001we have a call for corn please here here thank you Ashley stand for the pledge pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and just as strong excuse me foreign [Music] thank you for joining us again our dedicated and loyal audience uh Mr gripple we're going to turn over to you just around anyone this is a finance committee meeting in the whole we are uh Midway through our budget Workshop review for proposed 2023 24 24 budget so Mr gripple it's all yours thank you Mr chair um I'll open the floor for a public comment on the previous um meetings that we've had enough seeing none uh we'll move on to uh I'll hand it over Mr massiano
002Workshop session and the agenda for this evening is to go through the remaining three budget categories of structural expense support services and maintenance and operations and within instructional expense I will introduce Robin and carry our director of pupil Personnel Services to give you an overview of special education services for next year um before we jump into those topics just a quick refresher and I see the same audience and and uh board members are here but a couple board members were absent last week so just at a high level you know the budget lens that that we use for this budget includes a balance of Staffing programs and services so we can meet our educational goals and maintain fiscal prudence and we always look at complex thinking and social emotional learning as part of what we
003do here at the Cheshire Public Schools the key assumptions that we use to build this year's budget includes the projected enrollment increase that primarily affects K through or pre-k through six where we're going uh enrollment growth is is also driving special education needs which which Ms Kerry will talk about the need to fund the medical benefits account claims and also operations and maintenance the increases there primarily are in utilities electricity as well as as our heating costs in terms of the total board budget recommendation to 85 million 872 591 so that was the summary from the presentation that we had on Tuesday evening last week um I did want to go through two quick updates the follow-up information from last week's meeting the first one has to do with the pension and I know this
004is really a little bit hard to read um but I did print so I feel on the screen and it's really kind of hard at this angle if you're sitting on this end of the table but this First Column is the 2021 interim event interim valuation of the pension plan and that was used to come up with last year's budget number for pension and it's highlighted here it's 767. so that's what's in this year's budget the columns or the rows that I highlighted here are really the ones I want to focus on because what I'm going to talk about is the 2022 evaluation that we just received and that will drive our final budget number so in this in this going back to the 21 intro evaluation at the top you'll see that there's a
005mortality Improvement scale MP 2019 that was the mortality table that was used for this year's budget the interest rate of seven percent that's the interest rate assumption that the actuaries used on a pension requirement and then I highlighted a little bit lower the funded ratio of 73.5 that's means that the funds that we have assuming seven percent the mortality table we've funded at 73.5 of the obligation this is not just by the way for the board events um Board of Ed pension this includes if you look at the bottom sewer pool Town um and Board of Ed is part of that and then look last section I'm going to talk about is what was the actuarily determined contribution for last year it was about 2 million 242 681 of which 928 000 was for the
006board's contribution so this 2022 evaluation we just received this and they call it 2022 because it was as of July 1 2022 and that's driving what we need to budget for next year and this you'll see it as three different columns um the First Column where it says no changes what that's referring to is that there's no change in the mortality cable the seven percent is still used to drive the interest that's the interest rate assumption if we accept that the funded ratio is 73.8 percent so actually the the July course valuation was pretty good so we're funded at a little bit of a higher percentage than we were in based on the 2021 valuation so you could dropping down a little further based on no changes to the mortality table and the seven percent
007interest rate the actual uh contribution for all the plans would be 2 million 233 234. so the bottom line is the board's budget which dropped at 900 12 155. that's what we would have budget this year if you use that set of assumptions however in the next column there's a new mortality table highlighted MP 2021 using the same seven percent interest rate I'm just going to cut to the chase if that is what is used then the board's contribution would actually drop down to 905 thousand so the only change there is the mortality table has been updated and of course our contribution drops does anybody know what that means happened in the mortality table life expectancy actually decrease the top works and that's primarily because and then the last column is the new mortality table
008but with the 6.75 interest rate assumption the reason that you're seeing that column is that is what the actuaries with the Town Council and their I'm not sure they're recommending but they're suggesting that we may want to drop our interest rate assumption to 6.75 and in doing so we would have to contribute more in order to meet a future pension obligation so in that case the board's budget would need to be 951 289. just one second what we budgeted what's in the budget that's been presented in front of you is 948 767 . so we're certainly enraged even if the council who's the ultimate Authority besides that they want to drop the interest rate assumption we're within three thousand dollars that makes a question no you're interested already it's a Town's decision actually I do
009have a question interest rate you is it it's the rate that they're using like a growth rate or something we're not we're not collecting seven percent no they're using that as the Assumption yeah it's a race gotcha yeah yeah yeah okay so even if we go to the 6.75 um our our funding ratio actually is in a worse position then so what explains that and um I don't know I we seem to be doing better with a seven percent return if we could just get the market to cooperate you don't have to [ __ ] I mean this is a long-term assumption now if you compare us about a decade ago there's a pension plan was funded over 100 percent we were using an eight and a half percent Insurance assumption and by dropping the return assumptions
010from eight and a half down to seven is that reduced the funded percentage um to try and make it feel a little bit better if we look at the statement in plans or the teacher friendship plans they're funded at about 15 to 55 range so we're relatively good shake and I don't know that there's any discomfort about being you know above 70 percent funded at all right I'd like to be more funded but um yeah there's a lot of assumptions here and is the 6.75 or 7 long-term um I think it's pretty conservative is my opinion and I'm sorry one more two we know what our return this year was well it was about a minus 15 but the year before we were up over the pension plans were over 20. so you know last
011year the market we're down looked at unless the presentation last Tuesday night the portfolio was primarily invested in equities it was only about 15 to 20 percent you know bonds and more conservative Investments so it's not surprising that it had a negative return last year so one of the things that's been a concern for me in the past particularly with the teachers pension the state level I think at one point it was it was below 50 it was probably close to like 30 or 40 percent and in theory just in theory if everybody retired at the same time there would have been a massive problem with it so word funded it the board part is funded well it's yeah it's 70 right now with regard to our staff have this I believe is closed out
012to new staff correct since . I'm sorry the audio is better yeah we've called we closed it out to new staff in 2012. okay and about about how many staff do you have right just 50 is it no there's who are still eligible to enter the pension I think it's about 120 100 or so that haven't retired that are still in that plan as opposed to actually notice here a couple of hundred plus are now in the defined contribution plans which are the plans that you know new employees so in the in the past decade or so you've added a few hundred employees right the okay and that's basically everybody besides certified staff this is all non-certified staff yeah they're funding their own that's basically the teachers yeah and the administrator yeah they fund their
013own pension it's not an obligation yeah or an expense on the board's operating right yeah okay that's that's fine um and I know I have the numbers in last week's presentation but it's much many more employees are in our new defined contribution plan than there are in the pension plan but that doesn't mean the liability is any smaller and just to give you a sense we're budgeting 948 000 for the pension plan and about 300 seventy thousand for the defined contribution plan contributions yeah we're we're moving towards the day when that risk the theoretical risk of everyone retiring at once creates a massive problem it's just built into the budget because it's a defined contribution instead right okay thank you you're welcome okay good on that okay and then the other thing I was reminded
014that we forgot when we talked about the things that are coming soon on health and wellness we do have our Pinewood Derby this Saturday um you know this is this year's event we have about 20 participants this is an adult pinewood derby meaning that it's you know typically this is done by the Boy Scouts but with our adult pinewood derby the car weight allowed is much heavy it's 12 ounces it's very competitive there are 19 people aiming to displace Marlene Solano as the two-time winner of the pinewood derby and this does get a lot of attention we broadcast it on YouTube you know even though there's 20 participants there's a lot more people that watch it on YouTube there's a lot of family involvement there's a lot of competitiveness and there's a little bit of
015a buzz you know in the schools about doing this so there is you know a real benefit to doing these kinds of programs you know for our staff so I did want to share that and when we have the link to the live stream we'll share it with the board members as well because you could you could tune in It's One o'clock on Saturday okay so now we'll move into the agenda for tonight instructional expense um you'll see here that instructional expense is about 5.4 percent of the requested budget the budget requests for next year is 4 million 667 on 92. so the increase is about two point um three seven percent the largest categories of an instructional expense are here it is the special education tuition line these are for students that we cannot
016serve in District that we send them to a center that specializes in helping them with their specific needs and so that's about 2.2 million dollars budgeted for next year it is flat to this year um and Miss Kerry will talk about you know why that is and then another 808 000 is what we call pupil Services these are Consulting and other services that we typically pay provide us for to service the needs of our students you know mostly in District but sometimes for students that are outside of District so that's the Lion's Share about 65 percent of instructional expense and then the other categories are instructional Supply textbooks newer replacement equipment about 250 000 staff training library periodicals media and items that we need and then testing an adult at Supply so that's kind of
017the high level um breakdown of what instructional expense is I'll just quickly highlight a couple of lines here because you see some of these lines um you know we're holding pretty steady this is the big one tuition out placements staying steady at about 2.25 million some of the increases you'll see here eleven percent six percent and seven percent for our instructional textbook and and library items you know what we're trying to do is get this budget back to a historical levels we've been funding it pretty low the last couple of years because of the budget reductions that we've experienced and then we're trying to get new and replacement equipment up to the 125 thousand dollar level each so all totaled the request is is relatively modest at 2.37 for instructional expense I do want to
018start to kind of focus on special education and then I'll turn it over to miss Carrie so this this shows our historical special education cost by year going back to 2018-2019. and you could see that the percentage of our budget that goes towards special education has remained kind of steady and you know fluctuating between 24 and a half and 25 and a half percent one thing that you'll notice here in the circled boxes the number of students that have an individualized education plan has increased rather dramatically this year where uh last year we're at 577 but as of like this week we're at 619 special education students so as I was you know talking a little bit earlier about the assumptions that we used in this budget where enrollment was increasing in the special ed
019enrollment is increasing as well and that's driving some of the budget requests this year uh next year's projection at 6 25 you know is is uh probably light but we didn't want to overreach on the projection and you could see that the percentage of students that have an an individualized education plan has increased from about 12.6 percent we're at about 14.7 percent this year and then projecting to be at about 15 for next year and the cost per special ed student is about two two and a half times you know excuse me about two times what it is for a regular education student so we're just breaking out the math in this chart and with that I will introduce Miss Carrie who will take you through her presentation on special education and then we'll come
020back and wrap up the rest of the lines okay good evening so this is my first opportunity to have to actually present live to you guys for the past couple years we've been virtual on this night and so I've done it from my office so it's nice to be in person this year okay all right so I wanted to give you a couple updates as to some of the things we've been working on last year you know I came we asked and requested a transition coordinator we have a large population of students from 14 to 22 that required transition services and so we put that new position in place and it's been just a tremendous difference in the first few months that we've had her here so um the position was put into place to
021comply with the state mandate and what we really wanted to do was provide a very consistent oriented process and identifying the transition needs for our students so that required us to do assessments and to look at evaluations so we've updated our assessment toolkit and we've been applying those and doing conducting evaluations and determining the needs of our students which then drives the IEP goals and objectives in the area of employment post-secondary education and daily living skills if needed our transition coordinator also has already jumped on board with supporting our families there was a fall presentation with DDS and BRS that was I was over the top excited about the number of students that um came in person and were online it was one of our most highest attendance that we've had in a parent presentation
022in this winter will be um presenting a transition fair come March we have several different agencies that are available to our students once they graduate from here and they are now looking for those Services after the age of 22. we also did present a financial planning evening again very well attended so that's nice to see so our transition coordinator is helping our school-based teams also work with those assessments and to plan for our students in their transition needs thank you another area that's been focused on with this new position is really growing our opportunities for students to get experience in the employment setting or in the um work setting so some of you as you can see some of the places listed here are places that our students have visited and or worked at these
023work sites as well as some that have been in the past that we haven't accessed so much recently but are hoping to get back on board and get our students there oh my God one of our main focuses over the past couple years has been on Executive function executive function is all the skills you see listed up there that really um support our students in being independent um and building those independent skills developmentally appropriate we always look at it from that lens what's developmentally appropriate for students to be able to be independent to and then we try to address those deficits in those areas to build those skills so again we focused on assessment we've done a lot of professional development training with our school psychologists our special ed teachers and our Support Services in
024looking at those assessments pulling out the information that's necessary to address the deficits look at the strengths and then to build that IEP so we can um Target those those skills we are currently seeing an increase in goals and objectives in the area of executive function which to me is one indicator that our PD work is working so and then um also at Cheshire high school and at Dodd um there is a focus on Executive function in those classes where students are receiving um support specialized support uh one other thing that we've done is we've um we've accessed the smarts curriculum it's a curriculum online that provides lessons and activities to help build executive function skills in students and the staff is using that curriculum we're focusing on right now at the high school with
025it and um so again it's something that the the teachers can go to as a resource pull up different lessons in those different areas of executive function and then through those ASCS those academic support periods they're able to Target those um objectives another important area that we've seen a lot of growth in in special ed is our unified academic enrichment at the Cheshire High School so this program what it does is it pairs up students with special needs and gentle-led teachers so generally teachers have expressed an interest in working with some of our most neediest students and um and utilizing the peers and the other the students at the high school we pair them together with our students with special needs and the students are then attending a class that they might not normally attend
026because they're in a more self-contained program having this program this at unified academic enrichment helps expose the students to more topics and more activities it's an it's a place for them to generalize much of the skills that they're learning in their self-contained programming and their intensive instruction um our hope is is that in in exposing them to these different topics that they'll walk away with something um and some additional information and some addition additional um learning um the other thing we we hope that this encourages and it is encouraging is um some relationships with students without disabilities and we're hoping that those connections with those peers will continue outside of the school so some of the current classes that are um that are are participating in this program are per art music Foods social studies
027technology science and theater foreign by having that academic enrichment piece we're really increasing our students time with non-disabled peers too which having those appropriate models is always a plus and helps increase our student skills lastly one of our major updates that we have is the Implement implementation of CT sets we had talked about this a little bit last year the state has mandated a um Special Education data system for all districts to utilize in that data system goes all your IEPs your 504s your service plans and we're able to do our Medicaid billing through that platform training has taken place over the summer we train 15 Ex expert trainers and then we've provided training within our school buildings for our special education teachers and our Support Services uh there is um getting on board with
028the program was very interesting um there were lots of things that the training didn't provide us and utilizing that program but we we hung in there and some of these things have shown a lot of improvement now and I think the staff has really started to really get using um understanding the use of the program and with all those with the improvements that have taken place it's been a much more friendlier program parents now have access through the parent portal they can access their child's IEP and documents they can also sign documents uh right there in the meeting or it can be sent out virtually to that um through the computer and they can sign it there or have a print out their paper copies um the staff also in dealing with the new program
029the CT said's platform they've also had to um become accustomed to using our new IEP so the format of the IEP has changed I think it's far more parrot friendly but there are some things that the staff needed to get used to using and so what we are seeing is a real increase in time when they're building those IEPs pardon problem or when the glitches we ran into is that the staff if you go in there and someone else is working on something you will what else's work so that was one of the things that they did um update uh but again we are seeing that it is taking more time but I think as you get more used to it um it goes a little quicker I think the first one I put in
030um for one of our outplacement students took me four hours four hours to put to put that IEP in the first one I did I'm faster now Faith I'm much faster and it was an outplacement IEP so there were a lot of goals and objectives in there Okay so students with IEPs as you we've been talking about our numbers in in the uh in our general population is growing as well as our numbers in Special Ed so this year when I went in in October cdac Paul we do always do an October cdac pull our number came out to 575. I went in it just a couple weeks ago and we're at 6 19. so that was a little shocking um but I knew when I was hearing that we were growing and we were
031growing rapidly I hear from other districts too that the same thing is happening in their districts so um it took a little deeper dive into things wanted to take a look at what is what's going on here so in 2122 the prevalence of special ed and Cheshire was 13.3 percent the state average was 16.7 we've always tend to be lower than the state average um one of the things I wanted to point out right here was that since 1718 we've seen an increase of about 154 students with IEPs we've seen an increase of six special ed teachers and I have that in quotes because our transition coordinator is considered a special ed teacher she does not have a caseload so out of those 154 students will increase she's not picking up any of those students
032some of the other um teachers that we've hired have focused on more of our specialized programs not so much on resource support so that's just something to keep in mind when we look at we increased by six but it's not picking up the the general IEP population taking a look at Derby the prevalence I rank these in order you can see Cheshire is towards the lower end so we're not doing um so we're falling somewhere towards the low end with Avon being at 10.9 percent now orange you'll see is at 8.6 but orange only covers elementary schools so that's probably contributes to why it's only at 8.6 percent and at the very high-end region district 15 is at 18.1 percent so you can see how that all breaks up um Mary southberry that area I
033think Marlene you came from that area right [Music] what is the driving force why is there 42 if I did the math correctly 42 more students this year than last I'm gonna get to that you're going to get to it I will I wanted to know surprise that you didn't it's okay I wanted to get to know that too Andrew so um as you know you've seen this before these are our specialized programs I put an approximate number of how many students they are servicing at this time so you have your intensive Ed programs and just to point out too this Darcy kindergarten intensive class that was added last uh last year we at we because we saw that increase in numbers in students with intensive needs that are classified under the autism disability we
034needed to add that program and that is located at Darcy and IT services the kindergarten students and again we still have our transition programs at q-u our bridge to life our College to life and our community Life program and then our therapeutic Programs located it do little Dodd Cheshire high school and our Alternative High School um at humiston so here's our outer District placements it's been pretty steady around 18 um which is we're doing uh it seems to stay about that we have some kids that exit out we have some kids that go out we have some kids currently that we're in the process of going through the PPT process that may need more intense needs so we may see a rise in that number when I speak to other districts they're seeing a rise
035in outplacements so I did took a deeper dive and I wanted to look because this question was asked to me last year someone asked well don't we exit kids and then we refer kids and we identify kids doesn't that kind of balance out and over my years here I have seen that happen so we haven't seen a lot of growth but here's what we're seeing so we have our students oops wait a second go back uh sorry I hit the wrong button here we go so if you look here I labeled this as our students leaving so that is students that have moved out or left the district you can see there were 13. these numbers are pulled from December of 21 to December of 22. so we had about 13 students that moved out
036of districts and we had about 49 students that graduated or exited from special education and then when we look over on the other column we see 66 students entered our district with IEPs and on top of that we had 51 students that were then identified through the referral process no when we look at the number of students that we saw in that increase when I look at to see well what kind of students what are we seeing what disabilities are we seeing we're seeing that increase in the area of and I keep hitting that wrong button I'm sorry guys I'm just in a rush to get this done for my colleagues we're seeing that increase growing in our LD uh LD with dyslexia that area seems to be driving um uh more so growing at
037a more rapid rate than our other disabilities and our um autism students with autism what grade level are we talking I looked into that through for this I really did so let's take a look okay so now I'm looking at caseload numbers and what I found was that we saw we're seeing a lot of growth at Doolittle so at Doolittle when I take out the specialized program I'm looking at about 61 students that are between our Darcy kindergarten resource room and our Doolittle resource room about 61 kids so we're averaging around 15 per case load with our Cheshire High School taking away those specialized programs we're left with about 138 students where we're averaging around 18 average caseload size one of the things I wanted to point out about the high school is next year
038our teachers will drop to five teaching periods as opposed to six teaching periods that they have right now so this the teachers that it was per our teacher contract and now our special education teachers will drop to those five teaching periods and then Highland School take out the specialized program we have 99 students that are being Services through the resource room we're averaging about 17 per caseload those numbers are as of the beginning of like mid-December when I started pulling those numbers so highly school is seeing the largest impact what we're seeing is that out of 70 percent of the students that we saw coming in through new referrals and through moving in with IEPs 70 of them are at the elementary level and out of that 70 of them 20 of them were knocking
039on Highland's door so I Highland has seen the the biggest growth and you all knew that I don't think that's surprising um when we talk about a special edu the biggest impact we're now seeing is on the resource room teacher so the resource from teachers are so they service multiple classrooms and in many cases they service multiple grades yes 20 figure for Highland is that a general uh special ed figure or is that because of the specific programs being offered at Highland um It's a combination because Highland does house the students with autism Pro more are intensive autism program there there are other disabilities in that program uh but we do have many of the students are under the autism classification and in the resource room the general resource room population so it's a combination
040um because yes our intensive Ed classrooms are at full capacity there's three classrooms there and they are at really above capacity I think there's a classroom of nine we typically like to keep them at eight that's part of the reason why we don't absorb kindergarten in there we leave kindergarten at Darcy so um our resource room teaches at the elementary level you know we all know what the research says about our students and providing them the appropriate Services as quickly and as early as possible so we we do provide a lot of service hours in the area of Reading Writing math executive function and behavioral support in a pull-out model and in an inclusive model um several years ago back in 2015 we saw an increase of growth in elementary students at that time as
041well that was around that was the the following year after full day kindergarten um came into play we didn't add any staff when we went to full day kindergarten we didn't add any staff and special ed but what we did end up having to do was we took those diagnosticians and we reassigned them and made them special ed teachers so that we could absorb the growth in the number of students we were seeing diagnosticians focused on assessing students evaluating students for initial evaluations for identification and re-evaluations so basically their responsibility was to test kids they did not necessarily have a caseload but we had to do away with that we moved them as back to Resource room teachers and we trained all our teachers to do their own assessment and evaluation and of their own
042students and to help with those initial referrals our specialty teachers do a lot of collaboration and communication not just with the teams that work with our students but also parents outside clinicians um the administrators the different departments so uh they pre they they provide a lot of collaboration and need a lot of collaboration time they also supervise and support our Perry Educators they provide them a lot of guidance and a lot of training and they are you know they're held accountable to meet those state and federal guidelines the other impact that we're seeing with our students that are coming in that have learning disabilities and autism speech and language is always well in many cases on our LD students but always on our students with autism part of their IEP so if we're seeing an
043increase in those numbers we're seeing an increase in demand for speech and language speech and language address are in language area and in the speech area obviously so they work on vocabulary comprehension syntax phonological disorders and pragmatics um speech they can work articulation and fluence disfluency we're speech and language impacts our students you'll see it a lot of times in the reading and in the writing you'll see it in their ability to comprehend all their core subjects um because of those language deficits following directions and those communication skills with that increase we're also seeing a more need for board-certified Behavior Analysis so our board our bcbas which is you'll hear me refer to them as do a lot of collaboration again with staff parents and outside providers they support instructional strategies as well as behavioral
044strategies they conduct evaluations they identify students behavioral needs they write and develop various plans for the staff to follow and Implement to support those students they do a lot of data collection they support not only students that have an IEP but they also support a lot of our students who are not identified they might be in the srbi process or they might be just dysregulated maybe having a period of time that they're dysregulated because of outside outside factors things that are going on in the home things that are going on in the community but they do assist us in that they conduct a lot of trainings and they support our intensive programs at darcyhighland Dodd Cheshire high school and our trend transition programs so taking you know whenever we see these a growth and special
045ed and we start to see these needs pop up we always look within first what can we do with the resources we have how can I reallocate do I can I shift something is there maybe an increase in one area and maybe there's a decrease somewhere else and I can shift so one of the things we're looking within to do is to take our Darcy kindergarten resource from teacher she Services the kindergarten students that are basically Doolittle students that are housed at Darcy and at Doolittle so she splits her time and she supports those students with IEPs through the resource room we're looking to move her to or that position to do little by doing that not only can she support the kindergarten students at Darcy and Doolittle but she can now pick up some
046of that overflow at Doolittle because we saw those numbers are increasingly growing as well so now we would have four special ed teachers to support our resource room students there we're also looking at a revision of our Q U college Life program in looking at the needs of our students we've done a lot in District our students are coming out really well prepared and so when we look at our numbers of students that require a q u College Life program our numbers are quite small and we're looking at restructuring the program to meet the needs of the students as they currently are presenting and what we're finding is is that the current program provides not only they take one course on campus excuse me they take a college 101 course with a special ed teacher
047they get some consult time with the special ed teacher and they also get some employment experiences so their placed at a site and then gain some employment um skills what we're finding is a lot of our students that um are eligible for this program already have those employment skills because they already have a part-time job they're already working somewhere else and we're addressing some of those needs within our ASCS at the high school with our new transition coordinator and how the impact of that we're providing those that instruction and those strategies and those skills we're addressing them while they're still in high school so we're looking at um taking the program and adjusting it to meet the needs of what our students are currently needing and what they currently need is there they are looking
048for uh obviously to take a college credit course they're looking to have experiences on the campus they need to understand or learn how to access their supports and to have someone a mentor and someone that they can go to that they can get some additional support from so what we're finding is is we don't need a full-time special ed teacher on that Q U campus there's what we can do is revise it we don't provide an employment opportunity because that's already taken care of when they're in high school in that situation but we're going to provide them with that executive function skills that they really need in order to be successful in that college environment we're going to provide them with the mentorship that they need to feel comfortable navigating the campus and the Student
049Activities that they're eligible to go to and also accessing their uh their supports and their accommodations and how to access and those resources on the campus so we're in the process of having conversations with qu as we begin to look at that and develop it and see um what what we all agree on will meet the needs of our students so in doing that we no longer need a full-time special ed teacher on the qu campus we're able to take that position and we're able to relocate it at Cheshire High School so going back to what I said earlier where our special ed teachers at the high school are dropping down to five periods that was opening up a lot of empty spots where we were not staffed so by relocating our q u teacher
050especially teacher to the high school we're able to fill that spots one other thing we are doing is that we really want to make sure we might want to look to see how efficient we're using our resources are we getting the most bang for our buck are we are we meeting our needs of our students and providing the best programming that we can provide with the resources we have so we've contracted with a consultant and she's come in and she's been conducting um interviews with our administrators with our resource room teachers she's met with the department heads she's met with the supervisors and myself she's conducting a survey observations she's going in to observe we're focusing at the elementary level right now and she is also well there is a survey that our teachers are
051filling out she's Gathering that information and she will be coming back to us with a report with recommendations and commendations what's working what's not working and what will come out of that will then be an action plan as to how are we going to move forward with some of these recommendations so um we're really looking forward to that we're really excited about it because uh we think it's it's a great time right now to really be looking at what we're doing and how we're utilizing our resources across the district okay in summary we're see we're seeing an increase in special ed students most of those students that are coming in are falling under ldld dyslexia and autism the services that are most impacted by that are special ed teachers speech and language Pathologists and our
052behaviorist or bcba we're really looking we looked within to reallocate some of our resources to see if we could fill some of those needs and we're conducting the program study so at this time in as you are aware in our budget we're requesting one full-time special ed teacher to address the growth at Highland School a halftime speech and language pathologist at Highland School that would be located at Highland and then 1.4 full-time bcba support that would be District y . any questions yes just a point of clarification for these do little Darcy program you said that there's an average of 15 per case load that's with three sped teachers currently servicing those that's with the three so it doesn't come out even like that up in our upper grades they're uh they're at they have
05317 and 18 students and in the lower grades you know because we typically not a lot of students come in with IEPs but over time we identify them right and then for I guess the other item that I would assume adds to the increase because we have a system in place now that is able to identify dyslexia early on I would project that you'll see more cases coming through in the next few years once we you know are able to well we've been um we've been very embedded in identifying our students with dyslexia we have a lot of great tools to do that and we've done a lot of training on that so I I think the Inc I think in my opinion part of the reason we're seeing this increase now and we'll continue
054to see it is the outcome of covid so we have students that um were disengaged during remote learning then you had the following year where you had students that may or may not been back in but we still had the effects of teachers being out students being out with illness or students choosing to be remote and then we had the following year where everybody was in there was no option to do remote but now you have this period of time you have this these gaps that have been created so it it's interesting when you test and you evaluate and you look at those gaps it's not clear it's not is it's not so clear to say yes that's dyslexia or no that's a result of covet and not being engaged in learning in in the
055instruction but there's a need there so typically students do fall in in qualify under that LD classification based on the state guidelines you also have um will go through the srbi process but sometimes we don't get to complete the srbi process because um because parents are concerned we find that we may find that um there's there's a need to go to testing right away and we end up doing so with your you know are we going to see more students identified as dyslexic we could because we do get better at our at our Craft um and tools get better I think also um you know I worry about tier one in our srbi process the goal is not to put students in special education right so I'm looking at the 500 the after you deduct
056yeah the graduates and those entering math graduates those entering in in those referred into you still have 502 students that are still sitting in special ed what are we doing prior to that to stop that 502 you know that's just a broad question out there yeah well you know we have an srbi process in place and actually we've been focusing on revisiting it and taking a look at the process across the elementary schools and across the the secondary schools um looking to identify if there are additional tools we can add to our toolbox additional strategies that we could add um you know through the srbi process I think there's always room for improvement so we continue to not just sit back and continue to do things as always but I know Marlene and myself and
057Kevin Hanlon we've been visiting different srbi meetings and looking at the process and uh you know hoping that you know by will be coming out with um some changes or some revamps revisions your diplomacy with CT says though because I you know what it's like four hours is just not yeah my secretary kept coming to the door are you done with it are you done with it no go ahead Andrew so you mentioned that you know alas is a result of coven so is the answer just IEPs for the students I mean is it I'm sure you've thought a lot about this I mean isn't is there some sort of other mechanism for these students excuse the ignorance on that topic because I'm that's okay special educator I just that's okay so I'm going to
058refer you back to I believe Marlene was the one who did the presentation when we talked about acceleration so we we suspected we knew that we would have students re-entering in our schools after Co um you know once we were back in full time that we're going to have gaps that had um may not have been engaged in the instruction we knew that was going to happen and so much of our professional development and our work was towards acceleration so we were going to continue to move forward and at the same time as we identify those gaps that students had we're going to work with we were going to work with those students in small groups and it address those gaps within the classroom and that's happening that's what people are doing but um I
059you know like I said sometimes um you know the referrals come in whether it's from a parent or a doctor um the concerns rise to the level that they're they feel that they need that at this point in time we need to go to testing and so then once we take a look at the testing you know the guidelines the LD guidelines have changed in the past um just last year they made some changes in it and so we go through the process we follow those guidelines as close as possible and um and and the guidance that the state provides us and that walks you through whether the child uh is eligible or not based on you know your testing results your observations your parent reports there's a lot of information that's pulled in for
060that how long have you been doing this this is my 35th year okay so I mean just so yeah you know obviously this is a completely changed world like so how do you feel about it how do you feel like are we giving you the tools that you need to do this uh I have been extremely happy in Cheshire uh I'm very proud of Cheshire uh it just gave me goosebumps um you know I I'm fortunate that I get to talk to other directors and I get to meet other people across the state and we talk about some of the struggles that we're dealing with but um but I think that um I I feel well supported by the board and in the programming that we have and the amazing staff that we have and
061my two supervisors I have to shout out to them too because they're really uh they deal with the day-to-day all the time and uh having come from that I know what that can be like um but but yes I I things have changed a lot you know I piloted inclusion back in Massachusetts when it was just coming out and when I think about you know Marie's work at the high school with the unified art program what she's doing there is really pointing out how what I saw when I did inclusion with my students with learning disabilities they did pick up things on the on the on skirting on the edges of some of these topics that they never would have been exposed to so it's really nice thanks thank you yes so I'm going to
062just kind of tag team on what these guys are and I want to Echo what Sam says I had always thought that the goal is to get is not to not to over identify yeah um yeah it's not too necessarily grow their special program for the sake of growing the special program but to meet needs but also assess me you know treat the kids fairly hey I'm digging myself a hole here but let me so um can I just get some acronyms you said sure yes I'm sorry I'm a Layman here s srbi what is scientifically research based intervention okay all right and did I I that's all I heard I didn't hear s-r-e-i did I no okay then there was B sorry okay um so with regard to dyslexia I had always thought that
063that was um an or or almost inorganic condition you know it's it's a it's a disorder in the processing of language and but now you're saying because of covid these kids are coming in have developed dyslexia and and how much is this so you touched on learning loss acceleration so hopefully we will start to see some of these dyslexia numbers decline as the kids catch up are these kids never going to catch up all right so let's like take a step back a little bit I think what we're seeing an increase in learning disabilities students identified under learning disabilities um some of that is kind of coming out of covid um because that's where we're seeing the numbers grow um dyslexia also comes under the category of learning disabilities but like you were saying when
064we're talking about dyslexia there are so there are other areas that have deficits that indicate a student is a student with dyslexia versus a student with a learning disability okay so you can have a reading with disability but you may not necessarily be dyslexic your disability could be in comprehension reading comprehension you may not have difficulty decoding words but it's more in the comprehension the language the syntax the vocabulary if you if you have dyslexia typically dyslexics our students have difficulty in decoding um words sounding them out blending um applying those phonemic rules when when identifying words so so what I'm seeing or what we're seeing is an increase in students with learning disabilities okay um all right it's like that moment that one little oh my God it's out there I know it is
065all right so um I may come back I need to think about it okay okay yes Tony Rob and uh first of all thank you so much for detailed presentation hang on I got a question I see you I I look first but we're here to go no no I see your next Tim um sorry so thank you for the detail I just want to acknowledge the work beauty team are doing before I extend my question so I want to thank thanking your team um this is not an easy area um but Cheshire at least since I've been on the board of education I'm sure long before I've been on the board education has always been known for my pain outstanding special education services Focus I personally know of many families I know over the
066years that specifically move the Cheshire because this program um and you know the kids have thrived and I know that you know as much as we want kids to transition out of special education not all can't which is disheartening but I'm confidently leave the system that the tools needs to see an adult life so I commend you and your team for trying to uh continue assess and look at getting our kids to move into or outside of the program when they're ready one of the things that comes to mind is the behavioral side of things yeah I think soon we're going to get uh School safe climate statistics the board gets reports on just general stats on um things happening at the schools I don't have any solid numbers to back what I'm about to
067say other than I do different parents from time to time um to me it seems like this year probably last year um perception is there have been increased incidents of Behavioral situations be on the school buses or in the classroom or a playground for various reasons um it seems to me it'd be seem to be happening in earlier grades as early as kindergarten and uh you know some parents that reach out to me and of course we can never get into the details um are very supportive of the behavioral program but also are very concerned about kids that have extreme needs being adequately serviced or supported in our schools so so the question I have is the behavior analyst the 1.4 we've asked for would that help not just help identify and course correct but
068also keep helping situations when students are identified throughout your certain issues to be able to intervene and put I mean it it seems to me that again I can't quantify it but that seems to be growing yeah I wonder if the 1.4 is enough in my opinion so um yes it's true we are seeing an increase in Behavior increase of students coming in dysregulated at very young ages um the the bcba's due often help with our students that are dysregulated so they'll help support the team coming up with behavior plans collecting any data trying to identify what the triggers are supporting the teacher with some additional strategies so absolutely the bcba is a big help with that and it's am I quite to say it's uh that's also supporting Outreach to the student's home as
069well as I believe there's also discussions of parents and Guardians absolutely it's just collaboration it just seems like it's a very yep training sometimes we've had um you know parents come in and participate in some training um on how to uh put some of these strategies in place at home we've bcbas have also provided homes with visual schedules and some of the same strategies that we util in some of the same tools that we use in school to carry them over into the home so you have that consistency absolutely thank you Tim did you have a question yeah yeah I'm sure thank you Tony um yeah I've got a few different questions that are kind of they go back to the beginning of the presentation I'm hoping to keep her ultimately quick um you had
070mentioned at one point that your special ed students go to have uh go to the General Ed uh this was right before you mentioned seds oh our UniFi unified okay the Unified and you said that what I heard you say was uh you hope they walk away with something so I wonder do they walk away with something and I'm thinking you said specifically what we find is that even our students with some intensive disabilities some severe disabilities you'd be surprised at what they pick up so if they're in a class and in that classroom they're talking about a topic that that student may not have been exposed to if they were in their self-contained classroom say it's a science teacher or something and there's talking about a topic um it's surprising at what they do
071pick up on and then what they do hold on to and then they'll bring up or talk about at a later Point um so providing that exposure for them gives them new experiences it's educationally stimulating yeah you know for their their learning um expands vocabulary and that setting because it's a mix of of their peers and students with disabilities you have those role models and it's a place for them to kind of generalize all those skills that we're working on in the self-contained classroom to a more natural environment okay thank you um I'm glad you asked that because I could I could clarify it a little better yeah no I'm pretty sure those are your words I hope they're getting something right yeah okay um when you're discussing saids you mentioned Medicaid billing yes and
072one of the things that goes through my mind is I see the news and like a funding problem for you know say like a retirement home this is Medicare it might include Medicaid they talk about you know they pay 17 cents on the dollar or so in terms of Medicaid billing like what is could you give a brief background because I didn't know we were billing Medicaid for yeah and are we getting fully reimbursed for whatever we're doing and that I'm sure Vinnie's going to help me with but a few years ago it became mandatory that our support service providers so your speech your OT your PT they're providing therapy yeah so we're able to build that under Medicaid so what happens is our staffing uh was trained in how to use the CT sets
073program to document their services for students who qualify under Medicaid and so then those services are then um that that is then submitted to the state and we are reimbursed for some of those services I don't know what the percentage is no the exact percentage is not a big video but I'm just I just want to get it conceptually we have as an example we have an OT on the books we're paying them a 60 000 salary 30 000 in benefits ninety thousand dollars a year we're getting reimbursed 20 of that from Medicaid or something like that it's actually based on their services they provide to that individual student of [Music] payment that Medicaid pays for that service first year we started about Medicaid building in 1819 we received about 14 000 total reimbursement and
0742122 was about 20 000. so it has been increasing for us but it's a pure reimbursement that we've never got before reason the state required us to do medicate the building because as Cheshire and money support the community we don't have a high population of parents that are eligible for Medicaid service okay agreement mistake requires us to do it now because the state is getting a pretty good cut that we're getting so absolutely okay so you're confident that your team does a reasonably good job of you know documenting the hours the services that are provided and getting it through to you you do the billing okay it's a work of progress I'm sure actually makes it better for our staff to be able to log and track and enable us it is a tremendous amount
075of work that we had to add on to accommodate this larger school districts Hartford New Haven Bridgeport they were doing Medicaid billing through here if they have entire staffs that are just dedicated to the Medicaid building because they're reverse is substantially higher okay thank you um let me see oh as a general question and I just step out for a couple minutes I apologize about that so if you already answered the question I could watch it on video but you said uh 66 kids moved into town within IEP this year that was between December of 21 and December 22. okay do you have a do you have an idea Tony mentioned that people come here specifically for the special ed program but do you do you have any is is that a primary driver or
076um is there is there anything you've said I don't know um I think you know just driving through town and seeing all of the the new um developments that are going up I think you know that's contributed to the growth and our I think that's contributed to the growth in our population as the elementary supervisor uh previously before becoming the director I often did get phone calls from out of state and people across the state looking to move and asking about our programming but they were calling me specifically to ask about the special ed programming so I guess my question it's probably not for you it might be for the superintendent or event how many in that same time period December 21 to December 22. how many do you happen to know off top of
077your head about how many kids moved to the district the total number from December to December no okay um is that a high percentage the 66. I'm just wondering if it's if 15 huh if 15 of the population is yeah if you consider it wasn't 600 kids which would be you know 15 percent of 660 you know six six seven ten percent is 66 kids yeah so it wasn't that many kids that moved in that's a disproportionate number okay okay agreed that number looked high to me but when we talked about it that that was accurate okay so that's really disproportionately high yeah our I asked our um Scott Conway who does all our data and he pulls from our state um you know as the data is inputted into the and sent into the
078state he's able to access that and pull out the numbers for me okay I was curious about the trend so it sounds to me like people for me it seems likely that people are moving here for the special ed program some people say that if the percentage is higher than the regular population I've been here for a lot of you know educational programming sure we recognize that um oh you had mentioned that there's a drop uh starting next year I'm thinking uh to five teaching periods and you were saying it it seemed to me you're saying it in a way that that affects your teachers so five teaching periods for me a classroom teacher at the high school is straightforward they go from six to five there's you know 20 to 30 kids who don't
079have a teacher there what does it mean in terms of special ed so what we're what we're seeing is if if our special ed teachers just like our general teachers drop to five period teaching periods then given the number of students that we have we are not going to have enough teaching periods to address the needs of our students with special needs okay and that's why there was a need to add another another resource room teacher at the high school in preparation for that happening next year okay got it um and my last question uh with regard to Quinnipiac yes so the way I'm seeing this framed and tell me where I'm wrong in this is your students I think they get to 22 years old it could be younger that they're doing it they're
080going to Quinnipiac and this is steering them toward College so I know and the reason just so you know where I'm coming from the reason is I I just wanna I it probably could work for some kids but for the kids it might not be the right thing and I'm just wondering if you're steering them in that direction so I mean our hope you know whatever student decides if a student with a disability wants to go to college a lot of our students with disabilities go to college sure sure um what the research was Finding several years ago was that when you looked at the number of students who went on to a four-year college program and the number of students that graduated it was disproportionate to students with disabilities meeting that graduation and students
081without disabilities meeting that graduation so far more students with learning disabilities dropped out of college or weren't successful in attaining that four-year degree then a student without disabilities and so that's when you know these programs came came into play so why is it that they're not able to make it through the four years and they're dropping out much of the skill set that they were lacking false in those executive function skills planning managing their time if you think about a kid or a student who goes from the high school where they're really scheduled up you know they go to class they're there every day from time in the morning to time in the afternoon and then if they have sports or something or a job afterwards they're very much scheduled when you go off to
082college now you're in charge of scheduling you may have classes on some days and some days you don't then what do you do with your time and then there's the social aspect managing the social aspect so these were skills that are we were finding that our students with learning disabilities didn't attain by the time they were ready to graduate from high school they had all the academic skills to go on to college but they weren't being successful so that's when these programs like qu ite came about and were put into place so I guess I have a I have a my question or my concern is even before it gets to that point are kids being does every kid who come into every student who comes in to talk to you and they say I'm
083graduating high school and are you saying well let's go join let's go look at the Quinnipiac program because I'm just thinking you know somebody doesn't want to read they want to go become a plumber sure do they get steered or Quinnipiac um no no we listen to our students there's lots of assessment that happens so you know through our guidance through our school counselors there's lots of opportunities for those types of discussions to take place there's lots of different assessments that students go through they even starting at a very young age I think it's sixth grade we start looking at gee what would you like to be when you grow up kind of so and they start to go through those conversations and and those exercises to start to explore and then it gets more
084in depth and more detailed in middle school and then of course when they get up to high school there's lots of Assessments that they can go through and take through the school counselor through um that they're able to kind of narrow things down so that's where the conversation comes and are you one who wants to are you looking at a career or um that needs requires education furthering your education are you looking to go into the military are you looking to go right into the workforce so that's a piece of how that gets teased out okay with our students with disabilities we I'm going to go back to what our transition coordinator does and and our teachers is there are tools that we can use to assess students even further look even deeper to help
085them identify their strengths and to identify the areas that are not so strong for them so it may not be a good idea to go into this career because you're not like you may think you want to be a um you know some you want you know accountant but your math skills are just not a strength for you so maybe being an accountant is not the area you want to go in so we help them to work that out part of doing that is giving them those job Explorations you want to you know you want you think you want to work in this area let's see if we can find you an opportunity to go and experience some of that um so there's there's just a lot to it and then you know when we're
086looking at the college Life program we're looking for students who a want to go to college want to earn a four-year degree they are have are pretty self-sufficient they don't require a pair educator to support them because that's not going to happen in college and um and uh you know they and and then so we but they may be lacking some of those executive function skills they may need more support with that they may need some a little more support understanding their disability and how it impacts them and that's what we're going to provide them for them in that semester of q u college life while they're in the environment versus in the high school environment yeah yeah okay thank you any other questions yes if I could um all right so since we're on
087qu how many students are in this program right now with all of qu because we have two programs at que all of them and what are you talking about and then also well which one are you talking about streamlining the college the college Life program right now we have three students in that three students okay and if those numbers been going up or down or consistentary last year I think we graduated seven from that program okay um if that program were eliminated would there be opportunities within the high school for them to gain those both the courses through our own career and college um you know Career Training and also the SK the uh executive so I just want to clarify we're not looking to eliminate it revising it we're revising it we're looking at
088we're looking at what the students needs are we're still going to address the student needs but we're we won't we don't need as many resources to do that okay because of all the work that we're doing in the high school addressing those post-secondary and employment skills okay um um and then going to I'm just going to kind of go all over the place here unified academic enrichment um when those kid when the special education students are in the class the high school classroom do they have AIDS with them also or if they require an aid yes okay all righty and then um what is the overall cost of the seds program and I know it's mandated it's nothing right now it's it's per it's does not there's no cost to the district except it's at
089four hours per student that's taking time yes when do you when do you find that time you know teachers teachers choose when they are going to work on sets um so sometimes they may use their planning period to work on it they may um use um they may do some work at home they have access to it from home if they need to get on it so they really choose when they want to access that obviously when they're teaching in class they're not on it you can choose to answer this or not but has seds made the program in life better for everybody I think it will it's a process yeah you know you it's a learning curve the whole entire spread department has had to learn this new IEP has had to learn this
090new program and as we worked with it and discovered things that were difficult or were not doing what it should do we've been working you know the state has been providing um lots of um time where they're listening to what our concerns are and then going in and you know addressing some of those glitches that we've run into a program that we work with that we purchased IEP direct so the the reason that Robin was explaining it took four hours about 14 000 per year savings because we paid for IEP direct now the state provides that free yeah yeah I think it's hard for free I mean yeah taxpayer expense yeah I think I think part of the reason why it was taking longer was because those glitches but they cleaned they have cleaned up
091a lot of them and it's going at a much faster rate let me ask my supervisors how long is it taking you to do an IEP at this point okay so what she's saying about finalizing the IEP is this two supervisors are alerted by the special I teach you when the IEP is ready to be reviewed so then they go in they review it on the platform and check to make sure that the dates are accurate that there's no mistakes in it and then finalize it so it now becomes a finalized document and it gets pushed out to the parent okay okay so the implication is that the teachers who are filling it out are taking significantly less time than the four hours yeah something maybe a third or a quarter or something like okay
092got it thank you and then last but not this may be for Ben what is I have asked this couple years what is the cost we have the cost of uh per pupil of special ed students what's the cost per pupil of General Ed do we have that that's all students that's all students so you're talking about netting it out correct yeah I think last year we were at 13. we'd have to do the math on that I think that's a simple ratio problem yeah yeah I mean I could go to Khan Academy math and probably find the lessons yeah but yeah okay thanks that's all thank you okay that's it okay Oh I thought that was a see you later so just so just to go through the positions themselves um so luckily you
093you nicely labeled the first one for Highland School so and so you were saying that um your special ed classes you normally like to have them at eight but they're at nine right now that's the autism that's the Intensive Ed program because the question was asked about the 66 students that came in and the 20 of them going at Highland wore they in the Intensive Ed or the resource room and it's a combination of both all right so the um special education teacher um is that so you're going to open up an entire new class of how many or is that so that's the feature gonna float or that's a resource room position by adding that position at Highland School we will have one special ed resource room teacher per grade so what it's going
094to do is it'll allow the teacher to work with one in within one grade level as opposed to multiple grade levels so when you're talking about the number of people he or she has to collaborate with and the um and the number of classrooms that she has to work in or work with it will reduce that so if you think about it I what do we have between five and seven sections at Highland for each grade level so that special ed teacher that covers that grade level will service the students in either five to seven sections now typically we tend to try to Cluster them a little bit to make it a little easier to provide those Services reduce the number of General Ed classes that we have to go into but there's always students
095that can be identified that are not necessarily in those classes so um you know we're all aware when we add a position it's normally a permanent position um so how do you feel um adding a teacher here how does that translate to uh the efficiencies that we'll be gaining in say three years when we have you know a new larger or uh yeah a new school let's say in the North End that's going to be absorbing some of this highland population um how do you think that's going to translate well um if I look if I look at the trend of what's happening in the state and I look at the trend of what's happening in Cheshire our specialized numbers are continuing to increase so I'm not worried about numbers going down in terms of
096special ed so okay if it turns out that there's a shift in the population as far as where this special ed needs student needs are then we we shift we shift those we've we've done that I've done that previously as the elementary supervisor we've done that there are times where we've taken a special ed resource position out of say Dodd and moved it to Elementary to cover a need there because there may be a reduction what's that we're doing that in this budget yeah and moving so I just reallocate it from queu to CHS but what I would say globally speaking more generically and and I have presented this in previous budgets and not necessarily in this budget but you know there is uh I have a historical graph that we can share that illustrates
097that base basically our staffing hasn't necessarily changed much over time it's it's gone up in in terms of a ratio it's gone up when enrollment's gone up it's gone down when uh enrollment's gone down overall special education is not necessarily following that Trend because of as you've seen the increase in special education identification which is absolutely a Statewide issue so when Andrew asks like how do you feel about you know special education identification and I look at a derby school system when one in five students is special education I feel like there's something wrong with the system and we have a a much lower prevalence rate than um many other districts around Connecticut and at the bottom of what third of dirt b um and I I think that's we we really have a need
098to continue to focus on what we call tier one instruction the basic classroom instruction and making sure that it's diverse and Rich enough to meet a variety of needs because I think when when a one in five students is identified for special education even though we're getting better at identifying certain needs um we've missed the boat somewhere educationally we just need to refine that but like I said I'll get the the data around percentage of Staff or ratio of staff to students over history to kind of see where it hasn't just like we don't hire people and never lose them when the enrollment goes down we have data to illustrate that's not the case but as our enrollment's growing I mean we're certainly seeing the increase in staff now I was very long-winded but I
099hope it touched on a few different points that I've been kind of holding in uh it did um um moving on to the the other two positions normally y'all 0.5 uh for uh the language pathologist um is is that position um at one particular score against that are they visiting different parts of the district as needed or that that would be at Highland that's a position is located at Highland so is it a 0.5 now or is it a one you know like you know how many Pathologists do we have there now or so it's a we had a we hired a full-time speech pathologist that uh was in the budget in the general budget as a halftime position and I supplemented the other half of the position through the grant through grant money well
100that grants expiring so we have in order to keep it a full dying position we need to move it to the General Ed budget okay uh so Grant meaning um because the need was there the uh the one the one we're using for training uh a Corona fund Grant yes yes sir yes sir thank you yes sir yes um so then lastly for the bcba is that district-wide uh those positions um what we do with those with the bcba is we do assign them by building or by program we try to do that so what we'll do is look at um right now that position is focused uh with our intensive programs at Darcy and at some of our other elementary schools so because we the other bcba is focused on the Intensive Ed program
101at Highland and the Doolittle program uh for our students with the emotional needs plus you know like we said earlier they not only see those students with IEPs but the other students that don't have IEPs that may need that kind of support and so one point for that translates to a full-time and a part-time position or how does that why is it not 0.5 is that you know okay so um we the 0.4 we have a 0.6 right now um in District we need to increase her to full time so that's why the 0.4 the 1.0 that's coming from the grant moving into the General Ed budget um and then well I say lastly but I don't know how this is going to expand out but uh generally at least the last several years we've
102sort of got like a mental health update uh you know it's been in the headlines and and certainly um we would get statistics on who said that on our student population I was about to say general population as a prison term uh uh on our student population on you know on their mental health needs uh in in budgets passed we were talking about adding School psychologists you know that was a a big uh point of addition um so in in that respect do you feel that we are uh well staffed in those areas to be able to help our students to continue to um recover from the pandemic um do I think they're we're well staffed I think we're I think we have a good amount of support in each of our schools um I
103think that um there are times that we feel that we may we could use more um I think that um you know as we look at our numbers and we look at things again we'll go through and look at possibly reallocating some of those resources um as we look at those because we we are recognizing like you said earlier we're seeing a lot of that dysregulation with our younger students so we may need to reallocate some resources more towards those younger areas um we do take in a lot of interns in those there in the school in School counseling and through our school psychologists those interns have been very helpful in addressing some of the needs of our students too um so we have utilized them as a resource as well um so I think
104that you know are are we seeing an increase in more students needing that support I haven't looked at those numbers based on the reports that I get whether a student has had any kind of emotional crisis um I we're not seeing a big change in that those statistics like we were seeing previously so it's kind of remained steady um steady good or steady bad well I think that we've gotten really good at our reporting and assessing and identify students that may be in crisis and so we complete that report to determine whether or not we complete that assessment to determine whether or not that student needs a higher level of care and so I think that you know sometimes I feel like we're seeing an increase in those reports because we're finding that our staff
105is more aware they're more alert we've done a lot of training not only with staff but with our students we did a training with our 10th grade students this fall to be more aware and be more knowledgeable about how to help friends or other students that may be struggling or maybe in a crisis situation so so again that's helping us to be able to hone in on those students who may not come out and disclose but to be able to kind of pull them aside and say look I kind of got heard that you were struggling a little bit is there anything you want to share is there something I can do and they can take them through that assessment to determine the level of care that they need so I think we've got you
106know we have so many things in place to do that not only with our staff but with our students as well in helping with that um and La I guess I I was saying lastly but I'll say this one will be my last question for the students that are coming into District uh where you've been identifying uh learning disabilities and such is it um do you do you feel that the learning disability identification is from a true learning disability or that perhaps they're coming from a school district that did not prepare them as well um I I probably clicked that question for you because I don't have my eyes on each one of those situations or those IEPs um so but I was trying to identify the trend is yeah is that a possible uptick
107is that you know people are moving here you know obviously we have an excellent school system and they they're coming here and then when they come they feel they realize that maybe their child isn't as acclimated as they thought maybe they would be um I I like I said I don't know I I don't have my eyes on those IEPs specifically but I what I do know is that if they're coming into District then IEP we have to provide services okay so all right so that's they've already they're coming with their own paperwork essentially yeah already okay I mean that in in the numbers that I looked at quite a few of them just want to address that piece so curricular disability is not a disability that's identified under IIT yet and you know when
108I was CHS principal we'd evaluate transfer students pretty meticulously in terms of is this a situation where the student has a genuine learning disability or identified Special Education Service need or is this some a function of a curricular limitation yeah I guess that's what I was kind of getting towards yeah and so I think that's something that we look at pretty meticulously and I think when you're asking Robin about these new students I mean she's coming from that framework of these these people who came in were already identified so to go back and determine whether it was that initial identification was a curricular issue or not it's hard to tease out but what we I think you're talking about when students move in unidentified and right statistic did show a large section of currently unidentified
109students as well so the new referrals right the newer yeah so I guess in those students were the new referral right that's where we're meticulously evaluating is this uh and that's what our um educational diagnosticians and school psychologists do determine is this a function of a disability or is this somebody who maybe didn't have access to the curriculum or some other function that's not an idea identification but something that still needs to be remedied either way right I mean you gotta work with that student either direction but I'm teasing that out as part of the evaluation process thank you as far as looking at those new referrals I did not dive deeper to see were they new to the district had they been here since kindergarten did they move in at some point during their
110educational years I I didn't look that deep to see whether or not they had come from say spent some of their schooling in another district and then came here and found that they were being referred to special ed yeah I just wanted to bring up that point being that our population should be growing and they're not necessarily necessarily going to be well they moved you know all these kids moved here when they were three and they're coming in right at kindergarten you know so I just thought I'd right bring that up right so like Jeff said that's some of the stuff when a student comes up for a referral that may have moved into the district we look at all of that data to see you know how are they performing on the state mandated
111testing how were they performing on you know how are they performing on uh interim assessments how are they performing on benchmarks you know that all is all part of the the process of information and data that's pulled to make any kind of determination okay any other questions no no are you sure Andrew I'm off the hook all right thank you thank you [Applause] thank you Robin Forge ahead Mr grippo uh next meeting was just the the deliberations right on for Thursday public informational meeting and then adoption of a budget did you have any did you have more to present Thursday night we I'll finish instructional expenses quick then we had support services and maintenance and operations so so maybe we can 15 more pages please yeah um how do you maybe we can um we'll
112go through instructional expense and then maybe we'll we'll push the uh the other two items uh was Support Services uh to Thursday right everyone yeah okay so we'll do that then thank you good idea thank you okay so we just have um really a few more things to say about instructional expense we we're back to this slide where we were showing the increase at 2.37 overall for this category and so we just want to hit a couple of uh highlights about some of the curriculum specific line items you know so as part of instructional expense we do have all our curriculum writing revisions um I do want to note here the curriculum Council each year does an evaluation of different areas of the curriculum so for 23 24 the areas of curriculum that will be
113looked at are a career and career and Tech ad science and adult education and you know then those um go from the curriculum Council and recommendations go to the curriculum committee um this hasn't changed from last year so those are ongoing curriculum efforts that are covered as part of this budget and then as far as instructional materials and resources I did want to point out that there are new textbook and resources for grades six to eight that Marlene has budgeted for and then the professional development opportunities are consistent with what we're doing this year so those are just a couple of of highlights on the instructional expense and in particular the curriculum lines if we look overall at instructional expense as a percentage of the budget you could see it it's about flat maybe downward
114trending just a little bit but again that's that's a percentage of the budget that doesn't mean the budget hasn't increased in this category it's just as a percentage of the budget it stayed relatively flat so that's instructional expense if I can go back if there's any specific questions on on that budget amount and then Support Services is next so if you want to pause after this um are these online texts or because to be honest I haven't necessarily seen any new Publishers publishing texts most of it is going digital anyway so so usually can you hear me yes okay so Sam they could be either or oftentimes they're both usually there's some type of a hard copy textbook that has a portal and has subscription access was looking at updating them I guess would be
115my question well we're looking at a math curriculum or math resource for grades six seven and eight we're also looking at a new science book at the high school we have a couple coming forward to curriculum committee next month that include another math text and we're also looking at an AP history textbook too thank you [Music] that's so Marlene you had talked about how we will be eliminating certain online um reading subscriptions in the elementary and then replacing with updating the libraries and upgrading the libraries where would we find those items in the budget yeah I don't know that you would specifically see those in in the budget line item as as it's presented the thing that we were talking about during our last meeting was that we had a subscription that was purchased during
116covid that was a multi-year subscription and we decided not to renew that and so when we looked at that we said we weren't going to renew because we don't believe in having the digital access for children that young that served its purpose only during covid and that we would be taking that money and putting it into print books for classroom libraries at the elementary level okay so is it basically a one for one wash okay for for this particular subscription and what we're going to be able to do this year yes okay yeah questions all right well and could we just what is the new equipment going to cover well no equipment um we'll cover anything that we purchase in the district that isn't being replaced so and it's generally not technology it's going to
117be along the lines of furniture [Music] um equipment that is used you know throughout the schools you know as opposed to replacement equipment which is desks and chairs and and that's mostly Furniture items so and we look at those two pretty closely as one item it's it's equipment that we need in the schools and furniture that we need in those schools thank you um then uh which line item uh accounts for our gradual replacement of our smart boards is that in this one or is that that's in Support Services okay and we will so we'll we'll talk about that in particular um and you'll have to stay in suspense unless you look at the presentation you already have in front of you that we'll get to on Thursday night yeah that's Covenant Support Services okay
118thanks um I'm just noticing under uh the the bottom bullet point under it's under noteworthy factors next bus contract effective 7 2024. migration Tim sped ahead to support so sorry I thought we weren't oh gotcha sorry I thought it was just maintenance you do jump ahead and you have a question uh that comes up tomorrow or something and you want to email it to me it's helpful for for Thursday to be able to make sure we have information for you to respond sure so any uh obviously extend that to everyone not just him but if you see anything you you have a question and we're happy to address it Thursday never mind if I had a gas tense probably looking for you know details on the new green Fleet and EV bus strategy no I
119was I was actually I was just curious about it when dako came to talk to us a couple months ago they offered having there are three different types of buses come visit us standard diesel gas and an electric and I just was curious if that's something that we can make happen yeah we will as soon as we get through the budget process yeah but I've been in touch with daco actually we're going to start um you know talking about you know what um you know what we need as we look forward and you know their contract does expire in June of 2024 so that is a conversation we want to have now not that we wouldn't put it out to bid but we certainly would like to know you know what our options are and
120what we need to do to start moving our Fleet you know to an alternate fuel Fleet is very important because we have to do it by 2040 we have to be all electric any other questions on instructional expense okay well thank you everyone we're gonna pause here this evening uh the next meeting is Thursday night uh this Thursday night here 7 P.M we're going to cover support services maintenance and operations uh which should be a pretty lengthy discussion I'm sure board members will have additional questions throughout the budget um and if possible the finance committee will try to adopt a budget recommendation to forward to the full board of education for review so that will happen hopefully happen Thursday night that being said um in the event that the full board does not adopt the
121budget Thursday night we do have a meeting on the books for February 2nd if necessary it'll probably most likely especially in the Board of Education full board to adopt a board of education budget and hopefully that will uh wrap up the process unless there's more questions so I just want to say thank you to our case the cameras want to keep looking at the audience to our administrators and Educators that attend these very diligently we appreciate dedication and feedback is sticking out with us and again thank you for being here and I'll let you do so that being said I'm going to ask a motion to adjourn uh Andrew seconded by Adam all favor it is unanimous thank you to meeting his adjourned