001oh the united states of america and to the republic for which to stand one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all recitals of river meeting march 24th so move second thank you mr hagerty in the discussion say hi hi click are there any additions with deletions for the agenda uh not this evening thank you okay report superintendent schools good evening everybody welcome thank you for being here a couple of items first of all regarding tomorrow and next week tomorrow is a half day for students just a reminder to folks uh might be out there in the cyber world and then next week and the following monday is spring break so knock on the glass for some better weather than than we've had the past couple of days but uh everybody enjoy your
002spring break i hope people get a chance to uh relax and recharge a little bit a couple of updates for following spring break uh the next board meeting is the tuesday following break the first day we come back to classes on april 19th the reason for that is by law uh the boces budgets must be approved across the state on that tuesday so every every district in the state will be having a board meeting on that tuesday night so it is a change from our normal uh evening of the month but tuesday will be our board meeting and following that uh there will be an ad hoc meeting on wednesday the 20th is that still correct yes okay well usually 6 p.m and we'll we'll get you a location uh i believe there's going to
003be a zoom meeting uh on that one to review the boards requested some updated or additional options for the redistricting plans but that meeting will be held on april 20th it's a wednesday night also following break on april 28th through april 30th rfa will be performing the musical newsies so uh everyone get ready to go enjoy some musical uh at rfa april 20th the 30th and then following that strau will be performing matilda the musical from may 19th to may 21st and that will include some cast members from dentists they've kind of joined forces a little bit there uh for co-production so april 20th the 30th rfa news east and may 19th to the 21st uh straw we'll be doing matilda last thing i have this evening is just a congratulations to two rfa teachers
004uh stacy tiller and cynthia cerny were awarded the woman of distinction award by assemblywoman button sean i want to thank the 711 button sean for recognizing two of our outstanding staff members at rfa and congratulations to both uh stacy and cynthia both outstanding educators who are frequently and constantly going above and beyond to work with students and do what they can to serve the school and the community so congratulations ladies and thank you to a sunday woman button sean and that's what i have this evening sir hey thank you student board member report hello everyone sorry staff member our past two staff members of the weeks were mrs d and mrs ankins so congratulations and going off the musical pre-sale for tickets for rfa's musical newsies are eight dollars and at the door are ten
005dollars our youth art month spirit week went very well and i have the winners of the art contest so first place was kyle bremen second place was caitlyn barber and third place was antoinette lambias anil mentions go to lillian gilroy and rainy boyco so congratulations to those students going more off of some arts mrs coleman and mrs akivasi's classes are painting some artwork for the nursing homes they partnered with mrs nash and her leo club so both groups are putting together artwork for the residents at nursing homes to brighten their day and just hang up around the buildings junior prom is on may 14th senior ball is on june 4th and everything's on track with those ticket sales should be coming out very shortly and if you ever want more updates about rfa the nightly
006news i'm actually on it you can check us out on our facebook page the nightly news and on the rome city school district youtube so if you want a weekly update you can find information out there and where are the problems so i know the senior ball is at vernon downs and i believe the junior prom is at theodores and that's june 4th june 4th is for the senior ball and the junior prom is on may 14th thank you thank you okay uh before public time i'd like to make a statement before i came up with uh we want to hope to know that there was an investigation conducted into the alleged incident at the basketball game and i believe january 27th it was determined there was no dignity for all students for this violation
007with regard to student harassment it was determined that there was a violation of the district's court of conduct and the report recommended training and ms david says agreed and has already started her training thank you so our first speaker will be mark ambrose at this point the meeting is open for public comments if you wish to speak and have not already done so please do leave a comment card with mr promise this is not an opportunity to appear before the school board and express your views concerning agenda items and district affairs we ask that you limit your remarks to five minutes all public speakers are asked to refrain from making personal attacks for district employees and elected officials be advised that your comments do not enjoy the same privilege and immunity as statements made by
008members of your own board of education that defamatory or obscene statements are prohibited seasonal demons specifically indicated on the agenda this time is not a question and answer period there's no exchange of conversation with the members of the board or executive staff however if your accountants require a response every effort will be made to respond to your inquiry and reasonable time frame thank you for your cooperation now you may start thank you my name is mark ambrose my wife worked for the rome city school district for 35 years she put a letter in intent to retire in may of 21 she then called all your board members and asked for you to table that which you did with her letter of intent to retire she stated that she did it under duress due to intimidation
009retaliation and discrimination mr blake then had convened an investigation that was done by ferrara and fiorenza it was supposed to be an independent investigation which i don't understand how it can be independent when the lawyer that did it miles lawler is from the same firm that you use to represent you in liability so the investigation was convened my wife and i attended both meetings with her it wasn't so much an interview it was an interrogation by this lawyer my wife was the one that was the victim the second meeting took place on august 4th in this office she was told by miles lawler and amanda jones who is a representative in school to go back to school for the first of the school year for the 21-22 year which she did like the rest of
010her colleagues mr blake adjusted to beginning this school year because of what happened to your flooding at least trial for stanley good establishment as far as the investigation miles lawrence said no decision would be made on her decision to retire until the investigation was complete she worked the first two weeks of school however the school system does not want to pay her like the rest of her colleagues she gets paid per day she got paid per day per diem instead of 126 of her paycheck by contract by the cba collective bargaining agreement she wasn't paid her full terminal leave pay that she accumulated for all of her sick days personal days and the district didn't even have the decency to return phone calls to give her the appropriate information so she could calculate what she
011had coming to her that she was entitled to by cba that she had to actually look at her voya account to see how much that she actually received principal brian lebaron met with her on september 9th thursday to discuss with her her upcoming accommodations for a 21-22 school year which means she was a full-time employee mr lebaron met with her we were told that my wife was going to get a pager my wife has a documented hearing deficit she has hearing aids we had to call it the new york state department of labor and bring them into our faith so that they could install strobe lights so that my wife could leave the building in case of an emergency or fire drill she was actually verbally recommended by an assistant principal the previous year asking
012why she didn't leave the building to where my wife told her i can't hear him the door is closed i cannot hear the fire alarms the school system in the district did nothing it wasn't until i called the department of labor and had new york state come in here and do an investigation and then amazingly within 48 hours stuff happened you as the board took action on 9th september 9th we took my wife's resignation letter and acted on it still no courtesy to my wife my wife went to school on friday september 10th and went to work she gets notified via email at approximately 12 15 in the afternoon that the board took action and that she was retired the principal didn't even tell her the principal didn't even know however when the principal came
013down and they were not and my wife was beyond distraught union reps came down and at that time mr lebaron then stated that he was directed not to provide any accommodations for my wife's disability and i would say that that either comes from mr morton director of people operations or from mr peter blake the superintendent because those are the people that are about brian libera to me i'd say that pretty damning evidence of neglect discrimination not to provide somebody that is disabled with appropriate accommodations and then you take it upon yourselves to back date for retirement to july 1st call new york state teachers retirement system call the police and fire retirement system call any of them you cannot back data retirement that means if she was actually retired my wife would have received money
014for the month of july august and september my wife could not enter the retirement system until you separate from service as soon as she could separate from service was that monday you have to be done working with your place of employment so if it's the 10th it's the 13th is the soonest that she could actually tell them before she could actually enter the pension system you don't want to pay her her first paycheck per school year you don't want to pay her what she's entitled for terminal leave pay right contract can you wrap that up please yes i would like to see appropriate action taking place is that you don't even follow on your own website the people's app relations staff is to available to assist employees and potential employees in any way so we
015can serve the children in the rome city school district received the best the office of people operations is committed to promoting positive labor relations through collaborative problem solving and open communication ensuring a safe and professional work environment that emphasizes mutual respect and maximizes employee effectiveness providing resources and information to employees with an emphasis on timely responsiveness and customer service i would like to see this board take the appropriate action for my wife to serve this school district very honorably for 35 years to the children of this district thank you very much thank you thank you dennis for betty well well well march 25th you knew you knew march 25th why'd you cover it up for two weeks because that's what you did it's a cover-up i don't know what's going on with this board of
016education but it's insane i'm imploring the people that are out there running that they get everybody and remove every single member of this board that's up for re-election because using a laughing stock of central new york okay text messages last night after this hit the paper from school board members or school district members they're covering for her they're covering you guys has anybody on this board of education seen the video tape have you i have if that lawyer didn't find anything he shouldn't be a lawyer i could give it to my 18 year old daughter and she find it there's a former board member right there what he said on his board with john leonard and timmy safin and joe malacci and the rest of them this board ran like a well-oiled machine you know
017what it is now back to the way it was when jeff simons ran this district you guys are not above the law not for one second are you above the law not only should she resign but you should resign along with her because there's a cover-up going on in this board how does it take 14 days to get that information out it shouldn't once again and you've heard me say it many times sorry you guys sitting around that table you work for us you work for our kids we don't work for you and you can look as disinterested as you want but it's the godzilla you don't know me do not call okay this is embarrassing it truly is what are we gonna do about it we're gonna do nothing hopefully hopefully the voters will
018come out and hand you your pixlr that would be the best thing that could happen i don't understand is this whole board in alliance with what she did is okay because if you're not you should stand up and walk out and form your own protest that's what you should do and i know people are getting sick of hearing the same old thing but guess what until it's flipped i'll be back again and i'll be back and i'll be back and i'll be back ringing the same bell because i want everybody to know that we can't keep going like this one two three four five six seven eight nine ten people at a board meeting ten you know why they don't trust you guys they don't four percent of the total population that votes assuming there's
019twenty thousand there's probably more came out and voted for your budget four percent the other ninety six percent don't trust you with their money most of them don't trust you with their kids this is insane what are we going to put it into us what are we going to put it onto it nobody i didn't think so we just keep again hopefully this all comes to an end because there are well-qualified people out there that will treat this community with respect not what we're getting now this is not respect it really isn't you're so lucky that wasn't one of my kids and i hope that the coach john calandra and at the student the student's parents i hope they school this who district so bad it's not even funny because it's a joke i'd be
020embarrassed to sit up there hey felicia james williams my name is felicia james williams and i am the first vice president of the roma naacp president jackie nelson could not be here this evening so i'm speaking on behalf of the roman double acp as many of you are aware one of one of the missions of the nwacp is to ensure all students have a fair and quality education and all students are treated with dignity and respect those who represent the school board should be held at a higher standard anytime and anywhere the recent article in the daily sentinel is disturbing and should be embarrassing to all of you you all have the privilege of representing our school district and teachers and staff and most importantly our students maybe some of you can understand by your
021own experiences growing up in rome how hard it is for parents grandmothers and guardians to raise to raise a child when their circumstances are a barrier to learning it's important staff and teachers have the tools they need and are supported to make learning positive welcoming and nurturing they should not be bullied allowing one of you to violate the code of conduct not just once is unacceptable and our staff and students deserve better i have some questions that we all deserve the answers to why are you allowing the chair of the policy committee who has been proven to violate the code of conduct policy remain in her leadership role why did it take two days to receive one report when changes requested by the school were changes requested by the school board who is going to
022do the training that is recommended in the report did the investigators make more suggestions that you are not sharing is the report going to be made public is the board going to censor miss davis if not why not what exactly can you do who on this school board is in support of ms davis's actions why are you allowing this type of behavior we would like to receive a written response to these questions thank you thank you okay next speaker is sam pendergast thank you i know some of you if those of you who don't know me i'm the former pastor of the presbyterian church for about 12 years i've been out of town working as an interim so i've been out of touch but i just retired so now i need something to do so
023i'm coming to school board meetings trying to learn what's going on and seeing if i have anything constructive to say and i'm here to talk about the the diversity equity and inclusion effort that you have been engaged in i was i was surprised that you after only two and a half years left the consultants go in my years 35 years as a pastor i have learned that change takes a long time i mean you can replace the carpet if you can get church people to agree on the color of the carpet but it's really a lot harder to foster a climate that can help change a culture that can help people change their attitudes and their behavior so any commitment to a program of diversity equity and inclusion is going to take a good number
024of years and i i really encourage you as you re-examine where you are with this and i don't i really don't know where you are at this point but that you will commit to a course of action that will have the patience and the long-term commitment to be able to over time over a period of years to help people understand one another work with one another listen to one another and make this school district make these our room schools a place where every child feels like they belong they're heard they're listened to so i hope i hope that commitment is part of the decisions that you're making thank you thank you just so you know i'm saying we or just got the three proposals but we're 100 percent committed to it we're just not going
025to sit through the proposals we should select anybody else would like to speak okay we have a work study session okay it wasn't a vacation it was a conference if you'd like to speak again please step up i'm sorry if you would like to speak again please step up mr president sure so what i'm going to do is just miss davis and mr bowie don't get reelected i'm going to look for the board to pay the district back 8 000 that's what i'm going to look for them to do i've already talked to an attorney and it is possible for us as citizens to come after the school board so if they don't get reelected we want our money back you should have sent people that were on the board that we're going to be
026here for more than two more months and you didn't do it what we said mr blake what if he retires in two months so that's his decision and that's the money that you should get back well then i'll talk to peter about that later okay thank you mr president yeah couple comments over here you have no idea that i'm not going away john i you can come every every oh i'm going to come to my house and talk to me if you want dennis i'm not afraid i don't want well i don't want anybody to be afraid of me i want you to run it like then that's your fault because you should have did the right thing she should do the right thing from the start all the comments over dennis okay i thought
027[Music] all right here we go thank everybody for the patience just want to make sure that people in the zoom world can see the presentation that we can all see here tonight so tonight we're here to present the 2022-2023 proposed budget for the roman city school district for those of you that have been through a budget presentation before of mine i apologize because it's very similar as years before if you haven't been hopefully you learn a little something about uh public schools and our funding mechanisms and how budgets work i did test everything this afternoon many me says i can't speak okay no why you can see if i can find it so we'll put it on the boardwalk so there it goes is that going to work i don't know what i did but
028now it works thank you all right so some quick facts about our district our current enrollment as we sit today is just over 5200 students our total expenses per people 21 449 our combined wealth ratio was 0.36800 this is a significant statistic for our district in new york state uh an average wealth for a district community is 1.00 so the combined wealth ratio is a huge factor when determining state aid the closer to 1.0 you are the more average your wealth which means that at 0.368 we are going the opposite direction from one therefore uh the state would consider to be a more impoverished district uh which should generate more aid on a year-over-year basis last year our combined wealth ratio i believe was point three eight two zero zero so slightly down uh this
029year over last year peterson just remembers that they count they recalculate that every year it's recalculated every year correct uh instruction as a percent of this year's budget is 75 that's up slightly uh last year's graduation rate for the district was 74 percent rfa specifically was 68 or 76 i'm sorry uh for graduation rate some people might not realize there are two graduation rates you have a district rate and you have a school building rate so the school building rate are students that were physically in rfa uh through their time in the district the district rate encompasses all students that are rome residents uh that are also in outside places our regions with advanced designation rate is 20 this would incorporate students that graduate are going kind of above and beyond challenging more regents exams
030than the minimum we do currently have four schools identified under essa esta is the every student succeeds act from the federal government that could have been five however with this daily closure we remain at four as we've had in the past last three bullets have not changed a whole lot our homeless student population and english new language learner population continues to grow steadily i will say the english new language learner population is growing a lot more steadily than we have seen in years past and that does have significant uh budgetary attachments with it as those students continue to move in our community arts athletic athletics extracurriculars advanced course offerings they all continue to be a major part of our student experience we want that to continue to be there and grow and finally we uh
031continue to have a strong community schools program which uh if you're not aware community schools started in rome uh probably five or six years ago off the ground at this point in time i believe they are in about 12 or 13 local districts so they are thanks to the efforts here in rome and everything we built with that program that program is now moving to other communities and our entire region is really benefiting from that for this year i'm happy to say this list of challenges and responses is shrinking a little bit number one it continues to be the student staff social emotional mental health uh i'm not going to talk about covet because we've all been through tobit but rome is unique in that we lost an elementary building in august and that loss
032has created a tremendous amount of stress and attention on our elementary teachers and staff and students we know that our elementary schools are overcrowded we need to continue to look forward to see what we can do to mitigate those issues as much as we can but making sure that people are in a good mental state of mind as they come to work every day or come to school every day is very important obviously people who are in a better position mentally in a better position to to teach work with children and or if you're a child come to school and learn i mentioned the elementary school overcrowding we know that's an issue we also know that's not an issue that we can really immediately address in a school budget because school budgets are not connected
033to facilities works and improvements so we can't use a school budget to build classrooms create space we can use a school budget to be creative mostly with staffing to try and solve some of those issues there uh one thing that's different with this budget that i'm going to try and highlight a lot tonight so if i become a broken record i apologize but this is considered an aggressive budgeting process at aggressive managing normally when we build a budget we build a budget based off of revenues and then we manage that budget throughout the course of the year very aggressively to try and put money back into our fund balance this year uh as we went through our budget development process with the board uh collectively we determined uh instead of building off of revenues we
034were going to build off of a percentage increase year over year and when you do that you you minimize your top number for the budget a little bit more so than when you build off of revenue so because of that that aggressive budgeting style that does cause us to be a little bit more razor thin on our margins for next year it will require us to aggressively manage the budget to make sure that we don't go over for those that don't know in new york state as a school district once your budget is set you cannot operate over that figure without going back to your taxpayers and asking for an increase to the budget so it's important that whatever we predict or forecast at this time this year we're on the money for this time
035next year other issues that we all know about uh inflation and supply chain issues are a real thing we have vendors that we have contracts with coming to us and saying i can't i can't provide you that at that cost so sue me if you want to but you're not getting your feel of whatever the cost we agreed to or you're not getting your product whatever cost so that is an issue that has never been there really for any anybody in the world but in schools specifically we usually have pretty good contracts we have a lot of state-issued contracts that help mitigate some of that and make our budgets more predictable that is an issue for next year to try and make sure that you know hopefully that inflation doesn't continue and the supply chain
036doesn't continue but we don't know we also have an unknown for the state budget which is rare for us at this time normally by this time of the year the state budget is passed and that's not as much to say for funding of foundation aid normally we talked about foundation aid my concern with the state budget right now is there's a lot of bills that are wrapped up in the state budget that could be very beneficial for school districts in terms of receiving additional aid and or relieving some pressures financially things like the boces cap uh on the salaries that um you can get reimbursed for both these you've got but bills in there that are referring to uh the ability to get retirees to come back and work uh how many days they can
037work what kind of what's the cap on the cost they can make so there's things within the state budget that uh really could assist the district uh financially if those things go through but we just don't know we have workforce shortages we all know that specifically in our monitors teaching aids teaching assistants continue to be a pretty challenging area to find work drivers are also not a great uh rural cable bus drivers right now but you never know a big challenge is the curse of funding this is the federal funding uh that came from the federal government last year at this time and i put this on here because believe it or not last year we're talking about how it's a four-year funding process well next year is the last year of that funding process
038already believe it or not that you're talking fiscally so we need to start preparing for anything we're using that money for rolling that into our operating budget in future years so we're not breaking the bank as that comes due so we got to make sure we keep an eye on the future with that we do have some bargain unit contracts that have to be negotiated that are always a concern when you budget i mentioned earlier that every student succeeds act as uh we do have four schools identified so with that comes some funding from the state but it also comes with a lot of requirements that you got to use that money for things you got to do those are all uh things to concern ourselves with budgets and uh i'm glad to say that
039the continually rising health insurance costs are at the bottom of this list they are however they're slightly down percentage wise for this year than a normal year but they still are greater than inflation numbers they're greater than the overall budget increase percentage uh so obviously there's always that concern when you talk about your your rising health insurance costs just some other facts i'd like to share with the community our expenditures per pupil this is 22 local school districts in ornate county the mass in the united boces you can see rome here is uh district u so in our region uh per pupil spending we are the second lowest first per people spending district in the region you can look at this one of two ways you can look at this and say that's pretty good
040we're managing our money well we're finding a way to make sure we operate smartly and we're not overspending our budgets or you can look at this and say we need to be on the abcd category and be spending much more money for students in the district depending on your philosophy how you want to go most districts will want to be on the right hand side of this chart where we are because that means you're operating within your means and you're able to provide for your students the things that they need uh on a year-to-year basis without being in jeopardy of uh breaking the bank or busting your budget another really good spot i started showing last year this is the percent change in actual spending year over year again the same 22 school districts again
041we are district you you can see we are one of a few districts in our region that actually is reducing actual spending not budget but man this is this goes directly towards managing our budget year to year to show that we are making sure we're fiscally prudent and at the end of the year we're able to put money into fund balance if we need to uh and not frivolously spending our money year-over-year so again this is another positive for our business office and the work that they do getting to our proposed budget our number for next year is 127 million seven hundred nineteen thousand seven hundred and ninety one dollars you can see how this breaks out 75 percent of that figure is the program budget 15 is the capital budget and 10 is the
042administration budget that's called the three-part budget you will see districts throughout the state have to present or report their three-part budget to the community so when you get your notification home it'll be broken down into the three parts which look like this our three-part program program is the big word for basically think anything that involves students so this is your teachers your tas your special education your alternative education occupational education libraries extracurricular sports transportation counseling and health benefits all associated with that this is all the stuff that is meant to go directly towards your instruction in your students so in these slides you'll see the description of the item last year's adopted budget this year's proposed budget the difference between the two years and the percent difference between the two years i will highlight that
043you can see that here is a 5.70 increase in program budget when we work through our budget workshops with the board our goal was to try and get the overall budget increase to 3.5 percent so this portion of the budget alone is significantly higher than what we wanted the total budget to be and you'll see how that was done uh in subsequent slides some things to note uh when you look at these numbers percentages may look bigger than the dollar amount so if you see a large percentage that sticks out at you i would ask you to look at the dollar amounts associated with that and see what causes that a few things here that stick out on this slide is our occupation all educate alternative education at boces uh we have instituted two new
044programs with boces this school year that we are maintaining for next year so that is reflective of that 1.6 million dollar increase or 32 and the counseling and health portion you see go up a million dollars for next year that's 43 that's reflective of our community schools program uh we work very hard to get that program uh coastered by boces which means now the money we put into community schools we give back and aid so that number there is reflective of the money that we're giving to boces uh to run that program because of the boces eight ability we can we were able to expand community schools this year from uh basically three employees to eight so those are the two big ones here um our transfer to special aid down at the bottom that
045is a huge increase percentage-wise but if you look at the dollar amount of half a million dollars comparatively that is the reinstatement of the pre-k special education program so that was not in last year's budget we added that over the summer so budget to budget you see a significant increase and that's what that transfer is specially is everything else is pretty nominal uh transportation increases here are reflective of the addition of field trips back into the budget as well as after school programming we need transportation to be able to do that hopefully we have the driver's skill to do it but we've got to be optimistic and know that we're going to be able to have them the other big percentage that you might see is athletics a big portion of the athletic increase is
046the addition of a boys volleyball team at rfa that's something that's been coming up a lot and people have asked for uh so we have include that in the budget peter how about fuel prices affecting our transportation costs right now it's just the guest of it it's just a forecast what you think it might be and you have to do your best to work that out it's one of those things we have a contract for fuel so it should be pretty steady but you don't know when that can change at any point in time then there is still a percentage correct uh transportation is still able at 90 not all parts of transportation but the vast majority but it helps to offset that fuel yes okay on the capital program uh capital think of this
047word meaning anything that has to do with your facilities or construction projects is pretty much the uh the best way to think of this you can see overall year to year we have a decrease of about six hundred thousand dollars or three point two percent on the capital side um this is a little bit of what i'll call a wonky budget side because you have some significant increases and significant decreases and i'll just walk you through that our operation of plant uh being down about 350 000 that's mostly in relation to um some salaries some breakage in there and some supplies and equipment but on the maintenance of plant it's the flip of that it's a an additional position additional equipment additional supplies trying to this budget is heavy in trying to restore equipment and
048supplies that we have not been able to have the benefit of having in years past another couple of things that flip here you can see the bond anticipation notes number is huge 271 that's simply the rfa field project that's currently ongoing so we have to start making payments on that but you'll see there's some reductions in the previous bonds from years past you also have a huge reduction in the capital reserve in last year's budget we allocated a million dollars to our capital reserve this year right now we are proposing no allocation to the capital reserve uh at this time so that's why there's some some crazy changes within this budget last part so we created a new one but we don't have a plan we have not yeah okay or authorized uh the board
049authorized a option for a ballot option for that new one i'll get into that later yeah thank you last part of our three part is the administration this piece of the budget please think of it as basically everything that it takes to operate the school district so this is your central administration board of education legal um advertising um basically your executive leadership of the district is everything that falls into the administration budget as you can go through you can see for the most part across the board there's reductions in every line of this budget with the exception of some salaries uh the business office is very large so you got a lot of people in there a 40 000 increase is really minimal with the amount of people we have in our business office and
050the same thing with educational programs we have a lot of folks there so an 8 000 increase again is very minimal actually if you look at this slide what i find interesting is that in total uh we only have a 197 000 increase but we have a 213 000 increase in benefits for this function of the budget so that shows that there's a lot of reductions uh year over year in the budget for the administration portion of of the district the fun part becomes looking up on one side early expenditures so this breaks down the budget very similar this is more of a three-year history though so you can see two years ago what our budget was current operating year what our budget is and then next year's proposed budget again differences in percentages this
051breaks it down by actual budget codes there really is not anything that stands out here that probably is unique i would say if i'm looking at this without knowing anything the boces line sticks out obviously a 20 increase but we've already talked about that that's three programs there are two all dead programs and our community schools closer moving over there and you also have the contractual codes at 7.46 that's significantly up and that's mostly due to um making sure we have enough money in our contractual codes if something were to go wrong in facilities that we can get somebody in here to contract out and do that work if necessary otherwise everything is pretty razor thin equipment seems like a big percentage but when you look at it at the end of the day we're
052still only increasing equipment by 145 000 a total equipment budget of 890 000 for the district of our size is very minimal but i am proud to say that we've been able to move that up by about 200 000 in the past couple years because for many many years uh we kept equipment funding flat for the district and i think it's we've been trying to get that out of that run if you look down at the bottom line here folks you can see the past three year budgets um this year's budget in total of 127 million seven hundred nineteen thousand seven hundred ninety one dollars is an increase of four million seven hundred thirty nine thousand and ninety dollars for a total percent increase of three point eight five percent when we set out to
053do our work we are hoping to try and get that number down to three point five percent um i'm going to make a case uh in a little bit that based on some other feedback that we've received uh by both some of the board members and myself that we might want to look at increasing that bottom line a little bit to make some ends meet with some of the requests we've received from our teachers association recently fun part about being a public school district in new york state is balancing your budget so if you've never done public budgeting you might not know that public school districts are the only public entities that are required to balance their budget on paper to their community so local governments state government county governments nobody else is required to
054provide a revenue site or show you how they're going to provide the money to cover what they want to spend they're only required to provide a spending plan and that's it this is the part of the budget that makes the most challenging for public schools because we're required to show not only what it is that we think we need to operate next year but how are we going to go about funding that and where's that money coming from in rome this this uh if you've been here you've seen this before this is very different for this year uh our state aid is up to 66 percent this year that's largely in part to the full funding of foundation aid that has been instituted by uh the governor last year and can continue to follow through
055this year this is the second year of three years of fully funding foundation aid next year we should see again an additional a large increase in foundation aid property tax is pretty stable at 29 the number here that is um somewhat concerning for for me and our business office is the appropriate fund balance at two percent if you followed our budgets year over year we generally are about a six percent appropriation to fund balance uh and again you can look at that one of two ways you can look at it as you're saving money you're not you're not allocating money to cover your budget gap or you can look at it as um you're not spending enough back to that slide i've heard people spending you're not spending enough uh on your kids right now
056if you have the funds to provide then two percent other and one percent pilots here's our estimated revenues for this year uh current year projected 2122 our estimated revenues for next year 2223 and our actual revenues from the year prior so these are the main categories that our uh revenues come from uh you can see at the top we start with real property taxes it's one of our our second largest category we get in the property taxes you can see we are showing a slight increase in property taxes for the year something that's important for folks to know we we know um in memory of our friend john letter we don't like pilots pilots are not something that we like to talk about but when we as a school district increase our tax levy it
057also increases the private payments for those groups that have files in the district so but we don't have total control over their funding we do have a little bit of a way to increase that minimum star reimbursement there's nothing really in here that sticks out to be very different until you come down to the bottom line enough about mine reimbursable in other state aids and federal revenues you can see large discrepancies there the reimbursable and other state aides is up by about 5 million that is because we have a large boces boces aid coming to us next year for the re for the reinstatement of the two all dead programs and the community schools that we're doing this year so we expect more money that way and our transportation expenses are up significantly this year
058which will uh generate more aid for next year and that's simply a function of being a in a full functioning school year with transportation running all year long for spending more money so that's where those moneys are coming from and then the federal revenues being down by 6.2 million hopefully that's pretty explainable if you've been around that's simply the federal funding cursa that was available to us last year as a one shot in the arm not there any longer so overall our estimated uh total revenue for the year is 129 million dollars 83 248 uh about a four million dollar increase and that is pretty much mostly all in state a pretty big chunk of that foundation aid increase 5.8 million is almost unheard of in a great year in the past we were lucky
059to get 1.6 1.8 million in foundation 8 increase so that's a part of that function of the fully funding foundation i'm sorry can you go back to that one real quick so i thought that and again there's been a lot of confusion with all this with kobe but i thought that either the cursa or the arpa we were going to have through 2024 or 2025. so there's three streams of funding for that two of them are longevity out to 24 september 24. that part of money was a one-time shot last year the districts received so where do we see the other they're not in any of us those are federal grants they're not a part of the operating budget okay they become part of the operating budget should we continue two years depending on what
060we're spending those monies on so if they're on personnel type things or programs we don't want to cut we have to eventually weave them into the operating budget thank you so much this is a slide that i show every year but this year i'm going to do it a little differently um in the past we've used this slide to show the amount of revenue the school district has lost for due to not increasing taxes minimally year-over-year any school district or any finance person that is uh into school district finance will tell you you should increase your tax levy every year at least by something because that's your main funding stream i'm happy to say uh in collaboration with our board over the years we've worked very hard to help folks understand this and we have
061begun that process of increasing our tax dollar year over year what this slide shows now is although we are increasing taxes year over year we still are are not increasing taxes to the maximum level for the community which is a way of saying we aren't going to take everything that we possibly could take and we don't need everything twofold if you look at the left-hand column this is our allowable tax levy increase under the state's tax cap rule the middle is the tax cap that the board um not the board i'm sorry the middle is the tax levy percentage that the community has voted upon and the right column is the difference between those not the bottom you can see in total there's 1.7 million dollars 1.75 million dollars in taxes the district could have
062acted on over the past eight years that they have not i will also add that in the years uh 1920 and 21 22 the board adopted tax levy was a half percent less than the public approved tax dollars so there are two forms of the two stages of the tax levy the public votes in may to establish the tax the maximum tax levy the board adopts the actual tax levy at a meeting in august and usually while this works is at the time of the vote in may the district does not know the totality of their finances for the school year but when the board acts in august on the tax levy we do know the totality of the finances for the schools so the board's able to say we had a better year than
063we thought let's reduce the taxes a little bit when we approve it in august uh and like i said i'm happy to say that the past two chances that we've had to do that and we have done that in 2021 you can see we had a zero percent tax leave increase that was the middle of it it also happens to be if you look at the allowable tax levy increase at 0.63 percent we felt there's a group at that time it wasn't uh necessary to increase taxes people were going through a lot uh and the the tax levy increase would have been minimal to begin with so that's the only reason why we can have three years in a row so but in total thank you to the board uh for continuing to give back
064to the community in that sense thank you to the community for continuing to support nominal tax increases this coming year we are projecting a 2.50 increase in the tax levy so this slide just simply shows that difference of about 891 299 uh 36.5 million dollars in total tax levy again this is one uh one percent less 1.41 less than the allowable tax levy limit and uh i i forgot the self dot the top of my head one percent currently of our tax levy's in the ballpark of 355 000 so every one percent we raise taxes the district gains about 355 000 of revenue uh and if you think about that compared to 127 million budget uh comparatively they are they're not it's not that good local contributions uh this is a slide i showed just
065so people can see where we stack up against our local counterparts in terms of the taxes that we pay for schools we are district e compared to the same 22 we talked about earlier so uh if you were to take your home uh and move it to a neighboring district uh and everything was equal we would stack up as the fifth uh the fifth rated district in terms of our tax levy uh for a hundred thousand dollars on your home not the highest like you want to believe for fifth we're trying to go to the right on that slide uh projected tax rates this is all uh this is all stuff that will be online that i advise you i'm not to go through each of these slides or each of these communities but you
066can see the projected tax rates rome is comprised of five municipalities uh believe it or not rome annsville leave verona and western again this year's actual tax rate next year's projected tax rate equalization rate in the middle of this column the change in rate and then the percent of tax base you will notice that angel and verona will experience a slight decrease in their change in tax rate equalization rate similar to the tax on true your equalization rate simply means uh if i have a home in rome versus somebody that has a home and lead that that equalization rate is meant to stabilize the amount of tax school taxes somebody has to pay based on their home so that depending on the municipalities have their different tax rates uh your different assessments the equalization rate
067is meant to basically try and stabilize your your school community so that no one municipality is paying more into school tax than anybody else it can have a huge impact actually on your homes uh under your food tax this is just an example of what a uh a home assessed at 50 000 hundred thousand dollars a hundred fifty thousand dollars in the city of rome would look like for you uh this year compared to next year uh you can see at the very bottom a 2.5 increase in tax levy would mean a home valued at a hundred thousand dollars your overall school tax would go up by a hundred and five dollars for next year important thing for those that are really geeks about tax rates and your school taxes these are where the big
068things that are out of our control come from we don't control state and federal aid as i said earlier we don't have an approved state budget it is possible that we get more state aid than we're anticipating that could have an effect an effect on your tax rate if we get more aid and decide we're going to uh reduce the tax rate by whatever percent uh the assessor's office has a lot to do with this the assessment of your home value you don't control that we don't control the equalization rates that has a huge impact on your uh on your school tax as well as the change in the star exemptions again all things the district doesn't really have any further control over but can have a significant change on your tax rate if something
069doesn't look uh correct i would advise folks to take a look at these three websites um when you get your school tax bill if something seems off you just don't understand something good websites to help folks understand um school taxes and how your how your property value plays into that as we start the line down here uh overall right our proposed budget number is 127 million seven hundred nineteen thousand seven hundred ninety one dollars you can see our estimated revenues without a tax levy increase so just north of 124 million uh that will leave about a 3.5 million dollar deficit we just simply match up revenues to budget and that deficit is closed by a local share increase of 891 thousand dollars allocating six hundred thousand dollars in reserves and uh i can't believe i'm
070gonna read that number but allocating 1.9 million dollars in fund balance again that's about five to six million dollars less than we've ever had to allocate to close the budget deficit um in the past so at this point as we stand here today we do have a balanced budget with these figures good financial summary uh just breaking that down a little bit further for folks you have the current year budget here next year's proposed the dollar differences and then the percent changes uh i will highlight if you look just at the bottom two there's your allocations of fund balances in the current year we appropriated 8.2 million in fund balance next year we're proposing to allocate 1.9 million the 76 decrease in appropriate fund balance to balance the budget that is a uh that's a
071pretty big deal uh and then again if you look at the very bottom it shows you what's left in that uh unappropriated fund balance at the end of the year if we were to spend all of the budget for next year 1.9 million um we're hopeful to never do that the goal is to never spend your budget you want to make sure you're always under budget and put some back in the bank at the end of the year next year if everything goes worst case scenario we'd be looking at having 7.2 million dollars left in on appropriate fund balance which is significantly higher than a few years ago in summary as i mentioned early on this budget has very very minimal flexibility for anything to go wrong next year so if we get into september
072and we say we need two more teachers we don't have it there's no option to add staff if we have a major need to buy equipment uh vehicles something it's it's not there's not enough wiggle room in the budget to be able to pull that off uh it does utilize minimal reserves which is a benefit from the district uh does not have any reductions in staff which again is another benefit for the district uh has the restoration of some programs and inclusion of new programs and activities for the district so one of the things we heard repeatedly was we need our field trips back we need our learning experiences back we need to after school programs for our elementary kids uh making sure that uh boys volleyball is one that's been on the docket for
073probably four or five for 10 or 20 years now so all these types of things we're trying to get them back into the experiences for our kids the tax increase is under the tax cap and again i will highlight that it will require extremely aggressive management of our funds next year we traditionally manage aggressive anyways however i will make it known that under this budget there will be things that we will be telling people no uh we can't do or can't have which generally speaking we very rarely have to say no we usually have to say give us some time to figure out how we can make that work but this is a little bit tighter than years past uh so when you go to the polls i'm missing the slide in here not all
074right maybe it's afterwards uh when you go to the polls there's going to be some propositions for you to vote on uh one proposition will be for board of education members this is slightly different this year because of the vacant seat that we had in the current year there will be four at-large positions available for election at the polls and those seats will begin on july 1 of 2022. three of the positions are for a term of three years which expires on june 30th the fourth seat is for a remaining two-year term expiring on june 30th 2024. in case you're wondering how that works the fourth place vote getter would fill the two-year position and that's all by law how that works out uh they also would i believe take their seat immediately following the
075election similar to what happened i think your time you got elected they would start immediately to fill the rest of that term for this year and then two years uh interested candidates must submit their petition to honor before wednesday april 27th at 5 00 p.m to the district christmas office uh completed petitions include at least 100 qualified signatures that's different than last year last year was 50 due to cover restrictions those are all gone so we're back to 100 qualified signatures and if you are interested in running for school board and have not yet petitions are available in the district's business office here at florida and bell road also on the ballot you will have a you'll see a proposition for the establishment of a capital reserve we are asking the community to allow us
076to establish a second capital reserve with a maximum limit of 5 million capital reserve funds are unique in that once the account is created and the monies are expended you can't replenish it so it's kind of an expiring account we do have one capital reserve currently that uh has roughly two 1.4 million dollars remaining in there 1.6 is my recollection we're asking to establish a second reserve because we can't put more money back into our first reserve um it is common practice for districts to have more than one capital reserve i know some have as many as seven and uh funding of capital of the fund the funding of this capital reserve would occur either through year-end surpluses meaning at the end of the school year we have money in our budget left over the
077board can authorize some of that money being transferred into the capital reserve as opposed to the fund balance or we can budget uh for the capital reserve as a budget appropriation which we have not done for this proposed budget we did that last year but that's how you would fund your capital reserve so peter that just we had a lot of questions from the community right we have a project going now but that we are looking at phased projects and we want this one because we do know we have upcoming work based on our redistricting decisions yeah well the reality is we want to vote on a capital project every year we want to get in the habit of voting every december for a capital project and we don't want major capital projects for 30
078million dollars on one building all the time we might want 40 million dollars on eight buildings and if we have money in our capital reserves we can never have to worry about increasing taxes in order to do those referendum votes i understand people will say that still taxpayer money it is still taxpayer money but it's not increasing taxes to do capital work it's simply using the money you've already funded from taxes to uh pay for those capital reserves but it is uh it is a little bit confusing because it's new for rome but it's something that we definitely need to try and get in the habit of putting money away so we don't have to go to the taxpayers ever and say hey we need to work on some buildings and we need to increase
079taxes our goal is to never have to increase taxes when we're working in our buildings only for our operating budget thank you that's a it's a really good question that's going to come up probably for the next three or four years i would guess and then we'll get used to it uh this is not really a relevant slide but i use it every year so people understand the law section 259 of education law requires school districts to include the libraries within your community on your school budget vote uh i don't know how many years in a row jervis has not asked for a levy of taxes they remain at 817 000 so you will not vote on this but if if jervis library needed an increase in public funding they would let the school district
080know that would go on the district ballot uh has a proposition to increase the library tax if you have questions review library tax levy and or what they use doing well please give them a follow so the next steps this is the slide next steps um continued budget discussions amongst the board of education and district staff we've got our budget adoption happens on in a very quick timeline in our next meeting the official budget hearing is may 5th and the annual district election is on may 17th the one thing i will say traditionally you don't see changes in your school district budget from first presentation to the time that the budget occurs um i would say and obviously the board and district as you work through the budget this winter we did all this development
081prior to some conversations that we've had with our teachers association and hearing some requests that people have related to the relief of capacity in buildings and things of that nature so i do think that it would be prudent for us to have a conversation about increasing the budget total for two reasons this budget does not have any room to increase staff teachers tas to relieve some of those pressures that people have asked us to do which i think we we have the ability to do that as i highlighted the amount of uh we have we do have enough fund balance to be able to offset any slight increase that we would have i also think that a small increase would allow the district flexibility to make sure that we don't have to worry about saying
082no to people in a time of need my biggest concern really is our elementary schools and the fact that we know that um we know that they're overprided we know that they're asking for support the way we pull this budget off and developing it is without reducing staff is that there's a vacant position that we've been carrying all year long it's on the books financially but we're not paying for it we took those positions out of next year's proposed budget so on paper there's a reduction of staff but on in reality we aren't losing people right we just aren't gaining people that we might need so i do think that i would ask the board uh whether we have that conversation tonight or whether we try and find a dialogue sometime in the next few
083days um it's not a great it's a great situation to be in but it's not a comfortable situation to be in because we've spent a lot of time developing this and at the 11th hour we're saying it'd be helpful to have a few more million dollars in here for to make sure that we can take care of our folks and do what we have to do uh my only proposal i would ask the board when it comes to that is i showed you we had about a 2.5 million dollar increase in boces costs our request would be uh let us work on that 3.5 increase that we wanted without those 2.5 million dollars of closest expenses so take those out of that 3.5 and allow that 3.5 to be not inclusive of the boces work
084simply because that's aidable and that should get us to a figure that we feel we can support the district and staff in uh but that's just one of our decisions and we can talk about that after a few minutes of you trying to digest budget vote for those that don't know may 17th is a tuesday third tuesday in may every year 9 a.m to 8 p.m these are our awards the same words that we just had for the capital improvement project boat so nothing is new or different here uh the first and second wards are different from uh historical locations uh those locations are here for online bell road uh all the other ones remain the same as we've seen in the past and with that i just say thank you and i will open
085up the fuel for a report for questions [Music] full disclosure um i don't remember it was last year or the year after uh a year before we had a similar situation i think it was last year with some of the um federal monies and we prepared two budgets for the final presentation one was two million dollars more than the other as we kind of deliberated and we kind of made that decision at the last minute if we're going to go with the two million dollar more amount or not i think it was last year because we used a million for the capital reserve right so we it was because we didn't initially know what our foundation was going to be in our federal money by the time we adopted the budget so we we've done
086that in the past if that's something the board wants to do is have us look at i would tell you right now any amount of money we were to increase the budget by it would go 100 into uh personnel and benefits and i say benefits only because anytime you had a person you have to have benefits they go together so um those are the two areas where we really have been razor thin on um not increasing things we had a lot of requests for increased staff but at that that 3.5 margin to try and get that number down or three point five percent increase we had to remove a lot of those vacant positions to to make that happen so our thought was if we could put a few more million dollars in we've got
087we would still be well underneath our appropriate fund balance number that we normally are underneath um and you still hope you don't need it all but it gives us the ability to be creative and flexible with our staff the elementary schools that they need support so that would honor what you're saying i understand i mean the whole century would go up no we're not we are not we're not uh we're not proposing increasing the tax rate we're proposing increasing the budget number and using uh fund balance to offset that hole so whatever number we increased the budget by we would also increase the appropriate fund balance because quite frankly we have the money in the fund balance to do it not something that five years ago you hear me recommend you i'd say the opposite
088make sure you're keeping that mind the farm balance but we do have a healthy fund balance right now we know that next year should be a healthy year again i just don't want to get in the situation in october where people are coming to us asking us for help and we can't do anything because we don't have nothing to do we have the money but we don't have the money allocated to do it if that makes sense so that one point for the public on that is if we don't appropriate fund balance in the budget we can't decide to do that in the year it has to be done when we approve the budget the only way you can do that mid-year is to go back to the community and ask to increase the total
089budget number and then you'd have to kind of do this all over again in the middle of the year it can be done i wouldn't recommend that only because we're sitting here in april we know that we can do it and we're in front of it it would i think it would be helpful to us it does make sense it makes sense and you know you're not going to hire willie nelly you know when the need comes you're gonna hire correct peter do you have any particular positions in mind and places for people so i i have uh i had a great conversation with the rta today about some of that um we would like to see more teaching assistants uh however we generally carry 20 to 30 vacancies all year long for teaching assistance
090as it is uh we've removed about 10 positions out of this budget to help bring that number down so we still have vacant tas here that we can hire up but as far as positions in the buildings go we'd be looking at possibly uh counselors and social workers to help offset with a few things teachers we we've heard from them that would be nice to continue the team teaching model or the three-person teaching model will help with alleviate some of those pressures in the classrooms and i do believe that finding elementary teachers will be a lot easier to find than uh tas that are currently uncertified so a lot of that's going to be based on a case-by-case basis we talked about this before i think needing to know what the elementary schools are going
091to look like we need to know our class sizes for next year we need to know where we've had retirements where we might have to shuffle the deck a little bit but our three areas would be um teaching faculty for the classroom uh support faculty ais math and ela for buildings that are shorthanded right now and then uh social emotional mental health counselors social workers uh that area of learning that we would need that would all be elementors it would be all elementary support correct peter is there to look for any more ais i feel like that was a little bit of a conversation we heard about so they've talked about that we've had a conversation um the i won't speak for the teachers association but i don't think they're i don't think they're asking
092for more ais teachers i think they're asking for a more creative approach to providing um to conducting some of the screening testing and assessments and benchmark assessments that we do that will free up the staff to do more teaching so instead of having our teachers stop what their stop their teaching to do a lot of the assessments they're asking for more creative solution to to doing that which could be as simple as the the term that we hear a lot is called a swat team where you have a team of teachers whether they be current or retirees that they go into a school building and all they do is they test all those kids in that building for however long it takes the teachers are still doing their jobs but other people are doing the
093testing and then they would go to the next building the next vote so uh and generally a district that would do that would use retirees because they don't need a full-time position they just need somebody for however many weeks it takes testing so i will give our teachers credit they're not simply saying give us four give us more give us more they're saying let's be creative and we just need assistance and sometimes the assistants might be a co-teacher and sometimes assistants might be just a substitute to come in the building and help out for a week so peter i'm sorry i stepped out for a second but just can you clarify one more time so this budget does or does not include positions that we because i know there's some positions that we very clearly
094eliminate via our agendas but i don't think that we've really done that with um most of our teaching positions so this budget does or does not include those existing vacancies that we could fill first it does not include some of those current vacancies that are not posted so a great example is staley shut down we disburse the teachers across the district uh a teacher goes to i'm going to make up buildings here teacher goes to stokes as a co-teacher a month later uh a classroom opens up a bellamy that teacher leaves stokes as a co-teacher now there's one teacher in the room they go to bell i mean there's one teaching room we don't replace the stokes co-teacher those are the types of positions that are not in the budget we didn't ever replace we
095never you know post replace them we just said we got one teacher one teacher we're going to save the money in the budget this year so i would say it's been a long time since i've gone back and done the line by line but i'd say i probably took out about eight of those positions that are open that are on the books but not technically open because they're not posting for them can you get us an updated list of those vacancies that that so what you did budget but that's going to take a while because we haven't been monitoring them throughout the year if somebody leaves a position we just haven't posted it it's just helpful to know what the possibility is that's already built in versus what we might have to allocate for if
096we change these numbers you know if you're like they're still we have this year's budget number for personnel and then that would just be whatever you take that number times x amount of possible positions you think they have we have that going back to your original comment on the tas yeah those were um physicians that are funded in the budget where they continue correct we have quite a few of them every year we carry about 20 to 30 all year long simply because it's a quite frankly it's not a great paying job and it requires some intensive certification requirements and that's the two of them together are prohibited for not just rome but really a lot of districts to find those positions you know how we compare with our salaries for tas compared to a
097comparable district around us salaries salary-wise yeah i would say around us uh not great but better than comparative districts of need and size we are significantly less if you compare to districts of based on size and relative need of student significantly less so would it be who has to say instead of 20 positions we have 12 vacant and redistribute that available funding into an increase for that position or is that a full negotiation message it's a it's not a mess but it does require a collective bargaining process and you do i would what i would say is it's warranted and necessary but i would caution to doing it outside of collective bargaining negotiations just because it does have long range impacts when you do significant increases for you remember our ta population is in the
098ballpark of 150 employees which is quite a few people depending on what that number looks like it could i mean that could eat up a three million dollar increase to your budget in the blink of an eye because it's a lot of people not that it's not warranted but i would i would personally i would ask the board to increase allow us to increase the top dollar of the budget and allow that might go into personnel costs and work to figure out how we solve that problem and if we can solve that problem over the summer time or early fall with the bargaining unit for the teaching assistance and increase their salaries a little bit then so be it some of that money it goes there if it's through uh teachers if it's a combination
099um i i don't think we're at the point to be able to talk about exactly what do we use that money for i think we're at the point of can we do that so that we can have the access uh when the time comes and when the need comes jeff has done a great job in personnel this year keeping us up to date on that one and that always seems to be the sticking point that we cannot fail so it seems like every time we hire one we lose two man yeah well we've heard loud and clear from the teachers that they need since we really can't do much restructuring in september they need to support the classroom so i'm up for that so uh i appreciate that and i see heads nodding on nothing
100to cut anybody off but would you be okay if we built a budget based on the 3.5 percent increase without the 2.5 million dollars in boces expenses are you following kind of what i'm saying with that or would you prefer we just add a dollar amount to the budget i guess not totally half dozen and one half dozen of the others aren't we getting the funding so we originally wanted to increase the budget 3.5 year-over-year so that increases in the ballpark of four point something million dollars of that three point five percent increase i would say two point five six percent of those losses expenses alone so i'm saying take that out and we increase our personnel costs by that 2.6 2.7 percent so we keep it at that 3.5 percent goal but separate out
101the boces expense and plug that in with the personnel involvement i mean i think it's important to get a comparison and we can look at them side by side right if you do that yeah but i have to give you a number because we have to approve the budget in 12 days yeah i guess i don't think you can give us some sort of summary dave because i'm probably conceptualizing here on this minute in terms of those i'm not sure oh yeah any other questions that was the big one that people would probably have but any other players may also get a little bit better of a breakdown of those contractual items since that was that's one of the biggest well there's no there's no breakdown of contractual this is all hypothetical this is the
102proposed number of dollars we feel we might need to be able to use in those contractual lines so there's nothing right now that says this money is allocated for that contractual expense this money is allocated for that contractual expense at this stage we're simply at complete hypotheticals this is our guesstimate of what our educated professional experienced estimate of what we're going to spend next year i think it's important for us to think about too that whatever we get back from ross we look at from a position perspective too because if we're adding space with a hope of reducing class sizes that means people so again we want whatever we add now to be sustainable and it would help us to be in front of any of that hiring for when's when that space is created
103i agree it would it would make subsequent budgets three four years down the road a lot more digestible when redistributing is complete and we have more classrooms absolutely it's beneficial any other questions i'll wrap up i just want to thank dave dryle director of business finance he uh he comes to these uh every year just to kick me in case i say something completely available it's too nice to kick me when i make my mistakes but dave is instrumental in developing our budget he does a lot of the legwork on this uh i simply am the one that presents it as a superintendent we do work closely but thank dave for all his artwork and then mr mesa assistant superintendent of operations management again very instrumental in the budget development process and uh has a
104lot of historical knowledge students to generate so we couldn't do it without our business office uh thank you both for your work so thank you all thank you thank you this week by the way we'll have us online tomorrow hey moving right along resolution picks up the consent agenda that signed a recommendation the superintendent of schools the consent agenda is accepted by the board of education i move the revolution second president dr fontana any discussions say hi 26. finance there are no action items um meeting will be tuesday may 3rd at 10 a.m of more of the ongoing work which is what we did last time did you remember we were in our rfa i have a professional facilities peter have you gotten any updates from fema uh only that we've been fast-tracked which means
105that they're going to allow us to skip some of the steps we traditionally have to skip or go through to get to the end product so um i believe we have a phone call the week after next tuesday um the department of homeland security fema alex myself um with all the documentation that we need to get uh we're in the we're online we got into the queue our deadline is may 8th to get everything submitted and done with working hard with them to get the information needed put together a bunch of expenses that we had so far again dave's office did a nice job of separating codes it was very easy for me to do and give me copies of backup that i forwarded out to fema and to uh our homeland security for review
106so a lot of work still it's it's a daily basis thing but may 8th is at that line for us to get everything we need so those were all things relating to work that they're not going to extend ongoing that stuff is that was to clean up the overtime the mold the mold remediation um pumping the water out everything that we've done so far if we put anything new forward like an addition or building something or with the fema yeah no we're not at that far yet yeah and i mean i know it's been helpful but i know the biggest question we get is um we're pretty confident that they're going to not want us to rebuild that site in fact i can't answer that right honestly i hope people works fast thank you for
107all you're doing to get information resolution to approve the rfa spanish club field trip uh resulted upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools the board of education approves the rfa spanish club field trip to miami florida to depart on may 13 2022 and return on may 16 202 under the coordination of michelle navarrousky um with a resolution any discussion second amendment any discussion how nice to see field trips again yeah all in favor aye all opposed resolution carries resolution to approve the rfa french club field trip resulted upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools the board of education approves the rfa french club trip to newport rhode island departing on may 30th 2022 and returning may 31st 2022 under the coordination of michelle never was russia i apologize i mispronounced your name i
108move the resolution second second and um i think we gave a lot of um kudos to um the teachers trying to get them some assistance with the budget so um our next means may 9th but you wanted to you want to give a shout out to um our good news of the week absolutely our good news of the week um each year madison united boces puts together a two-day workshop at vernon downs for folks across the state and across this region and one of our own from our department dana benzo is going to be presenting on play at the pre-k3 level she was asked specifically by boces to come and do that based off of her knowledge of pre-k3 so we're very excited that she is the one presenting alongside some well-renowned uh renowned uh
109national speakers on education too so that'll be in july august i think that's good very good very excited about the work that she's doing uh in that in her field of pre-k three thank you thank you non-instructional personnel probationary resolve that upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools the board of education hereby appoints following non-instructional personnel probationary as listed on page seven of the agenda and move the resolution resolution to appointment to approve adjustment shifts resolve that upon the recommendation the superintendent of schools the board of education hereby approve the following adjustment shift matthew salisbury grounds maintenance worker first ship tuesday saturday from first shift tuesday through saturday to first shift monday through friday effective 411 2022 i move the resolution sometimes erratic any discussion all in favor say aye aye opposed carried action
110item number three resolution to adjust start date resolve that upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools the board of education hereby adjust the following start date kelly rutledge and supported learning office specialist 12 months eight hour day from april 1st 2022 to april 18th 2022 and renee khan on the business office senior counselor from from april 18 2022 to april 20th 2022 resolve that upon recommendation of superintendent schools board of education hereby appoints the following sports personnel john hussey clock operator 25 per event detective date 41 20 22 to 6 30 20 22 and move the resolution second send right mrs lubeck to mrs lubecki any discussion come on paper say aye aye opposed kerry h m number five resolution to appoint non-instructional personnel provisional resolve that upon the recommendation of superintendent of schools
111the board of education hereby appoints following non-instructional personnel provisionals christine sullivan in the business office principal account clerk salaries forty four thousand four seventy four rated for degree protective date for 11 20 22 brittany fiorenza house joy senior office specialist thirty three thousand one fifty eight sixty two prorated effective day four eighteen twenty twenty two and we directed ms davis any discussion peter if the first one the the second one is the first one in the internal move yep okay six resolution to the point rome city school district deputy treasurer was resolved that renee o'connell be appointed as rome city school district deputy treasurer effective april 20th 2022 i moved the resolution second senator mr hagerty any discussion i have another question so we appointed someone else in the interim we don't have to undo
112that to do this okay and this is a part of her job description well i knew that from the person that it was replacing yeah but i just want to make sure we didn't have to take that away the interim one any further discussion on favor say aye aye aye stery seven revolution to approve transfer resolve the final recommendation of the superintendent of schools the board of education hereby approve the following staff transfer julie carpenter teacher uh kindergarten and staley stokes to fifth grade at stokes effective date four nineteen twenty twenty two i move the resolution second segment any discussion do i if this is a real problem okay i will be understanding this any further discussion on favor revolution to appoint instructional personnel probationaries resolve that upon the recommendation of superintendent of schools the
113board of education hereby appoint following instructional personnel probationary deborah lenahan bridge mills teacher assistant salary 18604 pro rated degree effective date 4 4 20 22. i need the revenue [Music] number nine was resolution to appoint musical staff resolved that upon the recommendation of superintendent of schools the board of education hereby appoints pauline municipal staff nicholas johnson sterol co-stage manager update salary 500.45 twenty twenty two i move the resolution second second by ms reddick any discussion so this i guess the i understand that the manager that was there resigned we're gonna get so big they brought two ends so doing it uh two just who's the other call is that it was individual was there or are we would that be another uh [Music] okay so we met on april 5th and a couple highlights we
114did receive a couple resumes for some special ed teachers so that was a good that's a good thing [Music] applications for the principal of the ecp program we had two arnold two internal applications with five external so that should be moving along very well and another instructional site for our district clerk we received six resumes and helped moving up to one hundred percent the whole time really made a big difference so um the question to the board is who would anybody like to sit in hang those energy mr expressed interest in doing it i'd like to sit down for the ecp okay for the principal right okay i would like to do that too but since that person will be replacing some of the things that i do correct the clerk yes yes follow jeff
115and lianna and uh dr fenty from ucp and me and karen those are ecp thank you karen and i okay so thank you [Music] so our infamous motor vehicle operator is we finally decided that it's going to be a full-time and food service home so we're talking about going apart um it's 12 because of summer fuel summer feed okay um that's that's our head there and our next meeting is going to be monday we're going to switch to mondays starting in may so may 2nd at 4 30 p.m um action item one resolution to accept the first reading of policy one one four of information through schools resolve that upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools the first reading of policy 1145 distribution of information through the schools be accepted by the board of
116education and move the resolution second resolution to accept the first reading of policy one two two zero relations with community organizations that upon the recommendation of the superintendent of schools the first reading of policy one two two zero relations with community organizations be accepted by the board of education i'm the resolution second senator any discussion who's gonna be our community liaison did they mentioned policy was it discussed i'm trying to recall because that was a merge of two policies right peter was i don't know if we identified that person if you need to do that for a second you can all in favor say aye item three resolution except the first reading of policy one two two two booster organizations resolve it upon the first reading of policy one two two two booster organizations be
117accepted by the board of education i move the resolution second my name is [Music] so we list to complete out our zeros and our one thousands um a couple that i hold on um we do need to have a conversation about um our board self-evaluation and i attended a session on that when i was at the conference and that is the document that i gave to john at the beginning of the meeting so that's one that we have to look at um then there are a couple of policies we just want to review and revise and carry over from other sections in the manual to finish off the thousands um there is one new policy that was recommended for us through nisba which is relationship with non-public schools and in a situation like we have
118um nisba made that as a recommendation when we have something like rome catholic or the school for the death or deaf or other um that we have relationships with they felt that this isn't a one-size-fits-all policy but they felt it was important for rome so we need to review that um and then we have not yet reviewed 1800 1900 or 1925 and so that if we can get through those um those are those are policies we have not started to review it all yet but we need to check those off to get through the 1000s and then um there were previous emails but i'll resend them i forwarded them to john today um policy 1230 is one that we want to review as a committee of the whole um again based on um previous recommendations
119from nisba a training that john participated with in nisba in september and one that i just participated in at the national conference um it's a country-wide movement kind of to get better at how we're responding not only to public comment at the time because um people want responses and things like that so other ways that you can engage and make sure that you're accessible that aren't necessarily your public comment time so um something that we should decide as union on this board versus just the policy committee so john or i can get you those documents and then we'll set up again update them and that will wrap up those two um that will wrap up those two sections so we are making progress here any updates on board docs nope they did send the second
120installment um the second 22 installment oh can you i have sent a couple of emails can you get an update on we're looking for the 2000 so we can go into that next section yes and um can we get a community meeting for this on the books move forward sure i'm free all night [Laughter] right now i know i like to say i know why is there a week with nothing next week he's like it's break i'm like no it's not probably another week absolutely it absolutely is um so we're gonna do the ad hoc on the 20th so um but the next week is can we do like the 25th or 26th april we do monday the 25th at 4 30 monday okay 4 30 4 25 at 4 30. did you get that
121daddy thank you so much and that wraps up policy for tonight thank you okay miscellaneous business action number one resolutions combined boys varsity lacrosse resolve that upon the recommendation of super canadian schools of room city school district and support valley school district combined their boys varsity lacrosse for 2021 2022 school year be approved by the board of education and move the resolution one second discussion i just want to apologize to the player in the family and that we as a board need to make sure um that we add these items to our calendar going forward karen so that when we know sports seasons are coming we make sure that in any season there's not any exception that delays a player so um very excited this means that the game that was postponed tonight because of
122rain will now not be one that christmas is so we're very excited and um it's nice to have him here participating with our kids i just want to stay for the record this is not a realm issue this the the other district did not get us the paperwork or their board didn't approve it so our board and our district hasn't done anything to delay this matter this is no no and i don't think that but i think if we were if we knew what was coming we might have mentioned it wouldn't have known it was coming that's what i'm saying from year to year we don't know what districts are going to ask to combine for sports he did start he did go to tryouts with them so i kind of was surprised we didn't
123see before tryouts i'm just i just want to make sure folks know that that our board yeah i don't think it was it wasn't us we were definitely waiting on something from sequoia but to me i would like to be proactive and say do we have any special exceptions for the season and i wouldn't ever want us to be the one that if a student is playing on our team or someone else either so do our due diligence on that at the beginning of your sports season any further discussion i have a question mrs we had a second um part of the csc meeting we're still talking about the miscellaneous business vote on this one okay we'll vote that we're gonna discern um do we have anything for executive we do contract negotiations um not
124with non-bargaining for contract negotiations with rta and csea okay so thank you all for coming tonight