration. I don't know. I saw you had it up there. Uh but and that we're we're involved in the process as as it proceeds and uh and we want to be aware of things as as they come up. So it'll be a busy month or two, but uh that that's really what we So in other words, we're just not voting on a number. We have to vote on a number by law and tonight's the last night. So we vote on a number and we're not going to get any more money from anybody else but that's the number and within that number we align resources and that's what we want to be involved in in that alignment of resources with you and
040administration. So just want to state that. Thank you.