001I need a motion of executive session. Second. All in favor? I. At this time, we'll have the presentation of the budget from Caleb Russell. You're up. Okay. Is this one? This is working. Okay. So, start here. Presentation of the budget hearing. Notice is hereby given that the board of education of the Eldred Central School District will hold a budget hearing at the Junior Senior High School Gymnasium 600's Route 55 Eldridge, New York and said district on Thursday, May 8th, 2025 at 6 p.m. for the purpose of discussion of the expenditure of funds in the budgeting thereof proposed by the board of education for the school year July 1st, 2025 to June 30th, 2026. Notice is given pursuant to section 1716 of the education law that a copy of the statement of the amount of money
002which may be required for the following year for school purposes exclusive of public money and the real property tax exemption report will be annexed to any budget of which it forms a part and may be obtained by any resident in the district's district office 600 state route 55 Eldridge New York and at each of the two following school buildings in the district George Ross Mackenzie Elementary and Eldridge Junior Senior High School Eldridge New York during the 14 days immediately preceding the annual budget vote and election between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 2 p.m. prevailing time other than a Saturday, Sunday, or a holiday together with the text of any resolution to be presented to the voters and will be available on the district website. A copy of the detailed assessment of estimate estimated expenditures
003will also be made available at the budget hearing to be held May 8th, 2025. Scott, I think you're supposed to read the next one. I can do that. The board president or designate will review the Huh? when he goes he's going to do his budget here. Oh, that's after when we go into public comment then that's when Okay. Oh, okay. Excellent. Okay. So, 202526 proposed budget for the Eldred Central School District. Um when we're building this budget, these are the parameters that we're shooting for. Uh we want to maintain our existing programs with a target 0 to 2% surplus that allows us to handle any unexpected expenditures. uh for 202425 I'm expecting that surplus to be around 1% of the budget. Uh we want to maintain a total fund balance of greater than 10%. That's
004what the comproller considers to be zero in the fiscal stress score. However, ideally it would be 20 to 30%. Currently we're at 12% which is okay. Again, it's considered zero fiscal stress, but we would like it to be a little bit higher. Um we want to maintain reserves adequate to fund reasonable unexpected costs and known future obligations. So, for instance, uh vacation and sick buyouts that happen when people retire. Currently, we have 50% funded. Now, that might sound bad, but it's similar to like a uh pension expense where um that's all of your future costs. So, in other words, if everybody in the district retired today, which wouldn't happen, we could only pay 50% of them with the reserves we have. Um we want to maintain an unappropriated fund balance of 3 to 4%. It's
005currently 4%. and we want to ensure the continued fiscal health of the district and be mindful of this impact on tax increases. So the revenue budget for this year has property taxes of 13,72912. That's the part most people want to hear. It's 4.63%. We are going to the cap. Inside of that cap is a $100,000 capital project. I will go over the plan for that later, but currently it is to update a water filtration system. Uh it needs to be replaced. It should cost in the neighborhood of $50 to $60,000. Uh depending on how much that costs, we also need to fix these gym doors and there are some security upgrades that we would like to some of our external doors. Uh that is all funding permitted. Our state aid is going down. That is
006going to continue happening for at least the next 3 years. That's why we have to go to the cap unfortunately. Uh the issue there is our property taxes, our property values are rising very quickly. uh two years ago or four years ago our property tax valuation was at 767 million. Today it's at 1.4 billion. So essentially what the state is saying is that the value of all the property in the Aldrich Central School District has doubled in 5 years. And if you live in the area that is probably true. Um house housing prices have about doubled in 5 or 6 years. However, the state uses that as a key metric to determine your state aid sharing ratios, which is what you get back on transportation, Bosey's aid, and things like that. The other revenue line
007is going to be flat. That's things like Bosey's refund. Boseies isn't allowed to have a fund balance. So, what they do is they charge you uh a larger amount knowing than what it's going to cost and refund you the amount of costs at the end. And then there's some other things that occur at OSE's that like say for instance they're charging you if you send a special ed student to an 811 program and they're expecting to have six kids and it's going to cost them $100,000 they take 100,000 divided by six that's what they charge you. If you end up filling the class with eight it costs less per student. You get that refunded back at the end of the year. So that's what makes that up. There's also interest in there which we've been
008doing very well on. We should be earning around 200,000 in interest. That should stay around the same because bond prices are around 4%. So I don't expect that interest rate to go down very quickly. Um the reserves is a little bit of a funky thing there. So the reason that's going up 150 is we have uh the cafeteria fund has run a ran a deficit for a very long time. It ran a surplus during co but basically we owe ourselves money and the state wants me to pay it back to ourselves. So on the detailed budget which I actually believe is in your budget hearing packet there. I don't know if we printed out enough copies of, but um it shows that we're transferring $230,000 into the cafeteria fund. That's part of our um budget.
009A big chunk of that is to pay the general fund back what we owe it from the cafeteria fund. So, it's not going to change our fund balance. Um overall, our budget is 20,348. That is 2.69% higher than what we spent last year, which is still less than inflation. Inflation this year was around 2.9%. the school tax rates on here. This is what would happen on a $200,000 assessed home. Uh I'm unfortunately these are not going to be particularly accurate right now. I will try to get accurate numbers up there, but um the assessment data for May 1st is not available yet as wasn't on the Sullivan County Real Property Tax website yet. So I don't have the effect of any new properties. There's almost certainly some new properties that were put on there which
010will lower these rates. So they should end up being lower. On another scale, the equalization rates are also not available right now, which means I don't know what's going to happen directly to each town. Right now, the equalization rates are in for every town except for Highland. The property values rose. And Highland has not come in yet. If Highland goes from 57 to 55, I would expect this all to stay the same. If Highland goes down a lot because it's our biggest taxpayer, then all of the other rates will go down, Highlands will go up and so forth. I don't have that data yet. It's not available. The state actually just passed their budget today, so hopefully that'll be available in the next week or so. Um, our state aid ratios over the years, just
011to give you an idea of the effect that this has had, is BOS's aid has gone from 48.4, this is just over the last four years, down to 36, transportation from 36 down to 28. Now, let's take transportation for example. We spend about $1.2 million on transportation. We used to get 36% of that back. Now, I only get 28.8. So, that's 8% less of 1.2 million. That means I'm losing $100,000 compared to 4 years ago. Now, everybody knows prices have gone up, wages have gone up, but the revenue I get from this has gone down. And that is another reason unfortunately why we've had to go to the cap. We have been able to either break even or have a surplus every year. and we want to continue doing that. But um right now I
012think the trend is that state aid is going to continue going down for at least three more years except for in Bosey's aid cuz we're at the minimum. Bosey's aid can't go below 36%. So that will level off. Um just as a share of the revenue pie, property taxes make up 67% of our revenue. State aid makes up 27.87. So, um, when almost a third of your revenue isn't going up, it makes it difficult to kind of keep up with that. Um, this is how we calculate the projected tax levy cap. That 08 is based on new properties, and theoretically, that won't actually increase your taxes. Like I said, the assessment rules haven't come out yet, but the idea behind that is that there's been8% increase in new properties added to the ROS, and they'll
013pick up that increase in taxes. So, it shouldn't hit anybody else's bill. In our expenditure budget, our general support area is going up by 105. The transfers are going up by quite a bit. That's where you put in your capital reserve project, that $100,000 project is in there. And the money that I'm sending to the cafeteria fund is in there. Um, our debt is more or less staying flat. Our employee benefits, that's pretty typical, 3.57%. It's very hard to keep them below four. uh transportation is only going up by 1.93. General support we have in there the potential uh promotion or hiring of a supervisor for buildings and grounds. So that's why that's going up a little bit more than the others. Um as far as the breakdown of that construction and employee benefits, which
014by the way is should of course be your biggest expense, make up about 70% of our budget. Um, general support includes things like your plant ops, cleaners, administrators, um, insurance, printing, websites, things like that. Things that aren't directly instructional but support that mission. Where we had some cost savings this year, which was good, is our votech costs are going down about $145,000. Um, it's because of a bit of a different formula that we have for calculating our costs here. Uh I guess because business officials like myself weren't entirely truthful with Boseies. Uh Boseies bills you based on how many kids you're sending there. We frequently underestimated it. So they took away the incentive for us to do that. And now they base our bill on the last two year the average of the last 2
015years enrollment. And 2 years ago, 3 years ago now, we had 40 students where we normally have 25 students in VOTE. So that 40 is dropping out of the formula and our costs are going down substantially because of that. Um, we have some retirements that are occurring. Uh, two of which we won't be replacing. The fuel bids came in substantially lower. So, we're paying $2.91 for fuel oil and $2.89 for diesel. We're going to pay about 50 less per gallon for each of those. Um, we were able to cancel a few software and maintenance contracts that weren't needed. Um, and we have been able to save quite a bit of money on out of district placements. Now, you can never guarantee that that's going to last. You don't know. Um it's not something that's within
016our control, but uh that there were some considerable savings there. Um again, the $100,000 project, the main work that's going to happen is the water filtration system here. That is the most important project. Uh after that gets done, if there's anything left after we had discussed it would be the door security upgrades. I doubt there will be anything left for the floor repair, but we would like to at some point repair the floor over here that goes down past the cafeteria that you'll see a whole bunch of tape over. Um, we would like to get to repairing that at some point, but that can wait until next year. That's more of a cosmetic problem now. We'd like to fix it before it becomes more than a cosmetic problem. Uh, so at this time, you can
017talk about public comment and people can ask any questions they want about the budget. there in the budget newsletter. There is a breakdown of the expenditures and what we're planning to do with it. The board president or designate will review the meeting rules of order and the qualifications of voters during the public comment portion of this meeting. Each speaker should identify him or herself and state their town of residence. Speakers need to be acknowledged prior to speaking. Questions must pertain to their propositions, one question at a time per person. The president of the board reserves the right to close discussions. At this time, the business official will answer questions pertaining to the propositions during the this period of public comment. Public comment on a budget hearing. No questions on it. No questions. All good. Okay.
018Well, if any of you have any questions, you can always come and ask and set up an appointment with Tracy and we're happy to tell you anything that's in there. This time we'll move on to superintendent report. Yeah, Caleb mentioned earlier that New York State they finally passed their budget after several extended waiverss and lots of negotiations. Now with the passage of this budget, um it also included the cell phone ban. So starting August 1st, I have the district has to have a plan in place. This is for 2526 school year. The cell phone ban is a bellto bell ban which means from the beginning of the day to the end of the day there are no cell phones in school. So I will be meeting with my admin team and we will be constructing
019a plan on how to implement it. We have to have it in place by August 1. Uh let's see. Oh part of this budget was also talking about the EV bus implementation. So there's been an EV bus implementation like waiver. Um this waiver has been extended to two more years which puts us out like we can apply for this waiver and it puts us out going past the deadline for EV buses. But what in order to get the waiver we have to work with NAERTA. NAERTA has to come up with working with us an electrification implementation plan. So they have not given us more details but that was part of the budget as well. I am hoping that specific details will follow. Um the US Department of Education as of right now um has not
020released our title one or our DIA grant funds. These are the funds that we use for academic interventions. Um we currently use $325,000 between these two grants which we will absorb and that is in this budget but we have not received those funds for next year. I do have that we were on a shout out for the whole state elder central school district. The last year um Governor Hokll's big push was for FAFSA for all students to fill out the FAFSA. Have we filled out FAFSA, guys? All right, we're on the we are we have been shouted out the um and I got the email today from the state. Um, as of April 24th, 53.5% of New York's estimated class of 25 have submitted a FAFSA. Totally approximately 113,600 submissions, an increase of nearly 10,000
021compared to last year. Nationally, we rank seventh in New York for the nation. This is where we got our shout out. says several districts including Eldridge CSD and then two other school districts on Long Island have FA um FAFSA submission rates of over 80%. So we got a nice shout out and um and again the reason we are pushing the FAFSA is because New York students left over $220 million left on the table in Pell grants and other state and federal aid grants. So it's important that we get those filled out. So, I did want to let we got a shout out across the whole state. I was very pleased. Um, the last thing I have is parents will be receiving a notification tomorrow. I'm going send out a message. Um, Tik Tok, there's now
022kind of a disturbing trend going through regarding um, Chromebooks. And this is like Chromebook challenge, how to break a Chromebook. And what this tick tock trend is encouraging students to insert lead or metal items like paper clips, push pins, aluminum foil, and or mechanical pencils into the USB port in the Chromebook, forcing an electrical short circuit. This could also puncture the lithium battery, which poses a serious fire risk. To put it kind of local, I you know, I live closer in Orange County. Across the river is Wingers, which is a very large school district. the Ketchum I think it's their middle school or their high school actually had to be evacuated because of this. So we are seeing this trend parents will receive an email tomorrow just so they are aware that this is um
023you know it is a serious risk because it can start fires and we already had you know there have been several and I want to say even upstate there's been several schools that had to be evacuated because of this. So kids stay off don't put anything in your Chromebooks. So other than that, that is all I have to report. Any questions for Stacy from the board? Tracy. Tracy, I'm sorry. Looking at her. Stacy. Tracy's too many. This time it's my turn. Last meeting, we had something happen here that should have never happened. And it's on me. I shouldn't have let it go on as long as it did. And I did. And I regret it. And when I left this meeting, I knew I was wrong. When I'm wrong, I can admit when I'm wrong,
024and I owe somebody here an apology, and that would be Miss Mr. Ruick. I am sorry for what I let happen to you. It will not happen again. And I would expect nothing but the support that she has sitting behind her from Ela Central School. Thank you. I expect the budget to go through as it has for the last 7 years that we've all been sitting here. We've always got the support of all four towns. It's always gone through by 70 some%. At least at least right as 80. High as 80. Uh this the towns have always supported us. We've as you can see how we try to keep our budget to a minimum and I feel this board and this admin people have done a great job doing that. So hopefully May 20th will
025be a come out and vote and please support us. Thank you. Public comment on consent and gend only policy 1230 public particip participation at board meetings. The board of education encourages public participation on school related matters at board meetings. There will be a specific agenda item at each board meeting to provide an opportunity to address the board. A reasonable public comment period time not to exceed 30 minutes shall be set aside during the first part of each regular special board. The president is responsible for the orderly conduct of the meeting and shall rule on such matters as the time to be allowed for public discussion, the appropriate the appropriateness of the subject being presented and the suitability of the time for such presentation. The president shall have the right to discontinue any presentation which violates
026the this policy. Public comments should be as brief as possible. No speaker will be permitted to speak for longer than three minutes. Speakers may comment on any matter related to the agenda items during the first public comment period and on the district business on the second public comment period. All questions shall be directed to the board president. The board will the board will not permit in public session discussion involving individual district personnel or students. Person wishing to discuss matters involving individual district persons and students shall present their comments and or concerns to the superintendent during the reg regular business hours. The board president will be responsible for recognizing all speakers who will properly identify themselves for the maintaining proper order and for adhering to any time limit set. All speakers shall conduct themselves in a
027respectful and civil manner. Obscene language, lielist, lielist statements, threats of violence statements advocating racial, religious or other forms of prejudice will not be tolerated. Person making comments and or questions at the board meeting will address remarks to the president and may direct questions or comments to the board members or other district officials only upon the approval of the president. Questions may be answered by the district officials within five business days as as more information may need to be gathered to give the well-informed answer. Question and comments from the public concerning matters which are not on the agenda will be taken under consideration and referred to the board president for appropriate action. If the board president is absent from the board meeting, the responsibilities of this policy will be assumed by the vice president. Adoption July
0281st, 1991. At this time, I'll take any questions on the consent agenda items only. All good. Okay. Moving on. I need a motion to approve consent items 801 through 11:01. I'll make the motion. Motion by Stacy. Second. Seconded by Amodore. Any discussion on any of the consent agenda items to come before the board? All good. I'll take a vote. I'm Dor. 11:02. Yes, we had Oh, yeah. That weren't right. So on 10:05 hold on let me get September 1 10:05 should be September 1 2025 the same where is one why am I 10:06 oh okay I'm sorry go ahead with that again Linda please Linda Lisa Lisa anyway 10:05 there is a corre direction on the date just for everyone to know that it should be commencing September 1st of 2025. 10:06 the same thing
029commencing September 1st, 2025. So, we're going to update and make those changes on the consent agenda. Mr. Prebs, did you have something else to add? I mentioned it looks like it goes to 11:02. Oh, 11:02. I apologize. Yes, 11:02. Okay. So with the corrections for motion to approve consent items 801 through 11:02 and the corrections to 1005 and 1006 is September 1st 2025 for 10:05 and 10:06 September 1st 2025. Can I have a motion? I'll make a motion. I'll second second with the changes. All in favor? I We're good. Uh where am I at here? Old business come before the board. Any old business that come before the board? New business. Only new business I have is uh Lumberland reached out to us about our bus garage and they uh it's been 15 years since
030they got a increase in rent. I think that's pretty generous of them. So I had a conversation with one of the council person. Uh they want to increase it $400 a month. If you do the math over 15 years I think we're talking it ain't much. So then like I said that's the only increase that you know that they've gotten. so far. So, I don't think that's uh I don't think that's out of line. Make it like in the hot 3,000. It's probably 3600. What's that? We're paying uh 9 * 40. So, exactly four month. Yes. Any other new business? Stacy, you want to read this? Sure. Perfect. Thank you. Okay. So, the rules of qualifications of voters. The board president or designignate will review the meeting rules of order and the qualifications of voters.
031Voting will take place by p by in person on Tuesday, May 20th, 2025 at the Elder Junior Senior High School in Elder, New York. Closing. The vote is at 8:00 p.m. Qualifications for voting must be a citizen of the United States. Must be 18 years of age or older. Must be a resident of the school district for 30 days or more preceding date of the vote. The custodian and inspectors along with the district clerk of the vote will oversee the voting. The custodian inspectors will verify all handcounted results of the voting. The president of the board of education will read the call of the meeting. Notice is hereby given that a public hearing of the qualified voters of the Eldred Central School District, a school district of the state of New York located in the
032counties of Orange and Sullivan, held at the Eldred Central Junior Senior High School in the Eldred Central School District on May 8th, 2025 at 6 p.m. for the presentation of the proposed budget for the following school year. The budget will be available for review no later than May 6th, 2025 and thereafter at both school buildings and the school district office. Notice is further given that the annual meeting of the qualified voters of the school district will be held at the Eldred Junior Senior High School, Eldred, New York, on May 20th, 2025, closing at 8:00 p.m. Proposition one. Shall the following resolution be adopted to it? Resolved that the annual budget of the Eldrich Central School District for the fiscal year 2025 2026 is hereby adopted and the requisite portion thereof to be raised by taxation
033on the taxable property of the school district is hereby authorized 20,348,487 to levy taxes thereof. Proposition two. Shall the following resolution be adopted to it? Resolved that the board of education of the Elder Central School District is hereby authorized to levy taxes annually in the amount of $49,500 for the fiscal year 2025 2026 and to pay over such monies to the board of trustees of the Sunshine Hall Free Library. Election of board of education member. The qualified voters of the Eldrich Central School District are authorized to elect one candidate as a member of the Board of Education to serve a 4-year term beginning July 1st, 2025 and ending June 30th, 2029. Voters may select one candidate or submit a name on the line for a write in on the ballot. Thank you, Stacy. So at
034this time I'll have public comment on what everybody wants to talk about but the guidelines hold public comment period time not till you see 30 minutes three no 30 minutes and an individual come up state their name where they're from they have three minutes to talk and addition to that in addition to that board of education policy 1230 provides a permanent part. The board will not permit in public session discussion involving individual district personnel or students. Instead, persons wishing to discuss matters involving individual district personnel or students should present their comments and concerns to the superintendent during regular business hours. At this time, I will call for public comment. Come to the podium and state your name and where you're from. Hello. Can you hear me? It's Trinity Gotcha now from Glenn's Bay. Um, I
035was just concerned about what I heard from the students. Um, we're going from nine periods to eight periods possibly. I know that there was probably a lot of thought put into that, but I wanted some comments as far as we have not been notified as parents and I I'm more concerned that like basically the successful kids that want to do programs are not going to be able to. Yeah, I was I'm there's no decision has been made. We're still we're we are talking about it, but no decision has been made. No definite plans have been made. is still literally early in the discussion. Okay. Yeah. I just wanted to make my voice heard um so that everybody's aware because things like band kids are not not going to be able to do band and I'm
036concerned about that obviously. Um college courses and the electives and things like that as far as whether or not the kids are going to be able to graduate with the right credits. Absolutely. Okay. And also just really quick um castle learning might um I heard something that the kids couldn't get on to castle learning and they need that for regent practice. I didn't know if you heard castle learning is a software that we used to use. We have not used it this year offers the same thing. It is and it's several different software programs offer up regents prep and it's where they've uploaded old regions into an electronic format. So cast learning is not the only software that does it. Il does do it. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. [Applause] Anybody else would like to
037come up to the podium? Once, twice. Okay. Very good. At this time, congratulations, boys, on your win last night. I got up there just to see you. [Applause] got there just to see the end of it because my granddaughter was playing down here, but I was impressed. Okay. Uh let's see. Our next meeting is that up here May 20th. Oh, there we go. Uh announcements. Next meeting will be held junior senior high school on Tuesday, May 20th, 2025 from 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. The annual budget vote and the school board election certification of the election affair. All ballots have been counted. I want everybody to take note that the times have changed. It used to be from 11 till 9. Am I correct? They are changed till now to 11 till 8. So if
038anybody thinks that they're, you know, get in at 5 minutes to 9, sorry, you're not going to be able to vote. will probably the doors will probably be closed. Uh, at this time I needed I need a motion to move into executive session for more personnel issues and contracts. I make the motion. Motion by Stacy, second by Kristen. All in favor? I. Everybody be safe getting home. Hopefully we all see you on May 20th for the vote. No business after executive session.