001school committee to order on wednesday january 13th at 6 30 p.m i will take a roll call vote so when i call your name just respond that you're present uh i'm gonna go with first names for this uh if that's okay with everybody uh carrie carey present uh holla hello um margaret present and thank you doug for being here and for all of the work that you've done so far and um i'm just going to turn this right over to you thank you for all the information that you shared with us yeah so uh what i think i'll do is this is that um you know i put together a document i think if we'll see if i can share let's see here all right looks like 200 screens yeah [Music] all right does does
002that present it all to you guys no no of course not well i have the google doc you shared the document with us last night yeah so i think the idea here is that um i didn't want to get too too far along before i had some pretty significant feedback from you guys about whether this was heading in the right direction so you know and and mark and i were chatting about this just a moment before before you joined and that is is that you know the big bunch of books that we traditionally done i didn't get a chance to put it together last last winter but i will this this winter um you know have a real depth of of information about how you know stuff works and it interacts and all that sort
003of stuff and you know the the problem i've always had with those is they're just so long and uh they haven't you know they have all the stuff you need but they're just you know no one's gonna read except for a few folks gonna read 40 or 50 pages so i thought one piece of this could be you know uh something we use year over year that's really a much shorter version of that that it sort of um gets to the the nuts and bolts of how the budget gets together and and i think gets to some of the points that were made when we were chatting last time which is about you know what things are how variable are some things how much control do we have over them um part of why i
004sort of put it in a grid uh you know a table format to sort of speak to each of those um components um and and to sort of you know lay out those pieces in a in a fairly concise but but hopefully clear way uh and then obviously people want to go into much more detail they can you know there's plenty of resources out there uh for for that but that that was kind of my thinking there and it you know and just i sketched a few definitions of beginning that would be something that even somebody who's kind of sort of familiar can skip over if they don't need to but in that section that goes into you know the operating budget the sort of expense side and the revenue side trying to lay out
005those pieces because that's how our budget's constructed is with those categories that we have you know regular education specifications and so on and so forth and sort of describe what gets lumped into that because you know even when you look at the budget book it has those sort of uh uh talent up subtotals for those different categories but it's not always exactly clear when you look at the the detail which go into which ones you know and i can be perfectly honest and say that when i'm putting budget stuff together and going through the details then you know i'm back and forth a bunch to say is that line in there or is it there you know that kind of thing because um and then likewise on the revenue side the idea being just you
006know go through the different types of revenue which ones we control or don't control you know um you know i think end is a super confusing area for folks um because it's i mean i think one of the critical things you know sort of one-time money um it's essentially uh remains from previous years uh so you know it's uh i'll i'll say in in my previous history with town meeting in amherst um somebody's like hey you know we put like 200 000 into this you know this uh into free cash every year why don't we just budget that into the into the budget it's like well because it doesn't exist until it gets certified for one thing but also you never know whether you're going to have any or not you know general you know
007i mean it could be if you had the sort of perfect budget where you had exactly the right expenses and exactly the right revenues you'd end the year with a zero and you wouldn't have any excess right you know that doesn't happen you want to be a little bit to the surplus side so you budget conservatively and that's part of the the narrative there that that i would want to put in is you know how does this get created you know the interesting piece also for e d for folks that you know the general public is that they're unlike free cash which can be unbounded in in the circumstance with with the regional schools that if it gets above that threshold that they have we have to give it back to the towns you know
008and that's important you know we can't stockpile it um you know there are some things we can do to kind of stockpile it but it requires you know action approval to do that so you know that's some of when we get into that other funding category like grants and special funds revolving funds those kind of things that's where you can kind of in a sense sort of squirrel away some money um usually you do it for things like capital um so you we have a capital stabilization fund um you know but again it's it's uh you know they're all prescribed and stuff but to lay those out in in simpler terms was sort of the goal here and then to go into more um you know sort of the second half of this for lack
009of a way to describe it would be more specific to sort of what's been happening more recently with us you know some history and some yeah and so that that's kind of where i want to go there and like with the ads and cuts i realized you know it would be better to really abbreviate that if they want to look at the detail of a given year happy to provide it but the the the idea of here's what happened you know in general you know the specifics of it are maybe not as important um i did want to distinguish on the and i did this in the chart and i hope that was clear to you guys there was there are changes in staffing where it's not the people have left but the who's paying
010for it changed so if we shift someone onto a grant well that reduces our operating um so i wanted to make those distinctions of of changes to fde you know they can sometimes be you can reduce fte but not have fewer people working for you um because if we get grant funding or like you know uh in the amherst budget last year we had um three staff that we essentially are gonna fund with money from umass um in the region it was like part of a person because it was like fifteen thousand dollars so that that's part of why those last two columns it's what you know because i think that last comes one that you know is what people i think more intimately care about it's like well who lost their job well that's
011what that shows is who lost or got a job as a result of ads or cuts and then i was gonna i haven't done it yet but i was gonna film in sort of well who was taking the hit here was it teachers was it admin and then i kind of looked everybody else into the other category which is you know all the paraprofessionals food service um clerical maintenance i mean i could separate those out if if we're interested but i think that's broadly you know those are mostly hourly workers is one way to think of it and not the sort of professional staff but if we think that i mean i'm open to suggestion on any and all of those kinds of of edits um and then one other thing that was we chat
012about last time was sort of the idea of inflation versus um potentially versus just how our budget's changed over the years um i can certainly plot that fairly easily i've got um the inflationary factor we use in our busing contract um i can chart that and then chart that against sort of changes in budget um and so you know sort of show that that's an interesting uh sort of overlay uh it essentially is a way of looking at sort of constant dollar charts sort of like if you set a metric of you know today is you know the basis and everything after that is based on that basis kind of thing but um so those were the pieces that i kind of put together to try to get started but i wanted some feedback from
013you guys if that's kind of the direction you were thinking of um other things you want to have put in there or not put in there or um you know i think this might be helpful the first part of it i think is helpful for anybody that's interested in sort of what's the school budget and how does it get put together without having to read 60 pages so i'm hoping to keep this to about four five um and then the the second half is going to be much more about you know this year's story for the regional school district and and sort of what's what's going on what's happening in recent history and then what's what's uh the heart of the conversation as we as we get into the budget season more more fully in
014the next few weeks so i think i mean i'll stop there and sort of see how you guys are feeling about this any thoughts you have okay okay um why absolutely but um i'm getting an oh i'm sorry um but i i i wonder if holla and carrie would like to go first if you have questions or comments i'm happy to chime in um so i guess the first of all thank you this is great um the one question i have is just in terms of you put the ftes into the changes over time and showing the reductions but it's a little um it would be nice to kind of have the fts and some of this wanted to be applicable but for example for regular education special education do do you have that like
015is that do are people assigned to i don't know does it cost i'm gonna get my lingo wrong but it like could you give us the ftes at the top with the regular education special education student support services and programs or is that just gonna gather into like a person i don't see a personnel one here i mean obviously some of the health insurance costs and things like that are gonna be you know anyway i'm just wondering if we could get because the change is interesting but it's also in important to know the change over you know what the denominator is a little bit and i'm wondering if there's a place we could put in that denominator for the change or maybe that's yeah because because we have all the changes which i think is
016really important to show like we've been making these reductions over time and what you're asking for is you know potentially would be equivalent to like how many five years of reductions um anyway i'll stop talking let me if i may just ask a bit of a clarifying question make sure i'm understanding correctly so you're thinking along the lines of sort of uh changes within particular sort of category areas um in the fde i think we've done that to some extent um [Music] does but i don't know if it gets his i don't know if it does it by you know like contract area like teachers and professionals versus admins versus i just don't recall right off top my head versus sort of budgeting areas i guess the tricky thing i'm trying to think of is
017so when we look at the to go back into the expenses or like go back to the operating budget and we see that we have regular education we have a description of what it's supposed to pay for and here it's like classroom so um there's the year to year availability and what the num would we be able to assign to that a number of people or full-time equivalents to that to that area of the budget you know i i think perhaps yeah because it would kind of help you see kind of like where because people are our biggest you know our best that's that's what we spend most of our money on and i'm not i'm not um i don't know i'm trying to think if it would help tell the story to have some
018people attached to it because i think that's um important for folks to kind of when they're thinking about budgets it's abstract but if you put you know like this one's this is where x number of teachers are funded out of right right no i i i hear what you're saying and i think yeah in that payroll section which is you know got the color to it the green and the blue i just picked colors um yeah i can look at how that's changed um you know and and see if i can put in um or i could i could structure the that in the in the sort of ads and cuts um instead of it doing it by sort of admin teachers other i could put it into the sort of program areas might be
019instructed it might make it you know we have to reorient the picture to sort of widen it a little bit to show that but but um but yeah that's certainly i think a piece of it because it's you know when we if you see you know if you look at the as it cuts list it says you know special education or you know not you know classroom or whatever um so we can we can definitely do that um you know another way we might get at regular education and special education is to look at the tr the oh um when i was looking at that actually took some of the data out and looked at and and there are a couple of charts in the fiscal year 19 or 20 budget i can't remember which
020one with some charts that show how much we're spending on regular education versus special special education and there are some figures about how the dollar amounts have also changed and that presumably would also correlate to you know what we're paying in salaries and expenses for those services because it has definitely changed yeah yeah um not that that's a bad thing but but it you know it has changed yeah and someone that's driven by you know for like the term uh clientele yeah well our enrollment yeah what your enrollment is well one of the other things is is you know this happens uh you know if you look at um you know selected populations within our within our school whether it be you know special education tends to affect uh sort of regardless of of category
021of people you know other kinds of demographic type categories other categories track uh more with uh you know certain let's say race ethnicity groups right so as you know you're you know as and i've looked at this over the time in the in the district you know sometimes if you look at percentages of things it's it's indicative of something other than what it seems like because you know um if for example uh you know the number of ell students the number of students may not change but if the total school population is dropped in other words if if the kids said it you know if we're dropping population none of them are ell students your percentage bll goes up and it goes up considerably sometimes so that's you know we want to uh make sure
022we're you know taking that kind of piece into account as we sort of demonstrate stuff but but there's no doubt that as you um you know sort of carry uh certain you know sometimes you do like a stack bar chart where like the height is the sort of how much did you spend in the different colors in the bars the size of the of the different categories um and sometimes that's you know instructed to see that um you know sometimes when you have too many different colors it's a little hard to sort of have but but certainly um uh you know i can i can look at those kind of those kind of charts um you know maybe one of those you know we could we could do it by fte but we could also
023you know potentially we could just do it by dollars which is i think what's traditionally been shown um you know the the the you know special education tends to skew um skew things a little bit because they tend to have a lot of like paras so if you have a lot of one-to-one paris mostly other pair you know we don't have professionals that aren't special education very often we have a few but not very many um so almost all of that block of of employees is dedicated to special education and so that that's you know um the nature of how we do that i mean that's part of how you deliver the service and it's you know how do you try to be cost effective with that and and and uh you know leverage the
024skills as best you can you know um and that's some of what's going to be part of this story as well is sort of how do we actually execute the work we do but certainly you know i can look at different ways to to try to get to or or draw um you know the information out in in parallel to what is above as far as how the budget is constructed that's that's a useful thing and i i think um and you know that idea of sort of fte over time which is part of why i did what i started with there i may change that a little bit and and certainly anytime you put a table of numbers up it's often good to put the corresponding sort of picture because it's a lot easier
025to process the information sometimes when you see it on a graph now you can you know you can mess with those and make things sort of look far better or worse than they are but but nonetheless um i won't i won't be deceptive on purpose um okay carrie oh i'm sorry carrie did you have another well i was just thinking i mean as we're talking about the special ed stuff and i um i think one of the things that's worth communicating and i'm i'm not this may be text i'm not sure how to do this but it's just like a lot of special education stuff we don't have control over so if somebody you know joins our district and and has specific needs we need to meet those needs and it's not something that we
026could potentially cut whereas to say some of the other and same thing with english language learners like there's there are all sorts of um and i think it's the right thing like i'm just you know all right so um well that's one of those things in the in this report control you know it's it's i think that's an area where in the in the sort of grid where we explain the the different sort of areas you know in the special education area and again maybe it won't fit nicely into that or it'll be too much sort of text to explain but it can be part of it may be part of the narrative here at the very beginning where i you know i just sort of basics of budget you know i was just going
027to talk about sort of the very very broad stuff but but it could be a place where uh if if it doesn't fit into the chart where we can explain that where there are you know the the it's it's the term is called faith free and appropriate public education and so uh explaining that and how that um you know dictates our choices at times um you know because it's we're required to make the curriculum accessible to kids and do the things we need to do to make that happen um and some kids need more help than others i'm kind of wondering if we could create um like a i'm just imagining a little um like temperature thing where it's like on one end is high level of you know flexibility like this is something like
028music programs for example like there's no i think they're highly important i don't think we should be cutting them i want to preface that but i would say like you know certain types of veg programs are maybe would be very um low in the like state mandates that we must pay for this whereas others would we could go all the way into a red zone with like things like vapes where they're like very you know low levels of local control and instead of trying to do it because i think what you're saying is like i think a lot of this is already in that really long document and trying to think about how to make it so that opens up the top page you can look at it and say like the big takeaway and
029if one of the big takeaways we want to have is like the school committee doesn't actually have a lot of control over reducing this cost area or this you know this piece of the operating budget so maybe we could either like the same way we have those color-coded circles for like yellow green red maybe we have some sort i'm i'm not a designer but you know yellow green and red like green we have uh you know this is very you know we can do away not that we should but like this is something we could potentially cut whereas with like special ed i think a lot of it would be like in the red zone like we can't actually make cuts legally red would be and maybe red's not the right color because it sort
030of implies a certain thing but but but i get your point is that yes um there are there are things that uh are more required and others that are less required and so when you you know once you've taken care of those required things you're you know the rest of the things you have more levels of control over is about your you know your philosophy right and your community uh values i think to put it bluntly for this coming year it's what we can cut you know these are the things we can't cut and here's what's left where we have to make decisions about what we're going to cut i mean that's really right or we may be right and you know the difficulty i think for some folks is is that you know um
031if you want to keep like for example the high school or the middle school too it's like if you want a larger you know if you want to preserve certain classes then class sizes going up is one way to do that and that doesn't mean you won't have still small classes for some of the more specialized things but it makes it possible because you shift how many staff you have in one department versus another that can you know i mean that can create some tricky dynamics between departments uh but you know that's that's why you pay for us a nice salary um in the principal um i see a note since we can't see holla she's put a note in here that she has raised hands so thank you thank you for doing that so
032can you hear me yes okay so this is my first budget go around i'm excited to be here and pardon me if this question is super rudimentary but when um dr morris talked about furloughs last night i assumed that the budget for this year we've already passed so with that money that we're accruing or saving to furloughs be not a surplus but applied to the budget we're looking at for next year um sort of so it uh typically when in an operating budget if there's money left over at the end it goes to e and d um and the the quark of e d is you know it's basically a savings account um the quirk is that they have to what they call certify it to use it um so it almost always creates a
033lag of a year between when you actually save the money and when you actually can spend it um and so we try to anticipate what our end will be and get certified and then utilize that because technically when we pass so last year when we passed our budget we we were using uh we have a contingency fund which is is just in absolute emergency we try not to spend that from e and d but then we actually used i want to say 515 thousand dollars of e d um that we're actually going to spend to make this year's budget work um and so that 515 000 is technically from the money that was declared by the state to be you know sort of in remainder or left over after the end of fiscal 19. so
034because of what happened at the end of fiscal 19 we had that available in fiscal 20 to spend in fiscal 21. and so that's the that's the sort of you know lag time that you see um you can you can do it other than that but it's a it's a lot trickier um so there's a lag between when you sort of save and when you can spend relative to e and d and it's it's got a sort of year gap in it in some respects that being said the other things you can do um that makes the money a little more flexibly available to us in the next fiscal year is that let's say we get to the end of this fiscal year and uh it looks like we have a reasonably large surplus that
035would go to e d now we can do things like not utilize as much school choice and so what that does is that instead of using school choice to support the operating budget which we typically you know pay for teachers with that money we use uh we don't spend the school choice money so that stays in that account uh and is available to us for next year and so we sort of spend the money this year from from you know our this year resources and then we don't spend out of that account and that counts like a different savings account so if you think about um you know we've got e and d which has a lot of constraints on it but we have a few others so like the athletics has a revolving fund
036um food service has a revolving fund uh capital stabilization is a revolving fund school choice is a revolving fund there are a few very specifically prescribed you know sort of funds that we have they're like their own separate bank account and so if we've er we can one way to leverage savings this year next year is to essentially kind of keep money in those accounts and not spend it uh and so then it's available for next year's use and so we do that all the time with school choice i mean we always try to you know the amount we try to use from school choice in a given fiscal year um we're trying to preserve a little bit for the you know for subsequent years uh and and we try to use you know just
037enough to to uh to help things out but not uh sort of zero out the balance so um you know that's that's one of the things we can do this year so if if we do uh have considerable savings in in our spending relative what we thought would be the case um you know we can we have a few options so it can go to end which is a little more restrictive than how it's used and it and we can essentially not spend out of other ones we were going to spin from but those are also you know except for school choice but even that to some extent you are fairly strictly defined as to what you can spend it on so like capital stabilization you have to buy capital stuff with it um but
038you know we have plenty of need so we have ways to to spend that so i don't know if that helped or not or if that just sort of muddied the water i'm sorry no i'll say yes and yeah good um so i guess um i i like kind of what you've outlined doug i think um explaining if we can in some way some of the the terms that get used which i think you're suggesting here at the beginning right so i think um like i was thinking i finally my brain finally i think processed level services versus level funded which are two really different things and i think this is a year that we might want to make sure that that in particular is clear to people um uh and i i guess i
039feel pretty strongly that it's is carrick said and how i'm not sure how the best way to illustrate it but i think it's really important for people to understand that a big part of our budget in terms of our expenses we really have to do we have contractual agreements for payroll we have insurance payments we have to make you know transportation utilities all of those things we don't have a choice right um we're not going to you know we don't change our building size very quickly or easily so it you know the heating bill is the heating bill right so i you know and i think people will understand that but i i think it's important to point that out and and then what you said you know the the places where where we could
040make changes either additions or cuts although it's likely to be cuts not additions at this point um i just was looking at my notes uh down assessments one of the figures that i came across but i i'd have to go back and look when i was going through a couple of the budgets was the percentage of the budget that comes of our income that's from town assessments versus state aid because what i saw and i i is that it's changed you know the towns are picking up a bigger percentage of the school budget than we used to and so i think it's important for people to see that and some of these things we can't do anything about in the budget but i think your comment about advocacy you know if you're concerned about these
041things and you care about your school you know these are things you can go out and speak about you know write write to people talk to people and and i think that that is an important point to get across as well the uh the state i'll say on that on that particular point the state has taken a uh decided point of view relative to how much the state should support local schools versus how much the schools i mean even the chapter 70 formula the tweaks to that in recent years are are in part uh you know uh keeping in mind or following that same point of view relative to the amount of uh you know i think to put it bluntly this state would say well if you want to lose local control great you
042can also fund it and and so that's part of it because you know the the significant drop in in the portion of the budget funded by uh by state aid is dropped uh by design and it's at a level i mean you know like if you look at the chapter 7 formula we we fund well above the what they call a minimum they're many towns that just barely make the minimums you know there's a there's a net school spending that you have to do which is basically you've got to spend at least this much on your kids and then there's you know and as part of that is you know a certain required um you know uh kind of commitment to it we we spend well above that so it's not a you know in
043our community you know our communities i should say it's a strong value to support schools um and we're willing to sort of spend our money that way which means we're not buying something else with it you know um and and other communities don't have that and so the state has a sort of philosophy of how much they think is a minimum that you should do um but you know there are a lot of people would argue that that's not a high enough level you know i mean we certainly take a different you know here in in our community we definitely think it's a it should be a much higher thing and we you know it's it gets into your philosophy of like well should you tax more centrally and distribute wealth or not i mean
044there's all those kind of things too okay well so i don't know if that's i mean maybe that's not something to get into for this but but that was something that struck me when i was looking through some of the information um i wondered too in terms of some of the the the fte cuts the things that i came across um in fiscal year 15 the business ed fte went away which i assume means any kind of business education program we had went away uh or did it there was primarily one person who was you know up you know having those classes um and they retired and so i think it was you know one of those by attrition sort of you know cuts were going to be needed um and by retirement and you
045know just the general enrollment in those classes i think they felt this was a program that we could reduce okay and would the same be true for the two ftes in 2019 for the child study program so i think in that circumstance um uh one of the ftes may have you know there's a basically there was a teacher and a paraprofessional in that in that i think the professional decided to retire okay they might have worked a few more years if if the job has stayed uh the teacher uh did not and so uh they were essentially going to be out of work we were um i mean the short story is the the preschool crocker farm needed staff to cover i don't know maternity leave or something and so she was able to kind
046of cover that and and remain employed with us but but i think that was just you know uh i think that decision was basically if we go back and sort of watch the videotape was uh something we got to reduce and this is a program that you know it's it's got the green we've got controls so we're going to make this not have this uh food service i think with the same time you know i mean not food service but the foods program where they did the cooking classes and and that sort of stuff um it's not that people didn't like them and it wasn't the kids didn't take them it was well we really have to offer math english science social studies and these are more easy to you know remove than keep and
047our budget dictates that so i wonder how people feel is that are those examples of things that could be used to show the change and diversity of options for the students um yeah they definitely i mean they definitely demonstrate that we offer less stuff than we used to um uh or we in some of us we've changed what we offer too i mean so we've got um you know i think we have more uh um like computer programming type classes that we had uh we've we tracked in that direction a little bit um okay you know so it's it's um i'm making a note here foods this is yeah i think one of the things i i i find i don't know a little bit tricky and enamored and and i guess the region as
048a whole is that i think a lot of the folks who have had kids go through the district kind of have this idea of how it was maybe 20 years ago because a lot of the folks on our council and kind of in these decision-making processes like they've had kids go through the district but it was a while ago and i don't think they recognize necessarily the changes over time um in what we can offer because of the enrollment so some of it's about the budget and some of it's you know with fewer kids there's you can offer less options because class you know you can't be offering a class to like two kids or something who are interested in like i'm just thinking about like for example foreign languages like the number of foreign
049languages that were available in the 90s versus now is dramatically different but some folks may not have the you know not realize that and i'm not sure if there are other areas like foreign languages or art class i mean i'm not sure where all of these changes have happened but it might be worth kind of doing kind of a rundown of um i don't know i'm not sure i'm not sure of the utility of this but i'm just thinking that i think i think one of the things that we may have as a challenge is kind of explain to folks who no longer actively are engaged you know like have kids in the district you know they may not recognize the way that enrollment has impacted and and the budget restrictions have impacted our diversity
050of offerings um and it may be worth saying there's not much left to cut i guess that's the thing like that there's not a tip in my mind it seems like that if we start cutting back on some of the optional things we're really gonna get lose some of the core of what i think makes amherst the great school district and i think the thing is this is that you know there are choices we make you know and have made over a period of time and there's a lot of different factors that play into it someone who's like you say when there are fewer kids in the building it's hard to offer the larger spectrum of choices i mean look at hadley they graduate i don't know 25 30 kids a year they're just not
051able to offer they can't hire enough staff and you know they're gonna have people come in every other year and teach one semester of something you know they just can't do that it's not a model that works in any way shape or form for them um so just the reduction in number of students is one factor but i think the other thing is uh you know we operate in and this gets back to the question on charter you know we operate in a competitive market in others we have to offer things that retain our students because the expense of kids going to charter is so great um you know you whether you like the idea of a charter school or not i know that and peter dimling's talked about this at length the funding mechanism
052is is kind of screwing it's hard um and and so that's that's a piece of it and i think also you just have just changes in in um in what you offer by virtue of you know society is different than it was you know in other words the sort of tech ed and technology and computer programming stuff that's a bigger component of all our lives and so you offer you try to move in those directions that are supportive of kids and where they're going to be for their future um you know it's it's uh it's my mom calling me sorry about that i'll give her a call back i promise but um which is a good sign because you know given the circumstances in the world today that's uh you know she's 81 so uh
053the fact she's calling me that's a good sign um but uh you know you're trying to adapt to what you offer to match what kids need to be successful um you know and and so you know the uh i was in town meeting and the guy said to me and i've heard this echoed it other times with appeals like why are we still teaching french and uh you know as a language because you know it's like it's lovely and you know but france doesn't have the influence people you know people who make the argument they don't have the influence they used to have you know it was the international language of diplomacy for the longest time um i will say i saw a short video on uh the the still existent uh french empire and
054the fact that you know it's kind of like the sun never sets because they have all these island nations still that uh are still under their control but anyway we can digress on that later but but the point is is that you know that's that's the kind of comparisons where sometimes making is what do we you know if we have the opportunity to change it may not be that what we're giving up is bad or you know good i mean it may be just that we're thinking oh this course this set of course offerings you know better addresses the needs of kids in the 21st century or you know the early part of the 21st century that kind of thing so those those are also complicating descriptors that we may not be able to get
055into but are certainly part of the the broader conversation about how this happens um but i think you know um you know that's you know that's all part and parcel so i'm you know kind of thinking about those kind of things maybe there's a sentence or something where i can at least tease the idea so people can kind of think through that a little bit and um yeah the high school has you know fewer than 900 kids this year um wow and you know it wasn't uh in in 2000 we had over 2 000 kids you know i mean it's i mean or not well not the high school the high school itself had you know almost twice as many kids in the building yeah which is part of why we did a big expansion
056to the building around that time student enrollment um you know technically our high school is what they call a comprehensive high school um which means it has some vocational offerings um and there's things you have to do to continue to to keep that designation um uh so you know we used to have more vocational type programs like auto body and auto shop and shop classes and we've shifted away from that we haven't had as much interest and so that's part of why you shift away from those but then we've also picked up uh some of the programming and and tech ed type stuff that's filled in that that uh that area and still kept us as a qualified you know tech ed uh and we get some grants around that um you know that helped
057support those programs and keep them viable for us so it's it looked like the enrollment in or the the um the students going out to vocational schools maxed out like around 2015-16 and has gradually been going back down i might have that mixed up with something else but but but we're sending fewer students out to vocational schools which means we're not paying the tuition right to send them out but i think we i assume we've done some things to keep those students in school like with the summit academy you know trying to keep some of the special ed stuff in-house instead of having to send so many out because that also has gone down right over the last few years right and and vocational is an interesting one but it is one of those where
058i think sometimes it it's reflective in choice i mean choice students out and charter students out also reflective of sort of politics of the town so sometimes when the town has a lot of turmoil um and and uh and there's more for lack of a term drama relative to the school committee uh people make choices to to go other places where it's not happening and that that's a factor i mean i think there's also ebbs and flows relative to vocational as far as what what kids are sort of seeing uh how actively uh those vocational schools recruit and how well they do it it makes a difference yeah i thought some of that that those high numbers might have something to do with what was going on here yeah that it it does have an
059impact i mean it's not you know it's not generally hundreds of students but you know you two or three well out of you know if you've got 30 vocational students and you add three more that's a 10 change that's a pretty big shift you know um the fortunate thing for vocational is that the cost for those tuitions are uh not as you know difficult to take as as the tuitions for say charter so i've just one more point which is the um not fully funded mandates and in particular the charter school funding and the regional transportation i think it's really impo i mean that's another advocacy thing um if if people are concerned but i think people really need to understand that the state has told us these things but they don't give us all
060the money and i also wondered about the idea money because i noticed that we had that for the first time last year and and i looked it up because i didn't know what that was and it's a federal it's a federal thing and there's um an amount that they mandated that is supposed to be funded but they haven't been doing that either yeah the so the idea is they typically spell out the letters on that it's uh for special education it's actually entitlement program we've had it for a number of years how we do it from year to year changes a little bit um and some of the size of that uh entitlement depends on your student needs it kind of acts in some ways with with who the students are and what your projected
061needs are and that sort of thing so that one's a you know uh some of those things uh can get tricky to sort of tease out because they're really complex in some ways well i got that off of the website that talks about that program yeah yeah instead of i don't know 40 or something they're typically funding around 15 percent right so you might not want to talk about that but i definitely think the charter school and the regional transportation should be so the great story on regional transportation is so the idea of of of regional schools uh they got created in the 50s right so one of the things they said is that oh you've got to drive all these miles to bring kids to school um we'll help you out and so the
062the sort of promise made was will will you know for this category of transportation we'll give you a hundred percent uh reimbursement on that cost that has never happened in 60 years never once unfortunately when stan rosenberg was was our representative they they came to understand more fully by virtue of i think stan kind of beating him over the head with this that when you cut regional transportation so classically it's funded entirely separately from from the chapter 70 in the sort of school aid and because it's funded separately they would make adjustments to it separately and so all the you know and and the representatives from places that don't have regional schools you know cambridge cut it that's fine it doesn't hurt us keep chapter seven but cut this one you know for all the
063regional schools it was like wait a minute that's the same as cutting chapter 70 to us and so they finally they you know it's it's non-binding in a way they passed a thing that said well if you're going to cut chapter 70 you can't cut regional agent unless you've got chapter 70 equally kind of thing it it only has i mean they've kind of honored that uh that uh that legislation but you can't truly bind the hands of of a future legislature on what they choose or don't choose to fund um but they've been pretty good about sort of at least you know if they're gonna raise your lower one they kind of keep them in step because it is it is a cut to the to the regional schools if you don't own the
064transportation so what you're saying is they've been balancing that out for us with funds in chapter 70. right so let's say broadly i mean this is you know oversimplifying in somerset but so if if if chapter 70 was going to drop by one percent they would sim they would also cut you know uh the transportation reimbursement by you know an equivalent sort of one percent so you're sort of uh you know one isn't sort of forcing a set of choices in the regional schools that isn't the same set of choices that a you know a a non-regional school is having to make so they're trying to generally keep those you know adjusting either up or down in a sort of in step with each other um i mean they're still not fully funding it i
065mean there's in you know there's a thing called circuit breaker in special education um you know again how much they can offer to support it's those are for extraordinary expenses for special education students um you know how much they reimburse on those is is limited by how much gets funded so you know it's always dependent upon what the states um and that's never been funded as fully as as was originally you know thought of as the way they'd approach it um but you know you know you know the state's got a series of tough choices that they're making about what's important or not important too so they're trying to strike the right balance on all these things but um so i'm sure the charter school tuition is that so they pay us for and i'm
066not sure because i looked at the website today and it says they're doing the 60 40 whatever but i also read something in one of the budget reports that they changed it to like a five-year thing so which one is it and do they so if we have a student go out would they pay us for some number of years something with the assumption that by that time our population will have adjusted in our aid from what chapter 70 i mean are how does how do they how do they justify all that i will say that the the what they call the reimbursement formula has changed almost every year since since this started okay so they sort of moved the chairs you know after the game started here a little bit they're moving the goal
067post i guess the term that gets used but but the short story is that you know the idea is that uh you know that the tuition that you would pay to the charter school uh generally comes as a you know you're planning on having a student in your school they make the decision to go to a charter school that's a huge bump uh in your in your essentially in your costs that you weren't anticipating um and so the reimbursement is to help give you some time to sort of absorb that cost there's no subsequent um [Music] funding that helps fill in the gap all it's doing is just easing the transition so that that reimbursement is really about sort of smoothing out the the transition of a student out of your out of your district
068and so uh you know the the difficulty is is that what you pay for tuition is based on what they call your per-pupil expenditure which is which is you know essentially the average for every student well you've got some students that really run that number up i mean what it takes you know for a given student to be educated on a per year basis you know our our per-pupil expenditures in the neighborhood of about twenty thousand dollars well most of our students aren't nearly that expensive many of our students are but not many but a few students are very very expensive much more expensive than that um they kind of lump those together in that per pupil thing the difficulty i find one of the difficulties i find with that is that you know it
069creates a situation if i'm a charter school i'm much more interested in a kid from amherst than i am a kid from hadley because the per-pupil expenditure is like five thousand dollars more per kid well i get a lot more revenue out of a kid from amherst now they're not supposed to sort of actively recruit in but let's be real it you know they're trying to create inroads in schools i mean in communities that have higher per pupil expenditure they'd be fools not to right you know some of the rationale behind why they say it's supposed to be uh you know it's the full you know per pupil expenditure price as opposed to like school choice which is just five thousand dollars for each student part of the rationale for that is like well we
070don't give any money for for buildings uh transportation's a little different but the difficulty with you know with uh with the buildings thing is if you look at the pioneer valley uh chinese immersion school they got a usda grant to fund the building of their building it's like well wait a minute i don't think we could have gotten that so there's some real need there and i mean you know mr dimling's very correct in in saying that that funding formula has got some pieces that need attention but uh there hasn't today been the political will to to take that on it's so complex and difficult and um so do you think it's worth mentioning the the charter school thing or not i think well i think there's there's ways we can do it i mean
071we won't be able to go into the detail i just went on about for 10 minutes sorry um but but i think there are things in uh like that that are critical to understand how they impact our budget because you know so for the example you say oh you get this charter re-embarrassment it's this funding source it's great you get this 500 000 what's not easily seen is the expense side you know that's five times that you know or 10 times that you know or whatever um that's that's sort of bleeding money out of your district all the time um so it's it's it's worth mentioning sort of those those opposing pieces because you you know i think oftentimes people look the reimbursement piece they're like great this is income we can use this and
072it's like well it is but it's offsetting a much larger uh deficit in our budget and you know wouldn't exist if target schools didn't exist or um you know if it was funded differently would be structured differently it's it's um you know if you talk to sean mangano there's there's he has other things that he has problems with on charter schools you know and if for example like the ones around here if you don't have your own way to get to that school you really don't have a way to get you can't choose a charter school as an option that and that inherently biases it uh towards people with transportation ability and you know you think about who that is and that pulling that out of your community of students uh that changes the demographic
073of your building um likewise a lot of them aren't here to you know technically they can't they have to be need blind so if a kid has special education needs they're supposed to be blind to that but the reality is is that given what the charter schools you know they have often an area of focus that tends to bias who selects them and special education often gets excluded from that not always but but you know that's that's a another sort of quirk that isn't in the sort of funding formula stuff very well okay but i think we can mention some stuff that paints the broad picture all right well we're getting close to 7 30. um carrie or holla do you have other things you'd like to say or ask i realized i i didn't
074um i just wanted to say that i like the idea of doing some cost adjusted like some inflation adjusted illustrations i think those are generally in the books but um i think it's important that we highlight the inflation-adjusted numbers up front as well so but otherwise like i think i think you're on the right track and i look forward to seeing this more um kind of filled in yeah i mean i'm happy to comment on i don't know can we comment like if you circulated something and we responded to you directly rather than yeah you can certainly reply to me directly without any issues whatsoever if you if you so you can express it opinion to me all you want uh the when two get involved it gets to be problematic um the other thing
075i think is just you know sort of timeline on this and and so the uh the four towns meeting is the sixth uh so i think you know there are in thinking about sort of you know there's multiple audiences here but i think one of the primary initial audiences is going to be that group of folks um and and partly just so that we're you know there's a lot of uh varying levels of experience in in those in those in that you know in that room quote unquote um so hopefully this is something we can get kind of put together before that so that they have a day or two kind of looking over and get a more intimate feel for what what the you know the push pull is in the conversation around uh
076you know the different pieces of of the of of the budget and the funding sources and that sort of thing so that's kind of my target for a time horizon um but as i you know fill this in i will definitely share it back out with folks um for feedback and and uh you know if you guys want to meet again to sort of uh polish it up some more or have a you know a conversation amongst yourselves about what you know things that you think we should add or take away or you know enhance or reduce you know we may want to do that i would think maybe one more meeting would be useful in that regard just to collectively you know kind of talk through it with yourselves um but i think it's
077going to take a look at calendar see where we're at but i mean it next week wouldn't be probably that other the following week which would be just before we get into um the uh yeah so next week we have the holiday on monday um the following week and then there's another full week before the four towns meet so we've got three full weeks three and a half weeks really till that meeting um but i opened a suggestion on how you guys want to proceed as far as getting this developed carrie so we have a bunch of weeks where at least if if none of the meanings that we have planned or cancelled at least those of us on the region and amherst are going to have if we do this maybe we're having at
078least two meetings per week on because we're having all these thursday meetings as well right so i would love it if we could give you feedback directly and you could incorporate it over email if that's amenable to the rest of the committee um i'm just feeling a little tapped out in terms of being away from my kids three nights a week yeah yeah so let's say how is this let's say let's see how we are by not next week but the beginning of the following week how things are going and then maybe get some input from doug about whether he thinks we had to try and do something that week or wait until the following week how does that sound sounds good yeah and i mean i think if if um you know if what
079i get put together and based on your feedback if if we're in a place where you know we don't have to meet at all if people are comfortable right you know but if we if we think it would be worthwhile to have a a little round table about what's in there um yeah i think it'll take me until the 25th would be the the beginning of you know not next week but the beginning of the following week so i'll try to get something um you know to kind of compose this in a more full way by that date and then you guys give me feedback um if i get it done earlier great i'll get it to you but i wouldn't make that promise at this point um but then i think that gives us
080enough time if we need to do a pretty considerable rewrite we've got time to do that and if we don't then we're just ahead of the curve and we can get it out to people let them start musing through it a little bit and getting familiar so okay that sounds good to me i uh care carry and holla that's that sounds good and i assume and i'm reminding myself because this is you know i i don't have all that much experience with meeting stuff either we can't really share our comments or our feedback amongst ourselves it's got to go only to doug that would be right yeah okay and i'll i generally am i'll try to remember if i send you guys anything you know to remind you it's like oh just reply to me
081not to the group because it's also one of those things you know quirk in the open meeting logs like if carrie writes to me and then i send it to you we've just violated open meeting law even though you two didn't directly interact but because collectively got to all three um that's that's still council violation so we got to really be strict you know about sort of keeping that stuff straight and separate okay you know i don't know that anybody's gonna really give us a hard time about this but at the same time we want to know we should pay attention yeah yeah okay um all right well i thank you everybody i i think we made a lot of progress tonight and um doc i thank you so much for all this work because
082i mean you're in the middle of all your own budget stuff too yeah i got plenty going on i will say this if you have other ideas if you think of something you see something you're like oh that'd be great feel free if you even if i haven't seen anything out send me a note don't hesitate to say oh i found this thing or i saw this graph or i saw this thing or i thought of this thing send it to me i'm happy to sort of you know take a look and try to get it included if i can so don't okay so one thing i i would say just share with kev with heather i'm sorry with holla and carrie for you um i went through a couple of the full budget budgets
083the the documents but not the whole thing there's a section there's a couple places where there's information with charts and things like that and i learned a lot and that you know you might see some things if you had the time maybe to just kind of quickly go through those maybe the most recent one which would be what the fiscal year 19 would be the most complete one yeah 19 is the most recent complete one yeah it might give you some ideas um if you have the time so all right i'll take a motion to adjourn all right i'll move to adjourn the widget subcommittee meeting second thank you um all uh all those in let's no i can't do it that way can i um paula um holla carrie carrie i margaret i alright
084great thanks have a good evening everyone bye