001okay good evening everyone this is the grammar meeting the room board of education dated april 19th 2022 the time is six p.m please rise as of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberties [Music] more things to accept the regular minutes from the last meeting you know sign on our attendant minutes right all right let's pay them done uh we do not have any editions of deletions tonight very good reporter superintendent of schools thank you good evening everybody uh welcome back to spring i think uh it was a good week i suppose for those that got to get out of central new york and then you come back to snow so i know the students uh thoroughly enjoyed the extra day today so that's that's rare so
002welcome back everybody we are now uh ready to go for the home stretch the victory tour for the seniors as i like to call it a couple of quick reminders uh tomorrow night there's an ad hoc committee meeting of the board for redistricting and that will be on zoom so if you would like to uh participate in the meeting and uh listen to the conversations between the board and consultants uh the link for that zoo meeting is on our website i want to also mention that earth day is this friday april 22nd uh rome cleaning green is participating in the great american cleanup uh beginning on sunday uh of this week no earth day is yeah the 22nd i was right they're starting on saturday they're participating in the great american cleanup which goes through
003june 20th uh each of our schools i'll be working with the principals to ensure that uh each of our schools participates in that event is basically a school-wide district-wide cleanup beautification of our property so please look forward to more information about that as well as opportunities to participate to help kind of clean up the grounds as we get into spring certainly after one more salting of today that will be again necessary until the rain comes also congratulations to our music department once again we are named a best community for music education by the national association of music emergence so i do know that uh the group that submitted the application was a little bit more on edge this year because nam increased their application requirements and they really uh an application that was about three
004pages turned into 80 pages this year and they looked for a lot more detailed information about what the district and community does for music education so a little bit more of a difficult award to win this year and so congratulations to all of our music teachers and all of our music students uh again for receiving that recognition also if you are not aware master sergeant dela pray was awarded the yellow rose award by the zanta club of rome and she is being recognized on saturday at the franklin by the zanta club so if you are interested in attending that event please let me know i do know that they are looking for folks that want to attend just to be a part of that recognition so congratulations to della those that know her know that
005she's a mainstay of the high school does way more than what her job responsibilities include and we're very appreciative that she's here and continues to not want to retire and the last thing i want to mention is congratulations to two rfa juniors kenneth davis and colin seely they participated last week in the air force research labs spring event every spring break afrl does a event where they host two students from every surrounding school district and they compete in some form of a technology or uh cyber security event uh kenneth and colin took second place it's the highest scoring team that i have seen in my time in rome each of them was awarded a two thousand dollars college scholarship as a result and what their task for the week was uh the topic was machine
006learning uh and they had to learn and understand the computer program that would teach the computer to understand the differences between human faces horse faces and cat faces so they spent the week learning the program uh and building a approach or building an application to do that for a computer and they were second place so congratulations to kenneth and collin and thank you to uh rfa teacher al bangs who spent his spring break supervising the students and was on site afro with them the whole time so with that i turn it back over to you sir okay thank you miss blake uh we elaine is at a lacrosse game so we have no uh student board member reports we'll go right into public comment the first one is steve hampty as much as i wanted
007to remain a presence before the board after my term expired i felt it only fair to give some space and allow you to find your path however it was simply unacceptable watching the last meeting and witnessed the board declare that bullying was now permissible within the district well to be fair it wasn't everyone apparently it was just board members you commissioned a formal investigation which determined a board member violated the very code of conduct she is supposedly leading the revision of and then the only consequence is training training training to educate the supposed adults and representative of the district that they shouldn't have a tantrum in a sporting event shouldn't yell at students shouldn't that rather be given it's expected of everyone else the naacp and other members of the public have asked several questions
008of the board at that meeting have you bothered to answer any of them this board has made all sorts of claims of transparency what's transparently clear is that you have a significant problem with one of your own that's actively impeding your ability to carry out your duties why is that apparent to everyone except the people at this table and before i go any further i'd like to clarify a piece of history i'm sure that was not accurately conveyed as i considered my run for the board not being a rome native i sought out somebody who i thought had the pulse of the district yes this very board member we met at espressos where it quickly became apparent that i was listening to someone focused on their own history of a mass grievances with the district
009and a vendetta based agenda when i would not sign on to be a functionary in helping settle those scores that's when i became persona non grata that is the source of the bad blood that supposedly exists between us now when she joined the board during my third year the entire board feared not if but when her behavior would result in the board and or the district being sued not sure if you're aware but that came just a few months later during the original sale of the fort sandwich school we fortunately dodged that bullet so i'll spare you the details except to suggest you might want to ask what happened to a real estate career it took two and a half years but now you do have a lawsuit based upon one person's behavior of course
010that is born of her previous public tantrum earlier this year which the board dismissed but has finally wended its way through the court system and speaking of lawsuits mr nash i wanted to update you on the first amendment suit you challenged me to file regarding this board members blocking people on facebook first amendment law clinics have expressed interest in the cause but have demurred on filing it because it's such a small case but that said just last week i heard back from the knight first amendment institute at columbia university which won this case against the former president for doing this very thing they're currently examining it just a tip it's probably not a good idea for a board president to dare citizens to sue the district now some members have expressed consternation that members of
011the public do not know you and therefore should not be judging you to that all they have to say is welcome to being an elected official you might have a point that we don't know you deeply or personally except that doesn't matter we can see what you do here on our behalf ostensibly and supportive students staff in the community what we have seen especially in this situation is well a whole lot of nothing given my experience on the board i was inclined to give some latitude as board members are instructed that the president is the only spokesperson except you don't seem to have noticed that it does not seem to apply to the vice president point of fact this does not seem to have been something that has ever applied does you hear a repeat
012congratulations and comments as to the president's make slim if she can speak whenever why can't you at this point your silence is support of and complicity in her actions um another thing about comments mr nash before you attempt to dismiss my comments suggesting that these are things i should have known having been president of the board i just wanted to share that given my tenure i was invited to and have joined the nisba board retreat faculty actually when you do your job and do it well it does get noticed to conclude bottom line as i've shared with many members of the public i'm aware you cannot force a board member to resign and there is no mechanism for formal censure but this board elected its officers and its president appoints committee chairs no one is
013entitled to those positions of honor and authority you can reconsider a previous vote it is your duty to support and defend the student staff and district community something that is not possible when one of you is undermining your roles a few years ago the rome city school district was starting to earn respect across the state and now it's board is a statewide laughingstock your options may be limited but there are actions you can take at a minimum you can speak up that is long overdue thank you you all got your scolding there okay next speaker is jeff nelson that was awesome yeah her work is done so i've been yeah i've been thinking about um what i was going to say a lot since the newspaper article came out in regards to the lawsuit um
014thinking back many years the naacp has been asking requesting lobbying lobbying and um yes demanding more diversity equity and inclusion within the school district and in order to achieve that there needs to be a lasting plan there needs to be people who are knowledgeable and trained in the field it has to be people who have the lens and life experiences to accomplish this we had the equity task force was working on all cylinders and i hate to keep going back but with one vote that all went away and it's almost as if it's never been spoken again um you guys really have to look into yourselves and and understand that it's about all the kids it's about all of them and in order to do that we need to get agg back we need to
015get them back boots on the ground working within the school district and everybody needs to put their pride aside it just needs to be done you need to admit that there's a serious problem within the school district in all of the years the rome and double acp has kept an eye on the school district we have never seen anything like this nothing compared to what the school board is now and i know mr hagerty along with mrs fontana we've been around the bend a few times over the years and year after year we have spoken never backing down waiting for the right people at the right time that's what we have to do as people we have to wait for the right person to come that could speak on our behalf that can do the
016work and right now with your administrators with your counselors with your teachers we have the right people that wanted to excuse me that wanted to do the work and again it's all been gone away and this distraction ms davis has just been a waste of time um we i i just get so frustrated because i can't believe that none of you see what we see i don't i don't understand that none of you speak about it none of you react to it i don't do you go to school board training to learn how not how not to have emotions or i just don't understand it so what the naacp is doing tonight ms davis we are asking you to step down we are asking for your resignation from the school board to step away go
017take care of your business you cannot leave with this lawsuit looming over your head the children and staff of the rome city school district deserves so much better your circumstances do not give you any credibility at this time and i'm just saying what everyone else is thinking just step aside go take care of your business straighten it out and if you want run again but let this school board get down to the business that they're designed to do thank you okay and then profetti i'm here to give you your best representatives huh i'm sure you'll give it your best effort well i'm going to so now that a lawsuit has been put into place i have one question to the taxpayer where's that money come from come from her come from you my guess it's
018going to come from the taxpayers that's where all the money comes from this is kind of where this just hit me when i was driving over there we give you guys all the money but when we ask questions we can't get an answer we get no answers it's none if this was a real board i'll be gone with the exception of one person whenever i reach out to joe malachi i get an answer sometimes it's one i like sometimes it's one i don't like but i know one thing he's honest and i know he's gonna shoot straight with me i don't understand how we can sit around and this lawsuit's hanging and i wouldn't be surprised if there's a second one coming from the kid because if that was my kid and that was said
019about my kid i promise you i would have gotten arrested that night because there would have been an issue that's just the way i am but in response to jackie if you want to have the program put back in place get all your friends and over turn the board the four of them up they go bye-bye and you put four more people in there and you start over and you build something this this and you're right it is a waste of time this is nothing better but more than a waste of time we can't concentrate on the kids i see probably well you were in my business the other day i see probably three to four hundred people a day and fifty percent of them will comment on what's going on and i can promise
020you none of the comments are good comments everybody's concerned you're in a challenging time maybe we don't understand that sitting up there we don't know the time that we're in but we're in a challenging time diversity diversity doesn't have to happen now it should happen yesterday because you need that you have a diverse community and it's going to get more diverse because our our president just keeps dropping people off whatever hell he wants at three o'clock and more so you're going to have bigger diversity when when the first go around was when we were going to redistrict that's when all the bosnians were coming in to the united states and they were being placed around had we gone through with that first process if you think we got a problem now with overcrowding it would
021have been insane it would have been nuts is there a possibility that we could turn this building into a school what are they doing with stanley one person says or one article in the paper says that fema's paying 98 98 percent of what raising the building or fixing the problem those things that need to be out there but when you ask questions you don't get no answers i want a president that when i ask him a question he gives me an answer not sits there and looks at me and if you want to come to my house i want to come to your house that's not what i'm here for i'm here for the kids even though i don't have one in the school system i'm pretty pretty heavily invested between rental properties and businesses
022and it's in rome and the only thing that seems to keep going up property taxes it keeps going up and the education is not getting any better we're not doing anything to make it better we need to make it better i'm going to suck it jackie and i know you're not going to do it i would love for you to turn your resignation and step down but if you don't do it today in about a month the citizens will take care of that okay work study session thank you uh cross my fingers technology works better this week um i will let you know that the presentation is not all that different from a couple weeks ago and we have another we have a budget hearing coming up in two weeks so i will not uh
023label the tonight to throw something at me if i'm just point too long-winded joe i know that uh you got me on the clock my best i'm not full of mr interpretation tonight don't worry about me okay so uh welcome again everybody tonight as you know is the second of our uh planned proposed budget presentations this is slightly different than a couple weeks ago we're here i think mostly we're here we talked about adding some money to the budget overall so i'll highlight a little bit of that tonight as some as well some of the differences that we have from from time to time this slide there's nothing new on here so i'm just not gonna talk about it much more other than the one thing i always want to highlight when i do budget
024presentations for the community is that they understand what the combined wealth ratio is of a school district uh i was just looking at some of this today from four years ago four years ago we were at a point four two something so we've gone down considerably in combined wealth ratio uh again this number is a factor in our state aid uh foundation aid allotment and this is the way the state measures a district's poverty rate uh 1.00 is average wealth for school districts in the state of new york there are districts that have as high as a 5.0 uh combined wealth ratio and you can see we're at a .368 which is uh really far on the low end of the spectrum statewide so that number does help with our foundation everything else on here
025is the same um no real changes to that so far can i ask one question what four schools are in trouble we have uh currently we have and they're not in trouble i wouldn't call them trouble this is related to the uh essa regular or the s identification so this goes back four years folks uh because of covet the federal government hasn't done a reclassification of their heads of schools uh we had we had four schools bellini was going to be the fifth then it's daily closed so we're back to four but we have uh joy bellamy denti and gingerbread are on that list and currently all four schools are on the list due to participation rates in the 3-8 assessments so because we don't meet the 95 participation rate that's what got them classified
026four years ago they haven't given any schools a chance to get off those lists until uh this time next year so i doubt we're going to reach the 95 participation rate but it is possible that we'll see uh if you look at our data from last year's the three eight assessments in our elementary schools our students performed significantly better last year on the assessments than they traditionally have uh and those assessments are currently ongoing right now we won't have that data until sometime in the fall but those are the four schools uh thank you for mentioning that because i do think people feel like those schools are um i don't like the work you chose we chose the word trouble because that's what came to mind and that's okay right i understand how that works
027but uh those are our four schools uh and they continue to work hard at uh getting off those lists this slide is a little bit different are you saying those schools are schools in need and what is it they're in need for us this the federal government classified in the school was in need of improvement and it's simply and there's all kinds of well the rig their participation rate in the assessments is not 95 so the way the slr works is the state is required to have five percent of all their schools on that list no matter what so at any point in time five percent of the state schools will be on those lists of some kind and in order to make sure they can meet that mark the easiest way is to say
028if you don't meet the target of 95 of your students participating in those assessments which means they're not opting out you're automatically on those lists there's also factors that let's say you got 100 participation and you don't your scores aren't making the great so what i'm saying is we're on the list because of participation rates but we also can make improvements academically and i think all schools everywhere in the state can make improvements academically i say it all the time until our graduation rate is 100 which is almost impossible but until you get to that point you've got work to do and so uh it starts at the elementary level and we're aware this slide is a little bit different in terms of challenges and responses we don't have anything new at the top of
029this right our student staff social emotional mental health is going to continue to be a concern next year primarily the elementary level due to our overcrowding of the classrooms we do know that we have a lot of students in our classrooms we do know that our staff and our adults in those buildings are asking for support and making sure that they can continue to be supported there's inflation and supply chain issues uh that we will continue to face when it comes to materials and supplies for our schools uh right now we've seen more concerns related to inflation inflation excuse me than supply chain issues but as we get further and further down the road i do think that there will be some issues with supply chain issues for us the biggest concern that i have
030currently right now with inflation is in food services i had a good conversation with chris whitmore yesterday and the cost of feeding our children is skyrocketing right now and uh so that's something that we have to keep a close eye on as you know while the food services budget and department is separate from our general fund budget by law anything that they have in a shortfall the district's general fund is required to cover that shortfall so if they don't have enough money uh in their budget or in their fund balance to cover their costs we by law have to pick that up peter can you ask a quick question about the supply chain i know in our industry as well a lot of that has been technology are we doing okay with being able to
031maintain um replenishing our chromebooks and things of that nature so far we have uh if you look in the hallway you'll see several thousand new chromebooks just came in that we're deploying and we have also been able to secure uh brand new laptops for all the teachers uh throughout this year so so far no issues with that but that doesn't mean that that can't pop up at any given point in time um state budget uh one thing that's different between last time and now the state has an improved budget there are some things in it that are beneficial there's some things that are concerning in my opinion the concerns are for future budget development more so than current some of the things that are in there i i brought notes because i i there's a
032lot here that i wanted to talk about i'll do a quick but one thing the state budget that's important to know is they have approved what's called aid forgiveness and what that means is school districts across the state that are uh have penalties for either misfiling reports or skipping the power reports or anything of that nature and they were going to have an a deduct because of that the state has waived those deducts and so they're going to give people whatever money they're due as a result of maybe a misfiring or an error in a filing or a a misfiling altogether so that that has an impact on us in the sense that that's more state money that districts maybe we're not going to receive that could have gone other places that uh we may
033not be getting as a result um there's a grant program out there for covert recovery um personally i think that the federal government has done a lot for school districts in terms of public recovery funds i would have liked to have seen uh that funding from the state go into the general it's a hundred million dollars that would be nice if that would spread evenly amongst all the school districts only because i personally feel that every district has been given a lot through arco funds to be able to take care of coke uh related issues um of the of negative concern there was no change to career and technical education uh and boces staff caps so it was looking promising that they were going to allow districts to increase the uh salary limit of aidability
034for boces employees they did not pass that resolution so that number is still capped at thirty thousand dollars is the the highest amount of boces aid we can get um as i talked about a couple other quick negative things uh minor but important they did not increase the dollar amount for capital outlay projects so if you uh we haven't done one in a couple years but the capital holiday project maximum is a hundred thousand dollars and all that means is that school districts are allowed to put a hundred thousand dollars in their budget to allow them to do school construction work without needing border approval if you think about a hundred thousand dollars when you take your architect fees your construction management fees off you're really talking about maybe eighty thousand dollars worth of work
035can be done in the school you're not gonna do a lot for eighty thousand dollars on a large facility there was a proposal to increase that to a quarter of a million dollars that did not go through this year it's something that they try and get through every year so maybe next year most school districts support that because you can do a lot more with quarter million dollars to a school if you need it in the emergency then you can with a hundred thousand dollars um for the future things that are important to notice there was changes to the virtual open meetings law as a part of the budget i'm not going to get into all the details of it but there are some parameters that will allow school boards to continue to do virtual
036meetings or conduct their business in both an in-person and virtual format essentially if that's something that our board chooses to do everything we're currently doing is all we would need to continue doing making sure that the quorum is in person that the public has an ability to come and be in person and that any board member that wanted to participate virtually we just advertised that they were going to be participating virtually so no real changes but that could have a uh it could have an impact down the road the biggest impact that i've spoken about and that you're going to continue to see is that by the year 2035 all school buses whether they're owned or leased must be zero emissions so the only positive in that is that it was going to be 2027
037uh which is a concern because right now they have not invented a zero emission school bus that has a ride time of longer than a half an hour which means the bus would be able to get from the bus depot 15 minutes out and then to a school so you can imagine what that would have done to transportation ability my biggest concern with this is while i do believe that that transition is going to be aidable that the state will fund the purchasing of those buses and reimburse them through transportation aid because a zero emissions bus right now is about five to six times more expensive than a traditional school bus i believe that they will eat it but that eight money will come out of the foundation aid pool so you'll see a stagnation
038of foundation aid over the next decade to support the cost of the transportation aid reimbursement on school buses i can't say that that's going to happen i'm just simply saying that over the next 15 years that in my opinion right now that's the only way to fund that transition to zero mission buses when every district in the state needs to do that if you think about it uh for rome we're talking about needing between our own internal buses and uh first students fleet about 70 buses would need to be 70 75 buses of a district our size we're we're kind of of the average side of new york state those districts that will need several more hundred buses than we need and all those districts trying to get that i do have a concern that
039that is going to be a an issue for future budgeting when it comes to foundation until uh they find a way to do that wasn't that conversion part of everyone's proposal at least two out of the three proposals that we got when we did that rfe like i feel like that was obvious that's something that's been on the radar for years uh but i don't think they were expecting it to happen so quickly uh in my opinion right now the only benefit is that they pushed the date in 2027 to and i say that because number one the the buses don't exist for the ride times that uh districts need i mean there's districts that need ride times for up to two hours because there's such large rural districts that it takes an hour to
040get to the for this kid and then an hour to get them back um and then on top of that the funding is my biggest concern i do believe that the state will fund them i don't think that that will be the issue my concern is where are they going to come up with that kind of money when the buses are costing five to six times more than a traditional bus and everybody needs to do that so um for rome because we contract our transportation there is a small benefit to that that we don't need to do as much future planning to make sure we replace our nine buses however there's going to be a cost on our transportation contract that we gotta pay attention to and then worry about where is that money gonna
041come from and right now my theory is it will be a stagnation of foundation aid probably around the year 2030 you'll start to see those that foundation they kind of bottom out no different than the roller coaster i think we probably all expect so i'm just pointing it out because there's a benefit to the increased uh budget we have tonight uh because of some of those things and i'll explain it when i get there uh and the rest of these are the same right we still have works for storage uh concerns like everybody else does cursive funding for the future we know the federal funds that i talked about earlier are going away so we need to make sure we're preparing for that we do have some contracts up to negotiations uh the essa that
042we talked about a few minutes ago with our school is being identified and then uh continually rising health insurance costs are always things that concern us again no changes this is just our per pupil expenditures and these districts are all districts in madison and boces and oneida county we are the second lowest spending per pupil district in our region look at that one of two ways i'll let you choose which lens you want to look at that through this is a slide that i like to highlight for our business office this is the change in spending year over year again the same districts in oneida county and uh madison and boces you can see uh we are spending year over year less than our counterparts throughout the region so this is a tribute to our
043business office our administrators for ensuring that the money that we are charged with uh utilizing we are not previously spending it and we're doing our best to make sure that we are reducing costs year over year with that with that funding that is beneficial because as we talked about last time we've been able to build a little bit of a fund balance that we haven't had in years past which has allowed us to increase the budget uh tonight compared to a few weeks ago so the new budget number that we're asking you to adopt tonight is a hundred and thirty million two hundred eighty five thousand and twenty six dollars the breakouts are the same in terms of how much percentage is covered in each of the three parts 75 in the program 15 in
044the capital and 10 in the administration i will break you through each of the uh three parts and what they all are categorized at uh but as you go through the new budget the majority of that increase is in salaries and benefits for instructional staff uh you have some small contractual costs some both these increases within that but for the large part the this slide is the one that has the most increase from the previous presentation year over year in total for the program budget program please think of this as anything that directly is related to student learning and experience in schools this is your teachers your ta special education uh alternative education occupational education at bosey's library health counseling sports transportation for students all of those things follow the program budget you can see
045this year a projected increase of just about 8.3 percent about a 7.5 million dollars year-over-year increase in the program the capital budget is when you think about capital this is essentially anything related to the maintenance and repair of your facilities so this is talking about your custodial staff your maintenance and grounds um preparing of equipment supplies contracts related to maintaining the property transportation purchases anything related to construction the bonds that are due or the anticipation of so that is all in capital and as you can see a slight decrease year over year of uh just over five hundred thousand dollars and then administration part of the three part the easiest way to explain this is simply anything it takes to run the school district so this is your board of education costs anything related to
046my office superintendent and anything related to my role i've been all our business office all of our legal expenses uh hr uh boces administrative costs so each district in our component has to pay into the cost of operating the boces those are all included in here anything within our educational programs department in terms of administration and clerical uh and then all of our professional development so year over year again uh this this area is just over three hundred thousand dollars about two and a half percent increase from current year to next year's proposed budget last slide just kind of breaks out what the different codes are within the budget this is just a different way of looking at a three-part budget you can see this is the current year's budget in the middle then you
047have the previous year budget and next year's proposed budget the dollar difference and the percent difference in total uh year over year we're requesting a proposed budget increase of seven million three 304 thousand 325 dollars a 5.9 percent increase from current year's operating budget to the balancing the budget we all know about in order to build an order in new york state school districts are required to provide a balanced budget which means we want to talk about what we're going to spend we talk about how we're going to get the money to do that very different than municipalities in government they just give you a spending plan they don't need to tell you where the money comes from we have to show you also where our revenue sources are so a little bit different this
048year state aid is up quite a bit but 66 percent of our money comes from state aid 29 for property taxes the other five percent comes from fund balance uh other other usually federal money federal grants and then pilots that we have within the district our estimated revenues for this year uh are 125 million 383 247 this is not a different slide from the time before so the only thing that's really changed from previous presentations now is the total dollar amount of the budget and then the amount of fund balance that we are allocating to offset that so there's no difference in the proposed tax increase there's no difference in our aid coming in there's no difference in federal funds coming in purely we're proposing to uh close the deficit by increasing the amount of
049reserves this is a slide i want to highlight in years past i've used the slide to help people understand the negative impact of a zero percent tax increase on school districts local communities have one way of ensuring that they have fiscal stability and unfortunately that is through minimal tax increases year over year rome went through a period of about four years they didn't increase taxes at all and the result of that was 18 million dollars of lost revenue uh and that's a lot of money we can do a lot of money with that 18 million dollars that we don't have this year that that could have made some difference but we can't worry about that so we look forward uh now i utilize a slide to kind of highlight if you go back to uh
050all throughout history here you can see what the tax cap from the state was that is the maximum amount we can raise taxes if we choose the tax levy increase that's been approved by the board so you can notice those two columns the first and third each year the board is approving a tax levy increase that is less by at least a percent than what um i misspoke it's not always a percent in the end it gets less uh we tried this year we went to a percent my apologies um but each year the board is approving tax levy increases they're less than the tax cap the state sets which is different most school boards and districts will always tax to the cap the other thing i want to highlight that our board does is
051the process of uh school taxes is that the community approves a maximum tax levy increase in may the board sets the tax levy increase in august so the past few years our board has approved a number in august that is less than what the community approves by about a half a percent so each year uh when we get to july and august and we do our year-end close-out of our our district fiscal uh stances we generally do better than anticipated and the board uh gives some of that tax money back by not approving a tax levy increase as high as what the voters have increased so you can see right here now uh simply by not taxing to the cap over the past eight years we've left about 1.7 million dollars worth of uh tax
052revenue on the table by not taxing the cap so nobody likes their taxes to go up uh i completely understand that however the district does do as much as we can to ensure that we're only raising taxes the level which we need to make sure we're not reducing programs and able to maintain what we are doing this year as you probably have seen in the previous slide our proposed tax levy increase was 2.5 percent that is about almost just less than nine hundred thousand dollars uh in total uh revenue one percent tax increase in the city of rome right now is in the ballpark of 370 000 so if you think about that in comparison to 130 million budget uh a one percent tax increase does not generate a lot of revenue for the district
053to do anything differently tax on true this is a slide we use just to show how our taxes stack up against those same districts in orlando county and mass united boces i am happy to say that last year we were district d so if you were to pick your house up uh from rome and take it to any other one of these local school districts you would see how your taxes would stack up and for local communities your taxes would be greater if you picked up your property and to get somewhere else so again we want to be as far over to the right of this chart as humanly possible we'll chisel away at it i'm happy that we went from d to e this year and if you look at the numbers that's not
054that far off so hopefully next year we'll be able to move even further this slide shows the projected tax rates for our five municipalities i won't spend any time on this but this is we'll be on the website if you would like to see it in more detail and we'll cover it again uh in a couple of weeks but nothing has changed here from a few weeks ago same thing again no change from a few weeks ago but you're looking at uh that same tax rate applied to a fifty thousand dollar assessed value house hundred thousand dollar assessed value house and hundred fifty thousand dollars assessed by the house if you're interested to see how a 2.5 tax increase may affect your problem this slide simply shows uh for those of you that are financial
055uh geeks like i am at times this shows you areas where you can go to learn more about school taxes and also learn how things are impact your school tax rate so state federal aids can can have that impact the assessor's office has one of the largest impacts please remember the district has no involvement in the assessment value of your property we don't have any involvement with the setting of the equalization rates that's set by the state utilization rate simply meant to help uh different municipalities within a school district not have to pay more or less of a school tax rate and then the star exemptions we don't control either this slide shows you how we got to a balanced budget so again the expenditure budget that we're proposing tonight is 130 million 285 026
056our estimated revenues are just north of 124 million that leaves us just a little bit more than six million dollars in deficit uh an increase of taxes of 891 000 allocating 680 000 reserves and then allocating a fund balance of four and a half million gets us to zero percent so a few weeks ago i think we were 2.2 ish on the allocated fund balance a allocation of 4.5 is still significantly less fun balance allocation to balance our budget than we have utilized in recent years so that still allows us to have a healthy fund balance make sure that we're putting money away for a rainy day in the event that 10 years down the road we see that bottom out of foundation aid we won't be uh we won't be worried about cutting programs
057because we have built a healthy fund balance by that peter i'm sorry i don't think any of us have the last presentation with us anyone no rob can you do you know about where did we fall once the budget was finalized from the state where we closed on our estimation from the last are we getting a little more are we getting a little less the state budget the state budget the only thing that's different in the state budget uh and we don't totally know why yet but our pre-k funding increased by uh just over a hundred thousand dollars no it doesn't affect the general fund only at the fact that it won't we won't need use as much of our money to cover the overage the pre-k program but other than that everything was pretty
058much spot on where we were yeah the um we do think that this state budget shows higher numbers for reimbursable aids than we are showing in terms of boces a transportation we were expecting big numbers because we knew our transportation costs were up and we knew our boces costs were up we feel like what the state's providing is a little bit high but that's okay because if their numbers are accurate more so than ours then we'll have additional revenue next year and that'll help us get through the year so but the pre-k one was the big one that was different that we're still trying to understand why um this is just a quick financial summary of the uh of the entire budget here again you can see current year we've appropriated 8.2 million dollars in
059fund balance uh next year we're proposing 4.5 million that's a really important statistic for the community to know um it's very very helpful um that we're not utilizing our fund balance to balance our budgets anymore uh in summary different than last time this budget does provide us flexibility so that if we get into the year and we see that we need additional staff we have the ability to do that if we see we have a need to do something drastically different we shouldn't be able to do that it still utilizes minimal reserves to balance our budget no reductions in staff continues to restore programs we talked about this last time field trips after school activities our elementary schools uh an additional athletic team of boys volleyball at the high school um a lot of things
060that we're able to to restore that for the past couple years we just haven't done partially because of covet and partially as a cost savings measure in relation to code the tax increases falling under the cap and this does prepare us better for when the opera funds go away what i mean by that is we do have staff that are being paid for on those federal grants and when those federal grants go away those staff have to be absorbed into the general fund budget by increasing the general fund budget by uh 2.5 million dollars from a couple weeks ago today if we don't utilize that 2.5 million dollars that starting point is going to help us in the future when all those staff come off of a grant and have to go into our budget
061so we won't have to see as drastic of an increase so i do want to highlight that this increase in the budget from one week to the next is important for the future because it will help us to minimize uh drastic budget increases in two or three years when the federal funds are gone and we either need to cut people because they're federal funds which is what a lot of school districts are planning to do or we can find a way to keep our people enrolled into our general fund this does that moving forward nothing different here for the propositions on the uh on the budget both you've got uh four at-large board of education seats a little bit unique this year three of the positions are three year term one position is a two-year
062term interesting candidates still have a week to submit a petition uh next wednesday april 27th at 5 pm in the district office is when you must have that submitted must include 100 qualified signatures and must make sure you have uh the notary page notarized and submitted when you return your packet i have gotten a question about who fills the two-year term uh by law the fourth uh the fourth leading vote leader would fill the two-year term so you have the top three we get the three-year terms the fourth person would get the remaining two-year term and that's by regulation what's that yes let's see this right now that would be mr becky's when she filled in for mr fred so uh miss lebecky would have to run again would have to run that one again
063but run as part of the ballot if she wanted to win or become a three-year member who knows uh there's also a proposition on the ballot for the establishment of a new capital reserve we talked about this briefly right now we don't plan to fund the capital reserve but uh capital reserves are used to offset uh tax levy increases when you do capital work within the district we have a current capital reserve that we've used about 3.7 million dollars only about 1.3 left however unlike a bank account once you start to draw down your reserve you can't replenish that reserve you have to open a new account so in order to plan for the future we want to establish a second reserve so that we can start putting some money away for future capital projects
064operating proposition uh only in here for the purposes of education so nothing new the vote tuesday may 17th where uh just about a month away right so 9 a.m to 8 p.m these are our polling locations deploying locations are the same as they were for the capital project both last month and with that i will open up to any questions that anybody may have thank you can anybody ask a question that's up to these guys okay when you um when you hire like partners like um connected community schools ymca things like that where does that what fun did that money come out of it comes out of the general fund which is all of this so specifically within the general fund community schools comes to pay through boces now we draw eight on that that
065comes through partially our money and partially through what's called the state set aside for community schools initiative rome gets still about 330 000 a year from the state for a community school set aside and that money then goes to those who could pay for our community school initiative for the ymca program um the ymca work and any other contractual agreement that we have with an agency would come out of regina fund through a contractual code and the school board is the only ones that can approve that or is there the the school board is required school board is required by policy and regulation depending on which the topic is it's not an easy answer but in rome we have board policy that sets what the dollar thresholds are that they're required to approve and not
066approve and that for us is ten thousand dollars so would you say that diversity equity inclusion should be at the top along with the other things that i i think that uh and i can't speak for the board but from what i know it is a priority for them we talk about them often uh there is money in the budget to support the rfp for dei uh and i think as you know the rfp is scheduled to start on july 1 so we can do summer training with our staff so we still have some time to be able to make sure we solidify the rfp response and then a point and contract with the group for next year i don't know anybody on the board that doesn't think that dei is not an important topic
067and they're not invested in making sure that we need that form okay thank you and one question about probably the most important aspect of all that money that we're getting what can the community do to help kids what schools can we help deserve a pantry at any of the schools because there are a lot of these kids that don't eat if they don't come to school yeah i i all of our schools have access to a food pantry clothing pantry all those things are happening ongoing basis our community schools program uh provides transportation for families and kids if they need it they're providing um they're providing [Music] physician consults dental consults legal consults the community schools program that we have is uh is pretty much top notch um i could probably spend an hour highlighting
068it it's one of those things that is going so well that i think at times we take it for granted already because other communities are trying to model after what we're doing the only reason i ask is i don't know if anybody knows mark williams he just passed away he killed came to me when jeff was here and wanted to write dan's word check for ten thousand dollars to use to take care of coats and gloves and hats and boots and food and i told them whatever you put in i'll match on my pocket so what i'm gonna tell you and and the board of education and superintendent said no that can't happen i don't know i don't know the conversation i will tell you that there are some laws and legalities around preventing that
069from happening um that's all i'll say publicly about that but what i would tell you is if you or you've reviewed yourself or you know anyone else wants to make a donation to a school if you there's two ways you can do that you can contact rob in our business office and we'll work through that with you or you can speak to melissa royce in the connected community schools program she's their executive director you can make a donation through connected community schools which essentially operates all of our pantries all of our family services absolutely anything like that is connected community schools is your easiest route to make donations so okay thank you anything else i'd like to rearrange our agenda a little bit too much objections [Music] 123 proposed budget in the amount of 130
070million 285 000 and 26 dollars be adopted as a 20 22 23 budget a move resolution second and remember any discussion want to thank the business office for the work they did on this it's always a challenge and we appreciate all the information we've been given another discussion on paper say aye opposed people operations page eight all right thank you action night one resolution to approve transfer uh resolve it upon the recommendation superintendent schools of education hereby approved following staff transfer uh jennifer cerullo from staley home-based development home base effective date january 20 20 22 and faith whitmore teacher assistant from strata bellamy uh effective date april 19th of 2022. moved the resolution second seven minutes i need a second can you just clarify the back date on that first item yes mr rolando yes
071there was a movement back in january um she wasn't she's a just district wide float okay so we just moved her but she wanted to see an official that she had okay so thank you for the clarification for a discussion my favorite say aye aye actually i have two resolution to appoint instructional staff probationary resolved upon the recommendation of the supernatural schools the board of education hereby approves the following instructional probationary staff uh elizabeth horner uh teacher assistant 17604 pro rated effective date april 19 2022 through april 19 2026 a moving resolution second all right this is a discussion okay say hi actually in three resolution to appoint non-instructional provisional resolve that upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools the board of education here by foods and filing provisional non-instructional staff andrew castle building
072maintenance second shift tuesday through saturday salary fifty thousand six twenty six and seventy seven cents prorated differential uh effective date april 25 20 22 i move the resolution second discussion is that floating position they're all distributed a resolution to appoint non-instructional probationary resolved upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools board of education hereby appoints the following probationary non-instructional personnel uh gabriel dunn early childhood program one-to-one teacher aid salary 15 695 prorated effective date april 19 2022 through november 18 2022 and let remove the resolution [Music] um there's really not a committee report because we didn't have a meeting uh given the date of our general meeting tonight so um our next meeting will be made to 20 22 4 30 p.m when we're expected to have a pretty healthy discussion and a number of
073items so anybody would like to attend we'll be there thank you [Music] super resolution to approve payroll calendar for the 2022-23 school year resolve that upon the board of education approved the fundamental board of education approved the payroll calendar for the 2022-23 school year and with the dates and items listed below on page five i've moved the resolution second way mr bowling any discussions my favorite say hi okay it's item number two revolutions approved popular bidding whereas whereas it is the plan of a number of public school districts in the medicine and aida policies the boces during the 2022-23 school year and jointly for the purchase of various types of computers and technology commodities also called the commodities and whereas the rome school district from school districts the district is desirous of participating in the
074joint vetting of the cop of the commodities as opposed as authorized by municipal general law general misspell law between the faculty terms of law article 5g and whereas the board this board of education has received and reviewed the property of bid procedure governing its rights and responsibilities should elect to participate in the joint fitting commodities and be it further results that in accordance with bid procedures the board of education agrees to award bid purchase item purchases according to the recommendation of the boces if such awards is in the best interest of students okay move the resolution second sentence mr hager at the end of the discussion say aye aye opposed kerry action 9 3 resolution to appointment of election inspectors result that the following individuals are appointed as election inspectors for 10 school election districts
075which shall align with the city of rome election wards be appointed for the firm city school district board of education election budget and capital reserve vote to be held on tuesday may 17 2022 or on any legally authorized date thereafter and that they be paid for this service with the superintendent of schools or is designated being authorized to fill any vacancies and make location assignments as listed below on page six i move the resolution thank you second by mrs davis any discussion on people say aye aye poster action item number four revolutionary point madison united both season first looking to approve madison united both sea's administrative budget resolved the rome city school district approves the 2022-23 administrative budget of the madison native board of cooperative educational services the amount of six million two hundred thirty
076two thousand two hundred and seventy three dollars funded by one million one hundred ninety thousand four hundred ten dollars in expense by components plus five million forty forty one thousand nine hundred sixty three dollars and earned interest in other miscellaneous revenue and she also allocated its contingent expense its share of said administrative budget as a portion that according to section 1950 of the new york state education law the 2021-22 administrative budget expense for all components was 1 million factory house 1 million 156 861 2022-23 administrative budget net expense for all components million is estimated four ten for a change of two point nine zero percent i move the resolution second say the way this is for bowling in the discussion okay say aye aye opposed kerry executive number six resolution to adopt the property tax
077report card for the 2022-23 school year result that the board of education adopts a property tax report card for 2022-2023 school year and what's the resolution my name is ready i need a discussion on thursday aye aye opposed scary uh we haven't been since our last uh forward meeting committee report and our next committee meeting is tuesday may 3rd at 10 a.m and that will go to mr haggerty for facilities okay as you as you know facilities were scheduled to meet today meeting with postpo we have an agenda out uh idea that some of the items aren't gonna read couldn't find it in my stuff some interesting topics if you don't have it that's all right just yeah just kind of we're gonna have nate from um cns come and update the board on the
078capital project in the epc where we stand with those uh the long-range facilities plan that the comptroller you know needed us to do and just update on that that's still working progress that would haven complete streets plan our csd with the city we were just following up with them we're trying to schedule a meeting we haven't been able to be successful have all the group meet uh we were gonna discuss we had a meeting peter and i and alex with cns and labella friday i believe just the next steps for the march capital project that just passed what we were gonna kind of do plus the rest of phase three we're gonna update the board on that uh alex is gonna talk about the retro commissioning update uh he was gonna talk about the mechanic
079he added tonight tried to get an electrician it was very hard to find somebody's skill than that so he kind of want another route he wanted to explain what he did with that and just miscellaneous business if anybody had any questions would you like to reschedule that yeah and it's going to be what's the retro commissioning what does that mean what's that about that's all the um pretty much with the veteran's commissioning paul we've asked we'll ask our architects to go through and basically take a look at the epc work that's been done so it's been we've done it for the boilers and rfa we've we've done a little bit with some of the lighting controls uh this go around was for the glycol water heat loop systems um specifically at bellamy did get a
080nice grant from nyserda or something else with uh that so he has he set that up really nice it's a nice program where they're going and checking everything for us making sure we got all the right parts all the right pieces to move forward and doing some work like peter said on epc stuff it sounds interesting so yes and that will be scheduled in the near future um you want me to try to reschedule that three emails tomorrow or a meeting yes the date for that you know i determine quick question about i know we talked about in the safety committee was anyone from labella or any of our representation able to attend the meeting that they had the first one yes and cnn oh questions because it was a board meeting night so none
081of us no we were trying to set up that second meeting we just haven't been able to come up with a date with everybody now to do it it's pretty interesting yeah yeah it's on the city website and people want to look at it and it talks about it's going to affect the traffic over here and around rfa and around bellamy obviously and then finally the peter mentioned earlier the redistricting is tomorrow six o'clock here okay thank you mr hegarty educational programs uh there's nothing on the agenda and the next committee meeting is monday may 9 4 30 alrighty resolution to accept the second reading and adoption of policy one one four five distribution of information for the schools resolved upon the recommendation of superintendent schools the second reading and adoption of policy 1145 distribution
082of information through the schools be accepted by the board of education and with the resolution second thing is any discussion on paper say aye aye opposed uh action item two resolution to accept the second reading and adoption of policy one two two two booster organizations resolve it upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools a second reading and adoption of policy one two two two booster organizations be accepted by the board of education under the resolution second amendment any discussion [Music] and again we've also not met due to the break our next meeting is april 25th at 4 30. just for the records the board is aware uh there's a policy on the table that that's been through a first reading and because we haven't had a committee meeting we just haven't karen had asked
083a question about an individual who is going to be the liaison within that policy and because we haven't met that policy is still on the table after a first read and that's why it's not here for a second tonight because we haven't had time to clarify that question so we should have a an agenda item for a second read on may 5th okay thank you miss davis miscellaneous business item number one resolution to elect a member up to the bull seas board resolved the rome c school district board of education authorizes the clerk to submit and certify its fail in the name of nasally shared wood of the camden central school district to serve as a member of the medicine native board of cooperative educational services of the sole supervisory district of minnesota united counties
084return of july 1 2022 through june 30th 2025 for to see currently being held by ms sally sherwood attending the bell will be submitted to the clerk of the madison united policies on april 20th 2022 i moved the resolution second government mrs libecki any discussion on favor say aye aye opposed terry number two resolution select member to the boces board resolve the room city school district board of education authorizes the clerk to submit and certify israel in the name of michelle jacobson of the hamilton central school district to serve as a member of the master united united board of ed cooperative educational services the sole supervisory district of madison oneida counties for a term of july 1 2022 through june 30th 2024 first see currently being held by ms michelle jacobson of hamilton new york
085the bell will be submitted to the clerk of the minister of the united states on april 20th 2022. second by ms mcgirl any discussion on paper say aye opposed cherry three resolutions elect the members of the boces board resolved the grown city school district board of education authorizes the clerk to submit and certify its bill in the name of dr john costello senior of the united city school district to serve as a member of the madison united oneida county madison united board of cooperative educational services the sole surprisory district of madison or united counties the term of july 1 2022 through june 30th 2025 for a seat currently being held by dr john costello of a night of new york the bail will be submitted to the clerk of the medicine of nida postings on
086april 20th 2022 item number four resolution select remember to the board both seats resolve the roman city school district board of education authorizes the clerks to submit and certify its bill in the name of ms suzanne carvalli of the rome city school district to serve as a member of the madison oneida board of cooperative educational services of the sole supervisory district of madison and united counties for the term of july 1 2022 through june 30th 2025 first seat currently being held by ms suzanne carvalho of rome new york the bail will be submitted to the clerk of the medicine united boces on april 20th 2022 i moved to resolutions davis any discussion i must comment all these individuals with the exception of dr costello spoke at the post museum meeting on their behalf three of
087them are including dr costello and uh one one new member uh i think from hamilton was appointed i think during the interview because somebody passed away i believe but uh they all did a pretty good job of explaining why they were on the board and especially um [Music] several of us were able to attend that note so nice to be in person again at bozies and to be able to hear them get feedback and see the kids who are in the program and we enjoyed dessert and it was it's helpful to meet these people as paul said and see who's serving on our boces board from all of the areas but thank you again to ms carvalho for continued dedication any further discussion is there any old business to discuss there being none i need
088to add if we can please add a conversation on legal matters to executive session please stand here okay i i'm going to make a motion to go to the executive session but before i make that motion we will not be coming back into regular sessions so this will be it for the public portion um make a most of an executive session discuss individual contracts and then negotiating bargaining agreements and legal issues second commences any discussion on favor say we are now in executive session thank you