001in the pledge of allegiance for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all well like i said welcome to our tuesday september 6th school board meeting it's nice to have all of you back up at the table with us so welcome with that we'll move right into mrs mucha for the agenda approval deletions editions there is only we only have one edition tonight and that's under section seven part b undermine human resources move to approve the agenda we have a motion by dr medlin second second by miss kelly any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you thank you and mrs kelly is there any correspondence this evening there is none to report this evening thank you we'll move right into our liaison committee updates
002mr marshall thank you madam president uh under personnel interview committee nothing to report at this point thank you mrs kelly yes i'm gonna lump together my redevelopment and my parks report because i have a joint project to kind of discuss ileana everybody's familiar with that parcel in cheravel the town council we had a joint session with them the parks department board and cheryl town council and we have been given the go ahead to develop that into additional parks so it's being researched right now and and plans are coming up so we're all very excited about that and that's it thank you dr medlin nothing to report thank you and as for dollars for scholars we had the call out meeting last week if you need to uh register please see mrs resnick i'm sorry i
003don't know her room number but she's i think she's telling me one two two so um right over here across from the pubs classroom so thank you with that we'll move on to our official school board business topics consent agenda mrs mucha thank you i'm asking for approval of the minutes from the executive session which was held on august 15th the special board meeting on the 15th and the regular board meeting on the 15th also approval of claims payroll and extracurricular expenditures motion to approve those items we have a motion by this is cal miss kelly second second by mr marshall any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you and there are no public comments uh regarding action items so we'll move right into our official school board business topics
004and i believe you're going to do a little bit of dr veracos i am we are going to table the indiana learns and the open house teacher messaging for next time but we do want to bring up the we are required by indiana code to announce that we're ready to begin formal negotiations with lcta on september 16 2022 which is the first legal date that we can begin negotiations we have our lcta representative from the negotiating committee with us this evening nick meyer we will be negotiating wages salaries and fringe benefits as we do every year we're asking our public at this time for any comments they would like to make concerning these negotiations seeing none we will begin our negotiations after that september 16th date thank you thank you and we'll move right into
005director of human resources personnel mrs mocha thank you i am asking for approval for the personnel recommendations that were in your packet move to approve the personnel recommendations we have a motion by dr medlin i'll second that second by mrs kelly any discussion questions hearing none all in favor aye aye aye motion passes thank you i'm also asking for the professional leave requests to be approved that were in your packet so moved motioned by mr marshall and i will second that any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you very much all right we'll move right along to our director of primary education dr bracy good evening i am coming before you tonight seeking approval for the professional leave requests you have in your packets motion to approve we have motion
006by ms kelly second second by dr medlin any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you also for the first time ever i am so excited i get to request approval for field trip requests in your package i'm so excited to approve the field trip request second thank you we have a motion by dr medlin in a second by mr marshall any discussion just that i want to go on this one where they go uh windmill acres pumpkin patch you're right um all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you thank you we'll move on to our director of secondary education mrs castaneda thank you for my first item i am seeking your approval for the professional lead requests that were in your board packet motion to approve motion by ms
007kelly and i will second that any discussion hearing none all in favor motion passes thank you and for my second item i am also seeking approval for some fabulous field trips that we are finally bringing back this year motion by mr marshall second sorry johnny second by dr medlin any discussion all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you move right along to our director of student services mrs gramala my only item tonight is to seek approval for the professional leave requests that were included in the board packet motion we have a motion by mr marshall in a second second by ms kelly any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you thank you well that'll bring us right to director of business services mr james and i believe he's doing
008a presentation i will be after my first item my first item is to seek your approval for the donations that were listed in your board packet i'm sorry jen for yours we have a motion by dr medlin i'll second the second by mr marshall any discussion hearing none all in favor aye motion passes okay at this time i'm going to move to the mic and do the budget presentation for 2023 what is on the screen is what is at what is at your station so if you would like to move you can if you want to stay you can do that as well okay thank you jeremy okay members of the board public thank you um so we're here to discuss the calendar year 2023 budget for the school corporation we're going to go over
009the budget calendar we're going to talk about our capital projects plan our bus replacement plan funds to be raised and give you a little historical comparison how these numbers replace compared to the history and then give my recommendation for the board so here we are on september 6th on after tonight's meeting we will publish on the gateways system the state gateway system the notice of our public hearing we will have a public hearing on the budget on our regular scheduled board meeting on september 19th and then the board will formally adopt the budget at our regular meeting on october 17th so just remind everybody the budget is a calendar year budget even though most of us in the room operate on a school year fiscal year but we received our 2022 budget on december 27th
010um our net assessed valuation which is the value of all the properties in our school district is just over 5 billion we've exceeded the 5 billion amount here for the first time and when you look at the gross av which also includes residents and areas that are in within a tif district those is about 5.6 billion dollars so our net av increased by about a quarter billion dollars 5.1 percent from 21 to 22 and that was same amount for the referendum funds as well so what does that mean when you have a higher assessed value it could mean less it means less a lower tax rate for our residents preliminary indications are that our assessed value is going to increase actually nine and a half percent from 22 to 23 which is a huge jump
011but it's all market driven it's all based on the values of homes values of commercial property and if we've seen anything in the last few years is the skyrocketing cost of homes and the value of homes and that's exactly what that is based on just want to give the board a quick review that about 15 months ago the state of indiana passed their bi-annual budget and they increased funding for k-12 tuition support by over a billion dollars which was the largest increase in state history it was a 4.6 percent increase for this year and another 4.3 percent in funding for next year the foundation amount which is the basis of how much each school district gets per kid um that also increased and that goes to all school districts and you can see where complexity
012money and special leg grants also increase so again i'll reiterate how grateful we were to the general assembly for pushing this money into the k-12 pie we will they will be doing the same thing again and starting in january and that will be the long budget session going through may hopeful i you know when i'm not necessarily expecting increases by this amount but hopefully we'll still be able to get more funding put into the pot this is just a quick illustration of how much the k-12 pie has been in the state budget just up to five six years ago was just over 7 billion now it's over it's up to 8.2 for this fiscal year and you can correspondingly see how much funding we get per student and this year we're just over 6 500
013per kid it's all about your adm count and how many students you have and the more kids you have the more expenditures you're going to need and so forth so when we're preparing the budget for calendar year 23 everything is based on revenue just like your household your expenditures have to be based on what your income is and so when we're preparing the budget for what our expenditures are going to be not only for this year but for the beginning of next school year we're really trying to figure out what that revenue is going to be but that comes with some challenges because the revenue we get for this year from july through december is going to be based on our september adm count which hasn't even happened yet and that will be on september
01416th and then the first half of 23 is going to be based on the february 23 count and a year from now when we're doing the fall count in september of 23 that determines our funding for july through june of 23. oh and by the way as i mentioned they're going to change the formula for depending how much we get in 10 months from now so when we're trying to figure out the revenue for 23 we're really just using the best information we have now we're using what we see as the trend what we have as our enrollment graduation sizes incoming kindergartners we take that all consideration in order to try to estimate however we have no idea what's going to go on in indianapolis in the long session i don't see us being cut
015but it's hard to estimate how much additional funds we're going to get speaking of class sizes in adm one of the challenges that we have now is that we are our graduating classes are hovering around 800 students each and that's been that way for a while now and that is still the trend our high school classes are all around that size however we have approximately 600 kids coming in as kindergartners so our overall cohort population of students is decreasing as of now or excuse me as of last week we're looking to be down approximately 120 students compared to last year and that doesn't that doesn't mean that kids left and they moved we get an influx of kids in fact when you have 800 going out and 600 coming in you would think that our
016loss would be more but we are a destination of choice and we get a lot of move-ins from the parochial schools and from other people who want to come and bring their kids here and so that's why our loss is not 200 kids per year doing the math at 6 500 per kid that equates to about 780 000 less revenue for this fiscal year if we would have maintained um a steady amount of enrollment but we we know this and it's all based on facts and information that you have at the time so as much as we hate being down 120 we can see this coming and in fact it's probably going to be the trend for the next couple years because we know that the class sizes in all four of our grade levels
017that we have here at the high school are all still hovering those ninety 780 hundred kids so unless there's a big rash of influx of kindergarteners we're probably gonna we might be losing a hundred kids a year and we then base our expenditures accordingly based on that projected revenue so i want to take a quick moment and talk about circuit breaker you hear about units of government losing revenue to the circuit breaker caps that are in the constitution lake county and st joe county had an exemption for 10 years from 2010 through 2020 but since we have a higher av and low tax rates for our community our circuit breaker loss is not that much it is this past year or here in 20 2022 we're just a little over two hundred and five thousand
018dollars of lost revenue and two hundred and five thousand dollars is a lot of money and it seems like a lot of money but it's only about a half a percent of our total tax revenue here's a little comparison of the 16 school districts in lake county and how much money they are losing annually to the circuit breaker so the first column of the levy is this is how much tax dollars they need to raise in order to meet their operating costs and if you take gary for example almost 45 24 25 million dollars is coming off the top that is not even being billed to the constituents in the area so if you work your way down where you can see that our half a percent is very low compared to others hanover because
019of the growing population they have there a lot of construction their assessed value has gone up and therefore they do not have as much of a circuit breaker loss and this is just the same data in a nice colorful graph and you will see us at the very bottom toward the bottom there in blue any questions so far all right the next thing we want to talk about is our capital projects plan state law requires us that we come up with a capital plan for improvements or large dollar items that we plan to do over the next three years the key word here is plan is because things always pop up and you're always got a plan and then you just never know what's going to happen so i work with our director of facilities
020who works with his the heck custodians at each of the buildings and the school principals to determine you know what are things that we really need for our first priority is always health and safety issues bill uses that judgment and then him and i get together and we come up with a plan so here in 2023 we always put an allocation in our operating fund for asphalt and roof repairs this is not replacing a roof this is we've got a leak or we have to just do a patch same thing with asphalt we put an allocation in to replace desks and chairs because it's furniture and we've got a lot of kids the furniture gets worn over years we put some money in the budget for that for when it comes up the problem with
021that is it's difficult to get desks and chairs now from any supplier just because it's the world we live in for many products but hopefully that will turn around we're looking to replace the intercom system and do some painting at grimmer at holmen we're looking to paint the gym and continue carpet replacements at colling we the front of colleen was paved this year and we want to finish that off next year and i believe do the the back side and in on the round then we'll look to paint the gems at cole and get piper some more painting and replacing some doors at watson it's a little scaled down this year because of how much we did this year as you can recall seeing bill's four or six page list of all the summer projects
022we did we've spent a lot of money uh really getting our schools in some great shape so these some of these things besides the intercom system are more you know cosmetic some things that need to be done um at 24 some of the same things we're looking to maybe remodel the locker room at kaler some gym painting at bivich a new sign at holmen roof replacements at holmen and piper protzman has talked about putting in a concrete playground i'm in one of the coves and then that will painting the gym at watson would be then the last gym we would do three of them in 23 two of them at 24. profsman doesn't need to be painted because it's less than 10 years old and then for 25 again the bigger projects there would be
023to replace the gym floor and the bleachers at kaler we've had some issues there in the past but they're working fine now and but it's something we want to keep on our radar and to potentially budget money for we're looking at potentially converting the playground to a parking lot at clark um but each year it seems how sometimes that's used more sometimes it's used less so there's no real hard need to do that at this point we always we for last couple years we've put money in the budget for the old special ed offices at home and um it is used now for in the special needs programs and they uh have a they take kids in there and do things but um we never know what's going to come up so we would have
024put some money aside just in case there's a need that comes up at holmen maybe a program moves there that we can renovate that area there are no immediate plans for what that would be done and that's why it's a few years down the road and then items um these would be items that cost 10 000 or more or estimated to cost 10 000 or more um everything costs more these days in the last year or two and so these are just based on the estimates that we have at this time in 2023 we're looking at a new maintenance trailer a new gator at clark a scrubber at bivich potentially a new delivery van and one of those snow removal tractors with the brushes at coleman to help clear snow and sidewalks in 24 potentially
025another a new maintenance van a new gator and a ride-along scrubbing machine and then a free 25 or uh additional riding lawnmower and a snow plow with a with a spreader i mean as you can imagine with the salt that our guys deal with each year those dump trucks go through a lot and the salt just eats it away so any questions on the capital plan as we've presented so far rob yes i have a very generalized question i'll admit it probably should be a question that bill ledger would answer but unfortunately he's not here i'm going to throw it out there and if you have any comment on it in terms of capital project plans they have cooling towers at a school like grimmer correct we do have cooling towers on i know on
026some of our buildings exactly how it works it might be all but i know on some okay and some of them i hear from time to time there's incidences of legionnaire disease found in similar facilities like in a veterans administration home and that do we have a monitoring process for these cooling towers that gives us advanced notice of any potential problem it just entered my mind i thought i'd ask i have no idea so that is a question for bill he is all mechanical and uh facilities we will relay that question to him and he will get an answer for you i thought since you might be paying the bill on such a i think okay i'll back off i know there is a little there is speaking of not to go off on a
027tangent but um those cooling towers sit on the roofs and they're subject to water evaporation right and so the towns work with not only us but all facile you know buildings in the towns that have those cooling towers to modify the water bills because what's going through the meter isn't necessarily because of evaporation and so forth but we work with them and it's it's all clean out there fair enough okay um next we're going to go over the bus replacement plan we are required to do a five-year plan this used to be 12 columns in 12 years but the law was changed just to make it a five-year plan now even though you'll see on the next few slides that we do list all of our 90-some buses on the list and so one of
028the things that has happened in the last year is this rise of bus prices 10 20 percent cost more for a bus now than what we even ordered a year ago at this time in fact most school districts across the state had to modify the order that they placed in september because of the rising cost that has come in from the manufacturers so we've increased the pricing here for 23 and 24 replacement costs because of just how crazy it is right now hoping that once the supply chains get back to normal and there we can get buses in a more timely fashion then the prices will decrease to the levels we've historically seen they go up every year um but instead of costing a hundred and twenty thousand dollars now we're looking like close to
029135 140 per bus so um and we don't get any additional money for that you know so we have to make way and that's why we come up with a budget so um just scrolling through we have a list of all again 90-some buses i have it here at the end of 2023 [Music] to potentially add another mini white bus it wouldn't be replacing a curt one we i believe we currently have four but we're looking to potentially add an additional bus because one you don't need a cdl license to drive those and so maybe with the labor shortage and it being hard for us to find bus drivers and everybody to find bus drivers if maybe for some of those after school activities if a we can maybe ask the coach or if they're
030willing to to potentially drive a bus or someone in an office can drive that they get properly trained but you don't need to go get the full-fledged license so we're throwing out that idea that if we had another bus it might help open up some schedules or maybe there's even a small route that we can fit those kids on we'll see we also don't know what the time frame and the lead on that is for getting a mini white bus as compared to a regular full-fledged bus at this point so okay so now i'm going to get into the actual budget numbers so we have six funds that we establish a budget for our education fund operations fund our referendum operating fund and then we have three debt service funds and this is uh you
031see this every year uh this is what i call the 16 line statement because there's 16 lines and really that's the the basis for the the form on the dlgf site has been now changed but i do like this format better because it really shows you the computations so the first five lines you're estimating what your expenditures are going to be the following 12 month period of 2023 in this case how much you're going to need from july 1 through december 31st of this year and then on the lower half is okay well for example in our operations fund if we felt uh our need next year is 25 million we're going to have 13 million of expenditures for this six month period currently now so we have a need of 38 million so then
032it's like well how much cash did we have on hand at july one how much tax money are we going to get in december when everyone pays their taxes in november how much miscellaneous revenue is going to come in over the same time frame and then therefore well if we have 38 million in need and we have 25 million of what is already coming in then we need to raise how much money in order to have an operating balance and levy our taxpayers and in this case the operations fund would compete to a levy of 18 million dollars a little bit more than that our referendum phone would be 10.7 the education fund is zero because there is no tax levy formed our taxpayers for education fund that is fully funded let me phrase that
033not fully funded it is entirely funded by the state and uh we are at the mercy of the school funding form that we talked about earlier so our debt service funds those dollar amounts are very straightforward they're based on what is the debt that we have out there for common school loans that we do twice a year for technology it is based on geo bonds that we do it is the referendum capital fund is our referendum bonds that we sold in 2012 and what are our debt payments are there so these are all we make semi-annual debt payments and then these amounts here represent what our debt payment is going to be in calendar year 2023 and then just working the math down of how much money do we have now how much money do
034we need to raise as you know especially on these other funds we don't exactly know what is going to happen at the state for funding wise we don't exactly know what the assessed value is going to do so in order to protect ourselves we advertise high we don't expect to spend 66 million dollars based on what our current expenditures are however what if the state put eight percent more money in the fund formula um we don't know that but they may say hey there's eight percent inflation we want to put that money in well then that be an influx of money that we need that will have to us to be able to use and if i would put a lower number there then we wouldn't be able to spend more than that lower number
035so when it comes to the education fund and the operations fund and the referendum operating fund it is we advertise a little bit high just to protect ourselves to make sure that we capture all the dollars that can come to us so as a comparison um these were the advertised amounts in 2022 and these are the amounts i am seeking your approval for to advertise to advertise for 2023 we've slightly increased the education and the operations and the referendum operating fund as we do each year the debt service payments are higher here in for the debt service fund itself it went up 1.2 million dollars per year and that's because of the geo bonds we sold last year for the upcoming bivich project and so we said at that time that was going to cost
036approximately two cents on the tax roll and if you look down here it is almost exactly two cents higher as an advertised rate our pension debt fund is very close to what it was last year as is our referendum fund it's only a thousand dollars difference on this next slide shows just a little bit of historical um data for the past six years comparing what we advertised through this process and then once the dlgf actually certifies what the budget is based on the real av based on the actual revenue and what it is and you can see that this advertised rate even here last year when we advertised 92.33 the real rate came in at just under at 79 cents so here when we're advertising 94 the real rate will probably be somewhere in the
037low 80s but again we do it to protect ourselves and not leave any uh dollars on the table for that we can put them back into the classrooms um this is again just a similar data i'm showing the breakdown per fund historically and then the bottom chart shows how the assessed value of the properties in our district has increased over the last six years as shown by the red line on the bottom it is steadily increasing i'm expecting it to increase because there's actually like a two two-year lag on those assessed values it's based on home sales in 21 is what's going we are told now in 22 which will affect the av that we use for the budget in 23. as we've seen home sales now even with rising interest rates are still booming
038and so we don't know what the trend is going to be but the says value has continued to increase which is good because as you can see on the bottom line our tax rate has stayed very steady and actually slightly gone down here in the last few years so so my recommendation is same that which appeared on the other forms is to have a budget estimate of 66 million for the education fund 25 million for the operations fund 12 and a half million for the referendum operating fund our debt service fund would be seven million seven hundred ninety four thousand four hundred sixty three the pension bond fund would be one million three hundred twenty seven thousand nine hundred thirty four dollars and the referendum debt fund 12 million 397 500. again just a summary
039those budget estimates would then be posted into the gateway public access system we'll have a public hearing again at our next meeting on september 19th to go over the budget the cpep plan the bus plan and then we would adopt um formally at the board meeting on october 17th this is a little bit of a snapshot of what the state's gateway system looks like has those same numbers as listed below um it goes over the dates that we just talked about here here as well so um that's what i have so i will now turn it over to the board in case you have any questions about what was in your packet or what you saw on the screen at this time thank you rob before you sit down i just want to make a
040general comment i'm sure my fellow board members joined with me in complimenting you on putting together a wonderful bird's eye view and understandable with illustrations etc etc exactly where we're at well thank you and we do share the quarterly [Music] financial spreadsheet with you we want to be in the loop with with you all the time as we reported to you before we share that same spreadsheet with our cash flows we share that with our teachers using all the time because we are just open and transparent with them and with times are good we want to give as much money to them we'll go through that negotiating process here so um it's an open book for for the board and for the the teachers union as well and so i appreciate the compliment but i
041would also say that it is a complete team effort and it is getting input from you saw the facility side it's working with dr veraco mrs mucha and our curriculum directors because you know things have changed in the last few years we're adding this we're adding that we're addressing learning loss we're we're doing things and they'll come to me about hey can we find money for this we find money for this and yeah it's kids first and we need to we all work together so yeah i can put the spreadsheet together and i can put that but it's it's everybody so thank you again okay thank you so our buses the yellow ones they will continue to be anything that we order will still be the natural gas that were well we have been for
042we've been buying mainly propane propane excuse me um for the last many six eight six years or so we've been fortunate enough to get um grants to offset the cost it's it well who knows what it's gonna be now but it used to be about ten thousand dollars more for a propane bus than a traditional what used to be a diesel bus we were getting we got a state grant for two or three years that covered the cost of that and then we haven't gotten the state grant recently but instead we've been able to get money from the volkswagen v w environment settlement money pretty much serving the same purpose to put more energy efficient vehicles on the road and so we're getting grant money for that as well so talking with our mechanics i
043think last year i think it was seven propane and then the other three were traditional were gas buses we are moving away from diesel engines because they just harder for the mechanics to work on and there's just they're very time and you know not cost of cost effective where traditional gasoline wasn't available in buses until recently so we're always going to buy some gasoline buses because we got buses that are going pretty far distances and until you can pull up to any corner station and get a refueling a propane we need to have those buses that can go those longer distance that we know we can pull in and get so we still like that propane route our bus drivers really like them they're very safe they're quiet they start like that in the winter
044and so it's wonderful so is that the same for the white buses are they just gas the white buses we haven't bought white buses since i don't think we've bought a white bus since we started this propane program i don't know if that is an option for them or if those would be potential um just gasoline ones as well thank you sure and that's it any other questions all right so at this point i've just asked the board's permission to um allow me to advertise what was presented to you move that we um allow the advertisement of the 2023 budget we have a motion by dr medlin second motion second by mr marshall any other discussion questions hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you thank you all right and with that
045we have no public comments so we'll move right on to our board comments and consideration of future agenda items mr marshall i have nothing this evening thank you thank you mrs kelly um nothing really just hope everybody's off to a great start with the new school year great dr madeline nothing thank you all right and i just have two things i thought open house was fabulous a lot of teachers and and my daughter's teachers were there so i thank all those teachers for being there and then uh dollar share scholars is selling these nice little metal cups every dollar that we raise the proceeds will go to a 2023 graduating senior nothing stays in house so if you want a cup you can see mrs resnick or there are links that you can purchase ncaa
046hockey and some other sayings you don't have to stick with the lake central so thank you for that and with that i'll turn it over to mrs mucha for board calendar future activities i just want to encourage everyone that we have some great sports teams and our students that there's lots of clubs to join at every level and we'd love to see our children involved in something mrs rieby what did you want to tell us about the golf team they were the dac champions that's great to hear thank you and our next meeting will be monday september 19th wonderful and then with that do we have a motion for adjournment motion by mr marshall second second by ms kelly all in favor aye