001I've switched to video there. This is just so you can see I've switched to Yeah, so this one service And then it doesn't have the date set, but it will have timestamps for like relative to when it started. I can have a a week in here right here. >> Let me stop it. I apologize, everybody. It looks like it's broadcasting now, so I'll give me a minute just to make sure so it doesn't go out. Sorry again. >> That's fine. Thanks, Kevin. We appreciate you being here to keep us running. Next on our agenda is public input, and Jared informs me we have no one signed up for public input. None of you wanted to speak. So, then we'll move to our consent agenda, and I will take a motion to approve or amend our
002consent agenda as printed. >> I move the to approve the consent agenda items. >> It's been moved and seconded that we approve the consent agenda as printed. Any discussion to that All right, we'll vote electronically. >> Voting is closed and the motion to approve the consent agenda passes unanimously. >> Thanks, Jared. Moving on, we'll go to our action agenda. The first item on the action agenda is to approve the 2026 27 district calendar adjustment that uh Tim explained to us 2 weeks ago. And um Whitney is here to answer any questions you might have about that. We appreciate you being here, Whitney. And I will take a motion to approve the uh 2026-27 district calendar adjustment. >> I'll move. >> To approve the 2026-27 district calendar. >> I second it. >> It's been moved and
003it's seconded that we approve the 2026-27 district calendar adjustment. Anyone have discussion to that motion or questions for Whitney? Seemed pretty simple. Do you think the teachers will be happy about a Monday PD instead of a Friday? >> They'll love it. >> All right. Confident of that. Under penalty of death, they'll love it. All right. Thanks, Whitney. Uh we'll vote electronically. >> Voting is closed and the motion to approve the recommended adjustment to the 2026-27 school district calendar passes unanimously. >> Thanks, Jared. Uh next on the action agenda is to approve the 180 days, 990 hours calendar report that was presented to us 2 weeks ago. I'll take a motion to approve that. >> I move to approve the 180 990 calendar report. >> Second. >> It's been moved and seconded that we approve the
004180 990 calendar report. Any discussion to this motion or questions for John? Did I remember correctly and 990 is not such a big deal anymore? It's the 180. >> Excuse me, 990's been removed, yes. >> But it's still But we still have to approve it? >> We We left it on there and included it for a measure of standard for us to keep us at a high standard. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> But it's not >> required. Correct. >> All right, got it. All right, thank you. We'll vote electronically. >> Voting is closed and the motion to approve the 180 day 990 hour report as presented passes unanimously. >> Thanks, Jared. Uh last on our uh action agenda is to approve the adoption of the character ed curriculum that has been recommended by the committee
005um and by our director of teaching and learning, Britney Foster. She presented this us 2 weeks ago. So, I'll take a motion to approve the adoption of the character ed curriculum that has been selected. >> I move that we approve the adoption of the character ed curriculum. >> I second. >> It's been moved and seconded that we approve the adoption of the character ed curriculum. Any discussion to that motion? Or questions for Brittany? I've heard a lot of great things from teachers about this. They're super excited. >> It's a neat program. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> Okay. >> All right, we'll vote electronically. >> Voting is closed and the motion to approve the new curriculum for character ed as recommended passes unanimously. >> Thanks, Jared. Last the last section on our agenda this evening is
006the reports agenda and we'll have the monthly financial report first presented by Jared Black, our business administrator. >> Okay, and a majority of what I put on the financial report for the board I'll cover as we talk through the tentative budget and subsequent items. But, just as a quick update on any ongoing audits, the the school food services review has largely been completed. However, there will be a part two to that, which is more of a procurement review. So, the first part we're we're pretty much wrapped up with. The second part will begin shortly. And of course, our auditors um our external auditors um um have been working with schools the last couple of months on school audits and sometime this summer we'll get a report uh from them that we'll share with board members.
007Any questions? >> I have a comment. Kathy and I were at Cash High last week. And uh the principal there was complaining that we sent a 16-year-old to audit. I said, "Oh, that must be Cody." >> Hopefully he'll view that as a compliment. Yeah. >> Yeah. And now we will Hang on. I have to get back to my Diligent is not as friendly as BoardDocs was. Sorry. Now we'll have a statement from our budget officer, the first statement. >> Well, if it's okay, we'll do the report the tentative budget report first. >> Oh, yes. Sorry. We'll have a report on the tentative budget for 2026-27 by Jared Black, our business administrator. >> Okay. And uh we'll have a a few slides that I'll go through here. Uh just as a um maybe a a reminder
008and in Utah State Code is a requirement that school districts prepare a tentative budget by June 1st. That's not a budget that's approved by the board. That's done later in June uh by the 30th in terms of a deadline, but we still prepare a tentative budget uh by June 1st. So, what I'll share on these next few slides is just an overview of the information that that ties into our tentative budget as we're working on preparing it right now. Um so, we would have it prepared by June 1st and then the budget is refined further throughout June until we we come to the budget hearing, which is scheduled for June 18th this year. Okay, we can go go one more slide if you would, Kevin. Thank you. Um so, the basis of the tentative budget
009that we're working on right now, uh there's an assessed valuation. That would be the valuation of properties in Cache County that pertain to the Cache County School District boundary. And uh through through the Utah State Board of Education, that valuation uh is estimated to be just over 13 billion this year. We were just under 12 uh last year, so that that's estimated to go up a little over a billion. However, um that's entirely preliminary and we'll we'll get actual numbers from Cache County probably within 2 or 3 weeks um that that we'll then plug into this when when I say we refine our budget, that's that's what I'm talking about. We're getting numbers and and information throughout this process. We've included um in the work we've done so far, legislative estimates up to today, actually,
010and our estimated fall enrollment uh for students is 19,703. This is down about 80 students from the current year. And uh of course, there'll be a large adjustment in elementary and secondary because our 6th grade is moving to secondary next year and so elementary is is K through 5 and we're estimating just under 8,000 students in those grades and our secondary will be grades 6 through 12 which will be 11,000 739. So that that number of 19,703 does not include preschool students that that attend many of our schools. If we included our preschool students would be over 20,000. But we're funded with with WPU funding from the state for our K-12 students, so that's the number we use. Just informationally we have around 3,500 employees. We're The school district is a major major employer in
011the valley with with thousands of employees. And from an accounting perspective, we run 10 different funds. An example of a fund might be the general fund which would be often known as like a maintenance and operations fund or our capital fund or our debt service fund or our school food services fund. Those Those would be examples of funds. And then we also run large number of programs. Programs might be drivers education or special education or transportation as examples and each of those programs and funds is accounted for uh separately. So it has to balance as a fund or as a program and then rolls up into the larger budget of the school district. Any questions from board members to that point? Okay. Let's go another slide, Kevin. Thank you. Just to In the next two
012slides I'll talk about impacts on revenues and then on expenditures. So on revenues, the the largest impact we we typically would see year to year comes from state legislative funding through the weighted people unit or WPU. And that's an amount of funding that's provided by the legislature per full-time student. And so this upcoming school year that amount increases 4.2%. And the value will be 4,870 per full-time student for the WPU. So we certainly appreciate that funding that comes from the state level. There's also a new program allocated for early literacy efforts. So we'll we'll be building that funding into our budget. For Cache County School District, I believe that amount was just over 800,000 and it is prescribed how we use that. That'll be used for paraprofessional or aid support in our classrooms as well
013as coaches in in the literacy area. And so that'll be part of part of our budget that that's proposed this year. Britney and her team are are kind of working through the details of that right now. The other um thing to mention related to revenues would be property tax funds that are generated locally through through our property taxes. And I'll visit more about this in a few minutes. But we through our property taxes we receive funding for for voted and board levy programs to pay to pay off general obligation debt for schools that have been constructed by the district. There's also a state basic levy. The rate of that is is set by the state and by the tax commission. But we levy levy that and generate property taxes through that as well. And uh
014Let's go to the next slide, Kevin. Okay. As far as expenditures, we're grateful to not have uh any increase in our retirement rate through URS that we pay towards retirement for qualifying employees. And this is an exceptional year for the school district and in that uh our health insurance uh renewal is coming in at at cost neutral or possibly even slight reduced uh rates. Highly unusual, but um a credit to uh school board and a lot of folks that have worked on on uh helping our health insurance plan to be sustainable uh long-term. Steps and lanes, uh so for for our employees, uh salary schedules are built so that employees qualify as they gain experience and also as they gain education levels. Um and those are what we call steps and lanes. And to fund
015those takes approximately 1.5 million in our budget. We also apply a cost of living adjustment to a variety of salary schedules that we have for our employees. And just for awareness of the school board, 1% on the cost of living um is approximately 1 million to our budget. Um just to have an idea of that. And um that's not to say that that um the district is is giving a 1% cost of living, just that that would help you calculate how much that would cost. The the actual amount is is being worked through with our employee associations right now. Uh as far as expenditures, one one uh big adjustment going into next year will be that we're staffing three new schools, of course. Uh all three from elementary schools, Juniper Ridge Middle School, and Maple
016View Middle School because our student enrollments remain the same or are even slightly dropping, we wouldn't be adding new teaching positions in the district. It's more a redistribution of of where teachers are located. Uh from 28 25 to 28 schools, but we would be adding positions such as uh principals, uh assistant principals, custodians, uh specialists, uh sweepers, administrative assistants, etc. So, that'll be an added cost to our budget this upcoming year. And then there are costs for opening the new schools related to transportation and utilities and some things like that. Any questions from the board thus far? Okay. All right, let's go one more if you would, Kevin. Okay. And and I'll uh If there are any questions, I'll I'll finish the presentation on the tentative budget there. And then we would move, President Rhodes,
017to the statements and some more information that I'll share. >> Thank you for that report on the tentative budget. That helps us be prepared for our budget hearing on the 18th of June. Um we will now hear a statement from our budget officer. The first statement from our budget officer. >> Okay. Yeah, we'll make two statements tonight. These are related to um the truth in taxation process and to uh changes that were made um by the Utah legislature related to that process. So, uh the first statement is that the the tentative budget for the Cache County School District for the 2026 27 school year includes a proposed tax rate increase. >> And then moving on to the second statement from our budget officer. >> Okay, this statement is a little bit longer. And Kevin, I
018think if you could go one more um the the slide on the screen summarizes what I'll share in the statement, but um but this one will be a little bit longer. So, as part of the budgeting process for the upcoming 26-27 school year, the Cache County School District is considering a tax rate that exceeds the certified tax rate. The approximate proposed increase in tax revenues is 10,515,000, which represents an estimated 19.1% increase in total budgeted property tax revenues from the current year. There are three purposes for the tax revenue for the proposed, I should say, tax revenue increase. First is the board and voted levy program. And Kevin, could you go I'm not sure if it was back or forward. There's a slide on the board and voted levy program right there. Thank you. The
019the voted and board levy program has been in place for many years and combines state funds and local property tax funds to provide a guaranteed amount of revenue to school districts. To receive full funding, a school district needs to levy a property tax rate of at least .002000 between the board and local levies. The current uh district combined rate for those levies is 0.01508. So, approximately 80% or 7.9 million of the proposed increase would be to make the local property tax contribution to the voted and board levy program whole. This increase would raise these rates to the level at which the school district continue to receive full funding and the increase in property tax revenues would be met by a corresponding decrease in state revenues. The second purpose for the tax revenue increase would be
020to fund positions at the three new schools. Again, an approximately 2 million of the proposed increase would be to fund positions at the three new schools including principals, counselors, specialists, custodians, and sweepers and administrative assistants. And then the third purpose for a tax revenue increase would be additional buses and then in future years capital facilities projects. This would add approximately 540,000 of revenue to the capital outlay fund to increase to pay for three additional buses the sub coming year related to the opening of the three new schools and then to provide additional ongoing revenue to the capital fund for facilities needs throughout the school district. If the school district proceeds with the proposed increase the district will provide public notice and conduct a public hearing as required to explain the reasons for the proposed increase
021and to provide members of the public with an opportunity to comment on it. This hearing is currently scheduled for Thursday, August 6th beginning at 6:00 p.m. And that that concludes that particular statement. And then Kevin, could you go to the final slide? Should have a Yes, the property tax impact schedule. So, I want to present this to the school board for awareness. This is another of the the new components of the truth in taxation process is that the school district uh publish and share a property tax impact schedule. So, on this schedule will be much of the same information that I just shared in that statement. The revenue impact is at the top along with a percentage of increase in tax revenues for the school district. There's also a section in the property tax impact
022schedule on uh taxpayer impact. So, it outlines uh what the impact would be to the average primary residence and also the average commercial property within the boundaries of the Cache County School District. And then at the bottom of the property tax impact schedule is a narrative that provides an explanation of uh what these additional property tax revenues would be used for. So, there are copies of this property tax impact schedule on the back table for anyone interested in having one today. And it's probably important to note as well this schedule is is currently developed using estimates and preliminary numbers, so it will be updated as we move forward towards the the budget hearing in June and then a truth in taxation uh public hearing in August. Any questions from from the school board on any
023of that? >> I have several. Um does anyone else have Go Go Brian. >> Yeah, just one question, Jared. Um So, this So, the certified tax rate that we have to meet where the state sets 0.002000, it sounds like the district rate is above that or the proposal would be 0.002000. >> 0.002000 plus about $2 million of revenue which which it's hard to project that right now as far as a rate because we don't have um certified tax rates yet from the county. Once we get those, we'll be able to project those rates and and update the numbers that are on this sheet. >> So, in order to meet our obligation as a district, the proposal is to go a little above that certified rate. We don't feel like we could just go to the
024certified rate and be okay. >> In order to staff the new schools, we would need um an additional we calculated an additional $2 million to do that. So, it would be that that amount beyond the 0.002000 rate. >> Thanks. >> Um so, in your just to clarify, in your when you first started a couple slides ago with your second statement, you said the board and local levy, but it's the board and voted levies, right? >> That is correct. Sorry if I miss misspoke there. >> I just wanted to make sure it's clear on the recording that it's the board and voted levies. Um but then my other question is So, when taxpayers read this tax impact schedule, it looks um like the increases are astronomical under the taxpayer impact part. And yet the estimated percentage
025in uh for total property tax is only 19.1%. So, are are several of our other levies going down? Because um on our uh board voted in capital levies that are listed under the taxpayer increase or taxpayer impact, it's listed as uh 44.2% increase at 38.7 increase. You know what I'm asking? >> Yeah, so those those amounts are specific to those individual levies to show the percentage that they're increasing. But if you take the total revenues that are projected to increase and compare that to the total revenues from property taxes that the district is receiving this year, that's the 19% increase. That would include all of the levies that are that are issued by the school district, not just the three that are that are part of this truth in taxation. >> So, my question is
026are the two other levies that that we do levy um in addition to these three, board voted in capital, are those reducing? >> Likely, but we we really won't know that until we get uh the assessed valuation numbers and certified tax rate from the county. And that'll be in within two or three weeks. We'll have that information. >> Okay. >> And then we we would update everything. >> All right, that'll be great. >> That's part of why I said at the start we did all of these are preliminary and estimates because we're we're working with the best information we have. >> Sure. And we still don't have our certified tax rate. >> Yeah, and that's normal. Um it it typically comes out the first or maybe second week of June. And and that's um prescribed
027in in Utah law. I think it's by the 13th of June the certified tax rate has to be provided to taxing entities. So, it's a normal timeline for all of that. >> So, do you think there's any way we could get the legislature to amend the new um truth in taxation and tax rate increase laws that are where where working under right now to push the deadlines or the the initial deadlines for those back past when we actually have the certified tax rate? Do you think it's possible that we could get those new laws amended? >> Do you mean to move the deadline forward for having a certified tax rate? I want to make sure I'm understanding your question. >> I don't think we can get the certified tax rate moved forward. So, like the
028deadline that we're working on right now with our our first the first meeting in May where we're talking about the the budget >> Mhm. >> um that whole timeline seems like it's um out of sync with when we actually get information from the certified tax rate. >> Okay. >> So, what I'm asking is um I think that those new laws need some amending or some adjustments so that we actually have real information. >> Yeah. Well, I I would anticipate that um cuz many public entities will be going through this process this year and likely there's to be feedback um to the legislature on how that timeline is working. I think it's normal anytime you implement something new, you you learn things as you go along. So, probably some feedback and possibly some refinements or or
029adjustments would be part of that process. That's not atypical in in in our state with our legislative processes that something's passed and then it's refined as we go along. >> All right. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. Anyone else have questions? >> another question just for clarity. So the double the double 02000 we need to be at that number in order to get funding extra funding from the state. That's something we tried to do last time that I think you know we educated the community but just for purposes of this meeting I think it would be good to express or share we're doing this or the proposal is to do this so we get additional funding from the state. Do we know how much additional funding we would get from the state if we hit that
030minimum double 02000? >> Well I I would say the best way Brian to answer that question would would be to say that it it's not really additional funding beyond what we're getting now. It's to keep the funding that we're already getting. >> Got it. >> But more of it more of it would be coming from local property taxes and less from state funding. Um but if we if we were to not if we were to not keep our rate at the double 02000 the result that would be that we would actually start to lose uh millions of dollars of current funding that's already part of our budget. >> I think as a community we need to understand that so when we when as these discussions continue I think if my neighbors recognize that they'll be
031more prone to support this. >> Sure. Yeah. >> There is uh on the website there is uh district report that Todd presented to us a couple weeks ago or last month that um explains a lot of that that we are um >> Eighth lowest? >> We're the eighth >> Go ahead, you go. >> Eighth most reliant on the state for funding. So >> But our property tax rates >> Our tax rates we are the tax I can't speak to the tax rates, I can speak to um our expenditure. We're 39th out of 41 districts in spending per student. So we're second from the or third from the bottom. >> And part of that is because of our property tax our low property tax rates. >> Our tax our tax rate currently is 90% of the
032state average. And our maintenance and operation portion of that is 70% of the state average. >> Right. Thank you. >> No, thank you. >> Anyone else have questions for Jared? >> All right. >> Thank you so much for all of the back-breaking, brain-breaking work that had to go into getting all those numbers ready this early in the budget season, Jared. We appreciate that. Uh next on the agenda is board member reports. Anyone have any report you want to share? >> I have a couple. >> Okay. >> Um so um Brian and I attended the BTech ribbon cutting ceremony today for their new um is it the innovation um >> Innovation >> campus. Yeah. Anyway, I thought it was awesome. It was really um impressive and um it it's a wonderful building and they have so
033many so many great programs down there for um um students and also for adults. So I I was really impressed and maybe Brian can comment a little more on this uh after I'm done. Also um for the BTech um report Chad uh Campbell is going to be retiring at the end of June and he has just been a legend and done such a great job at BTech. He's been there for a couple of decades and and really done some impressive things there. So he will be greatly missed um when he does resign retire. And then um the second uh meeting that I attended this week was the Sky View Smithfield Rec Center meeting and um we approved to um allow $3,500 to $10,000 for inspection and repairs to the basketball standards and the curtains in
034the shared gyms. The original basketball standards and curtains are still there and so um that will be taking place.