001well thank you everyone for joining us for the dartmouth school committee budget subcommittee meeting um our first one of the fiscal year 23 calendar so we are having a remote meeting today here obviously on zoom uh but it is also being broadcast live on uh dhs tv media channel on youtube so just wanted to fill you in on that so um we're looking forward to working with you all on this fy 23 budget this is we're still in the preparation phase of this budget sort of the planning phase are we will be bringing forward uh a budget presentation for the school committee next week so this is an important part of the process where we can hopefully start to build some support from you folks and uh and um you know get ready for sort
002of the next stage of moving forward with this so with that i will share my screen and get started with the presentation if anybody has any questions please feel free to chime in at any time we have a pretty small group here in the zoom meeting so feel free to just interrupt me and we can we can talk about things but we'll have time for questions at the end as well all right so um we have a consistent uh mission vision uh and budget goals that we've had for some years here in dartmouth um as you probably know the our mission is to provide a quality education for all learners uh and our budget goal really is to make sure that uh we our funding is strategically allocated to support the mission and vision so
003to support the school the district improvement plan the school improvement plans and really to focus on providing a quality education for everyone here so we're still early in this list but there's actually been a lot of work that's gone in to get us to this point schools and departments back you know prior to the holidays prepared budget proposals that they submitted to us they are focused on their school improvement plans and on student achievement and really looking at data to support their requests they've submitted some very thoughtful proposals we'll go through a little bit some of the proposals in a minute we at the same time that they're doing all that work i am uh preparing projections for all sorts of budget areas so um staffing transportation utility projections lots of moving parts substitutes um
004just you know every every little piece of of what it takes to run this fairly large operation we're doing at that same time and then we begin to meet talk about evaluating proposals and trying to come up with a district-wide plan to move that to move that forward and that's sort of what we've done to date today is the first time we're actually going to be speaking publicly about the budget so that's opening the lines of communication with the school committee with our finance committee representative and hopefully gathering some support for what what looks to be you know a somewhat challenging budget year um where our hope is that from here we're able to expand that support and um and you know get support from the school committee and ultimately the other boards in town
005the finance committee select board and so forth and get what we need to support kids so there's some some things that um you know play a large role in in this budget and uh we'll look at the numbers in a minute but um we we are in we will be in bargaining with all seven of our collective bargaining groups this year all the contracts expire either june 30th or august 31st of this year so there's a lot of uncertainty revolving around that in the in the meantime there are contract there are things that we know about those contracts so there are increases there are salary schedules that have steps built in and other benefits that are tied to those that we do know so we build all those in we factor in savings from retirements
006and uh then at this point we have 10 of those this year which is kind of on the low side for us some of the retirements are not particularly big savings type positions sometimes our our retirements are spots where we can you know focus on trying to save some money to reallocate that's not really the case this year we have some increases as as we do every year with special ed tuition the state sets out of district rates um for statewide for all of the schools that we sense we send students to that usually is an increase of between three and five percent so if you think about our typical budget in in past years well it's actually typically gone up less than what that particular area um has increased we've built in about a
007hundred thousand dollar increase to to cover that uh transportation we've got some some really good news uh in that this is our final year of our fy 23 will be our final year of our regular bus contract that means there's no increase this year which is a big help budget wise our special ed contract is expiring it's not been a great year for bus companies uh transportation has been an issue staffing major problem uh the minimum wage increase has caused sort of competition amongst uh you know for for uh employees and we've definitely felt effects of that and the pandemic clearly hasn't hasn't helped either so we built in just under a hundred thousand dollar projected increase for that and we're hoping that that uh that will be sufficient um enrollment in fy23 slight decrease
008from fy22 not quite sure whether some of that could be pandemic related too we might seal we might see some people returning um that uh you know that made a different choice with their kids in uh this school year so town state federal stuff um this is a fairly bleak area of of the of the projections uh the town i don't i don't have a firm projection as to you know where we are for the town yet and i'm not surprised by that certainly don't blame them for that there's a lot of moving parts right now and they have a lot of uncertainty in terms of um funding from the state and uh other sources so it's that that is sort of to be determined that'll be coming but not quite yet state and federal
009funding so chapter 70 which is uh the biggest funding source that the town receives um that is education aid from the state they have uh the governor's proposal was for a one percent increase for dartmouth in chapter 70 funding it's a hundred thousand dollars they we get about 10 million dollars in um in chapter 70 funding so that one hundred thousand dollar increase one percent so it is an increase but basically it's a step backwards when we're looking at inflation and wage wage increases and everything else i wish i could say i'm surprised but but at this point i'm i'm definitely not surprised by that but it is unfortunate well the legislature hasn't done anything with it yet there will be as we move through this process they'll the different committees the will will act
010on it and i'll keep you posted i don't have a lot of hope though that that's going to be significantly different um federal funding though uh i don't know where all the money's coming from but they definitely you know they're still seem to be maintaining uh all i think the grant funding um will be maintained they've committed all the funds for esser um which is the covid relief um monies so we know that what that is so we can plan on that so that's actually kind of a nice one to be able to to count on and i'll talk a little bit more about that as we move forward through the presentation so health insurance we we got i guess what i would say is fairly good news in that the the average increase of
011the maya health group which is what we participate in excuse me is 3.7 so the town received that notice has not yet received notice on um on on how much dartmouth's increase is going to be but the average increase is 3.7 so last year dartmouth was below the average and that was a big step um and that is based on uh the experience rating of the town dartmouth has historically been above the average uh so it was great that uh that that we saw sort of a turnaround in health in the community hoping that that happens again and the increase is below 3.7 they did say that the low increase is zero so somebody some community had no increase i'm hoping it's us uh some community had a 7.5 increase so obviously that can't be
012dartmouth so um greater new bedford volk they have uh the the minimum required dartmouth contribution is up 80 so that's 418 000. that's pretty significant um so that's that's something that the town's going to have to you know obviously doesn't have any isn't in our control and doesn't have anything to do with what i'm presenting today in terms of the budget but it is something that the town needs to incorporate and consider um as they you know as they move forward through this process and bristol aggie is up 47 124 000 um and that's basically it appears that there's eight more students next year at bristol aggie than before so it definitely is another uh another amount that the town needs to to factor in so mr kiley i know you you're you're just the
013facts ma'am here but i'll make so i'll make the political commentary and i you know i know it doesn't quote unquote affect our budget but it does because it affects how much money is available in the town you know we talked about this when when you know our vote representatives came came to see us and it's it's hard right i mean those numbers that we're talking about provoke and aggie are you know several positions in our district right i mean or things that the town can't do and i and i do think it's time to sort of think about as a community how we can smooth out some of these um these bumps because you know 418 000 is a not insubstantial amount of money right oh i agree it's i mean 8 so an
0148 increase is um you know obviously we're not talking about increases anywhere near that level so um you know if there's only one pool of funds how do you you know how do you split that up who pays for that i don't know but uh yeah it's certainly a concern and that's why i thought it was important to note on this so um i won't walk through every single proposal because the next three slides are have valuable proposals that could help kids in the dartmouth public schools so um i'll start by saying sort of at the top the top two lines of numbers on this uh on this slide what they show is the fy 22 budget that's the year we're in our budget is currently forty seven million one hundred and eighty thousand five
015forty eight eighty two okay now the fy 23 draft budget so that is sort of our preliminary budget before considering all of the requests from the schools and the departments all of these things in this list down below so basically what um that number represents is all of the projections that i talked about doing all of the key factors that we talked about the special ed increase in tuition the transportation increase the um all of those factors um obviously building in salary uh contractual obligations uh are built into that and where our starting point is at forty nine million one hundred and seventy three thousand one hundred and fifteen dollars and ninety three cents so four point two two percent increase now so that is salary so you know staffing is more than 70 of
016our budget so obviously that is significant um and those other areas where there is some increase relatively minor increase in utilities also built into there unfortunately the town has locked in some pretty favorable contracts because if they hadn't the utilities would be uh would be a problem as well so that's sort of our starting point at 4.22 and you'll see we have a lot of really you know a lot of proposals here and as we go through this process i can share more detail if you have questions about specific proposals but a lot of proposals for staff that can help kids um some proposals for supplies and i'll talk a little bit about that in a minute and i'm just going to page a page through this a little but most of the major proposals
017on this list are are staffing related so the left left-hand column of numbers so that if you look at the bottom the total of all of those proposals is 969 000. so just under a million dollars it would represent about a two percent increase in our budget so as i said we started at about just over four percent 4.2 percent that would get us to 6.2 percent uh if we were to incorporate all those proposals that's 50 million dollars for our budget at that point now obviously we have to you know we have we understand that we have to do our due diligence and try and um come up with a budget proposal that accomplishes at least what we hope to accomplish in terms of providing what schools what students need but also be reasonable
018and responsible in that in that proposal um as a result the right hand column of numbers are what we've uh actually built in at this point so there are a few things on that list that we have incorporated into the budget and there are some on this list that we haven't incorporated in the right hand column but we do intend to acknowledge that they need to exist and that we need to figure out an alternative way to fund them so one thing that was sort of a common theme amongst the schools is uh inflationary factors on uh and supply chain issues for ordering things it's real as we all know i think in our personal lives there's no way around it it's it's a reality i don't know how long it's gonna go on i'm
019hoping that things come back to normal but that may not um you know that that may not be for some time so what we are committed to doing is using about sixty two thousand dollars uh our proposal would be to use about sixty two thousand dollars of school choice funding to buffer costs of inflation and supply chain and supply issues so i have specific items on this list that we know have to happen we're going to make them happen our hope is that the school committee would support our using school choice funding to support that i believe that it's a good use of school choice funding uh i don't know whether prices are ever going to come back down so i don't really know whether it's one-time expenses or not but at this point i
020think the best thing we can do is you know is attempt to incorporate those things that way if in fact this is this is the new reality and the new normal moving forward that costs are higher then at some point we're gonna have to come back and try and build them into the operating budget but at this point i really think that um you know we'll we'll hopefully try and approach it that way to lessen the actual need to increase the operating budget even more than it already is here like like school using school choice funding we're also going to use sr funding to support some of these requests so esser again is the coronavirus relief fund there's multiple grants involved and it's over a course of several years and they couldn't have really made
021it any more complicated than they did but the good news is there is money and we we are currently using it to support kids right now with staffing and expenses and our after-school programs that we've that we've initiated and uh so we our hope is that um we will be using approximately 75 000 of sr funding to support support things on this list so that being said there are a lot of things on this list that we haven't built in um so even if if we're talking about 217 000 that we have and i'll talk a little bit more about those specific requests uh in a second on the next slide but you know we're gonna support 75 000 with esser and 62 000 with school choice that still leaves a lot of requests that
022are valuable that we are not able to to build in at this point in in our process so what did we build in so we built in a teacher at the quinn school we had a situation where if you if you you'll have some more information in your budget books when i when i send them to you um but our enrollment at the quinn school was problematic we were going to be up to 27 kids in uh in a grade level um in each class on average uh and that was really inconsistent with what we're trying to do for kids and inconsistent with what the other schools look like um and so at this point uh we've included a new teacher in our recommendations so you may know the next one you may know that
023um our tracy oliveira is is will be retiring uh in september mid-september so we are including in this proposal a director of teaching and learning focused on the needs of specifically on the needs of the elementary level so we've identified some thoughts about how that would work and how it would allow someone to really focus on the needs of the four elementary schools and that we think that that would be beneficial to students at that at that level and then one director dedicated to the secondary level so really bridging the gap between the high school and the middle school focusing on the on the transition between high school and middle school uh and and really attempting to meet their needs and then those two folks working together obviously to to um make sure district-wide uh
024we had a good transition from elementary to to middle school and so forth so there's a lot of work to be done and this would allow you know allow us to do that in what we think is a more thoughtful way moving forward and then the third proposal that yep can i ask a question about that 108 number that you have on that oh yeah sure right so is it help me understand is that the full cost of two people or is that two people starting when tracy retires because it's not in sync with the fiscal year right so i just want to know are we gonna have more higher costs on that in the year after how does that work okay so let me explain to you where we are right now so our
025our budget proposal last year um so let me back up so the assistant superintendent michelle roy retired in december 2020. in the budget proposal for fiscal year we presented a um we presented a replacement of the assistant superintendent position we never replaced that position but in that process we had eliminated the funding for the director of teaching and learning position so we only had one position at that time we had the assistant superintendent position funded now as of right now we have a director of teaching and learning so this what that 108 000 is the difference between what we currently have built in in the fiscal year 22 budget and what it would cost to have the two director positions in the fy 23 budget now those positions are offset they currently are in the
026budget offset by some grant funding particularly title one being the largest amount and but it that would continue with these new positions so there's really no impact there uh so this would that 108 000 would fund an extra position a new position for next year i would not necessarily anticipate an fy 24 increase beyond what you would normally you know whatever salary increase are we going to overlap these people such they start at the beginning of the fiscal year and they'll overlap with miss oliveira a couple year a couple months for training or at least july and august is that the plan so it's these two positions we'll actually have three positions for two months do you know what i'm saying or are we just gonna have two people and they're gonna start in september
027dr gifford do you want to jump in on that i think that um our plan would be to have them start just like any other administrative position which starts in um sometime in the summer uh we haven't really talked about the days and as you know some directors have uh various days to their contract so we haven't gotten into that depth yet but we obviously would want the first the people to come on board earlier than uh tracy leaving just to get i'm just trying to figure out what the what the numbers if what the numbers mean in that 108 contacts if it's two people three people for two months and then two people for the rest of the year or what that's just why i'm asking right and depending on how when we choose
028to do that um could have some impact obviously on the on the financial side of it so the third request that we have there is uh for an rbt an rbt is a registered behavior technician so they are members of our teacher assistant group and they provide direct services to students behavioral services so this proposal is actually not one just one staff member this is to hire one staff member to meet needs that we currently have so we have the needs now we are spending money to provide the services but we think it would be best is to hire a staff member to provide the services rather than contract out services um so we'd be doing that with the hiring of that one position and also uh we're in the process of we have sought
029volunteers to train existing staff to provide rbt services so we'd be providing them with training they'd get the credentials and they'd be available to us and it would provide some more flexibility as uh those services become necessary for for students in their ieps uh it it would be a more robust model than what we have now and right now we're we're stringing it together but this would um this would be a much much better way um to provide continuity and offer those services to students so i talked a little bit about the school committee so the school committee uh we'd be coming up with uh on the 14th we'll we'd have we'll have a presentation for the school committee um we will have a school committee meeting uh we will have a couple of school
030committee meetings where we can um work through the budget talk about the things that um you know that we've proposed the things we haven't proposed um and other topics as they come up and develop with funding and with the state funding and so forth we then would have a the public hearing for the budget on march 21st sometime in that mix we'll meet with the finance committee i'm not exactly sure when that would be sometimes that's before the school committee approves the budget um sometimes it probably will be before then i would guess but we'll also meet with the selectmen and hopefully you know get recommendations for town meeting from those bodies um school committee approval right now tentatively scheduled for april 4th obviously this can all be flexible to an extent although we do
031need to get to to be done with this process at least in terms of an initial budget vote by the school committee so that we can get it on the warrant in time for the town meeting which is on june 7th so we do have some flexibility we have lots of opportunity to talk about this and basically um that concludes the presentation part of this i'd be happy to answer questions talk a little more about specifics about this if anyone has anything they'd like to add so i'll keep talking sorry i don't know if others want to add but you know from my time on the finance committee i've developed a real aversion to using one-time funds for recurring expenses and and i know that some of these things we need to do um i
032think we need to have a conversation like at what point does school choice become a recurring revenue we've had it in place for [Music] how many years now so i maybe i'm a little less worried about that we have a healthy balance in that account where we could ride it out for several years such that if we put 62 000 on it this year and school choice went away we wouldn't have to come up with the full 62 right away um i am deeply concerned about the fiscal cliff that the esser grants really represent and um i know these are things that we need to do i mean we can see it on the news about the the emotional challenges that our students are facing right now um i'm just it worries me um about
033you know where we're going to be two to three years from now um and i think we need to have these conversations um about you know deeply about what we're putting on us our funding um and to develop a plan such that we don't all of a sudden have to lay off a bunch of people who we who we've come to depend on because the town doesn't have the money for that um so i'm really a little bit nervous about you know 138 000 going on non-recurring revenue just here i think we already have some stuff that's on us or um and i think we need to you know have some conversations about how we're going to plan for a soft landing i'm really worried about that it's your right to be worried about it
034we are very worried about it i think all school districts are very worried about it um and the reality is that there is no way to not have some degree of fiscal cliff the intent of these funds was to support students by hiring staff i mean yeah you can run after school programs which you may not run three years from now sure but that is minor um and and they've come out with additional grants that have helped us do that so that the problem is that we they you know we've been provided with millions of dollars that's a great problem to have and we are attempting to address those needs which are absolutely real um we're well aware that kids need more help now than they've ever needed and we're trying to provide that help
035but it will come to an end and there is no source of revenue once you get past this that i i would be very surprised if there is a federal source of revenue that continues this at the end to any to any large degree so what we've been talking about internally is okay how do we adjust staffing and sort of wean off it but it's hard to do and you know when you have a proposal a budget proposal that's already fairly substantial it's not like you can build those positions into that easily so you have to look at things like attrition and it's just not going to be diff it's not going to be easy to do it's going to be very difficult can i just make maybe perhaps one recommendation as we look towards
036the future right particularly where we're using this money to hire um i think it would be good for us to be very careful to in documenting sort of what these people are doing so if they're you know doing you know uh community outreach as a social worker like how many people are they visiting how many kids have they gotten back in because i think part of it is we're going to have to make a case for continuing these positions so to the extent we can document real needs that have been addressed um it's sometimes pretty you know opaque here you know for for the community you know what does an outreach social worker do well you know they make sure the kids are in school and this is how many kids they contacted and this
037is how many times they connected them to these services um i think that may help us because you know ultimately i think you're right mr kylie um we can't look to the federal government i don't think we're going to be able to look to the state government to save us from that and so it's going to probably have to be on us and so from the school side i think we need to be prepared to make the case as to what benefit these positions offer and why we need to figure out how to fund them so to the extent that we can document that or just track that now i think that would be useful i agree do other folks have comments questions thoughts okay well i appreciate you all attending um again this is
038our first budget subcommittee meeting depending on how things go we could have other budget subcommittee meetings we certainly will have lots of whole school committee discussion about the budget um starting on the 14th so i appreciate you your time and coming and and talking to us about this and considering our requests and hopefully we can move forward and with some support for for what we need for kids so thank you all have a good night thank you mr kiley thank you so much mr peratti has the video stream ended