001all right good evening everybody i'm tara carr for celebrating brookfield and it is um what is today thursday evening the 10th of february 2022 i'd like to call to order the meeting for the board of selectmen i have myself again first elect me tara carr and selectmen harry shaker present this evening um selecting steve dunn is not present this evening and um with that i'll pass it over to glen rooney board of finance i'd like to call to order the board of finance meeting for february 10th everybody in the board of finance is here except for brianna rucco uh on to you bob okay i'd like to call the february 10th meeting with the board of education to order thank you all for coming we have a quorum if we have four of our seven
002members we do have i think two members will be arriving late because of conflicts so because we started early tonight which is kind of nice so let's start by uh rising for the pledge of allegiance [Music] pledge allegiance to the decline of the united states of america and to the power for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] so thank you everybody for coming this evening our primary goal this evening is to actually share the board of education budget with both before the finance and the board of selectmen we are entering into a uh to the next phase i'll call it of the budget process because i can't call it the first phase because we've been at it for a couple months now um the uh and
003and i will be doing the presentation tonight with help from dr barrel um but before we start um i'd like to turn the floor over to eileen koch if i could because she has a special uh announcement my apologies ahead of time but i heard that it might be somebody's birthday today so there are some cupcakes to help celebrate at the end of the morning happy birthday i promise we wouldn't sing you [Music] okay so my goal would be to go with reasonable pace tonight i know everybody has very busy calendars um and i will pause as often as we need to to do questions and answers as we go or if you'd like you can hold questions till the end and you know so you see the whole picture and then we could do
004that i do recognize that there are more meetings on our calendars and we will have plenty of opportunities to talk in fact the board of education is scheduled with the board of finance i think on march 8th so i'm one of the thoughts glenn and i had is that ought to be a very working meeting we'll do this we won't do this presentation a second time but as uh as people have questions you can send them to myself to dr burrill or mr post or all three of us and we will get them answered right so there might be more detailed questions that people have but we'll talk about that budget as we go along and some of the things we've done already to scrub this budget so let me see if i can get
005this to work right um i put the mission statement up in the first present first chart of every um budget presentation just to remind us it's all about the students right we're here to give a good education to to our children in brookfield the the board of ed is charged with doing that we try to do it with a relatively tight budget mentality but we do understand that there are other pressures that the town has to deal with taxation revaluations and everything else and we like to participate in that process but what the budget you'll get from us today is our best estimate of what it takes to do the educational job that we're charged with so we've been at this budget process now since october it's kicked off at the beginning of october now
006just to remind everyone we're just barely into school and dr burrell sits the principles down and says now start working on your budget for a year from now so the budget process in this in school districts is a never-ending process uh dr that work was started in october was worked through in november it came to the board of education in the first meeting in december which is i think the second it's december 1st this year number first this year we are the earliest district to get a budget from our superintendent of all districts and the reason we've been doing that is then we take it as a board and we really use the month of december and the month of january to exercise it we actually we have a finance committee who goes through all
007the line items all of our board members have a chance to inspect the budget ask questions try to find opportunities to do it as efficiently and as effectively as we can we had a numerous presentations at our board meetings on the various topics we'll be talking about today so it's a very busy month of december and uh january for us we submitted that budget at the end of january uh we're doing this presentation a little over a week later and and we do understand the process now goes all the way into may right as we go through reviews and public hearings um as as a town before i jump into the budget itself i want to talk a little bit about the thing that will dominate the discussion uh for the for school year 2022
0082023 and that's the new elementary school that we have um for those of you who haven't seen it this is the artist's rendering of the of what the new school will look like what you're looking at is the cafeteria entrance right in front of you the main entrance just passed it and the uh young early elementary entrance further we actually have a school design that has a separate entrance for the kindergartners and the first graders because they're just so tiny compared to fifth graders and and what you see here is the front facade which is very natural it will have a stream rolling in front of it that property has a stream that was buried was called eastbrook it was buried for years by the farmer who owned the property and that's why the the
009fields were always a little wet so they're going to open that up and put bridges over it and give a very natural feeling to the to the property what i thought would be interesting and it's only 30 seconds is to show you a little bit of what's really going on right now so this is uh thank you to eric he pulled out his drone and went and did a little video for us so what you're looking at here and if i could do this in the back these are the classroom spaces back in here these are the common spaces the gym and the cafeteria the main offices are here uh this is the beginning of the early childhood side side the the drive will come right in the right in the front here and the
010bridges will kind of grow go across to the entrances of the olympia there's the stream you can actually see the stream bed itself there this is where the parking will be for the new school and i would point out that that's right where huckleberry is now which is what was in the foreground and that's what gives rise to the biggest challenge we're facing in 2022-2023 is how to move into the new building get the parking built and then be able to get all of the teachers to be able to get to the building so they could teach so let me turn to dr barrel for a moment let him talk a little bit about some of the challenges we've been facing sure uh thank you bob and uh and thanks everybody for being here and
011uh assembling this evening we are extremely uh excited uh thrilled and grateful for the opportunity to be building a brand new elementary school that will bring three school cultures together i mean essentially we've got the fifth graders eventually from wisconier they will not no longer be educated in portables they will be at the elementary school which is very appropriate for the age level of course our huckleberry students and our center school students all coming together so we're really excited about that some of the things in terms of timing that have been a challenge and we started to talk about this in very early november because we are working hand in glove with the municipal building committee and mr cecco there was a roofing materials delay so that has has slowed us down a little bit
012and and while uh every every setback could be looked at as a challenge we decided we were going to flip that and look at it as an opportunity and frankly it's it's given us a little bit of the gift of time in terms of some of the planning we're doing with our with our faculty and our staff as we transition over the course of next year having said that um the original plan was it was a full a move in in 2022 at the beginning of the year that is not going to happen actually what's going to happen is we're going to move the huckleberry students at the middle of the year next year into candlewood lake elementary school when it's ready i'm getting a little head of the slide the piece we have to
013think about and bob started to talk about that is the parking situation so as we think this through we only have space and temporary parking space for about half the faculty and staff in subsequent visitors and so when we move the students from huckleberry in the right before christmas time and over the winter break into candlewood lake because it'll be ready by then uh next year and we get the kids in then we vacate huckleberry now what happens the school now the old huckleberry needs to become demolished that takes time you don't just demolish a building like you see on tv and it's an implosion and it's done there's a lot of materials that need to be removed there you have to be safe it's on an active school site there's a lot lot to
014do and you have to have parking as well you can't just use the entire property do whatever you want to do that's going to take some time through the winter months and then the parking will start the asphalt will come together and so forth and all the landscape changes we only will have room for parking for the huckleberry now candlewood lake two three and four grades uh faculty and staff so that's gonna happen all of next year the huckleberry kids start at huckleberry middle of the year they go to candlewood lake they finish the year at candlewood lake center school students next year actually stay at center school for the entire year so center school will be an active school the entire year next year there'll be no disruption to the students of course all
015the kids matriculate a grade at the end of this year to the next grade um and then they will move in at the beginning of 23 24 and fifth graders they'll already be a candle with candle with lake because they'll be fourth graders who matriculate to fifth grade they just won't go to wisconsin for the fall of 23. so we've got a lot going on on there some of the things we the board did is we had a healthy start times committee and we were moving from a three-tier bus system which we have right now down to a two-tier system we postpone that start for one year because of this transition phase we have going on this coming year and you can imagine the the staffing issues that go on when you're bringing three different
016faculties and staffs together three different sets of students together and all the different needs that go on so there's a lot of logistical planning going on in that regard the other piece is uh let's say i want to make sure i touch on everything its ball fields will be repurposed over at wisconsin there's been a lot of conversation about that so we've got a lot going on there's a lot of logistics to handle there's a lot of contracts in terms of the different unions we have with our staff and how we have to make sure that works and then there's structural uh administrative frames that we're working on we'll be announcing over the next few months of how that's going to work so we're really excited and i'll leave it there okay let me just
017pause with any question the reason i wanted to do this is it's going to dominate all of our actions next year right so when you see our budget we don't have any massive new programs or investments that we're we're talking about because this is what we're spending our time on next year we have small things we have to work on but but it is not a major set of new investments for the district because this is uh very important any questions on this oh yeah microphone microphone can you just describe the ball fields the change involved i get this question all the time and i just don't know the answer the change in ball fields from what we have would have before to what we would have after and i think i'm going to answer
018it but i think we need to be careful to not make this a ball fields meeting because we can go down a rabbit hole so that's a good question so we have a 16 and 90 at huckleberry they will not be no longer in existence at huckleberry and we'll be repurposing um we'll rework the 60 that's at wisconsin uh and add the 90 over a whisker i think that's how it's going to work so net there's going to be at this point based on the uh what the nbc is working on with the field study committee um we had net loss of a field at this point um and i know that's still up for conversation so i i do have a question but i also want to say that i'm so excited about this
019this is amazing and i've i've loved watching the progress so thanks to everybody's efforts as far as moving this all along and it's just it's going to be awesome um regarding fields and it's not a ball field question but for for the front of the parking lot space what will there be playing yards or areas where what what's that going to look like there's a grass field area in between where the parking lot the driveway is that i'm told will be about half the size of a soccer field so if you're going to envision you know a 50 yard by 50 yard big area and then there's three playscapes around the back and the size of the building and one of the there's going to be an asphalt playground that has uh some uh a
020basketball court or hoops i should say so for that green space the purpose and the kids will be able to go towards the road and use that space or that's that's the the grassy field we'll have and we will as it gets built and developed we'll look at how we could utilize that thank you you got it it's less than you would think because the parking is such a big building the parking will be bigger than the current huckleberry parking and that all gets leveled out in front with it's up on a hill right now that'll all get leveled out there's quite a bit of parking actually that has to be in front of the school the driveways come in on the sides in one side out the other side so it's that space that's
021right in the middle toward the road so and just one last thing bob i'm sorry uh for anybody who is watching who might be interested um you can go right onto the school the district website and it says new school candlewood lake elementary school and you can click you can see every document about the project as well as all the renderings and so forth that are that are topical type views so you get a feel for the landscape and support okay the second before i jump in the budget the second thing i wanted to talk about well let me just do the goals the goals are the same goals i presented every year we have very simple but pretty broad reaching goals class sizes and enrollment related things we've got to deal with that second
022we want to have a rigorous and effective curriculum third we need to have programs that are continuing to advance our students and kind of evolve with the needs of the world fourth that we have a technology infrastructure that makes it all work and fifth that we meet state and federal laws and their requirements so and there's a lot of those in education as you know especially in the areas of special education grants and and also mandates that we get some some mandates i'd rather not have to deal with and others we do so they're kind of high reach high goals and you'll see those throughout throughout the discussion here's the view of enrollment and i'll start down here on the lower left enrollment is only up four students year to year in aggregate but there's
023an interesting thing going on in brookfield what's we've had historically we had 200 size classes and 200 kids in a graduating class we are still graduating classes at 190 to 200 and we went through a couple of years where we were only bringing in classes of about 150 to 160. we've been those of you who have been on the boards for a while lived through that but what that means is every year we're graduating 200 bringing in another smaller class so overall our our population isn't growing but what's happening is the kindergarten grade is now turning back up so the entry into our district has gone from 150 160 and it is now in one set mid 170s and next year the projection is over 180. so what we've been finding is we're adding instructional
024staff at the youngest levels and lowering instructional staff at the older levels and that's in fact what you'll see again in this year's budget it's an interesting challenge because it creates some multi-faceted issues there's a big push to do school choice you know out of danbury that was approved by the state legislature and conceptually it's a great idea but the program is structured so that you actually bring kids in in kindergarten the one place where we don't have room to bring kids into and uh and so without adding staff we could bring him in but it would be even more staff in brookfield so we're gonna actually be talking to the danbury people who are doing that in the spring and see what we what we can do with that but it is this growth
025in kindergarten every year it's stepping up you know somewhere between eight and ten kids and when you have an average class size of between 18 and 20 that's adding teaching staff so what generally happens to a kindergarten cohort 13 years later does that class size stay the same does it generally go up or down um it goes up slightly over time i did i did a look at that it's been going up a lot more in the last three or four years over time because we are having a big migration of families into brookfield right now so i'm seeing you know you're seeing eight to ten kids coming in in the middle school ages especially um as you look at the enrollments each year so in the last couple years the population of transfer ins
026have been like 20 to 30 maybe [Music] yeah so so you have this interesting phenomena of you know what's happening the other thing is this grouping here between huckleberry center and the fifth graders out of wisconsin that new school is our biggest school right it will be uh uh notably our biggest school um in in the in once it's up and running so it's it'll be very different having three schools than four schools in brookfield i'll just point out a couple of other uh little tidbits our special needs kids it's slightly down seven down year to year the ell students have been growing so or that's english english language learners so these are children whose primary language at home is not english and that has an impact on us and we have a um is
027it on this chart uh yeah so and we have the outplaced students is a very expensive piece of our budget um it's at 31 in our projections for next year that's actually up from this year's budget which was 30 and it's down from where we were in october which was 34. we actually had an influx in september and october so our official report was at 34 but our budget was at 30. and we've been dealing with that all year long in our in our in our outlooks so that's kind of what's going on on enrollment um this is what's happening on class size we used to have a big problem on class size but as the years have gone by as a board we've really worked hard to try and keep within our class size
028guidelines and class size guidelines are up on the top right of the chart so you kind of know we have a high and a low and a target for each grade for each great grade grouping this year the last couple of years we have met them all this year the top end of the range is 20 and we're at 20.3 and 20.8 in the kindergarten and first grade but you may see the note with support and i'll talk about that more as we go through the budget because it's a very important piece of the budget that we're going to show you so we're actually pleased with uh with been able to maintain the right class sizes in brookfield um glenn you always ask me this question what's really going on on the special eds this
029is a very simple chart but we've been we keep our eye name by name by name on what's going in and what's coming out last year we had 30 uh in our budge in our budget three of those are leaving we have four that are coming in and 27 of the 30 ish are consistent from year to year they're not really changing a lot so that would tell you that other than the one additional there's not a lot of dynamics inside the uh the cost of the special ed bob can i just make one yeah um mr belden said oh we keep track name by name the educators keep track name by name even on our fine and it's important on the finance committee uh i i get a number it's all by number uh
030is we keep everything private just to make sure that i get christmas i get student one student two student three is all i ever get so um okay so this is the overall budget um and i've broken it down to try and really kind of get the dynamics of what's going on and what we'll do in the coming charts is go through each of these areas and talk about what's happening to to the spending overall our budget is up 3.8 percent year over year that is made up of a what we call a status quo budget that's kind of if you did nothing right that's what status quo is right so the same programs basically the same staff what's happening to your spend it goes up naturally two point seven percent that in recent years
031has been over three percent um this has been actually one of the lower years in my six years on being on the board in terms of the status quo budget and its growth i'll take you through the detail of what drives that in the next chart um we have a couple of areas that i that are new things that we need to talk about the first one is a bilingual teacher and it's a it's a legislative requirement that we have to deal with john will talk about that a little bit more in the next chart and an upcoming chart we have and that's that's about 0.2 year-to-year growth that's one position that's a teacher a bilingual teacher we have some dynamics on enrollment in this area that's another 0.3 percent year to year growth we
032are asking for four and a half paris that's a half of a paraeducator per classroom and at the request of the teaching staff and the and the administrators at center school they said we would much rather live with a 20.3 class size then add a t and have help than to add a teacher and not have help and so there's been a discussion the costs are not all that different between the two and so we've had a good healthy discussion at our board meeting about that as an option to have a better educational experience for our kids [Music] that's in the 20 point that so that that's why i say with help it's 20.3 it would have we'll show you the numbers it would have been 18 it would have been 18.3 if we had
033added the teacher so the the point down on that very quickly is the the teachers and mrs diamond you know collectively felt that with another set of hands for a half a day a given the pandemic the needs of the student is very different kindergarten first grade the last couple of years than it's ever been before the needs that we're seeing drastically and so the extra set of hands and two more students in my class was better than a new colleague and eighteen kids in a class yep i have one quick question on the uh bilingual teacher is that a dedicated uh for a class can you hold the question because we'll actually have a chart um we're gonna reduce a grade five teacher right and that's in those class sizes that i showed you
034and uh we have the one additional outplay student happens to be a very expensive one sadly so that's enrollment driven that's very straightforward you know this is what's happening with the students we have it's point three percent year to year uh we have a very interesting phenomena and i have a whole chart on it on the arp esser grants and there's the esser grant and the arpester grant and we we have a phase in where certain items actually have to move if we want to keep doing them they have to become a budgetary item and i'll walk you through what are the items and how they roll off in a coming chart and that's these two are the ones for this year and then we have this last little bit here which is the new
035investments we're going to go through them in detail but there's that you see none of them are huge the most important one is a math interventionist at huckleberry and that's driven by the needs of the students who are with what's been happening with covid they really need some help with math and we're seeing that we would actually the net cost of that's less because we would actually reduce two para educators in uh huckleberry because we have the interventionists helping specifically there there's a little bit of need because of the enrollment to take our 0.7 art and music teachers and take them up till full time uh that and then and that's a there's a cost small cost of that the athletic trainer is a difficult story uh because we can't retain we went to a
036service two years ago two years ago three or two or three years ago three years ago and it's just been hard to retain anybody and so we if we're going to retain an athletic trainer for the sports teams we really need to get to a full-time job this is the net cost it's the cost of an employee less look what we were paying for a service boyce hockey this is a last pay-for-play sport we have and we had an appeal from parents to please don't single out the hockey team to do pay for play and uh and it was 16 000 for us to eliminate pay for play there and the last two are situations uh not all secretaries just selected secretaries one in each school and then the athletic uh uh director we find
037ourselves always there right now they're 11 month 11 month employees right they're 11 month employees and we and parents are calling up in the in the summer months saying i need to enroll my child but there's no one there to answer the phone and uh and we have a an athletic director who has to organize the fall sports but he's only got 11 months and he's out in the summer so it's it's we always earn a scramble at the beginning of the year so we you know for relatively modest increasing amount of money it was that made sense to us to tactically you know make the make the schools work better so the net of that is 2.7 status quo that the next couple of categories are are enrollment driven another you know almost 0.5
038percent uh we have the arpa situation and then we have these small numbers of investments so and we'll go through each of those in a little bit more another question i'm sorry yeah um so i was just doing a little bit of math the salary per para does isn't the same on the ones being added versus ones going being taken away it's not huge but if you divide the 100 998 by 4.5 you get 22 444 if you divide the 39 790 by two you get 1995. so why why why are the why are those two numbers different and then it's probably the specific people that we have step and what step they're on right because we we actually have a range of salaries and the the the ones you hire and the ones you
039uh are letting go maybe have different salaries so the ones being hired are actually being hired at a higher salary than the ones being let go according to this chart can you need a microphone so my point being that it would be you would save probably you know 15-ish thousand dollars if the salaries being let go were applied to the salaries being i hear what your question is yep so yeah the numbers don't stack right he's saying for two it's forty thousand for two on the removal side but when we get there i understand what the question is so we'll we'll get the specific answer back to you because we build that up from the bottom so so there's got there's there's it's a very interesting that how quick you are at spotlight it's been
040four years i'm curious to know what that salary range is for paris as well okay it's an hourly rate they're hourly employees so uh we actually our contracts are online and we'll get you the ranges yeah well contracts are online yeah and it should be in the book right i think all the yeah the salaries are in the book yeah all the salaries are in the book yeah we have all this information we do have this information yep we just got to look at it that's all good yeah we didn't see it for us to go back we just got it right back but we don't know the assumption this is why we do this exactly these questions on the table so we can talk our way through every lots of people in a room
041thank you um all right so this is the status quo 2.73 and i um two point seven three percent is one point one point two seven seven million dollars if you look at what's driving that it's in these first four lines and then there's a lot of little pluses and minuses on smaller line items the salaries is up two and a half percent that's actually better than we've seen um in in prior budgets we are um we're aggressively um we were keeping the same assumption on uh on retirement so we haven't tried to back off from what we've agreed to in the past so it's still two hundred thousand dollars there but we realize that's fluid too and that tends to be very understand we understand completely it's a good healthy discussion that we've had
042in the last you know three budgets if it changes we have to adapt to the change that's the good like i say number that we've agreed to so this is a nice this is the same tight budget philosophy and i'll need your support as we you know build the aggregate budget benefits are up 4.9 percent this was when we approved this it was before the most recent new news that we were getting that that's actually going to come in higher than that so you don't have that reflected in this budget yet so we've agreed that with uh with you and with uh the finance director for the town that we would patch that in after after we had approved this and that's part of us driving you yes so the town does know you always
043put in a higher estimate we try to get you down to you know closer we push you to get the latest information yeah so the latest information you got drove you down to 499 but then it take up new information that's going to drive you back that's correct so this is not an ad this is not any business no this is just where the number lies that's what the number is and this is one of those topical areas where the insurance companies aren't on the same budget calendar that we're on right they tend to bring you their number their actual final rates in february and march right but and so we're always doing a placeholder and it affects the town side and the school side the exact same change again yeah but we asked for
044that on our site for you to do this this isn't you this is we asked you to go with it so we had an idea sure but i just want to make sure this doesn't include anything since we had approved it back in midtown more than likely going to go up from the latest information that's correct okay transportation costs are up six percent that's nothing more than a new contract um every five years uh we are required by the state to go out to bid we've just completed the bid process the lowest uh bidder was was this bid and [Music] of course bus companies they the bidding process also involves new equipment and uh you know revamping for the next five years because you know buses wear out so they look at their fleet and
045they replace the ones that need to be replaced the problem is this cost of vehicles is going through the sky so so this is uh this is what's driving the transportation it is not a change in what we're doing this is all just the cost of the contract and utilities and fuel oils we had a really good rate for uh for fuel oil in this last year and uh and what were the numbers you told me this morning ken it was about a dollar sixty a gallon for diesel fuel and heating oil and the estimate we got from our contract here for the budget was 239 per gallon so this is uh it's a big driver to our uh to the to the overall so if you look at those four categories that's basically the
046entirety of the increase and i you know i i i you have a book that has all of the detailed line items i'll touch on one or two items the custodial and maintenance supplies is all about air handling and the fact that the air handling equipment in the schools is running non-stop and we are we need to replace filters and you know and all the things that go with that the cost of custodial and maintenance supplies are also going up helpfully and the furniture and equipment is a tiny little budget here and it just happens to be that we're doing some replacement of certain things in certain classrooms so and i i don't have the specifics of those but primarily the high school art classroom stools tables storage units so i'm terry you got a
047question sorry to back pedal but does the gasoline for the transportation come with the contractor do we pay separately we pay for the we pay for the gasoline thank you we generally would get a better deal by us doing it because we have more negotiating leverage so we usually go out to bid with the town with the furniture and equipment is what is the process for evaluating the condition is it based on a teacher reporting that my desks are kind of old and wobbly or is that is there like a schedule of replacing equipment at a certain time i don't believe there's a replacement but every year the teachers do make requests of the principal and principal checks out everything that they are asking for and makes a determination of what to bring forward okay
048okay how about how about equipping candlewood lake school is that and fun and furniture is that so in yeah so in the actually it's pretty exciting and dan i'm glad you asked the question because i should have said it when we were when i was on that early slide um as a matter of fact the board will be attending this board will be attending not in session but there at town hall for the municipal building committee on tuesday night where we're going through a presentation on all of the furniture that is in the cost of the new building so we will be moving into brand new furniture the teachers the nurses the administrators the you know so many people been a part of selecting this furniture so we're really excited about it so we're going
049to have a pres a presentation from the architects we're going to go through that with the municipal building committee there'll be an approval there most likely the board needs to see that presentation because to go out to bid the board on wednesday night at its regular meeting needs to uh also approve that same uh bid process right at that point yeah and those costs are in the the mbc budget that they made they're in the school project budget not at all in the operating system and and and uh the one of the interesting challenges uh because we're not bringing a lot of furniture over from huckleberry uh into the new school so one of the side questions we've asked is okay given the speed we have to exit huckleberry hill school what are we going
050to do and how are we going to you know what are we going to do with the existing stuff most of it's old right it probably just gets scrapped but there may be a opportunity to help local charitable organizations or maybe have a little auction or something right help the other schools and maybe help they will take some things over to the schools if they if they fit sure but like well the teachers the teachers shelves and teacher desks perhaps yeah so um and there are bob also just as i'm sorry to interrupt you the um there are some furniture that we are tagging it's furniture for occupational therapy physical therapy some of those students with profound needs fire proof cabinets which are extremely expensive we're tagging we will bring bringing those over uh all
051of the phys ed equipment will be brought over so we're tagging all of that taking pictures having that ready for move management services when the time comes to ask a question of the transportation um with the i know that we delayed the the new school start time but do we expect that that will impact maybe drive it down next year um when we're no no well basically the transportation companies have to guarantee their drivers a certain number of hours otherwise they can't keep them okay so going even though we're going to be consenting times a little bit and it was the same with both of the companies that did even with the driver shortages from the panda i mean maybe that will level off as the pandemic ends but um that's interesting yeah yeah the
052uh the the new school start times is an exciting uh proposal it actually gets the high school kids not up at the early early hours that they're getting up today and uh i think we move the time out eight o'clock to eight o'clock for the high school we will run two concurrent runs we'll run a middle school and high school run and then the second run is going to be a uh elementary school run so middle school high school are on separate buses i knew that question everybody wants to know it's not a budget question but that's a question everybody wants separate buses and then there and so there's a there's a it changes completely uh especially for the high school kids so bob what does that do to the uh closing time for the
053day of school for the high school it's 45 minutes later we moved everything 45 that doesn't interfere with the uh we've worked out with the sponsors most of i want to say about two-thirds at the time this is going back two or three years now when we did the study of the swc schools in the area schools are moving to that later start time or already have moved to that later start time because of that and it is a healthier start time for your superintendent who won't have to go i could at least get up at 4 45 on those days rather than four so trying that all right um so that's the status quo budget so here i'm just going to quickly go through some of these because i've already talked autumn the bilingual
054teacher law requires that if you have over 20 kids registered where a particular language is their their language spoken at home you need to have a bilingual teacher and a bilingual program that's not a english-speaking teacher coming in and and trying to teach them english that is somebody who speaks the language natively and you're running a program that helps them do that um at huckleberry we the way it works is you get the report this year it's the following year when you have to put it in so we actually know we've crossed the threshold of 20 spanish-speaking students at huckleberry when we put the new school in we're going to be well over 20 students between the all the grades that are going so this is going to whether we we we have to do
055it by law we really are going to have to do it you know as as we keep going forward this is going to be a a continuing need at the new elementary school and bilingual is a special certification different than a tesol teacher just in case anybody is curious about that is that is that a position that is easily hireable no okay i'm thinking back to some of the other people yeah you have to write a special letter to the state and request you have to post the job for bilingual if you exhaust through the summer candidates or can't find any candidates you can't find the right fit you then could with a special permission go to this go to the state obtain a special permission to then work and find a tesol teacher which
056is a little more common uh that wouldn't be ideal based on certification but you have to do what you can do because the students need to and these 20 or more students are not in the same class so they're floating around this teacher is going to be floating to different classrooms correct sometimes bring the students together other times be all over the place special schedules et cetera and then when you consolidate to candlewid lake elementary school if you hit 40 students you need to have two is it like a ratio if it's just one that's not just one okay for length we asked the question whether we were near the 20 on any other language and it doesn't look like we're there yet but it could go there right i mean there's a lot of
057change going on in our community and it is spanish is that spanish and now portuguese would be a different one if correct okay you're due we've we've got about 15 languages we've got a lot bring terror in there there you go perfect so that's that's that one um these are the uh the other enrollment driven items um we uh um we are we can reduce one fifth grade teacher and stay within the the class guidelines so we're doing that because it's so it's a tight way to run the budget which is the right thing to do um we've talked at length about the four and a half fte some of the data is here if we had put the teacher in we would have gone from over the top end of the range to 18
058which is at the lower end of the range it would have been within the range and uh the cost difference the paris was a hundred thousand the a new teacher would have been 90. so it's about a 10 000 difference when you get back when you get back to us on that can you is that loaded with the benefits that a hundred thousands so and the reverse of that is the benefits on the back side coming up right because yes i don't think the low number is loaded with the benefits on the back side out i think that's your difference that makes sense all right that i think that may be i'll go back a little bit it's not a big deal it's a good time there's another point bob i'd like to make just
059we we we're saying and we want to be sensitive to our staff this reduction of a fifth grade teacher it's actually the reduction of an fte it just would come from the fifth grade section it doesn't mean that teacher is going to be reduced there's puts there's takes there's retirements there's resignations every year we've gone through this we haven't actually had to lay off a teacher with a reduction in a certain grade level so i want to be sensitive to our fifth grade teachers um we've got a lot of great people there and i don't want them to hear this meeting and get nervous with somebody saying you know you're going to be laid off you're the last one in first one out kind of thing we want to be sensitive to that yeah the
060other thing i will just add on the para educators is those youngest grades are hit pretty hard with what's been going on in covet right it is great to have as extra arms and legs as they're in the classroom getting acclimated to their first experiences in school so to us as a board this was very positively received so i don't think you're getting pushback from this i think you're just getting let's just make sure i'm at that i'm with you no i'm not taking you're not taking this pushback so um so and the outplacement we talked about is the one additional suit and that was 124 000. so um and we also know speaking here at the table since we're all talking that could change we might have two come in yeah and we have
061another hundred thousand we have three come in we have another hundred thousand this is what we had we had a year like that if i remember just so we all know like we're all in the public knows that we're you guys are projecting this this could change this if i if i were to expand on that this is the hardest part of budgeting in the schools is calling what you're going to have on our place students it's their bit one kid could change the entire equation right and it's hard for all of us especially if you happen to have a big influx in any one given year and over the past several years you know between the two boards we've agreed to put you you set a baseline and then if there's overage we're going
062to agree to cover that so we're still operating under that same yeah we agreed that it would be better not for us to put the contingency because there's more of a base for the town to carry the contingency which i think is a smart move and the other thing um you know we all have our own context in our small communities here in the same region uh my regional colleagues when i've talked to them as they're putting their budgets together they're having significant upticks like we did a few years ago in their special education budget so we're in a fortunate place in comparison to some of the neighboring districts just to let you know that yeah i hope it stays that way um this is the situation with the esser grants so we had about
063between the esser and the art besser grants the schools got about 1.2 million dollars allocated to them can you explain what that is for everybody so the uh the uh sr stands for what uh elementary and secondary schools education uh relief recovery relief excuse me recovering and it's the it's the federal uh recovery funds and they came in two ways so it was the esser and then the arp s was the second wave we spent a lot of time as a board of going through how to use those funds i know the town is actually going through that same process um the lesson we so so if you can see we broke it down on how we spent the 1.2 million in the yellow and it came with a some one-time spending you know these
064were things that you you know things we needed uh on some professional development to help do remote learning for example um to some equipment like chromebooks and they were just one-time events they'd have no long-term repercussions financially to us as a district other than we got really helped where we needed it the interesting part is the ongoing we we launched some programs on the back of the arp esser funding uh including a social studies instructional coach at the middle middle school starting at the middle school starting at the middle school this year um you can see i'm not going to go through all of them but a social worker math tutor instructional coach for science uh a technology integrator this helps you know the using technology in the classroom and summer school which we had
065never really had summer school except for special education now we have a summer school for all kids and it's needed right because it's a chance to catch up and a little bit of occupational therapy the problem with them is that once you start the program you have to deal with it in the long run or you have to stop it right so of course once we start summer school we'd like to continue summer school so we took a long hard look at how would we how long would we fund each of the items so that we didn't have a cliff on every uh you know we're going to fund it for two years and then we got a million dollar cliff that we have to deal with so we you can see we phased them
066out over the years and the if the orange was what we would have to put in the budget and as you can see the the bottom line on the chart that meant this year was 130 000 impact of the budget is mostly the social studies instructional coach a little bit of the technology integrator i couldn't figure out how to do that graphically but it was we partly funded that um and uh and next year it would be 265k in the following year 176k we can move those around a little bit partially funding things as we as we deal with it but um right now that's what the plan is and so the the 130 that you see in this year's budget is that first roll off the we do have we do recognize that this
067has an impact in the following years right so as we've been taught this may be our investment money for each of the next couple of years our primary driver of above status quo so we do know that's ahead of us so uh but this is i wanted to lay this out for you on what's really going on and why there's this thing called our fester it's how you start with a grant and then you you know move it into the regular budget over time so i do like that you broke it out and call it an investment as opposed to status quo because in reality you did take that s or money and make investments correct that's kind of outside of the budget process outside of the approval process and the vote and the referendum
068process you added staff that wasn't necessarily approved based on the grant that now kind of has to be continuously we have we have to ask for it as an investment right because from where for where we said is if we don't get it approved it is an investment that we're dealing with right you'd end up having to figure out how to stop something that would be that's a good thing for our district but it's uh it is an investment we agree with you we have a big jump the biggest of the jumps is in 23 24 and on the town side that's concerning because that's also when we start paying principal on the new school but offsetting that or will there be something do we know yet offsetting that with the savings from combining two
069schools to one when we first did the projection back in 2018 we were thinking i think the number was 200 000 if my memory serves me right have we been able to look at that at all to to see uh to quantify that or is i know that things are so fluid sure great question marsha obviously things are fluid we want to make sure and and no one when we were putting this all together and planning for that in terms of personnel we're thinking about the pandemic and the extreme needs of the students however big savings is around that 200 000 and i think that's a conservative estimate we've asked tech on their engineers to to take a look at the energy savings compared to what we budget now versus when we're in the new
070school and i think i think we're around there so um that that number is still relatively true so we're gonna keep uh working that but if you're talking the energy savings is it also factored in we have to heat the building still so pipes don't freeze and everything else or is it just considered a shutdown or is that all no i think they could they considered that i know can work directly with it but that was a consideration because you can't just get rid of center school you've got to keep it at 50 degrees or whatever it is exactly if you're not using it so i give you this i suspect when we get back to getting together again this will be an important piece of our discussion as you as you internalize this there
071is room for us to move the things around on the funding from the grant versus the funding in the school so if the if the right answer was do a little more this year spread you know maybe take you know fund some more in the budget this year so you don't have a big hit hit the following year that's perfectly in the range of you know what we might be able to do we're you know so i think this is this is what we have filed right now and uh but we've moved it around twice already so my first glance at your budget was that's this is the main talking point of this whole budget this is the main project pretty much falls in line with everything that i expected i don't know about the
072rest of the my team here but it fell in line pretty much what x but your salaries are salaries and we expected gas and oil to go up we expected all you this is the one point here that for us is difficult and i'll explain it wise it was brought in in between budgets so there's a lot of positions that were added that weren't in the last referendum now we have them if we go with this we have them in this one and not only we have them in this one we carry them now through the next three correct and that's the piece i think that we're going to have to discuss a little bit more and see what we can do in my opinion i'm only one member but my opinion so we kind
073of expected that so that's um so so now these i'm we'll quickly go through these because i touched on them and let me let john so that i'm not doing all the talking change it up for you so i'll be very brief because because we've actually had questions and hit the details in the earlier charts so just briefly on new specifically on new investments that are not part of an arbester investment conversation the math intervention is at huckleberry again pandemic driven needs of students math achievement down we want to make sure we're giving our students a certified teacher who is expert in mathematics and instruction with students who need intervention rather than two para educators who we've been using in the past and just to be frank the paraeducator positions have been difficult to fill
074difficult to keep folks many of our para educators who start in those positions are needed in um to meet ieps for students with special needs who need a para and so that becomes the primary need because you can't not fund that and so the regular ed suffers in that regard in terms of intervention so the we can we can recruit and retain an expert interventionist much more than we can hold on to a paraprofessional position uh to transition for the principal secretaries our three k-8 uh principal secretaries work 11 months we want to move them to 12 months for family engagement as bob talked about a little bit earlier there's a lot of hiring in the summer that goes on uh so there's a lot of scheduling and that kind of a thing general overall
075organization uh whether it's crisis plan updates uh different mandates and expectations and reports from the state that are demanded by the end of the summer the secretaries play a key role not only in our climate culture but obviously supporting the principle to get the job done over the summer as we all know education continues to get more and more complex and complicated and schools don't shut down like in the old days for this for the summer it is a active place all summer long transition of the athletic director bob talked about that again it's very similar you can't have someone off in july and then have activity going on all of july with coaches and students and then starting that first week of august physicals and again engaging with families engaging with students all the
076things that need to happen to have a top-notch program something that we are very proud of that we haven't talked about tonight is an achievement and the support that you all gave us and the community gave us is this year we have gymnastics for our girls for the first time for a winter sport we have boys volleyball which is a rare sport from ciac that high schools have we have it now in our first year they'll be starting this spring and we're going to fully fund hockey which many schools don't do so we have a complement of all ciac sports now which is really fantastic so we're really appreciative john i have one quick question bob maybe you can open this one was the region but was the reason uh budget driven when we went
077from a full-time uh um athletic trainer it was two it was a budget we reduced it to to help with the budget because jen i mean and that really was a hit because it was so beneficial yeah to have a full-time yeah and it was you probably were still on the board when we did that because it was one of those years we had a big cut and yeah we were looking for places to cut and it was a savings i think it might have happened during one of those years with the special education budget was extremely high and we had five things i think it was the year that my last year on the board talking about last minute uh special ed if you remember bob in november we had 12 health outsource students
078yeah we have 1.2 million dollar exposure in november in november we got but we had 12 go yeah big hit that year i think that that's what drove you off the board that was my last point briefly on the art and the music again another budget hit a few years ago we had a full-time art and a full-time music teacher at center school but the way we were able to creatively work the schedule with the unnecessary budget reduction we reduced those positions down to 0.7 what that has done has created turnover in those positions because as soon as there's a full-time position in another district a teacher who's part-time moves on to the full-time position and we put a lot in professional development into our staff and it's good money after bad we don't want
079that to happen so we want to keep our people the other thing is with fifth grade coming into candlewood lake two years from now we need to be ready because we're gonna we have to have those 1.0 positions so we want to build our capacity meet the enrollment for the coming year and be ready for candlewood lake when everybody comes together and then the last one is the hockey which we've talked about so i don't think we need to say it can the girls um play on the boys teams or is that not true so for like boys hockey can girls participate in that sport um i believe they can um i haven't had a situation where they've asked uh recently but yes they can we did have one we did we have one gal
080who played on the uh in mike's mike's senior year she played she played that and there are hockey tara is not a cic sanctioned sport for young ladies however there are schools that pull together co-op teams that do play each other but it is not officially a ciac sport just because there isn't anything in fact our team is a co-op team yeah it's with where brookfield uh uh bethel and danbury called bbd okay so then we have two other slides and bob you go to the next one this is a slide there's a lot of other things we're doing besides our new investments that are achieved through our base budget um and we continue to work through our base budget so i'm not going to read through all of these because we've been at this
081an hour already but really the focus here curriculum instruction assessment professional development those are really the keys here you'll see some investment in science you'll also see um investment in starting to take a look at new curricular tools to make sure we're matching our uh curricular needs and our student needs so that's really the highlight here and i'll leave it at that i don't think i need to read through all of those for you and then the next slide is again out of the base budget is technology based our one-to-one uh digital environment uh making sure we have the platforms and supports we need for our students and for infrastructure and also we want to upgrade our website for a more user-friendly interactive opportunity and eric's doing a lot of wonderful things with our techs
082on that and also integrating that with our new technology integrator you know instructional coach that we have that helps all of our teachers with integrating technology so we're not we're not always asking for money we're trying to do a lot with what we've got we've got a lot going on so look that's the last of the presentation charts i just leave you with a chart that kind of ties into your book um the budget is as we said 3.8 percent year-to-year increase made up of the status quo enrollment related things the esser grant and investments i wanted to put on the last page just how that showed up in the line items because as you're looking at your your budget you might ask questions like why is you know why are salaries up more than
083bob showed you at two and a half percent well the reason is that some of the investments we have roll into the different line items so we are at your disposal to answer any questions that you might have on how things work in the detail budgets that are in your book and uh and i will pause and ask if there's any questions excellent presentation thank you thank you i appreciate your work and um the starting point in the last few years that you've given to the board of selectmen i think is fair and very well thought out and it's well appreciated i will i will give thanks to the administration and all the board members who have participated we actually have every one of our board members is looking at the budget throwing questions in
084i hope you found that q a document like we did last year useful we find that extraordinarily useful to share and you know hear what each of us are asking so we like to make sure that we're as open and transparent as we can in everything we do so anyone from our side questions i think we're good from our side thank you i just want to say thanks again everybody for all the hard work that you put in especially over the last two years and it hopefully fingers crossed we can move forward and have brighter days ahead especially as we open the new school the q a has been fantastic i looked at the one from from last budget cycle and that was helpful early on glenn pointed it out to me with john early
085on and then it's just it's been a fantastic very useful presentation so thank you thank you thank you um uh if you uh first elect my car if select a woman car i ought to do this right um if you have questions i know you're under the big tightest deadline in terms of what you need to do with the budget if you have questions you know you know you can call me or ken or john in the next days because i know those deadlines are coming and for the board of finance partners we have a meeting on the 8th if you have detailed questions throw them at us right if we can get them by the beginning of the month it will give ken a chance to staff them outright and we can use our
086time in the eighth very productive way so agree well thank you all thank you everyone thank you uh and with that the board of education meeting without uh objection is adjourned for the finance meeting is also adjourned all right thank you all have a good evening great night everyone happy birthday board of finance and and border selectmen i've got some budget books for you and there's cupcakes cupcakes there's cupcakes [Music]