001good evening we're going to call to order the regular meeting of the Board of Education today's Wednesday March 19th 2025 please rise for the pledge to the flag to the flag of the United States of America and to the stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all we'll start with a reading of the mission statement we are committed to academic achievement and success for all students in a safe environment in partnership with families and our community our mission is to promote confidence inspire a passion for Learning and to prepare our students to become responsible Global Citizens is there a motion for the approval of the revised agenda motion second second all in favor I I motion carries update on questions or comments raised from interested citizens there are none there are
002also no questions or comments from interested citizens tonight and that brings us to our budget presentation by Miss Hawk okay I don't know I think we're down here in the bottom somewhere I got my finger need a PowerPoint BR there is okay thanks all right good evening I want to thank the board for the opportunity to present our Personnel I also want to thank our business office staff for their assistance in developing tonight's presentation specifically Michael buffamante Patricia Wallace and Patrick Gill thank you in tonight's budget presentation we will take a look at Staffing from the following perspectives we'll Begin by looking at districtwide FTE or full-time equivalent positions that we're proposing for the 2025 2026 school year these positions will be reviewed in two separate categories those included in the general fund and those
003that will be funded through federal and state grants we will then provide an overview of expenditures or salaries for district personnel and finally we will examine the cost ass associated with employee benefits hang on you control oh you did it I'm sorry there we go okay sorry on this first slide we break down our district Personnel into 20 categories or departments and provide a year-to-year comparison of FTE you will see that we have proposed a total of 1,1 12868 Ft e for next year which represents an overall year-to-year addition of 6.17 FTE or a 0.55% increase fun fact that I have to share uh in preparing for this year's presentation I reviewed presentations from previous years and what I found was last year we had a reduction of 6.17 FTE uh from the previous year
004of 2023 2024 so in 23 2024 we had 1,1 128. FTE um which is the exact number down to the hundredth of what we're proposing for next year um it wasn't planned that way but it's pretty amazing coincidence essentially what we're doing is we're recovering the 6.17 positions that we cut last year for most of these categories you'll see that changes from one year to the next are relatively small and in consequential these changes are typically due to recoding or portions being reassigned either to or from title grants there is one number on here that jumps out to you immediately so we're going to address that one first it's the 12.49 FTE increase in the instructional staff on the teaching line this line includes all teachers and teaching assistants teacher aids and any staff associated
005with the special education and elll programs including clerical there are a few reasons um a few different things that contribute to this overall increase of 12.49 first it's important to note that 4.75 of these FTE were actually added during this current year but they were not included in the budget simply because the need arose after the budget was adopted last spring so we need to add them here the positions added during the 2425 school year including a part-time AIS teacher part-time teaching assistant um additional enl teachers and two portions of clerical positions associated with special ed or elll also contributing to the 12.49 FTE increase we had a 1.0 behaviorist who was recoded from the uh to the teaching line and we had 2.14 FTE that were returned to the general fund general fund from
006the title grants where they were budgeted for last year um and this is due to typical flu uations in recurrent grant funding in terms of strictly new positions for the 2025 2026 school year we are proposing a net increase of 4.6 FTE and I use the term net increase because we actually had a need for 7.6 positions um but a reduction of three sections of general education sections at the elementary level due to slightly decreased enrollment um has allowed us to reallocate those three positions to other areas of need these new positions include two new special education teachers new two new enl teachers a teacher for Writers Workshop several teaching assistants and an enl coordinator for 6 um I also want to look at the transportation line because that's where where we see another large
007change we see a decrease of 7.97 FTE in that area now it's important to note that we are not decreasing the number of drivers that we currently have if remember last year we added additional positions um with the hopes that we can pull um increase our number of In-House runs we did not fill those positions and since they remained vacant um we will we are planning on removing them for the budget for next year um we will however um continue to recruit and incentivize uh additional drivers um and if you're asking how we would do that we have additional contracted runs right now and should we be able to pull those back inhouse the money that would be spent for the contracted runs will be pulled back for salaries um are there any questions so
008far next slide next okay all the positions or FTE we've just talked about are part of our proposed general fund budget it's important to understand that there are an additional four 43.91146 feral and state grants we budget for these grants based on the current year but there are small FL fluctuations from year to year based on federal allocations you can see how important this funding is for our instructional staff because it provides us with salaries for 40 additional teachers and teaching assistance now that we know how many employees or FTE we have districtwide let's take a look at the salaries associated with these FTE and explore the year-to-year salary comparison of various subgroups I'm going to start by focusing on the last line of this chart you can see a proposed budget of 112 milon
009974 this represents an overall proposed increase of 3.53% for staff salaries in each of these subgroups you'll see a percentage increase that is primarily reflective of of employee step increases and contractual increases or raises as expected for transportation and for reasons already mentioned you'll see a small reduction uh in transportation Staffing costs the largest percentage increase on this slide is in the other category at 3.63% the percentage increase is large but you can see the dollar amount is relatively small and rep represents only 1.2% of our staffing expenditures this category includes health insurance buyouts vacation payouts and we need to appro adequately appropriate funds in this area as we are contractually obligated um you'll also see under safety there's a 5% increase in safety um it doesn't seem like a very large amount but I
010do want to address it because it is slightly bigger than the others um our increase in safety is has to do with the capital project um we budgeted we allocated additional money there because we anticipate that our buildings will need to have additional Staffing for hours that they typically wouldn't be covered due to work being done by the capital project do we have any questions on this slide okay the graphic on this slide shows how our human resources are allocated throughout the district and what percentage each subgroup represents in our overall Personnel budget as you would expect the largest portion of our Workforce is our instructional staff representing over 82% of our overall Staffing expenditures on the next slide um when people think of Staffing costs they typically focus on salaries but we cannot forget
011the equally important component of employee benefits in this chart we've outlined the expenditures for each of the benefit categories employee benefits or Fring benefits can be broken down into the six categories you see on this slide as you can see the overall increase in employment benefits is a modest 0.1% several C categories remain unchanged from last year but you will see that we do have a projected 2.6% increase in health insurance insurances for act for active employees and retirees represent the largest benefit expenditure and the cost increase is primarily due to an increase in premiums through the orange olster healthcare plan we're also projecting a 7% increase in the area of other insurances this includes workers comp life insurance and unemployment and this increas is primarily driven by an increase in our required contributions to
012the bosis workers comp Consortium as well as an increase in unemployment and finally you'll see a decrease there of 6.5% in our contributions to the ERS and TRS systems again all of these items result in a 0.1% increase in benefit expenditures question what accounts for that decrease Patrick the retirement system yeah do that um well there's there's many ways to sort of approach the retirement system projection or appropriation and we participate with TRS ers the state and local retirement system called ERS uh ERS has uh literally different rates for different tiers so the employees if you're mostly it's tier three and four employees have one rate the the newer employees are are part of a different tier so it it can be a little trickier than it first appears and what we did this year
013is we tried several methodologies some new methodologies to projecting the the budget um for the ERS and what we what we realized is we were probably over resourced in the current year in that area and we were able to based on this sort of New Wave looking at it um reduce that um budget code and so it's one of those things in budgeting if you're very prudent and you're very conservative you budget higher um but I always like to say what where you want to start is you want to you want to basically project what you think the number will be and then based on the probability that there will be variance or variation in that projection and how safe you want it to be probability and and Prudence is what I say you then
014make an adjustment a contingency based on that so this year we looked at it we said I think we can bring this down safely bring this down um and help the overall budget increase you know reduce the overall budget increase Sal area so thank you you're welcome next next slide so on the next slide um this chart shows a breakdown of the six employee benefit categories you can see that health health insurance accounts for almost 56% of the benefit expenditure contributions to ERS and TRS another 22% and 15% of the budget is allocated for uh Federal F tax these three categories alone account for 93% of our expenditure in terms of benefits and our takeaways are essentially this we're committed to providing all students with a quality education um we have provided additional Staffing through
015this budget and allocated existing instructional positions to address the needs of all students and of course we exercise for financial responsibility because it's always important to consider the impact to the taxpayers um with that I'd like to ask does anyone have have any questions the F to the last one f is 7.5% right it's not 15% 7.65 yeah so why why do we have a 15% F in our budget 15% 15% when you say 15 well it says here that the budget 15.3% of it the fex I know what you're saying it represents the 15% of the portion of all of the benefits benefits the whole P the benefit Pi it's 15% this F the FICA rate is 7.65% that's 7.65% of salaries payroll this is is benefits so it's it you calculate the F
016amount and then you compare that that to all the other fringe benefits and it represents 15% of The Fringe Benefits that's what that pie chart represents s out of the out of the total so the total 55 mil 178,000 FICA is 15% of that F at at uh 8.3 million that makes sense thank you any other questions no thank you very much thank thank you you very much okay next is the approval of minutes from March 5th 20125 is there a motion motion second second all in favor I motion carries policy manual update do you want me to speak okay so we met on um what was it March March 11th and we discussed three policies the sexual harassment grievance policy is being reviewed by our attorneys and the ex official student board member and
017School District records policy are for first reading this evening we also discussed adding a link to our website so that the policies and titles can be accessed easily and on next meeting will be on April 22nd thank you M Clark for the next section do I need to go through each you need to get an approval for the first reading of those two of those two polies we need an approval for the uh first reading on that those two policies there motion motion second second all in favor I I motion carries I have to so just okay so we need a motion to accept the the annual budget vote scheduled for May 20th 2025 motion second second all in favor motion carries and there's approval of a stipulation agreement motion second all in favor I
018motion carries and Miss Hawk Personnel thank you I'd like to ask for approval from the board for the items listed under Personnel this evening any questions motion motion second second all in favor I I I motion carries Mr Kill business and financial uh thank you I'd like to respectfully request approval of the business and financial items 12.1 through 12.6 any questions motion motion second second all in favor I I motion carries and committees on special education and preschool special education accepting recommendations is there a motion motion second second all in favor I I motion carries and reports by Board of Education committees uh Miss Don you anything else on policy other than what you just no other than we will be meeting 22 no the last meeting on March 5th it was happening simultaneously with
019this one I did follow up with Oxo to see if there's anything that we missed but the agenda just contained every school board having a student representative which um Monro Woodberry already has so thank you Mr Reynolds for visitation uh we visited Smith clove and in the Ed Center uh looked at the playgrounds and the rest of the building so getting the great support from the team on making those uh even better than what they are even this lovely room I think we're going to try to refurbish this beautiful room um to its fine Glory so other than that I think our next one is craigville school in April 2nd thank you Patrick did you want to speak about audit and capital project task force is there anything up to update uh um we had
020a meeting scheduled for next Wednesday and I think we're going to have to reschedule that to some point in the near future I think at that meeting we're going to talk about the claims auditing process which we typically do once a year and probably the focus area for the internal audit uh which may be payroll okay I think I think the meeting thereafter the June meeting is June 11th okay and anything for the capita project um one thing I did want to mention is we're we're approving a proposition for the May 20th budget vote and the proposition uh essentially is asking the public for authorization to uh spend additional monies on Capital work and um the the total cost of that proposition would be $16.6 million and folks are aware I know obviously the board
021is aware that we have an existing Capital project of about $98 million and three of the buildings that we're working on are getting new um hot water heating system are the the three two five buildings so it's Pine Tree North M and Central Valley so we realized over the course of developing the design work for this that this would be a very costeffective time to add air conditioning to the classrooms of those three buildings and air conditioning is a big part of this we're calling it proposition two which will appear on the May ballot um the nature of that work where we're converting a steam heating system to hot water involves a new boiler in the basement new piping that will run through the building to a new unit ventilator in the classroom so very
022relatively small additional investment we're able to air condition all those classrooms so that is a major part of our 16.6 million uh proposition the other major piece of that is adding doors and walls enclosing essentially the the open classroom design at North M elementary school so that's another big big piece of that um we're also proposing to do some electrical upgrades at the other three buildings uh Smith clove Sapphire and the middle school which will enable us to add window air conditioning units because now there is a new law in New York state the heat index law which um basically says that classrooms cannot be occupied when they get hotter than 88 degrees or any instructional space really so so the addition of adding that onto the three buildings is help helping us achieve that
023absolutely and this is the biggest point I want to make about the $16.6 million ask it sounds like a lot of money and it is a lot of money but we've structured it to have no tax impact and we're able to do that because we're putting down 5.3 million from our capital reserve and the the repayment we would then borrow the remainder and the repayment uh The Debt Service if you will will equal the building Aid so we're able to spend $16.6 million we have this really um I don't want to say once in a lifetime but really opportune moment to add air conditioning so three buildings walls and doors to North M with no tax impact so it was the timing is good because it aligns with the timing is good it would it
024would cost us a great deal more later on down the line if we waited so now is the time it's like to say it's like your own home you're renovating your kitchen the ceiling is open it's the time to put in recess lighting that that's essentially where we're at at the three buildings the 325 buildings this is the time to add the air conditioning it's the most cost cost effective time and we planned it and engineered it to have no impact cost or tax impact by using the capital reserve been setting that money aside so that's a big thing big part of the uh Capital advisory task force we're going to be talking a lot about that on the 27th it's our next meeting and also talking about this the really the construction phase of
025the $98 million project which which will begin this summer okay thank you you're welcome and next up our reports by board and central office Dr Morales good evening um over the last few days I had the opportunity to attend seam night at CV as well as the Pine Tree science fair um both were so much fun to see students engaged and explaining their projects and I believe I built a catapult with a pom pom um in addition I would like to thank the pine tree team today was our superintendent conference day and over 200 staff members arrived at Pin tree for the day so I want to thank Mr Martin and Miss Bennis our custodial crew Sabrina and Zach from the MCC uh Mr troto for helping us with Rich and Mike this morning to
026direct traffic and parking and basically for everybody working together to ensure that all of our Logistics were taken care of it was a great day um and other than that just to congratulate Mr mochio on his appointment and that's all I have thank you Mr Cahill thank you so I'd like to thank Lori and her team uh for all their work on putting together the Personnel budget uh it's really a team effort and everyone pulled together this year so thank you so much uh I'd also like to thank the folks at Robert Half we had a donation that we accepted this evening uh to the middle school and the high school uh we really appreciate their generosity and um with that I hope everyone has a nice evening thank you thank you Dr vs um
027big shout out to CV team uh for hosting a really well attended steam night um I really had fun to uh not enjoying with the students but also making um a rocket uh I also attended um middle school did a good job with at PTA and administration they hosted U an online uh session for parenting in the digital parenting in the digital age by Dr Shapiro was very well attended and he gave some good nuggets about how different it is um in parenting being being parent in the digital age good night thank you Dr Hassler so also kind of following along with the Middle School um I I attended the professional development day at the middle school and at the high school today and one of the presentations that the Middle School hosted was for
028staff called hidden imp plane site and it's a presentation on current trends in uh drug use vaping cannabis and it was very very eye openening about how sophisticated some of the things that are out there right now and I bring this up because next Wednesday night March 26th at starting at 6 o'clock at the middle school they're having the same session for parents and I encourage everybody to please please please attend because it's very eye opening to see what's out there these days so it was a great presentation today please go out and attend and uh I attended Middle School career fair great job to the team that did that I don't know if this was a coincidence but congrats to the Middle School Math League team it was posted on Pi Day Mrs spenley
029I don't know if that was intentional or not or was that intentional Jen so great job congrat they they won first place in the in the regional Math League um on Pi Day so congratulations finally I attended the high school um college application Workshop where we had just short of 500 uh people attend between students and parents and it was a great very eye-opening experience for me as a parent starting in that process and um just how supportive the entire high school team is counselors Administration in equipping our families with that very daunting process so those that are working towards that I highly encourage you to attend next year thank you thank you H thank you I actually want to commend every single person to my right over here uh for the professional development day
030that was planned and implemented uh for today's conference day um throughout the district we had multiple trainings going on not just for our teachers um and our but for our administrators clerical safety custodial um I think um we collectively did a wonderful job addressing each area and making sure that we had purposeful professional development for our employees so thank you for that um I also want to um give a shout out to Mr Christopher moio who uh was approved this evening as the assistant school lunch manager um congratulations and welcome to the team thank you thank you Miss Noak is not here this evening Miss donu yeah um I'd also like to congratulate Mr moio and uh welcome him to our district I'd like to thank you for the budget presentation it was very informative
031uh I also attended the steam night with my grandson who built some kind of electrical devices made noise and flashlights and he had a ball we had a ball um I intend to attend hidden in plain sight with my daughter-in-law next week and I'm really looking forward to seeing Secret Garden on the 28th you and have a good evening everyone I had the distinct honor and privilege of participating in the U Middle School career fair on the 7th trying to um entice the next generation of attorneys um the students were particularly inquisitive um it was a wonderful wonderful day um I encourage anyone to participate um moving forward uh also uh that same weekend uh the middle school had their phenomenal presentation of honk Jr um all of the performers as of all of the
032plays that we've seen this season they did such an amazing amazing job uh congratulations to all of the the new appointees um uh and uh I'm sorry I'm just I have a other things on my mind in terms of personal family thing so I'm a little off my game this this afternoon but thank you um and have a great evening everyone so thank you Mr rold uh thanks to everything for what everybody does uh it was nice to see the two young ladies and all her classmates in the Middle School play that are in the audience over there um have a great night get home safe thank you Dr C uh thank you for the budget presentation very informative as always and U have a great day thank you superintendent Dr nor so I want
033to just really uh take pause to just um thank the community um the cabinet you did an amazing job rational development and all the other things that you highlighted thank you for your time thank you for supporting our students to the board same uh we see you at all these different events I know that um that doesn't that time just doesn't appear you make it so um thank you for that and I want to thank the community you the parents our students out there because together when we all form and support each other we we form a a formable force if you will and that that gives me great pride I had the privilege of presenting to the high school college African-American history class this week I had a great time the students were engaged
034we talked about a lot of history we also studied the uh the science behind biases it was great conversation and looking forward to hearing hearing back from those students to uh to see what they learned and see what they do with it more importantly uh you heard about steam night so I won't go into that but I will um just share that I attended the station where we had to code to make the little bracelets and um so I made a bracelet year that represented my name and my wife's name and um I want to thank that young man Joshua you who led that station High School senior so if you're listening out there Joshua I kept my promise I said I would acknowledge you so this this past weekend um I stopped by the
035elementary Special Olympics practice um it was an amazing opportunity and wonderful time uh to just really hang out with our special Olympians and they were practicing for their big event but um it was really great to see the parents uh the coaches the teachers are really red behind our students who's going to do amazing things I also might add um if they're watching and listening uh I had fun playing tag with them and they're quick so lastly it gives me a great pleasure just to share with the community that we had a mum Woodberry alumni from the class of 2005 who recently won an Emy award um this young lady's name is myo Tommy masu received an Emy for individual achievement in animation Back ground designed for work on oron in the dark a feature
036length animated movie produced by Dreamworks Animation that premiered on Netflix in February 2024 as a senior at the high school my ho was voted most likely to succeed so we certainly got it right congratulations if the fam is out there listening thank you have a good night thank you I'll just end off saying thank you again to Lor and the team for putting together the budget presentation uh very easy to see everything that's going on here um and that's it have a good night and welcome to all of our new hires especially the new assistant director for Food Services thank you and we're going to ask for a motion to go into executive session to discuss Personnel second all in favor I motion Carri meeting