001[Music] I don't have a lot today cuz I was optimistic the state might pass a budget which they have not done as we know. So I don't have really any updates from the state because uh they just did another extender into next week uh and they probably won't get it done next week as well with an Easter holiday and Passover coming. So there's there really no updates for the state uh in in that regard as far as not just the budget of course but anything else that might impact schools cell phone policies and things like that. So just also just wanted to uh you know questions come up and and and things like that. You know how a lot of times people ask well how much money we get from the federal government as a
002kind that was a question we heard a lot here in the last couple weeks. So um it's really a little less than a million dollars now uh we get total from federal funds uh each year. has been declining each year uh because it's it's somewhat enrollment based not just for our district but for the state as a whole. All right. So, New York State has been receiving a little bit less federal um grant money uh for the last several years. And some of that big chunk of that special ed and another chunk is what they call title money which goes to u academic supports and things like that in our program. So, I just wanted to put that out there kind of so people had at least an idea how much about we're receiving from
003the federal government each year and state revenue. So, all the updates I have for tonight. Okay. So, um I am here to give you a budget update. Um just wanted to go through our timeline. Do I have a clicker here or no? Yep. Okay. All right. So, here's the agenda we're looking at today. Um want to start off and explain where the gap is that we started with. Talk to you about expenditure and revenue shifts. Talk to you about budget to budget. present to you a balanced budget based on conversations had um and then I am required as well uh to discuss this the idea of capital outlay what it is what it or you know the purpose of it so on and so forth so I will have a brief couple of slides u
004on that for you at the end right so how did we get here uh there's been a series of meetings uh we are in the highlighted yellow one during the end of the budget season here um yesterday we met as a finance committee and on Tuesday hosted an open open to the public open house night. Um I actually really like it. I would like to start doing that a lot earlier. Randy and I were talking about that. I don't understand this. Why in New York State do we do public budget forums 2 days before the budget vote and not months before? So I really liked it. I hope to continue doing that in the future. Um and then we also met with the school staff on Monday as well this week. So All right. So,
005where are we standing right now? Right. So, right now we've got a a gap, right? We've got a $ 1.9 and change million dollar gap, right? The cause for that gap is we have things are more expensive than we're getting in money, right? Our money out is far more than our money in. Our proposed money out is far more than our money. All right. This does assume the tax cap. The tax cap is a calculation that we perform via a statemandated calculation every year. This year for us, that tax cap is 2.83%. Okay. All right. So, some of the shifts that we're seeing that are causing this this this gap here. All right. Salaries, not much of a change district-wide. The reason for that, a lot of the retirees going out of the budget are
006being replaced by obviously lesser salaried amounts. Um, and it's just it's it's a savings for the district. We're in a good spot there. Fringes, that's the big one. Health insurance. Health insurance is making up a large portion if not the entire portion of that 98 or $981,000 delta. Okay, debt service not much of a change. Boseies Bosey's costs like anything else are going up. The more we participate in Boseies, the more money we spend. The good news about Bosey's expenditures, it's aidable, right? So not next year but the year after we will see aid on that on that uh $3.66 million. All right. Aid means we're spending a fraction of it in the long run. Transportation was the other big kicker. Yes, sir. Explain that. Aidable. What is aid? Yeah. Yep. So, there's a big
007formula on how schools are aided in New York. All right. It's a each school district is provided what's called an aid ratio. Bosey's aid ratio. Ours this year was 54%. Next year it's actually 56%. So, there's actually two aid ratios that districts are provided and we are we carry the higher one. So next year we're at 56%. Essentially what that means is $56 out of every hundred spent come back to us in the form of eight. Essentially meaning we were on the hook for $44 on the 100 44 cents on the dollar. Okay, that's a form of revenue in the 26 27th school year. This year we got aid from last year's expenditures. Next year we will get aid from this year's. There's a year lag. There's a year lag. Yes. Transportation aid is no
008different. Good question. Thank you. Okay. And uh as I mentioned, transportation is the other big one. We've been talking about that since since January with our new contract with first student um and with Kaki Transport. There were five contracts with Kasaki Transport that went up 35%. And then we saw the big jump in our first student contract. Um we had a 5-year contract. We sent a bid out to 30 some odd companies. One responded and it was significantly more than we're spending this year. Um, I'll just answer the question now because I'm sure it's looming out there. Does this include EV buses? It does not. This is to get buses as we have them right now. They're diesel buses. Um, there is a stipulation in there that if student were to purchase an EV bus
009or were to get a grant to get an EV bus, could they charge us more? You know, do they need to go and build a new garage? Do they need to hire a new mechanic, get all the new tools and everything else? Can they charge us more? The answer is no. there is that language embedded within the RFP and therefore within the contract. Okay. And then other is anything that's essentially not salaries, fringes, debt, policies, transportation could be contracted vendors, um and other just ancillary costs to keep us open. Any questions on this for me? All right. All right. So then we have our big five which yes you just saw a bunch of these namely you saw transportation we already talked about health insurance we already talked about salaries. So it's really just the
010special education and the retirement piece of it. So we are on the hook as a as an employer to contribute to what's called the TRS the teachers retirement system and the ERS the employees retirement system they each carry a different employer contribution percentage ERS is in the range of 15.29% 29% next year TRS is 9.56%. Okay. And that is of the salary of the individual employee. So again we do see an increase there. Sorry we see a decrease next year in that field because the the rates actually went down from this year. This year 10.29 for TRS. So it's going down and um I believe ERS was right around the 16% margin. All right. So revenue shifts. This is our money coming in. This is when when people uh pay us the district. Okay, so
011we have really a couple different categories I'm going to go over with you that build up our total revenue stream. The first of which being state aid. Okay, we are seeing a, you know, the governor came out, oh, I'm going to give a minimum of 2%. But when you look at that 2%, really dial it in. Foundation aid may have gone up by 2%, but if your transportation aid went down, that 2% goes down with it. Okay? So, our net difference is actually a 0.25% 25% increase to our aid coming in from the state in its totality. Okay. Fund balance. Um so fund balance we annually appropriate this as part of our bal as part of our budget. What this does is is it helps to offset the burden on taxpayers by contributing money that
012the school has built up in reserves or built up in the form of fund balance over the years. Next slide. Uh other revenues you'll see that on the left. I'm going to point out really two of them. Uh the top two tuition is what we are charging other schools to come here that we can recognize as revenue. Uh those are students coming into our special education programs. Those are students coming here for other programming. Um we did pretty well this year. We continue to do well in that field. Uh interest income. Last year um at the reorg meeting if you guys recall I had asked if we could venture not away from but in addition to um our bank to work with New York Metropolitan Bank as well. Okay. Uh that has provided additional interest
013for the district. The more money you have in there obviously the more interest you make. So we have looked to put more and more money in there to try to generate that that interest up. The scary thing with interest is yes, could we go ahead and budget all the money in the world in interest and match the number we're getting this year? We absolutely could. The downside of that is if the economy takes a turn for the worst, we have a giant dent in our revenue stream and in our revenue budget that we would have to go fix in the subsequent year. So re um interest is one of those lines that you want to be highly conservative with for that very reason. Um and then at the bottom here we have the tax levy
014uh 2.83% 83% which equates to a $575,000 increase in to in its totality. Uh and as a reference point, just what what is a 1% of our tax levy? It's about $23,000. Any questions on revenue? Next slide, please. All right. And this is all just lumping it together. All right. So, our budget is right here in this middle column, 2526 budget. I do not anticipate our revenue stream going above that $37.7 million mark. Okay, as you can see by that beautiful pie chart in the bottom because you guys know I like I like my pie charts. We are predominantly funded by taxpayer dollars. Okay, that has been the case four years and then the next size up is our state aid and then on the other end we have our other revenues that we have
015discussed before. questions on that? Okay. All right. So, the question that still remains, we've established our revenue, we've got too high of expenditures. How do we bridge that gap? How do we lower our expenditures to meet our revenue? These are what we call discretionary cuts. They're non- staff related cuts. We're talking about things like eliminating bus ride, eliminating bus runs, support services, software reductions, uh programs that we subscribe to, um teacher leader stipens, other services that we have, um couple of additional bus runs here towards the middle and the bottom. Okay, these are items that we were asked to look at to try to build up a savings in. So, it's not all in the form of staff for obvious good reason. Any questions on that? Okay. All right. And so then we get to
016the, you know, the difficult part of the presentation that nobody wants to talk about, but we we do need to discuss. All right. So what we did when we we looked at the next steps here and how are we going to manage the rest of our gap, which leaves about a $1.3 million gap after those discretionary cuts, we wanted to look at the trends over the years. The 0% trend line shows where we were 10 years ago. Okay? So 10 years ago, we were flat at zero. Okay. Since then, we've seen a 17% decline in enrollment, a 9% decline to our administrative team, a 5% incline to our CATA staff, which involves our teachers, our school counselors, and our nurses. Um, our 35% decrease to our cafeteria staff, a 20% decrease to our clerical staff.
017Custodial has remained flat. Uh mid-level supervisors are our transportation supervisor, facilities, assistant director, facilities, and our food service manager are all on there. Those have maintained as well. And then finally, our teaching assistants and aids have seen significant increases over those 10 years. A lot of which due to the needs of of special education. Okay. So, we met on Tuesday with the community and we presented some some uh options. We met with the staff on Monday and presented some options. We met with the finance committee yesterday and this is the um the option that we took away from that meeting. All right. From that meeting, uh we went with option D. Okay. So, just full from the start, option D was the option that left the elementary schools the way they are. no reconfiguration at
018all. Okay, we still have three sections in in the grade levels here at CE, two down at at uh EJA. What this does mean is we would see eight teachers cut elsewhere in the district. Okay. Uh that would result in 45 and I'm sorry, and one reduced. Okay? So that would leave 45 sections being cut 7 through 12 sections meaning classes. Okay. Um, in the process, we do have retirees that we need to replace. Okay? We have a speech pathologist retiring that we need to replace. We have a special education teacher retiring that we need to replace. And we have an elementary school teacher that we need to replace. In addition, one of the other cost containment strategies that we are proposing is the addition of a special education teacher to hope to bring back
019students that are placed outside of the district currently. And in doing so, we would save on transportation costs and tuition costs. That is one that we've talked about at length at our meetings. We would do that if and only if it made financial sense to the district. If it is more expensive or not good for the the quality of the kids' education, we would not be doing it. Okay. So, that one is is something we will continue to look at. And then finally, we will be looking to add a social worker to the school. So that is a school-based school uh employed social worker um to replace some uh contracted services as is of right now. Who the staff members are is still being discussed among uh our committee. Um obviously we want to preserve
020as much as many CA staff as humanly possible in this process. Okay. So we will certainly be back with you guys with with final answers uh at a at a later time. But I did want to present to you the numbers that we will need to attain to get to a balanced budget. Okay. Uh as I mentioned, our elementary schools would remain the same and they would look like this. Okay. And by doing all of that and again it was not done without empathy. It was not done in a simplistic way. That's how we get to our balance budget of $37 million. $37.7 million on both our expenditure and our revenue side of the budget which is required by uh the district to go to taxpayers with. We cannot go to the taxpayers with an
021imbalanced budget. Okay. Does anybody have any questions on the budget itself before I get into the next piece that I I do have to talk about? I just want to clarify when on the slide it said uh teachers cut that could also mean other staff members correct other than teachers the the positions that we had discussed were in the teaching unit so that is why it does say teachers yes but it's still being discussed at the correct committee level yes a pair of professionals oh I'm sorry yes I'm sorry thank you Mike um my apologies there in addition addition to get to that balanced budget, there is a reduction in pair of professionals as well. We do anticipate nine cuts to pair of professionals. Those are our teachers aids and assistants. And I'm sorry, Ryan,
022you're good. One more question. So, the five new hires Yep. does not affect the eight CA teachers cut. What is the net on that? Quickly, can you go back to that slide for me? So, what is the net here? So, one of the things and I I hope that this answers the question is one of the things we will obviously look to do here is are there folks in here that can fill these roles, right? We don't know the net yet. We we do not know the net because it will depend on the decisions made here that will impact down here. Obviously, if there's a way to move five people from the eight into here so that we don't have to tell as many people that they can't work here anymore and service our kids,
023we would love to do that. We would love to keep them here if I just want to clarify that. So, if this is a good time to add this so the public knows because one of the questions came to the board was that are we are we considering any incentives to retirement? Yep. And so I think the public needs to know that um those discussions have been ongoing. Yep. And uh so we have looked down that pathway for some savings, but there is a particular formula that has to be met to to make it achievable. Yes. It it it's under negotiation right now, so I I can't speak too much to it, but the conversations are being had. Yes. And all the pieces of this presentation we've seen and talked about just so people this
024isn't the first time that we've correct seen it. So we correct been discussing this for Yep. The the finance committee saw this finance committee finance the whole board has not and this is the recommendation that came from the finance committee. Correct. Okay. So, annually as part of the budget presentation, one of the things that I am required to give is a presentation on what's called a capital outlay project. Okay. So, just in a nutshell of what it is, I'm not going to read right off the slide to you. A capital outlay project is a $100,000 project that is 71% Aidable. What this does is it allows schools to tackle projects that don't require a full-on specific capital project vote. It happens in the within the confines of a general fund budget vote. Okay. This year
025we renovated our athletic spaces and PE spaces in the middle school and high school gym. In the past couple of years, we've added door key card swipes to our two elementary schools. This year, what we're looking to do, I'll get to in just a second. Um $100,000 projects are aidable up to our building ratio, which is 71%. meaning in the end we're we're actually spending $29,000 on the project. Okay. Um we still have to go through SEDD, you still have to go through the proper channels. You still have to work with your architects to do so. We had talked about this back in uh January and we have already um worked with CSR and approved that contract with the intention of trying to get the work done during the summer so that it didn't impact
026any programming during the next school year. Okay. Um, you know, is it new to the budget? It is not new to the budget. This is something that has been in our budget as far back as I know and that my predecessor has talked to me about. This is a a annual amount set in the budget for us to be able to go and do the these smaller projects because $100,000 does not get you very far anymore in school. Um, and so I do, but again, this is something that I do have to present on anyway. Um, is it a separate proposition? It is not. by going to the polls uh in May to vote. If you vote yes on the on the uh Proposition One, that is the the budget amount, you essentially just voted
027yes to the capital project. If you vote no, the same. Okay. The capital outlay. Capital outlay. Thank you. Thank you, Kyle. Capital outlay project. Thank you. All right. Um where where are capital outlay projects allowed? Capital outlay projects have to be performed in a single building during a year. In other words, I cannot do some work in CE and do the same exact work in EJA. I can't split them up and say, "I'm going to do 50 grand here and 50 grand there." That's not allowed. You can only do this in one building. All right. So, our proposed project scope for the next year is to do some asbestous abatement work in CE and obviously it's in the floors um and then replace the flooring. And we are also looking to do some upgrades to
028the H HVAC system in a particular classroom over in C. Okay. And we had talked about that previously as well. So that said, are there any other questions from you guys that I can help with?