BBRSD School Committee - 2/15/22

001just a reminder that this meaning is being recorded so your image and or voice may be brought we're going to begin with the pledge of through the allegiance of the united states of america and to the republic which stands for nation under god industrial liberty and justice so we're going to start with public comments um two people signed up and i think i have other people that would like to speak so we'll start with the list first is okay so hello it's me again i feel like i'm here a lot lately um my name is katrina i have a third grader at bes and i'm here tonight to just say it's time i think it's time to give parents the rights back and to give these kids the childhood they deserve a sense of normalcy

002an environment where they're not treated as potentially harmful to each other our children should never again carry the burden of protecting adults they shouldn't feel afraid to attend attend school they deserve to be free and to learn and to see each other's faces again in their teacher's races i was lucky enough to volunteer monday at my daughter's third grade class and some things i noticed in a very very short time with the amount of time a child touches their mask there were children who were pulling their mask forward i've seen adults do this to talk there were kids whose noses weren't covered and there were kids having trouble hearing people talk very normal and there's nothing wrong with that for them heck i couldn't hear any of them speak unless i got really close and

003try really hard and i don't think that's any way for a child to learn it's especially upsetting that this is their school day when on tv just like we saw this past sunday there's people unmasked in large groups you can go to a restaurant and eat you can go to the mall you can go here and there without masks but we're teaching them that school is unsafe and this isn't the message we should be sending this committed committee has heard overwhelming evidence over the last month or so that has showed the inefficiency of masks the side effects of hearing loss and the mental health effects to our children we never mandated masks for flu or any other respiratory virus and there's still had always been risks to some family some more than others mental health

004is no different i'm saying tonight that if there are any potential side effects to masking it should be a parent's right to choose what's best for a child let's as a community come together for our kids stop putting the burden on them what's best for one family isn't always best for another it's been two years of sacrifice and fear for them and it's time to do what's right for them and i heard this quote and i thought it was very important to read today nothing in life is to be feared it's only to be understood now is the time to understand more so that we can fear us and i thank you for the opportunities to speak in front of you before this and please let these kids faces thank you so maybe what we'll

005do is we'll we'll go in order of people that want to speak um hey there are you guys with welcome i am would you like to speak oh i'm going to put this up first sure excellent thank you very much specifically wherever you're comfortable okay guys i'm reading from an email sorry i apologize for that uh all right uh we are uh we're glad that rates in central mass as of yesterday are low so they're below 50 out of 100 000 which is the cut off for indoor masking for the cdc um however this is not true for western mass or many of the surrounding areas um it's good that last week our district showed uh nine student cases and two two staff cases um but they're not zero if students are unmasked there could

006still be spread in schools um the timing of the mass mandate is unfortunate with february vacation coming many people traveling uh we want to make sure that you know people traveling people on planes people in places that have much higher rates we still want to make sure we're being cognizant of that the one thing that we want to make sure is if people are in areas if they're getting close contacts if people are traveling if you're traveling out of state we still want to make sure we have the ability to think through those those cases and being able to handle those and as the situation changes being able to adjust um so we'd like to consider requesting people to mask even advanced if they're close contacts unboxed and maps closed contacts should be masking just

007by nature uh we also ask to listen to the survey and the data on the survey there's a lot of questions on there it seems like the majority of parents think that the code protocols have kept their children in school and so if our rates go above what they currently are please have another vote to see if based on the rates based on the changes um if there's something that has changed that we want to reconsider um we'd like to just have the opportunity have another vote and see if it makes sense to uh rethink the masses uh thank you i appreciate it thank you so much [Music] thank you hi my name is elizabeth i have a son in the berlin memorial preschool program it's been phenomenal they've done a great job managing covet

008so thank you for that um i think the gomer problem was seen as a fan member of breakthrough phases you can get vaccinated and boosted and so i think one of the simplest ways to protect against that is still to wear a mask and so i'm in favor of continuing to wear masks um however the community feels differently i know of one school district that is considering requiring it for the preview programs because they're not able to be vaccinated as an option for consideration i'm section is there anyone else okay uh does anyone have any communication if you want anything they would like to share so i guess we'll move on to our discussion is there any motion to accept jesse guidelines for the removal of the mass mandate so second okay okay discussion i

009wanted to talk about the survey so um one thing that i saw in the survey was um the one question i thought that was overwhelmingly it was like 70 um seventy percent of the group said that they wanted do you believe the school district should define parameters for when to remove and or reinstate masking and coveted safety regulations and then there was a link to the cdc 69.3 of the community said yes so i guess my question is to jeff what what were you guys getting at that question and how can we follow through with that because out of all the questions that was the only one that 70 percent was yes that i would say a majority swung to yes we want to do this by saying you just find the guidelines then you

010can define when the mass can go up so for example one of the things that nurses have recommended and you you saw that typically right after vacation we see an increase in patients and so what they suggest is removing the mass but waiting a week and so if you think about that it makes sense because from this standpoint it's actually from a from a science standpoint if you you're not going to use two variables into this equation so you take the mass off by the 28th we know this we're going to see a spike but because the masses are off and we historically see that spike after vacation you don't know which two of those which one of those has fallen so by introducing timeline and this is the version by saying something like the

011math will come off not on the 28th but the next is [Music] yeah or any other way you choose to do that so it would be something that the school committee would set in place i mean i think it's an interesting concept because um i guess i interpreted it to general cases in in the state i mean you can interpret that many ways there's many ways to do that well now that it's left up to global control so that was just an example i had just read that yeah yeah so i guess i'm wondering um given jeff just brought that up about the nurses and i was thinking about that does it make sense to waste i went back today after seeing that recommendation and looked at the cases both in the state of massachusetts

012and physical toilets and in both cases the number of cases went down the week after both vacations last year and continued to go down that so i'm not sure where the concept that we see more cases when we get the vacation is coming from because the data i'm finding from the massachusetts department of health indicates otherwise if you look at the school data february vacation last year there were 31 cases the following week april 20. we had an increase in cases when they came back from this vacation i know that's the show i think i agree 100 in the middle of the moment there were more i'm not arguing with them i'm saying the nurses track the data so they're using food data as opposed to whatever's happening in the community and sometimes there is

013a lie so i mean i i know for a fact that it was increased on december that i looked at it so i don't know except for what i mean also last year in february we were in a hybrid model so only half the kids were coming back to school and monday tuesday school was closed wednesday and then everybody but april we were trying to stabilize 60 percent after which is different than february because cases in general were probably lower than they are right now right yeah but it's hard to compare year over year i think and i agree with adam as well that's hard to compare december break to this break because again cases in general in the state um but i guess two questions i'm posing to the other members of the committee

014or other people here um one should we you know i'm not saying something we have to do tonight but moving forward so it's not always this off the cuff okay what do we do now should we maybe define some black and white parameters you know and again i'm not saying we do it maybe we work with the nurses or we have an expert somebody you know the board of health i don't i don't know how to go about doing this but maybe we define okay when cases hit this amount masks become strongly recommended when cases hit this amount that's become required so it's not always you know oh we have to do a vote because cases are through the roof and the nurses are freaking out i don't know i'm asking does that make sense

015it seems like that is what 70 of the community according to this survey is asking for i would just add that i love surveys but we have to be careful with surveys too because 70 of the community it's not right whatever percentage it happens to be the number one survey isn't that right i mean are we not planning to use this survey well if you think the survey is important i mean it was pointed out that people could vote multiple times which makes it not necessarily 100 reliable but if the information is there it is helpful um as far as the parameters going i'm not sure how we would mark that um [Music] yeah i mean i don't think it's something that any of us has the expertise to do i think it would be

016something that the nurses would have to do but i think moving forward it might be helpful so that people in the community would know if cases start to go up we're gonna have to require them but if they stay down and maybe it's in schools right i don't know i don't know what the parameters are all i know is we set the survey out we had everyone do it before the meeting i think we should at least discuss it before we take a vote and i think i looked at this and you know most people want masks gone i'll be honest i voted yes i don't want my passing for the rest of the year do i think the day after break is the right day no i i think maybe wait a week and

017the nurses recommended that i think that's a safe way to go i know people are chomping at the bit they want the kids out of the masks if i could have a say i'd say let's get the masks off for sports like this weekend i don't know if we can even do that um you know because i feel for those kids playing basketball in there um so i guess um i guess i i guess i'm posing three questions hey can we remove masses for the sport effective immediately b how do people feel about you know one week seven days per the nurse's recommendations if it's just in the classroom and see do we think the committee should be responsible to define some parameters as far as when masking comes back and while masking doesn't come

018back or are we just saying definitively well i think the answer to number one is actually i think that lies in the hands of the miaa so that we can't even discuss so even if we drop masters in schools they might still have to wear the basketball game and during the press conference if i remember correctly they had hinted at the fact that the m.i.a was meeting and they would have some kindness that would be coming out soon so that is that's something that we you know it's not in our jurisdiction to tackle right now um how do members feel about waiting a week so i i have an opinion on that so the last few weeks the few meetings we've had here everybody said follow dc paul dc don't go against the science qualities

019casey has now looked at the signs and decided that the 28th is the day they've got the state department held involved um a panel of experts that they call their health experts they say that's the date i don't think we should not go against a few weeks ago and then go against them this week if they're saying the 28th of the day i'd like to do it today as well i'd like to do it for sports but um so um and again i'm going by so there was an email thread through masc and i understand that masc is not desi but it was clarified that desi is not actually giving any formal guidance on whether a community should mask or not jesse is saying we no longer have a mandate you make the guidance localities

020so technically if we extend it by one week we're not going against a desi recommendation we're just we're gonna remove it we're just doing it you know i don't know that every district in the state has break on the same week i don't know the answer to that i don't know public schools so i'm just reading from the memorandum that we were given from the department of elementary and secondary education center after consulting with medical experts and state health officials the commissioner will not renew the state mass plan uh state mass requirement after it expires on february 28 2022. effective monday february 28th the dusty mass requirement will be lifted statewide the common the commonwealth's high vaccination rates and widespread availability of coping 19 testing for school personnel and students to support this decision and

021i believe in the press release they also mentioned that they had met with the local boards of health um and other you know people in the medical field so i know this decision didn't come lightly it involved you know the commissioner and involved the governor even the lieutenant governor spoke about it so my feeling is that as mike pointed out we've been told that we were supposed to you know follow what jesse said in your rights giving it global control we have very high vaccination rates in our schools and they felt that the 28th was the date that it would be safe during the mass candidate so that's just that's just my feeling and no and that's why i'm throwing it out there i mean i know we all have different opinions and i think

022that's what makes us a great committee so that we can all bring it out and hopefully you know we're each representing an aspect of the community um the other thing i was going to say in response well you just said lori was desi is also strongly recommending individuals that are not vaccinated to be masked um so i think somebody spoke tonight about the preschool i mean the vaccination rate within the preschool is probably extremely low if anything i know the elementary school is only at about 54 i don't know if that rose um it'll be probably not much but you know is that something we're going to say you know since we're sticking to strict dusty guidelines we're strongly recommending individuals that are unvaccinated and still ask just to your original question about when it

023um is second question though around future fountains and you know as you pointed out with the survey question the seventy percent who who supported us doing so i also point out that in the same way and lowering coding it specified that the commissioner of desi will continue to monitor public health data consultant while emergency state health officials being issued further guidance into our requirements so i'm working under an expectation that as time goes on betsy and other public health organizations may begin to provide us with a more clear [Music] metric yep upon what should we consider whether an amount of acceptance we're going to be my hope is that either we as a world or we would say health officials will continue to resist because i don't think the conversation goes up for a period

024of time for us to continue thinking about what some of the most threshold might be or other things [Music] what sorry okay pushing it out a week versus not um well i'm going so the nurses sent us a letter yeah and i think i would be curious well i think their concern is that people are traveling and like what jeff was kind of saying i think jeff kind of summarized their concern if people are so we're going to disney world um people are going to be here there and everywhere they're coming back if they choose not to wear a mask they might not have symptoms of code yet and there's a bunch of people that are coming in we're trying this out it's new we're not going to wear our masks is it going to

025create a spike um you know that first week like jeff said how are we going to know if it's because we dropped the mask or if it's just it was going to happen anyway because it's a week after vacation and you know we're not at summer weather yet the winters are so close it's still chilly and people are still getting sick so i guess that's the rationale behind and or at least that's my understanding of what the nurses asked was um in in saying can you push it away but i mean again we're gonna we can vote i agree with that it sounds like mike laurie and adam to john i'm far from convinced that a week is going to do anything and far from the days that cope with spreading whatever vacation week in

026february yeah and i mean i have no idea so we could come back and there would be their money there might be you know no surprise themselves if they're afraid if they can't get over that vacation they make the choice of what they want to do if they want to go on that you won't ask if they don't they don't get home i mean apparently each individual for equity's sake needs to make their own decision i mean equity is not forcing one thing on everyone just letting everybody make their own choice so i don't i'm good at them i'm not convinced the week is going to do anything other than upset majority of people so if parents want to make the decision that they need a certain health decision for the week after every vacation

027that's on them i don't think i'm not a health expert you know i'm not a health benefit parents when it comes to their own children are pretty good health experts the nurses and children so just for clarity the nurses are i believe it's two weeks march 14th yeah they said a week or two i mean i was hoping two weeks is two weeks right yes i mean i think a week would be sufficient if you're going to get covered from february occasionally you're going to get the week after mike's point one thing that just kind of occurred to me as he was saying that it was you know i expect that the first week that named afternoon we were only required that we're going to see most percentages of students still wear a mask as

028weeks go on throughout the course of the year once they're required [Music] giving people that choice to decide whether to send their travel to school and i i hear you on giving the choice because i do think parents know their children best but there's two things i worry about and one is certain children and i don't know how many we have in the district that might be high risk where it might you know i'm not convinced that wearing a mask i think wearing a mask does stop the spread so you know and again i'm not an expert that's just what i think based on what i've read and what i've seen so i guess i worry about children that you know hey have a hard time wearing a mask you know potentially special needs kids

029that might also be high risk um and then there's going to be a bunch of other people not wearing masks right after february so that's one thing i think about the other thing i think about is teachers that are high risk um and how they feel about this i know we have the union come on february 1st and they stated they weren't ready i don't know how they feel now we haven't heard anything from them all i know is we've heard from the nurses i have not so i'm just recognizing what time is i know we started a little bit yeah let's vote i i think we're clear no no seriously because i i can go on and we're never gonna so let's just let's bring it off okay so there's a motion on the

030floor right now to accept the industry guidelines for the removal of the mass mandate which means that it would we would remove them at 1201 am on february 28th meaning kids could come to school on monday morning if their parents if their parents consent wearing a mask or not once they get off the bus they have to wear it on the bus so at this point i'm going to take a vote all in favor of accepting dusty guidelines for the removal of the mass mandate on february 28th all right as well opposed no one opposed the motion to accept the updated jesse guidelines passes this means that on february 28th which is the monday following february vacation masking will be optional in school buildings left up to parental choice it will however still be mandated

031on school buses if they fall under federal mandates at this time i'd like to entertain a motion to accept provisions to policy [Music] yeah there's two um the that's a good question we have two two versions of this that have been presented to the community one of them is that was drafted by them and i also offered them to submit an alternative version of that [Music] i'll make a motion to accept the masc policy is it ebcfa yes as stated second i'll second i was on the policy subcommittee when we originally invented the evc um [Music] masc is not dc it's a separate group that we actually paid money to become members of that group i think of it as more of a lobbying group or advocacy groups or like board of realtors or the

032national board of currency or something like that they do provide a lot of policies to us and we look at those policies we go through all policy books we have a lot of their policies on our books we have some policies that they don't have that they don't make recommendations on some of our policies don't follow the similar policies so this policy is just a recommendation by them you do not have to accept it we can make our own i'd like to say this policy whoever wrote this should be fired the way they've written this is fairly slanted it mentions the best way to stop the spread of toronto viruses masking when dc has just come out with public health more than said no that's not the case they've switched to vaccinations so it's actually

033incorrect if we accept this all css um so that's what i want to say about that i like the amendments or the other changes um if we were to catapult the other policy that was recommended there that game might need to be beefed up a little bit with a few things but the policy here is ms masc presented it i think it should be thrown trash well i mean can we just remove that paragraph i don't know if that's true or not i did not research that i think cc is still saying you're saying cdc is saying i think when dc made their announcement asking they said uh vaccination is the way to go in the state being one of the highest stakes investigation rates uh i have the question is here i mean we

034can delete the paragraph i think it's important to know the masks are still required in the school health offices so i mean you need to put that in there people need to understand that if their kid falls down and gets a cut you need to have a mask because the nurses express a concern that they have to hand out masks that's going to cost us money yeah well we already do that i mean we already end up with a mess my dog comes in the mask every day so they aren't in love i mean if we're only worried about the small percentage they go to the nurse's office in a given day i think we're probably actually going to save one because we won't need as many masks to be handed up uh so the

035press release says um the decision was being consultation infectious disease physician department public health developmental experts vaccinations are the best protection against coded whereas the policy says masking facilities that's a little disagreement the other part here is where they try to segregate kids based on health choices by wanting to masculine vaccinated and saying that vaccinated don't need anything i don't think we should be separating our kids based on anything like that i think that's a terrible way to go out that's equity and i think that water is our bullying mike are you suggesting we get rid of paragraph two which is according to the felt so that's experts the spring sun spread face the second one the face covering covers the nose and mouth and then the individuals who are vaccinated are not required to

036wear a mask remains desired are you suggesting me to get rid of that part of this move forward oh god yes i believe this version of it is [Music] is that a requirement based on the medical requirement that exists in the state today it's stated here when you require the non-health offices where's that requirement it's from it's public law yeah so can we but can we do we have to sit here and make the policy or can we switch over to budget and have or can we do the policy for the next time or this policy needs to be done before february 28th so you guys so we can vote this down down and about the policy ebcfa if you are in favor all in favor opposed and i'm in a as well the policy

037does not pass now we're going to look at the other one in the drive which moved the i'll just read that for everybody to see what we're starting with here at the beginning of this policy we'll get it wearing the wearing the face mask is optional in those schools effectively one am on monday february 20th 2022 individuals are not required to wear face covering on school property but may do so if desired by the federal public health aware all students and staff are currently required to face covering the school buses get the federal public health order requiring the pace coverage to be more on school bus and that requirement would also immediately end in the district and at that time i'd like to offer an amendment to my motion there to add a sentence from

038the other religion that being the sentence that says mass will be required in all school health obviously and insert that into this policy after reception what about the quarantine if you have covered and you come back days five through ten this is this policy is specifically starting all right that's another policy i think it's fine i don't think you need to strongly recommend it for individuals who remain unvaccinated for immunocompromised i think that's kind of legal jargon that's just trying to cya all right if you have any more discussions um i just want to ask if we should there was a question the nurse was talking about this question of the staff having to enforce parent decisions about that smart holiday which they should be learning so maybe we want to have something that's the

039effect of uh teachers and staff should not be enforcing the mass marriage parents um i also think based on recent events we should probably have something in there that says there shouldn't be any disciplinary action taken against the student staff member or visitor based on wearing an offering mask or vaccination status that's important to put in there if anybody feels the same way make a motion from them i don't think that's a good idea what so the first thing why would somebody take a disciplinary action against somebody for not being vaccinated [Music] i mean that's almost something that doesn't need to be said you would think the question of teachers um is both primal choice yeah so somebody came in on the mask they have massive they don't have a mask they don't there's no

040there was a point the nurses brought up um uh are the teachers is there an expectation that the teachers are going to have parents yeah it's going to happen you want them to teach right i don't think we should say this policy because what about special needs kids i mean they're at some point or four preschoolers i mean there's a lot of things that you know we also send our kids to school in underwear and preschool like they pee their pants the teachers gotta change them or they gotta stand home so i mean at some point there's a and i guess we're trying to do a blanket policy for the whole district but when you're talking about little kids versus high school kids you know and even in the elementary school i think it should

041be fine but i i mean i guess it's almost better here to not say anything at all i mean you know some of these special needs teachers might have to so jeff just made an excellent confession which i appreciate i think to move on to the budget what we should do is take a vote on this and then we should also we should send it on to the policy committee for further review to bring that for next time yeah so just take another vote after this one all right fine all you can right on this one so that'll be the policy then then you both just said that this policy policy subcommittee okay so i'd like to um just i'd like to take the vote on accepting the amended eb cm and healthsuit all in

042favor aye aye and i as well and you post okay promotion we will upset we will accept the policy ebc has written now i i'd like to entertain a motion to send the our new policy ecfa to the policy committee for any revision [Music] our new policy evcfa as as amended will be sent over to the policy um so i would like to um as well this concludes our meeting please stay tuned for the garden here all right good evening i pledge allegiance [Music] before um [Music] to accept any discussion okay all in favor aye aye as well opposed any communications all right we're going to move on to our report section which will be mr zhang and mr kleiner presentation is that visible people [Music] so um [Music] we're gonna go over we never

043decided to talk about the budget talk about um some of the things we need to look at in terms of savings [Music] so to start off our goals haven't changed it's to design this to maintain our existing programming what we saw as level services to support the district improvement plan and implement the other priorities so that would be above global services that we talked about and then to provide that additional support that we're going to need and we um [Music] this is just a high level overview of the budget process um you know we basically got to be with the preliminary budget in december um one thing i want to point out is when we get some feedback from towns we get information from the state that helps us make decisions but this part of

044the process will go on beyond uh tonight the towns tonight is the first time you see what the actual assessments are as we're unable to provide that until we get the state data we've also made provisions to the budget so that feedback was going to continue after tonight's meeting we meet with the towns one time tomorrow night and one i think in two weeks so we included this slide this is a part of the uh the enrollment piece that we did uh last i think last month i think it was last week right yeah um so i wanted to show you because this question came up i think both adam and mike uh sort of talked about this this goes out to 2031. i said during the original presentation that there are two conditions in

045which going out that far is not that accurate you have big um uh error up to 30 one when you have a thousand roughly a thousand kids in the school um and then the other one when you have buildings inside of control but not out of control but we have increased growth so we have both women in our town and so um but i did want to put it on here you saw a little dip there in 2020 which all schools in the state tended to have all public schools uh but you see an increase uh k-12 we're continuing to move to 2031. i'll point out that these nasdaq projections have consistently been a little bit lower than our actual numbers that number out there is is is 12.97 approximately 1300 students roughly 300 different

046times now now these projections don't include um school choices so you can add roughly another 100 students to that by today's standard so maybe it's 150 to 200 then depending on you know and that's all the question of how many uh how many seats open and how many um seats that the school committee will vote on um [Music] so i wanted to show you that to show you that there is you know there is a projected growth up to 2031. the next slide just shows it's the same it's the same not it's the same graph done in the bigraph form so you can actually see the numbers there but can you go to the next one please this is the one i wanted to talk about this is where people's spending now that consists of

047all the things that we use so that's teacher salaries that's material costs all the things that go into educating a student so if you if i was going to talk a little bit more about this and flush it out a little bit more but if you just used that number today and you assume that between now and 2031 you know i don't think i think it's conservative to say that 400 kids well there'll be 400 extra kids in this district and it's probably more like 500 but if you just look at the pupil expenditure today and remember that's going to increase the teachers salaries go up the price of constructional materials go up so that number just continues to clock as it does with that existence if you just assume 300 which i think is

048is way under what would be that's almost 5 million every student representing roughly sixteen thousand dollars that's another five million dollars if you if you get the middle class and said it was one student that's closer to seven ninety dollars and if you went which i don't think is unrealistic given the building that's going on it's it's roughly about eight million dollars added to the budget just of kid walking and that's assuming that these are all general education tips you have to probably have you know roughly 17 special education students in that district and each one of those kids could be between 75 000 if they're not placement up to 300 and that's certainly not all the majority of those we educate right now we try to do that um but you need to think

049about this you need to think uh about what happened when you when you increased enrollment if you can't stabilize the enrollment in the district you cannot stabilize the budget this there's no possible way to stabilize a budget if you can't stabilize the amount of kids that come into the school year after year as it is there's some guesswork too but once you factor in building up i showed you the building permits um especially in doyle's there's a lot more building going on um you can see where these numbers can go and and you know it can it can take a dip like it did last year but you know i wouldn't give her what was the end i i wouldn't count on and the reason i say this is because you know you're going to

050look at this budget and it's certainly a little bit higher than the towns have asked us to go but um the idea with increased enrollment as we've seen over the last couple of years and into the future that we can maintain you know two and a half percent increase is almost impossible this is almost impossible to do again if you can't stabilize the population in moment you cannot stabilize the budget it just continues to grow so i want you to keep that in mind we have made some significant cuts and we're going to talk about those but remember everything we cut comes at a cost to a student you know you cut a program that that's that's instruction that's the benefit the student doesn't get and we still will do what the town of the

051world is with the community as well as um but you know please keep that in mind when these enrollment of us when you're looking um he's like bob can you flush this out just a little bit more sure i saw that just wanted to highlight a couple other things um so the first thing that i looked at there when i saw it jumped out to me a little bit was shrewsbury is a pretty good district and that's below us and that kind of jumped to my attention so one thing about that shrewsbury is a lot bigger thus they're able to leverage some of their costs over more students the other thing is that they have 28 20 high 20 kids in their elementary school classrooms and that's something that we've heard this these our two

052towns do not want to have so bear that in mind when you see the low number for suresberry the second thing is in addition to shoe spray it just passed an override but i think it was last year in over three to four years they're going to see a significant increase in their school spending so they'll be more in line with us um grafton has been historically in the bottom 10 uh or even lower than that in the state um i don't really know much why that is so it's not just a district you would want to compare to but it's part of our passive foreign peer group um so the other quick point is that you see the state average is 175.75 uh we are at um about just around numbers about a thousand

053once per student we have a thousand fifty students um just to make math easy for me a thousand times a thousand million dollars so our budget to be at state average would be a million dollars higher in fy 20 than it was so that just gives some context to um you know to get us to state average spending it's a million dollars more than that budget so now we're going to just go over the changes that we made since our preliminary budget so just to orient you at the top we have last year's budget what the preliminary level service budget was on is the 19 million two thirty seven point three increase on a level service budget um then we have adjustments here the first adjustments to the transportation revolving we had the transportation revolving

054fund committee approved two years ago we're budgeting to use that for the first time we anticipate we'll have fifty thousand dollars going into it every year we'll be able to use that to offset our transportation expenses um we are planning on the second item to prepay for some special ed transportation costs which is legally permitted for that category of spending it's one of the only exceptions where you can prepay for future fiscal year expenses the next two items are we have grants for special ed and we've been able to preserve uh the balances in the grant so that we can carry a little bit more forward to next year so we're going to use that to offset what we would normally pay for in the budget and this is the same thing applies with the

055music therapy services where we were able to carry forward we had money set aside and grant forward and we're able to carry that forward next year and preserve some of those funds 20 000 increased usage of school choice funds i was fairly conservative in the preliminary budget and what i budgeted to use in berlin and we have the capacity to use more we used school choice funds to offset teacher salaries in the general fund budget and we received school choice funds in general for taking school choice kids into the district it's 5 000 per student and we try to spend about what we receive on school choice funds the worcester regional pension information was an estimate it wasn't available at the time the preliminary budget that received the actual data from worcester regional shortly after

056the new year and the last item is we've had a series of different adjustments related to students attending charter schools out of district placements and choice schools where between the time you prepare our preliminary budget and now we've got updated information on what those costs are involved [Music] transportation revolver and school choice this is typically where we have a safety net and i know i always feel uncomfortable when we dig into it and so you can could you just talk a little bit about that so the committee has an idea sure so this will be able to continue to do in the future um we won't necessarily be able to carry over to two years of grant funds prepaid for special ed and it's nice to not budget for that because if a student moves

057into town and we've had four in the past year and a half that are going to affect next year's budget um we don't have to split the capacity to absorb that in the budget we feel like with where we are this year we need to be a little bit more aggressive in offsetting our cost increases um so and we typically have a little bit of a balance at the end of the year on our budget so we felt like this is a year we need to be a little bit less conservative to get our budget to a level that the tenants might be able to accept it's a difficult balancing act we'll talk about it more as we go forward so all in all that brings our level service budget total adjustments is the 302

058000 and the overall increase is 5.6 on our level service budget so uh an above-level services this is what we talked about uh in december we presented all of these items these are all personnel related items that again we wanted to make investments in we thought that even going forward i mean given the last couple years the investment in our personnel would be really the thing that was going to help our students some of those we had to take out again you'll see them again in a district improvement plan a new one that's coming up that you're going to vote on in september this is what was left so the two items in yellow we've managed to uh keep those in but we funding them with grant money one would be ida special education grant

059the other one with uh that's a three grand i believe and then um in green would be the ones that funded the budget as you can see there one is the curriculum assistant this uh this was a an existing position this was an assistant for the assistant superintendent and we combined a couple of um roles up in the central office to um allow that position to remain and it's already paying you know what that position is existing and it's already paying benefits it gives carol a chance to get to schools and work with the principals and work with teachers which is really what's needed and it's especially needed now that's what we've done for this quarter the other position was the the elementary the literacy coordinator we talked to you about that that was a

060position we have a math coordinator coaching right now so i want to provide a class repair observations to model lessons in classrooms um to hear professional literacy related professional development to teachers and just to work with them work with them on their instruction again and this will benefit this will be a benefit to us to our students [Music] the final position we kept down there with the honda addition of one consulate to the hanzo counseling department this would allow us to do a few things one to have one counselor from nine and ten that would also handle psats and vp testing coordination another one that would handle the students in grades 11 12 and that person would also handle the internship and the shadowing program that we're introducing again so we can expand programming a

061bit and then not a bit i think that's that's going to that's going to be great for us it's one of the things that's going to separate us from other high schools and then finally we will have one guidance counselor to work specifically with uh middle school students where we're seeing a lot of issues especially now with coleman those are the students who really especially sixth graders they've never been in the building and you know we've never even seen their faces so there's a lot of work to be done in middle school so we kept that position and we thought it would be it would be critical so we're um above all the services we kept uh again we really just three everyone going into the going into the budget do you want me to

062be over again why haven't we kept everything i guess i'm trying to understand what guidance are we getting from the town that says we need to stay below a certain number that has prevented us from funding some of the other things we would love to find them all again the time gives us numbers we'll get to that but i'll say that's what we did was when we took the entire list we said you know we can't keep all of these but if you remember what we talked about the new district approval plan the one you guys gonna vote on in september we said that you'll see these again so we took them we just said all right and we have to cut some of these how are we going to prioritize them let's take the

063things we absolutely we absolutely need next year and keep those in the budget and then the other things will sort of prioritize so i'll give an example that classroom teacher up there for aces building he doesn't absolutely need that this year because he can move a teacher around but the year after that there's no way he can't not have that teacher because there won't be enough teachers in that building for the incoming class we're seeing keeping our classrooms fit up between 50 and 60 kids now which we didn't see before so you can't do that with with just two teachers and so so again that will be that will be on the first year the first year of the transitional district approved you'll see that um but yeah we would have loved to keep we

064think all of them are required so you'll definitely see them again we think that we'll we'll try to prioritize i mean you you get the answer to the other part of your question about why would you why are we going to do that so um this basically takes our level service budget that we just showed you of the 18 928 as in the cost of the level service request you can see where they're allocated by school the curriculum assistance support is district rules so it's it's across all three schools the ela coach is just in the two elementary schools and tahanto has the its sheriff curriculum assisted and the bulk of that is the social the school council [Music] so that brings us to a proposed operating budget increase the operating budget number there the

065increases are 6.7 for berlin memorial boylston is 10.9 percent tahonta was five percent an overall increase of 6.8 typically the range that was presenting to the towns is three to four percent uh for um a little bit on the high side but somewhere in the it's the typical range but we'll talk more too about this because we are getting more state revenue so we'll talk about how this all fits together but this is the expenditure increase to the operating budget um just a highlight of what it is my school um you know this has been something historically people are interested in um the berlin memorial increase in terms of what makes up that 6.7 percent both of that almost two-thirds of that is more than two-thirds of that i think no just under two-thirds of

066that is out-of-district tuitions and transportation this is again from students that are newly identified in the district needing to be either through moving in or pre-school age that have needed to be placed in a private school outside the district um and the transportation that goes with that the other piece is the most significant trigger is teachers union contract increases and then there is an offset this math coach is currently shared between the two schools and we're we're doing that we didn't budget for it last year we made the decision and figured out how to pay for it within fy22 but fy23 is the first time we're budgeting for that so that relieves half of the cost of that person out of berlin memorial's budget and then the last piece is above the cost of the

067above-level services we previously presented boylston elementary um a lot's happened there again primarily though um close to half of it is out of district tuitions transportation paraprofessionals and special ed contract services just the needs that become fairly intense in that school and in their students attending schools outside the district the teachers union contract increases is 76 000. we've also seen an increase in the number of people participating in the healthcare plan so the constant benefits for those employees for health care plans has gone up the cost of sharing the math coach is 48 with berlin memorial you'll see that this isn't exactly it's not a net with berlin because we've also factored in tutor support with the person switching to become a coach position the tutors provide direct instruction tier 2 instruction to students so

068[Music] there was that tutor support that was needed in addition to to the coach so that 48 is a little bit of a tutor cost plus half of the math coach and again the amount of the same month above level service items that we showed before the tonto it's a similar story the out of district tuitions and instead transportation and paraprofessionals are driving a large part of the budget this doesn't happen every year this is an unusual year um and again this is why we're faced with the the challenge of arriving on a budget that's relatively reasonable increase uh teachers contract increases is in health care again affecting toronto then a counselor position and we have a couple offsets there that are they're moderating the increase of tonto as well i'm also just going to

069highlight with capital we presented this uh pretty quickly at the end of the last meeting but this is the capital for berlin memorial we had a firm go through and do a full assessment of the capital needs of the burma memorial school and 54 000 is going to go towards addressing level two level three priorities on that assessment we didn't have any level one um critical immediate priorities we worked through part of level two and we think we're going to get into the level three priorities um through the use of these funds and that'll be kind of an ongoing item in our future capital plan as well the entry access security is something we are um [Music] we likely there's a possibility we may pull this out if you look at the entrance to berlin

070memorial school it's a little bit different than the other two schools this will be something that's also in toronto's plan the person at the front desk has a clear line of sight to letting people in at burling memorial school and part of the entry access security best practices is to have a lock on both the first door and the second door the thought is at berlin memorial the principal uh has commented well you know you might you may not need that at school even though it's kind of a recommended best security practice because they're going to see people they're letting in so this is something we may end up pulling back and redirecting to the first line so i just wanted to highlight that um the items for boston are listed there the library group

071prepares it seems like we have some type of group repair annually at some point this is going to be a much larger capital article but we are able to by doing this by some more time with that roof we would like to eventually for this building do a facilities assessment like we did for burling memorial but right now these were our three top priorities the asphalt repairs and improvements some of those were made last year we're going to continue with the kind of the next areas um that are priority and the scrubber for hotline will enable the work of cleaning the floors to get done a lot more effectively and efficiently um to help us get our schools ready for the beginning of the school year a lot quicker than we have been able to

072the last couple years excuse me for tonto the first two items are just payments on the bonds we have outstanding for when how we fund this building those are going to be fairly steady over the next i think 10 years to 12 years that are left on those bonds until they're paid off the second item the rooftop units you see them as you're driving up on top of the building um that will replace either two or three of those motors we've had i think about four or five of those replaced uh in the past two years it seems like their useful life must be pretty close to 10 years when this was built because they're all starting to fail and the motors need to be replaced the the last item is for enhanced security up

073at the front where not just the first door but the second door would be locked would give uh front desk an opportunity to see visitors that can step into the vestibule before they're admitted into the building you might have seen that in some other high schools that you've attended excuse me so the budget's paid for in two ways one is by assessments to the town the other way is we have revenue that offsets the expenditures we receive so the revenues we're getting um primarily come in the form of state aid the bulk of them we've had very flat about one percent two percent increases uh in the time that i've been here the student opportunity act was approved i believe three years ago and through that act it calls for changes to the foundation budget

074which is the baseline amount that a school is supposed to be funding to get students for and it varies based on grade level varies based on demographics like income english language learners special ed so basically what the foundation budget does is it says this is the minimum amount you should get you should have to run your school and then what it does is it says how much should be paid for by the towns by looking at the relative income and commercial property values of the town so communities like berlin and boylston about 80 percent of the budgets are paid by the town and 20 is paid by by the state through chapter 71 funding community like worcester would be the exact opposite um still even with that our chapter 78 and 19 fy23 is increasing

075by 12 over fy22 which is a huge help to our budget as you'll see when we look at the assessments um we're also seeing an increase in chartered tuition reimbursement the rules for people who are familiar with charter schools we get a small amount back from the state when we have students attend other districts i'm not sure why that is but i'm sure it was because districts lobbied about the impact of charter schools there's also a provision that says when you have a year where there's a significant increase like we did during the beginning of the pandemic that the following year you receive almost a one for one dollar amount for what that increase is so we're going to get that 79 000 next year but it's one time we're not going to keep getting

076it but that's still good news for next year and then lastly we're seeing a decrease in breaker fundings due to lower claims what we've seen is our special education costs up here they've gone down and now they're coming back up the reimbursement you get it occurs a year after so we're now in a cycle where the circuit breaker revenue we're getting is is based on the year when we didn't have any special education costs it doesn't really match what our expenditures are their budget's actually gone up these are the dollars that go with that again the chapter 78 is the big change chapter 71-8 is is for transportation as a region of the district we get that for students that live more than one and a half mile from the school um and those are

077the other categories the one thing i want to highlight here is we have an excessive efficiency fund um i have not budgeted sometimes the charter reimbursement will change which is i've only budgeted a 5 000 increase i've instead budgeted to use the excess inefficiency fund because if for some reason the charter reimbursement amount changes i don't want to have to go back we'd have to go back to the towns if we were going to have a shortfall in revenue to try to get a budget increase or we basically have to cut our budgeted spending by using e and d instead once our budget's approved even if the state aid changes we don't have to go through kind of an additional budget exercise so but in total um state aid is up 281 thousand 282 000

078and the district revenue including the use of e d is up 87 000. this is just a high-level picture of which categories of spending administration being primarily central office although not all central office positions the special ed director and the assistant director for teacher and learning role into the instruction category other school services includes things like the nurse athletics food service maintenance and operations is basically facilities costs and also some technology costs more of the infrastructure technology costs fixed charges is benefits and pension costs [Music] and tuitions is out of district tuitions so uh the bulk of the dollars are going to instruction there you can see there is an increase though on the tuition line a little bit but this is uh how desi kind of looks at the high level functions of spending

079across your school those are just for your reference they're in the slots for you to have that feature aside from the the general fund budget we also use revolving funds um we pay for some school expenses that are revolving funds these are the key funds we have other funds that are smaller but these are really the key funds what i want to highlight here that jeff brought this up before the question is you know our safety nets and if you look at boylston the school choice revenue we're bringing in we've had less schools less students attending you'd have larger class sizes larger numbers of students in town in boylston coming into kindergarten we've also had a pandemic which affected the thinking of maybe not wanting to take you know new kids in during a pandemic

080or having a hard enough time educating our own kids um so we went from 73 000 in revenue and school choice right from boston and fy 21 to 43 000 this year out of that 43 000 um all the three students are in fifth grade so next year that number would go down to 15 000 but discussions with base we're planning to take in three more kids so that's the 30 000. but if you go down to the bottom so right now this is what we're planning to use in next year's budget um this balance gets down to 77 000. we'll be at a point where we'll basically exhaust that next year if nothing changes um then one of my you know we talked about um you know kind of the risk you know it's

081going to have to be a priority in the fy24 budget to basically um just fix that in the boyleston budget where we can't rely on school choice anymore we could take a little bit basically maybe spend what we take in so i do foresee a fy24 budget challenge specifically for boylston elementary school it's not an issue for the other two schools um you can see they have healthy balances berlin has a for its size school has very healthy balance we could even use that to fund an unexpected facilities that came up um and tahanto is in in good shape as well although we do because we know it's in good shape we've been kind of planning to spend it down a little bit by taking in 370 000 next year plus you need to spend

082570 we feel like we have a balance that's maybe more than we need to have it's nice to have but in a year with the challenging budget we felt like we should draw that down a bit to offset the budget increase similarly in circuit breaker so the revenue that we received in fy21 was based on expenses and fy20 that were high the um this is what we used and spent during fy21 the revenue that we received here was because we had a lot of special education expenses that um students had graduated or moved out of the district this year so our expenses were less so this is the revenue we expect this is going to come up a little bit next year and then jump significantly the year after so that'll help the fy25 budget

083what we typically do there is we typically spend this would be an example typically try to spend our beginning balance was 474 we typically try to spend what the beginning balance was and carry forward the revenue from the prior year this year we're going to be in a case where we need to kind of dip into and go beyond that in fy23 so we'll um be taking in 240 000 but we're planning to spend some of that we're going to end up at an end of year balance of 132 000. technically that 132 still serves as a safety net but you know one placement can cost 300 thousand that's nothing that's not a normal placement placement under collaborative is probably more like 65 70 000. but so i just wanted to highlight that we've seen

084a shift in over time you can look back at the beginning when the ratio of students from boylston over a period of time significantly increased to the point where it was uh more than double in 2017. we're seeing that come back to be a little bit closer what that means is that berlin's paying for a larger share of the times of budget than it has as those numbers become closer the budget's allocated by regional agreement which is essentially based on that enrollment level so now i'm going to jump into how this pulls together and leads to the town assessment so this factors in the revenue that we have in terms of state aid and factors in the expense budgets and the expense budgets are offset by the state aid that we're getting to arrive at

085these percent increases so we have for the town of berlin this is how they typically will look at their expenses look at their budget overall what is the assessment impact overall it's a 5.3 assessment increase to the town 361 000 they had initially communicated an increase of did they desired an increase from 2.5 to us what i've shown at the bottom is that an increase the different increased levels using the i'll use this one as an example because this is kind of my guess that's what my guidance 3.5 increase we would be able to increase our budget by 238 or at uh 361 would have to cut another 123 000 [Music] so we hope to make the case to them on what we're doing why it's important but those numbers kind of give us an

086idea of what we would have to cut to reach different level targets for boylston [Music] wells is a little bit less and you can see if you go back to honto's increase for berlin is 5.4 and for boylston it's 2.4 and that's really because of the increased number of berlin students uh attending toronto it's all enough to four point nine percent increase for the town of boylston it's either reached the different targets there um we're not as far off those would be fairly substantial numbers to cut if we were pushed to do so we also provide guidance to the town of boylston however on the vocational costs this is some potential good news um not necessarily for the students who want to attend assabet um it's very becoming very difficult for those student for those

087students of towns who aren't members of assabet which boylston is not a member the people who are in member towns are getting priority the number of students who are wanting to attend there may even be wait lists for the students from member towns it's not clear whether there's even going to be any spots for non-resident towns in the past we've been able to get students accepted from a financial standpoint this means we're we're likely going to see a decrease in asset value enrollment to all we're projecting a decrease of 137 000 or 19.4 percent when the town looks it's look at its assessments they typically also look at the vocational with it and this 137 thousand dollar increase would be pretty close to this number the town would look at that and said well three

088and a half percent i think they have a little bit more growth in boylston need to do berlin that might be something they can accept so we're hopeful again we'll see i will just mention too i'm not going to go through these but there are some supporting slides with how some numbers were derived and split out by school but okay did not go through those at this point i wanted to pause here and see if there's any questions on what was presented so one of the things i was like we were presenting the school of choice information um trying to understand a little bit is you know we're going to potentially bring a traditional school choice into the dds next year at what cost or what do we get for revenue for each of those

089placements we get when we receive 5 000 and if there's any additional special ed costs we will get an increment to cover those additional special ed costs who sets that five thousand dollar rating that us or the state one the state the state sets it and i've got the case you know all these numbers in the state go up every year why hasn't school such it was voted i think 20 years ago and it's not indexed to inflation so um i have my theories as wide they probably are not in favor of districts that are net school choice receiving districts i think they're trying to push in the impact of people to districts that lose students yeah that's more my political thought but what you're what in theory this is there solely for us if

090we have extra space we're not going to do this if it's going to cause us to hire another teacher because it doesn't pay for itself but if we have a class of um we had this case come up where we had i think 23 kids in an elementary school great at brewing memorial it's like it's an awful lot for kindergarten and that well we're going to have two classes 11 and 12. we can certainly afford to add three or four school choice students so we i think in aces case there might be one grade where we can probably take group two and another grade we can take one but we're not accepting any in kindergarten or first grade because we know there's time for that to grow uh over time but as we get closer

091to the third fourth and fifth would be the grades uh secondly potentially even second it's a really small class and look at it and then we also look at it when we get to when the students get to toronto um the combination of berlin and boylston but the class size is particularly small they might look at the incoming next year's sixth grade class is very small and it's simply smaller than typically a rising fifth grade to six would be that might be a case where we want to take students that then and we also lose some students in ninth grade to uh we also do something to answer also this one to the ninth grade aspect particularly with our own students so there's some certain points where it makes sense at toronto how much demand

092is there for seats from other district students that we're not meeting right now i don't know um we've already received for next year and we really haven't done um you know any advertising yet we haven't even given our recommendations um we already have five applications for next year yeah in comparison to what we've seen in the fall well because of color the past couple of years but yet we're seeing um applications come or request earlier than we typically would say okay and then using the metaphor before i did which was inflation to what extent are we calculating 7.5 percent annual replacement inflation rate into these numbers into the budget yeah we're not [Music] it becomes less and less possible to the you're gonna take school choices so not only do you you you start to

093grow the amount of students and they start to strain the system but you lose the revenue from the school choices also foreign there's a balance there we don't necessarily want to be filling up our schools with it but if there's opportunities we're also relying on right now in our budget when you saw that enrollment trend chart you might see that over time we're not going to have space to accept any school choice students so it might be something as time diminishes i think right now we probably have the lowest amount of school choice seats in the elementary schools we have in my time here so some of that's just happening naturally because we have more kids coming in in both towns that are of school age coming up to than in kindergarten past i just

094want to correct my previous statement about not factoring inflation into the budget that's not true we um we factored it specifically into the oil budget a little bit into the electricity budget every time i receive a contract if the increase is more than three percent i call the vendor um and complain and say we're in pandemic for schools and have pity on our kids usually it works so that's it so um we do we do fight inflation and then budgeted for it for oil and utilities and there's certain places where we know things to be budgeted bob yes i still see the fourth nurse uh being budgeted in there and i know when we talked about that it was specifically a one-year thing to handle the additional focus contact tracing and test the state stream

095we don't have that now so based on your numbers in the poll we will within the state guidelines for nurses it's a significant salary that i'm sure we could use another feature or another program or something so what's the continued need for that if we only need it if we can increase it well we're finding that uh going to look like so right um that's that's why we put it in as a point-and-position you know if we aware that they've asked for a permanent position and i'm not convinced of that but certainly not knowing what next year's going to bring you for a bit for that one year so i just want to type in with inflation for so many other services you know probably how do you balance that based on the fact that

096all that additional work that we wanted that for is no longer necessary well again you know may have been started [Music] we have the flexibility to decide what we're going to do between now and the end of the year budget it's basically in there so it could potentially change to something else that's necessary it could in the grant we you know we previously had some dollars in there for more tutor support than we were able to obtain um the nurse is a contracted position with company so you know we pay that over a finite amount of time so technically if we didn't need that nurse after x amount of months we could terminate that contract with the vendor so it's not like hiring someone permanently so all right yeah it does give us flexibility like

097you mentioned though you know it's a grand money um you said you could be spent on some other kind of position tutor or language coach or whatever we know that's sorely needed right now with everything at all the last three years i just um i wonder if it would be perspective but we'll certainly look at it you know we're certainly going to look at it as we [Music] you know we want all these things all these things are qualified priority on personnel but let's prioritize the ones that we really need this year and then the ones we can we'll need down the road like i say bes without a teacher this year they can't next year so it'll be there next year so it's not like they're going away if we don't get all the

098stuff you're not going to see it again these are important positions but we just thought in terms of we could get by without some of them this year so we can't so uh given the cost of some of those items all the items we've seen don't control them we just put priority on them so i'll give you the process from here so have you ever gone through this process in this seat before we're taking this budget to the finance committee is that correct yeah well in a regional district uh let me give you a couple of things to be aware of then a regional district has to present past two-thirds of the member towns well since we have two towns let's pass both of them if it doesn't uh you could potentially do a reboot

099but this is supposed to attend meeting if it doesn't pass we could potentially be stuck with a 112 budget which is set by desi and on again oftentimes it's flat so whatever our budget was this year could just be the same next year which is it's just untenable this doesn't work that's not desirable what's that yeah um so we do want to so the fincom will make a recommendation on our budget we do want to get their support we didn't present already to them or at least the burlington a preliminary budget um they have communicated 2.5 early we presented this and they gave us feedback later that kind of reiterated they didn't quite say two and a half but they kind of applied closer to two and a half um so i i believe that

100we want to demonstrate that we're kind of working with them to try to provide something we're also trying to advocate for students so we have to find a balance i think if we presented 12 things we wouldn't have incredibly presented they were trying to listen to their concerns at all [Music] and i think that we have developed a relationship where they trust uh trust us and they've worked with us we've received their support from um through every budget um a little russian from boylston in one year but um from berlin pretty much throughout and this is really the first time they've presented any kind of guidance that they were looking for something a little smaller because of their own particular challenges what that all translates to we'd like this to pass education across the three

101schools i think it's somewhere around six hundred thousand yeah that sounds about right you made a comment that that's not every year it fluctuates up and down so are they not here for 12 years 10 years no no this is this is represents an increase versus last year so these same costs could carry forward next year but it's not going to be a six hundred thousand dollar budget increase all right of those members of just anything um and then so when you're presenting this to the topic i'm a taxpayer or a girl okay um i see a five percent tax increase coming through or whatever that translates to on my taxes inflation is coming up next winter is going to be hard to you know most of the towns most of the homes in burling

102right so that's going to be a tight tight boiler fairly and then i look at the per pupil spending right the lower end of it right so so what can you tell that like what's your strategy to tell taxpayers hey listen we're not even spending as much as some other towns [Music] what do they get for this i mean they're not getting more futures they're not getting more programs they're not getting more it sounds like it's most of it just going to contracting increases in salaries no additional teachers or additional sports or arts or anything like that you know well a lot of it is i mean the reason we presented even in december the way we presented it is to show you know that even without increasing making these above level requests there are

103big increases this year and most of them are out of control so i think towns all times need to make a decision really in the reason we laid it out like we did that'd be one of those things on that level it has a cost that and tom has to decide if you know there's inflation if they decide inflation is too much we don't want to support this and then it translates to not supporting the education but students too that's how it translates and you know we've talked about this as a leadership team and basically the reason we presented that first project we did like is to say let's lay out everything we need we believe we need to support our students and then moving forward and then we'll cut in order to get close

104to what the town recommends but at some point it's not on the city did your decision as a school coming as a town's decision they said for example you know inflation's high all the time all of this stuff we can't do it we take all of that out but we want to make the town aware and to say well listen you don't have to support us but if you don't here's all of the things that you don't get because all of these have a cause it's just like everything else and i and we try to stretch our resources as much as possible but there are some things that doesn't feel spread for us that are just out of our control so we still try to we still try to move forward obviously at a slower

105pace because now we've got these other things just to maintain services i think that's what it is i think it's a pretty i don't think it's a pretty straightforward conversation here's what everything cost if you don't want it you don't want it i think my question was from the other perspective let's say we bumped up to like was it eighteen nineteen thousand percent what could that get to that or what to get what benefit could that mean to the students additional programs or well yeah that's very small prices well exactly all of all of the you know teachers plus the materials plus instructional instruction all of that is wrapped into perfect extension and if you want to function what [Music] so we want to expand we want to have an internship shadow in order to

106do that we need more more guidance now so that will increase effect that will theoretically increase uh per pupil expenditure a little bit so anytime you expand programming you you expand your people's expenditure a bit too so um if you just do level service then you don't you're not doing that we haven't you know if you think about it over the past few years we've put a lot in and we've increased per people expansion yeah everything everything's a cost and all of those costs to increase programming gets reflected in that peripheral expenditure you you know teach your salaries so you hire another teacher hire another guidance concept it gets reflected in him i don't know about how much but it will get reflected in the formula and and we should probably not at some point

107bring that slide that would be because i didn't know there'd be so many questions about it it has all the categories that go into their people expenditure from that [Music] so you're asking one way what would what would you get we would you would specifically get the additional school counselor the ela coach for giving direct instruction to the coach get instructions to teachers and you'd get let's be able to convert to curriculum assistant which will get carol in schools so those those are the things that you would get out of the increase but the other thing that we need to present is uh if i'm a town i'm gonna i don't have any context for assessing whether this is fair not like why you're asking for all these things it seems like a lot of

108money and by showing them for people expenditure we can remind them that with relatively wealthy towns um we um are a relatively high performing district and our permutable spending is in the you know high 30s percentile across the state relative to neighboring communities we want to compete with we spend less than most of them so it's a context and i think that they understand that it might not be something that they can say well we can't fix that right away but we i want to keep that in front of it and if we're about that then they could also make the case then we'll make you making the case if we were clear at the top of the state um we had a harder time being a case for a million dollar increase and those

109are the two things i would like to see right like along with the per people spending where do we rank and performance among those towns however you want to make a performance subjective but and then exactly what you just said you know the speech and language technologist curriculum assistant all that stuff i mean it's in here but to me you didn't gloss over what i was saying got lost to me and long everything else those are the things i want to see if i'm going to spend that much more money i want that to be front and center and blasting my face every time you talk about it and you know the other thing is like and we've talked about it at other times but even if you talk about personnel which is reflected heavily

110in this transition you look at bdf for example bes is about a 2015 uh of personnel levels and that's with a number of additions over the last four years now i can argument that the middle high school is probably three to four positions at least short of where they should be and we know that because we have a number of teachers who teach six courses so the reason that happens is because you don't know how to teach it so as you continue to stretch at some point you can't do it anymore and he said well and what happens in the argument of always well you know you sum it up your summative test is still good you still have good outcast course at some point that catches up with you and once you do that

111you can't hire five teachers in a year and that's one of the long long-term things we really need to stop looking at and by hiring more personnel and this is why we've we've made a big focus in this budget and in the district improvement plan coming up we'll focus our personnel because we need to turn that around and that will you know that's the biggest investment you can make in your students because you're personal people teaching them yeah that's what i want to say yeah no no question but again for a number of reasons we're we're playing when you look at things like you know the things that happen at high school and you look at you know we're at 2015 funding on you know personnel levels at bes a town that's increasing in the

112enrollment [Music] we've got to start turning that around and we we have we have done that the code is a little kicking it but that's what you get for your money your best investment is is just teachings good teachers no question about it right exactly a little more aggressive like saying and wonder why why don't you think that point be now to go and say hey these are the things that we are prioritizing from this list the ones that are getting yelled and that's a fair process but i i want the town to understand what it is they're not getting by not also go into that next level of funding that would have all those white section degrees right so you're by approving this budget you're saying no to the things that we're not able

113to do there and make sure that the time this and that's what we've tried to do that's why we laid them all out you know the original one so that was our intent so maybe we didn't you know we quite get it across what we were trying to do but the reason we laid them all off and like that originally is we asked everybody on the leadership team the principles what do you need in terms of personnel let's report that person we didn't even go to curriculum tears and things like that we're going to make a focus on personal because that's what we think it gives the students the best bang for their buck then you know you if you look at that that's what we're talked about except like you know the musical engine

114because it's a small item um that's what we're trying to do so maybe we didn't they were saying we didn't that i'm asking for us now you guys [Music] well i think you know going back to what bob was saying about them you know they do give us parameters um [Music] they have not this year they said they don't think they don't think it'll be two and a half percent like berlin but um typically we've had a problem uh challenging getting guidance from the town last year we were able to get it from the town i think um we're meeting with them tomorrow night hopefully on his own i think they're trying to schedule it and try it this year we tried to go on a little early and say give us a you know

115give us a framework to work with them i mean we were difficult to get uh you know difficult to sort of get another one like that i'll be honest i kind of look what adam was saying the point is the presentation i saw this at lunchtime today i did not realize the white was not actually coming through this buddy and so maybe this is just a presentation issue i looked at this and i thought okay there's a checkmark for that school so that school's given a classroom teacher that's what's getting kindergarten that's what i wanted yeah i mean it was misleading to me we just did the check to show where it was and then we added the colors for tonight yeah it threw me off i mean i'm thinking i don't know what i

116was thinking but it wasn't that but after you explained it yeah it was clear but it's not yeah i guess if you're looking at it for the first time i think we could just thinking okay this is what we showed in december you know we talked about the district improvement plan and how that would focus into these things but they're important so they're not going to go away they're going to see them again you might see some of them next year like again the the classroom teach which is a must uh the next year some of them maybe three years down the road but you know it's a point while taking the items are being requested that are above service loading requests the thing that we're not going to continue as of right now putting

117in the budget what's the total cost of those things as we look across what's in what's in white there it looks like we're looking at a couple hundred thousand dollars to cover the things that are in white teacher i mean i top my head in the classroom teacher with benefits maybe 80 that kindergarten aids it's not benefits maybe that's 40 especially a teacher 80 potentially more if it's somebody who's maybe needs somebody more um experience there uh single sign-ups offers some small software and if it's not expensive um bfbs preschool staffing again would be a teacher we might get some revenue but that's that's there's also some logistics involved there for us to organize that and set it up like i don't think we're ready to do that um even if we were able to

118budget it reducing school choice usage um i mean that would be a hundred thousand in boylston two hundred thousand in tahanto before you do that right away um instrument repairs is small and i feel like that doesn't need to be in the budget we have a donation fund we have actually a little bit of a budget for that user prepares so there's ways to pay for some of this without using existing funds part of it which is budgeted the stem teacher probably would cost more than the other two teachers that might be with with benefits over a hundred thousand including all three hundred thousand dollars of federal service of above global requests that we're not going to put forward yeah and given that boylston hasn't given this guidance i question that i'm just just didn't

119think they would fly based on what you know the guidance we you know we've had in the last four or five years and back before that um that we thought we'd you know have something later and we'd have a backup plan to introduce those positions um later on so that's that's you know that's the honest answer to why we we didn't like that okay but let's show a big thing back to to peer this [Music] earlier like even before we get to the fall about okay we want to do some things and we want to have a little bit more capacity in our budget or to get a sense from them i know that boylston may have another commercial development going in when the revenue comes on online i don't know but that might be

120you to say okay if you're going to get another 3 million in commercial revenue then that's the year we we put forward more initiatives so or just make the case so we meet with the towns i think if they hear from a resident and a school committee member it can help too we're happy to kind of go to those meetings um then we've had kind of a committee a little bit in flux for about two years so um maybe that's something we could build next fall do we have the author tonight to propose well the idea tonight was that you have a quota that says that's correct so so now your question is could we rather than voting it through as presented voted through the addition of i think you have the ability as i

121understand it to recommend a different budget number but you don't have the ability to decide which how we increase the budget but maybe you can certainly make your comments and recommendations but um you do approve what the budget number is and understanding [Music] again [Music] we get kind of confirmed you know we certainly jeff will talk about clients with especially but we would pretend we haven't come back before you know something very 2015 funding level personnel personality um [Music] we [Music] to put forward a larger number my suggestion if you did so would be to grand state and put it include the classroom teacher bes the kindergarten days of the bbs the sped teacher at bds the single silent software and the music which both seem to be small items for preschool teachers he seems

122to be on the table off the table for now when you consider that and then the stem teacher at tohonto comes to around three to four hundred thousand dollars more than what we're looking at right now and if they know that commercial stuff is coming online in a year or two they can come back with it and say okay did you hope to take the mask off as we start developing district improvement plan we started in march and then we have everything done and we linked the treaty and put together july excuse me so we would have to kind of go through and decide what was going to be a priority was out of that list and i mean i almost wonder if you can't go to the buying votes in particular because the documents

123[Music] come on well i think bob showed that slide but you know we were anticipating actually just them asking us to decrease to get down to even lower but not that i if the principal submits me a list of 15 items like i'm just going to say i'm not going to feel like they've really been in the list um i feel like if we present pretty much everything they're not going to feel like we can kind of build our list and they may just they may look at it and say okay well you haven't done any work on this we're not gonna you know that's a risk i don't know that they're gonna say that but i think bourbon will be the one that's um maybe we get a school committee involved and um at

124least some of the initial um work on the uh traditional one so maybe those are some of the things that you can talk about to us you know where you feel the direction of the of the district it will incorporate those and you know you prioritize your list also and so i think i i agree the time is now but i i think the time to do it is with the district approval which we'll start working on so for all of us [Music] what are you going to get if we increase the school budget to meet this thing where you're going to get the priority on this plan improvement plan like that kind of stuff we can figure out how to do it you're going to vote on it so we're going to put in

125there what how do you think we can this we can sell this too so yeah thank you so much great idea like who's i think it just a five percent increase in either down already it's hard to swallow especially with the weight i mean eyes inflated since the 80s right playing and working on also marketing job yeah would be probably easier because that's i mean let's start now this is february we usually start marching we just collected ideas so these are ideas that we'd love to hear from you to you'll have something that looks familiar to you and that'll be less direction for the next three years to you know increase the personnel through the program but we've been through today i think it does cause a relaxinator to go to approve the uh headaches

126we had one that was um how did you get in there how many speculative powers going when i first started we had two kindergartens and two full-time records sorry um the classes were don't call me honest for their [Music] i mean i think that's significant before you're speaking to adam's one i understand your front too but the idea is to have you have you ever gone to town floor without a print con recommendation i don't know we have to do that either no i know i know i mean i think that's significant also that's a honda stem teacher is their current one yes yes it's several it's science technology and engineering okay again that's one of those areas really we need to work on you know right that's why yeah that's why i brought that

127sure i remember the musical part too i mean the ones in white i know i'm [Music] music [Music] maybe we'd have to repurpose a different position to to the essence we have to meet in terms of the grant to shift the money around but it also is making a comment about boylston's budget because i think we painted a little bit of the picture it wasn't an awful place we've added two teachers in the last couple years we've added i think four or five eighties we've added a full-time technology teacher so like the tenant was the budget was in an awful place at boylston elementary we're making progress but it just the challenges that we're trying to digest um as much as we can as we go forward but we're doing it in pieces i think

128it's worth having a conversation about you know at some point if we have several things to put there maybe it gets to the point where it's an override um but i do think it's worth you know when we have a district improvement plan bring some of these and say you know we want to push this into one budget year and have it be voted on and um i don't think that's this year i don't know that we have enough runway but i do think if we want to be more aggressive we should present it as a package and say get it and not just talk to the parents i think we're going to get parents of course i can tell you but pretty much many parents support we always have especially from parents of students

129um i do think we need to to talk to the towns earlier even maybe before the school year and say here's the things that we didn't do we really want to get these on the radar we know that the increase is going to be more than six percent from boston elementary um you know more than a town typically see but um i think it would be helpful to have the school invader for those conversations too it's probably more impressive well everything everything except for some of these things when we start to rethink the personality some of those are new but for the most part we've stuck with everything in the district approval so nothing's been a surprise so you know just thinking about that maybe reading here's everything right here so there's no surprises um

130[Music] promoting that to the community especially as a newly general school committee i think it will give us an opportunity to share communities [Music] yeah i like that play that would be early september october [Music] cool any other questions okay could i have a motion to accept the fiscal year 2023 preliminary budget as presented [Music] discussion [Music] fiscal 2023 open hearing budget as presented next second no discussion all in favor aye aye as well opposed thank you motion to accept the fiscal year 2023 by adhering passes our next dates for um for meetings and just a reminder that we're accepting resumes for the open seat from berlin um from any residents in berlin we ask that you send them to either myself or christie churchian by our march meeting where we will hopefully be choosing

131another foreign as well this concludes our meeting thank you very much