001all right thank you good evening everyone i uh called it meeting to order um mr oginski roll call please flag the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you everyone for coming tonight um well normally this is a time for audience comment um is there anyone from the audience who would like to comment on our budget discussions this evening seeing none um well maybe we'll revisit if some people come a little later on do you have a one from uh i i do mr chair just a a quick note from jack buster of 45 tress road who emailed the kobit 19 cps cobia 19 at cheshire.k12.ct.us in case anybody's watching and wants to send in a question or
002comment i want to express my support for the superintendent's budget request at a time when our students are under a great deal of stress related to all aspects of learning i feel that the district administrators and cheshire teachers with the support of the board of education have navigated the many challenges of the past year and a half extremely well although i have expressed my concerns about specific policy objectives the staff deserves the support of the community and should be rewarded with a budget that they feel addresses their needs moving forward that's it okay thank you well next in the agenda is the superintendent's summary of the recommended budget thank you [Music] all right i'm just gonna start by i know mr paragini's home watching uh under the weather so he's doing his civic duty in
003keeping us all healthy thankfully and i hope he's feeling better so um i'm just going to start by going through a few questions that have come up through the process that i you know thought we should address before i do a quick recap the whole presentation i think is 10 slides or less so this should be relatively brief but again i wanted to answer some questions that had been posed through the process one of the questions that was brought up at a recent meeting was the per pupil cost and what do we estimate that it might be in terms of a difference between uh general education peer pro per pupil costs excuse me and special education per pupil costs as you can see on the screen you know the state issues our data it tells
004us what every town in connecticut spent uh nce is net current expenditure and so for the 2021 school year our expenditure was 73 million 945 373 that's our budget when you back out transportation costs regular education general transportation costs the average daily membership last year was four thousand seven uh excuse me four thousand seventy seven point nine eight excuse me students and so you divide the number of students into the money expended to get a simple cost per student number for us that was eighteen thousand one thirty three as you can see bookended by two other communities that had a substantially almost outrageously higher per pupil expenditure rates but the so what we did was try and back out all of the lines that pertain to special education services divide that by the number of
005special education identified students students that are receiving special education support that number comes out to 33 and as a result lowers the average on the district for general education to 15 7 73 there's 15 7 73 yes so again this is not an exact dollar figure it is an estimate uh we feel it's you know responsibly close but again just an estimate there was also a question about extended school year costs so the extended school year costs for 2021 you can see the various line items that were considered in that calculation again this is an estimate it's it's pretty close it's it's in the very close vicinity it's not like an audited number though and so our considers our transportation staffing operational costs so you can get a ballpark of what that program uh costs
006uh four thou four hundred and six thousand dollars generally and we had a hundred and thirty two students participating roughly a per student cost of about three thousand dollars per student so that kind of gives you a sense of you know what the extended school year costs are please keep in mind that last year was a bit of an anomaly as it relates to extended school year costs i think it was ms rosenberg that brought up the point of you know how what sort of compensatory education is offered for you know people missing these days last year obviously uh was even uh more more impacted if you will than this year in terms of the covet impact and so we certainly had a substantially higher number than usual in the extended year services category bless
007you so some other questions how many students do we exit from special education in a given year you can see the last five years listed here ranging anywhere from 22 students to 33 students and i'm not including this year we have 19 to date but we're again we just crossed the midway point so you can kind of understand where we are in terms of a trajectory likely to land somewhere from you know 22 to 33 students uh you know perhaps higher this year a little bit but uh we're we're in the ballpark of past performance i would say finally the question was asked what would happen if we eliminate the three elementary positions that are you know proposed in the budget those positions were proposed as we as i i know you know beat mercilessly
008on night one enrollment and insurance those are the the big drivers we're seeing huge enrollment growth in order to sustain the services we currently have basically provide our ratios commensurate with our history given the enrollment growth we recommended that three positions be added at the elementary grades i don't want to miss the fact or you know gloss over the fact too that we are also offering a half adding a half time music position to be able to accommodate the music curriculum at that level as well with the addition of the three sections that's would be necessary and so you know when we consider the reduction of three positions i look at that from two different perspectives one is the simple mathematical computation to figure out what's the new ratio that's pretty straightforward i think the
009other one uh that also has to be considered is the contextual impact where you know we've been through two years of a pandemic i'm conscious of class size and how we meet the needs of students and not necessarily stretching beyond our historical ratios and so you know from the the clear and straightforward math computation we have 2190 elementary students projected next year for grades k through 12. um we proposed 116 so you divide it by 113. when marlene and i looked at where the distribution would be um because i can't take a third of a teacher from four different grades or three different grades i have to take a teacher from this grade a teacher from that grade in this building um because the teachers are obviously whole people and not fractions so uh the
010result of that calculation would be that we would recommend that if that were to occur they would be taken from sixth grade at doolittle which would bring their class size average to 23.3 at highland uh at 23 flat and at norton at 23.6 the existing class size is 21 and a half at chapman which means we have two sections 21 and a 22. these this number 23 to provide some context would be the highest sixth grade class size average in at least eight years i went back we went through marlene vin and i this afternoon we're looking through historical budget books and things you know we were easily able to get to eight years it would would have been time prohibitive to continue to dig uh to find further years but uh it gives you
011some context of what that reduction would mean uh you know as i i hope that we're at the end of the pandemic but we've just been through two years of it so it's certainly not my recommendation to reduce those positions but given that the question was asked i wanted to provide some data and context around the response so to quickly go through the budget recap i know we've spent a lot of time hashing through uh various line items and information as you know the um 21 22 budget was 77 million dollars the recommendation for the upcoming school year is 81 million dollars the medical benefit increase is 2.2 million dollars you know 2.9 of our increase again i want to reiterate that's not a mistake anybody made that's not that oh my god all of
012our staff got terribly ill over this year it's not any of that it was a calculated effort to you know how are we going to manage tax rates last year we have federal money let's take a million and a half out of the operating budget infuse a million and a half of federal money which it worked it did what it was intended to do the outcome is always a gamble with insurance you know i bought life insurance for the last 20 years thank god i didn't need it but i don't consider it a waste of money either so the the um plan was to infuse that 1.5 million dollars hopefully the claims come in super low because we were budgeting well under what the projection was and that and we knew that this could very
013well come to fruition and it did we have to fill that gap with operating budget recommendation in april the council could always decide to do something like this again infuse some federal money maybe it's kind of a step down maybe they you know do 750 000 this year something like that that's still on the table but it on the surface is a significant sum in this year's budget when you back the insurance benefits out of this understanding that we have rapidly growing enrollment our budget increase is only 2.44 which i think is is really very responsible but it also shackles us in some respects to really stretch beyond that knowing that i can't walk in here and request six percent you know so some of the key budget takeaways obviously the budget driven by climbing
014enrollment and medical benefits recommending funding benefits at the projected claim rate you know that's nothing new as we discussed uh with with tom from usi at great length the remaining 45 percent of our budget increase is aiming at preserving current services and when i say preserving current services i think some people may feel like you know we're leaving we're leaving kids short we're just preserving we're not advancing and talk a little bit about that our current service level we work to advance what we provide and i'm going to talk a little bit about that but i also want to reiterate that you know we continue to be an outstanding value with incredibly uh great success uh at a number that is significantly cheaper than our peers spending on a per pupil basis not total budget
015per pupil when you compare us against our peers we spend 5 million less a year than they do 5 million that's a huge number covet 19 obviously still the real factor so when i talk about the context of reducing you know elementary teaching positions i'm cognizant of the fact that we've been through two years of of covid so what are our budget priorities sustaining class size that's that's not jeff sollins necessarily that's our communities and it's come through loud and clear and various things we've done you know marlene will tell you when we did our um personalized learning task force what the the clamor for ensuring that we maintain class size was was very evident so the proposed elementary class size average is 18.9 which in itself is the highest in 10 years it's not
016dramatically higher but it is the highest it's been in in 10 years and you can see at least what uh the last eight or so years there in the chart where the highest we had previously been is 1718 at 18 8. so it's in the ballpark it's responsible it's not insane reducing the staff at the sixth grade level would elevate that number to 19.3 just you know something to be conscious of the proposed seventh and eighth grade class sizes are the best of times worst of the time scenario where our 7th grade class size average at 26.3 is the highest it's ever been the 8th grade class size is the lowest it's ever been so um it's a little bit of a wrinkle in our enrollment to add sixth grade or seventh grade teachers it
017probably won an early ad but it would really really lower the class averages there uh down to significantly lower um it's it's at a high number but reasonable at the moment i mean that's not um outrageously above where we've been but it is certainly high in the seventh and eighth grade you know there there are limits these are at the limits of what we would consider appropriate you know the top end and the bottom end we wouldn't want to go really much lower than 22 in in the middle school we wouldn't want to go much higher than 26 but it's kind of where we are at the high school the ratio is 15.1 students to one teacher that makes us the 14th highest ratio in 21 dergby schools and i think you can think 15
018per teacher it's not really you're considering all the certified staff in a building which is why it's not like we're way overstaffed we're you know two-thirds of the way up the chain for durgby high schools we're also in the second year if you'll recall of a phase-in we're reducing from six sections to five in line with pretty much all of connecticut i think we were one of the only high schools in connecticut if not the only that had six sections through our budget or through our negotiations process this was part of the consideration i really would not recommend reducing staff there which will certainly compromise the effort to go from six to five and maintain you know class sizes again within the context of a pandemic so continued priorities we do focus intently on at
019the building classroom level our central office leadership team is incredibly lean we have four positions roughly allocated to central office makes us 21st out of 21 durgby school systems in terms of students per central office administrator when we added the community coordinator position that ratio took us to 19th for some perspective that's how far out of whack it really was so you know we're we we focus intently at the classroom level i'm not complaining about the ratio at central office i think we're we're doing things we should be that's why it's my recommended budget the cps you know church for public schools ranks 12th to 21 derby students per mental health provider we were 20th when we focused on sel the board put its you know resources where its needs were where our goals were
020and we focused on that and we've you know dramatically improved in that respect we're second of 21 in dirt b instructional assistants per you know or students per instructional assistant ratio and that's in large part due to the programs that we've brought in house that are more need intensive same could be said when you look at that ppe per pupil expenditure ratio the the students that we've brought in have more intensive needs it's cheaper and more efficient and better for the child than outplacing them at a greater cost but it's certainly it's going to impact your your costs the discretionary spending history there were some kind of like some questions around the periphery of this and i thought it'd be interesting to share so it went back to 2003-4 our proposed budget is twelve thousand
021dollars higher for staff training today than it was in 2003 for so when we made that recommendation in it was it was higher it was only 12 000 hires the instructional supply line is 240 thousand less than it was in two thousand three four textbook supply budget is eight thousand less than it was about twenty years ago the library resource supplies about fifty thousand less than it was twenty years ago the curriculum material supply is roughly 7 000 less than it was 20 years ago now the overall instructional expense line represented 6.5 percent of our budget then it represents about five point six percent of our budget now so what does this really mean a lot of the discretionary spending lines are down because we had about a thousand more kids back then a lot
022of those lines are down because technology spending is significantly up and we've changed the way that we do business and when you look at our performance it's really objectively the best it has ever been ever and so you know the the questions about fluctuating and is this too low or is this too high i wanna i can share with you in confidence that our administrative team many of whom are here tonight vin marlene are support staff who play a role in the formulation of our budget we evaluate the the multiple spheres of which you know come together in the budget formulation process you know the educational needs of our kids the political and logistical issues like enrollment the contractual obviously with respect to our our you know various bargaining units and um how we navigate
023that as well as the social and health more than ever against our budget and we respectfully recommend this budget before you as a vehicle to advance our goals in a fiscally responsible manner in advancing our goals really is about student growth driven by the supports and resources that help that happen so this bounce forward you know the visual will look familiar to you because this is the what we put together last year when we talked about the infusion of federal support and we asked ourselves at that time geez you know there's a short window of this money we could spend a lot of money on just trying to plug holes for short periods of time or we could invest in our human capacity our our organizational capacity with this money to yes address learning needs
024but ensure that when you know this pandemic has run its course and our these resources may have run their course that we are organizationally undoubtedly better for the experience and that's what we did so this year you know an effort to close the achievement gap we added reading and math support folks at the elementary grades math support people at the middle and high school one position in each location importantly we increased our building-based administration incrementally at the elementary grades which i guarantee you that every administrator in this room would tell you has been incredibly beneficial not because oh there's just another person there to monitor the but because that time is focused on we call science scientifically based research interventions where we [Music] review student performance we develop plans we coach teachers around how to
025close gaps for students in reading writing and math in particular that you know we spend that time coaching teachers and supporting them in classrooms and so you know again it reaches that organizational goal of improving capacity that is certainly warranted and beneficial additionally we've been focused on coaching acceleration and so acceleration is the idea that you know kids had significant learning gaps as much as we tried as much as we i think did very well in terms of providing instruction over the course of the pandemic right from three days after the pandemic to having computers on and kids homes and doing the best we could there are gaps admittedly and so acceleration means you don't go back and try and reteach everything if you try and go back and re-teach all the time and things
026that were missed you will always perpetually be behind acceleration is an emphasis on we're going to move forward in the curriculum we're going to provide scaffolded supports for you to be able to understand these concepts that we're currently working on and provide real-time intervention that's connected to what we're doing now to make the learning easier for you and more relevant as opposed to teaching you a skill from a year and a half ago that you missed outside a context of anything else in the curriculum and trying to just hope it sticks to you we've spent a lot of time money and energy on acceleration um and coaching those skills and our teachers have been incredible in terms of the way that they've been able to pick that up and run with it we've also spent
027a lot of time on professional development around environments building constructive school environments particularly at the middle school how do we do a better job of engaging middle school learners giving them more choice and ownership of their learning goal setting and mike anderson is a national consultant probably somebody we could have afforded to be honest prior to the infusion of federal money and he's done an incredible job for us we're very very happy with how he supported our staff um again using you know professional development to build capacity this is where you know we've built that money in i talked about our professional development budget being 12 000 more than it was two decades ago this money supports that effort and we have that in it you know i just want to reiterate the budget that
028we have presented includes these supports and it we are moving forward a great speed and and i'm very proud of the effort that these guys put in our every teacher our our ias our support staff they've done a tremendous job navigating dare i say unprecedented challenges but uh you know i think this budget allows us with the support of federal assistance to really continue to grow evolve through the 22 23 year it allows us to address you know the the kind of obligatory insurance issue that we have and also meet the needs of vastly growing enrollment so that concludes my summary for you and i'd be certainly happy to take questions our administrative team is here to hopefully help me with any questions and add a different voice and perspective need be as well thanks
029adam jeff i don't know if you can speak to this but this is one of the concerns going through my mind right now is not simply this year's budget but where it leads us over the next few years so my understanding of what had happened back in the 90s it leads right up to 2005 so for the people who are watching our peak was around 2005 2006 right in terms of student enrollment and it's been declining for about 15 years what was going was going on before that i think it for a call correctly was probably about a 15-year increase in enrollment so this is something what we're facing right now over the next day 10 years is something we've faced before but one of the thoughts going through my mind i didn't pay that
030close attention to it in the 90s but my understanding was there was a lot more state funding coming in increasing every year do you know if that's the case and i say that looking at the next 10 years and wondering we've gotten you know we get about 10 million a year 9 million of it is ecs for the last 10 years basically with some other funding sources coming in but that was the lion's share of it of the 70 to 80 million dollar budget as it's grown in the last 10 years ecs has been stable so as ecs grow in the next 10 years as our student population is growing up is is increasing and that's not something specific to this budget but i just have that in mind as we're looking forward including this
031budget well i know it's one of vin's favorite slides but ecs funding has in essence been flat for the last what 20 years man plus i'm i'm excited to talk about the fact that i was in college in the 90s that i i wasn't following the cheshire budget then but um since 19 roughly 1990 the um state funding just in all the revenue but the bulk of it is ecs has been flat so as okay so what i was saying was not correct no okay i wasn't sure i was that's why i'm asking yeah it's basically so what's happened is our local taxpayer contribution has funded a greater total amount of our educational costs since 1990. sure okay when i was a junior at west genesee high school in camillus new york so you've done
032so much to make me feel young today i really appreciate that when we're talking about context of when i was in high school that's i want to make that make me feel young thanks um so i have two questions the first one is if you could remind us what the um the increase the percentage increase of the budget over last year's budget what that percentage increase is if we take out the 1.5 million that was infused artificially into the if you want to just do the math on that then real quick it's one and a half million divided by the current budget well if the question is what was last year's budget increase it was one point excuse me it was two three percent and that did not include the 1.5 million no right because
033that didn't get funded into our budget yeah so it was that the questionnaire yeah so i just think it's it's erroneous to think that we're asking for a five point whatever three four four three four increase what we're really asking for is a 3.23 increase over last year's budget absolutely i you know i would consider that legitimate um you know postulate but again i think 3.2 percent is inherent in that is uh is also closing the gap between where we had underfunded the insurance the monthly insurance projection to go from 825 000 a month to what the current projection is we also had to close that gap so when you add that in as well now we're at three you know two point excuse me um yeah 2.9 percent and you know that's a substantial
034budget increase but again like you said i mean that's this is stuff that we knew would you know more than likely occur that's also um numbers that the town council will understand because they're the ones that infuse that 1.5 million yeah mr massiana and i had a meeting with the budget committee of the town council was that monday night event tuesday night and you know there's a clear understanding about this situation right this is nothing that's a a whopper surprise to them i just wanted to make that a little more clear because you know 3.23 sounds a lot better than 5. and that's the point you know i mean we're obviously up front that this does represent a 5.34 increase in the operating budget over last year we're also considerate of the fact as i
035said earlier that there's still federal money available that if the council sought to it to do something similar to last year maybe a step down approach or something like that might be prudent the other thing that's a real variable here is that by the time we get to to april when we're having these conversations we'll have more accurate projections for what our insurance costs will be as well as multiple months of existing real data around january february march claims uh that may influence this decision too for better or worse because again i you know we can't predict i hope that everybody's healthy but you can't predict that and that's a beautiful segue into my second question which is because i heard secretary cardona speak this morning about the need for more school counselors because we
036are coming off of two years of covered great stressors that our students have been under for two years now and um he is urging [Music] congress to appropriate monies to the states for more school counselors um and then the states would you know send it to the schools so that may or may not be happening but it leads me to ask you um and i'm sure we've looked at because it was two years ago that we um that we brought in those three more school counselors about yeah about that maybe a little bit longer and i'm just wondering three years ago this budget should have any more positions sure so we evaluate that certainly and kind of going back to what i had said earlier about the bounce forward plan you know as a former
037mental health provider and the fact that you know ms solano and i were both former school counselors we have the utmost respect for the impact that those people make on our school communities but you know i could spend eighty thousand dollars and get one school counselor or i could spend eighty thousand dollars and provide incredible training for 400 staff members to be better at meeting the social emotional needs those are two different worlds but if we elevate our capacity to provide a solid emotional foundation for students and make them engaged and provide support it doesn't doesn't replace a counselor but now the counselors are focused more on students that haven't had the same success in those environments you know what i'm saying it's we've been investing in making everybody even that much better at their
038craft and i think we've been our staff has really bought in done a tremendous job of doing that and if somebody were to say hey i've got a school counselor for you tomorrow would you take it yeah of course i would because i know that those positions as i said have substantial positive impact on our school communities but you know when we balance all of this and we have to look at the whole big picture we didn't include that and we emphasized the training instead god bless you great thank you for the for that answer and it really goes along with the discussion that i've been hearing a lot of which is we just need to the school communities just need to be healthier socially and emotionally absolutely and we are doing um a lot
039of that and i recognize it because the reality is is kids can't learn they're not going to catch up if you know if they're not coming to school in a really good place if they don't feel safe if they don't feel they can belong i mean these are the foundations maslow's hierarchy very fundamental but you know we've as a community as a board started focusing on that six years ago this isn't a new thing for us where i think a lot of people a lot of other communities are like well we better do something about this now we did something about it six years ago which is why we don't have to knee jerk in fill holes now great thank you for that explanation sure do you have an idea when the elementary schools it's
040been a while they start to departmentalize is it fifth grade or sixth grade across our elementary schools in sixth grade but there are pockets where it happens in a fifth grade classroom and there are some instances where for some subjects in some parts of the year teachers will partner up to do some of that departmentalization in fourth grade but not the way they're doing it in sixth grade like a chapman to truly departmentalize but right i just didn't know how far down to the primary grade even if that's an option for a future that's all i'm just kind of thinking out loud right now in my head sure yeah i mean that's that's more of a philosophical delivery model conversation um that we haven't really you know considered we've had you know over the last
041several years really tremendous success uh in our all of our standardized assessments and we're not even you know we're not teaching the standardized assessment we're really focused on the learning standards and it's translated really well to academic achievement so right now we weren't really even considering any sort of departmentalization even if even if it was perhaps fiscally more cost effective i don't know that i'd be willing to jeopardize the growth that our students have shown to do that could it be more so but we're ranked fifth right now so it was hard to top that i don't know that i'd want to risk it um can you for the first time i really have no idea what you're talking about oh sorry so what is departmentalization so i'm sure you're familiar with like math science
042social studies departments at middle high school i think the question is at the at the sixth grade level when students will have students transition to different teachers who a teacher may exclusively teach english language arts uh or math uh that happens at the fifth grade yeah it's is marlene was saying in pockets at fifth grade yeah certainly uh you know it's more established in sixth and then certainly seventh and beyond it's pretty pretty commonplace it's the standard i just haven't have you really heard you use that term before so i wasn't yeah sure sure sorry thank you for clarifying for people okay yeah my next question is um so the 134 esy that average 134 students on a typical year they'd go through the esy well we have 132 last year okay i don't know
043what the annual average would be could you ballpark it robin it was just more that the needs were more intensive last year than typical some parents chosen to have a summer but i think the majority of those students are those intensified students and then you have um some students that are more of the resource so our threshold not ours but the threshold for extended year services is when you're evaluating at the end of the year will a student regress beyond peers and will it take that student significantly longer than peers to recoup what they've lost so if you consider that let's say i'm just throwing out an arbitrary factor here you're not grounded in anything but an average student leaves for the summer and loses 10 points and they can gain those 10 points back
044in in four weeks when we're looking at extended year services those are students who lose 20 points but gain eight back in those four weeks so it's regression recoupment is the way that you know educators look at who do we provide extended year services to and now um can you just clarify you're adding three more elementary teachers but we're not sure specifically what grade levels or we are certain no we're certain on you know where those uh positions would be um can you i don't have my budget book and i lost that off the top of my head vent do you do you have that marlene do you know those today i know it was sixth grade at highland right sixth at highland yep uh i believe it was six a doolittle and then we
045had another teacher added at norton we were focused there am i wrong you're talking about what you would do if you cut the three but if we just look at it grade by grade this year to next year so because some are up and some are down is the point it's those three so kindergarten stays the same grade one goes up by two grade three goes down one grade four goes down one grade five goes up one and grade six i can mess that up a little bit hold on kindergarten stays the same grade one goes up by two grade two goes down by one grade three goes down by one grade four goes up one grade five stays the same and then grade six goes up two and then that's just total and then
046obviously it's spread out in each of the schools right if you look in the enrollment section of the budget book and again like i i want to go back to something i think i touched upon uh in the initial budget presentation and that you know there's a reason we don't put these in stone tablet you know you know how much building is going on if we get a just it happens where you get a significant number moving into fifth grade randomly from another into one building it happens and it's like all right well we better shift this sometimes we have to add positions that that happens on a regular basis um over the last six years i'm sure it's happened multiple times where like all of a sudden you get an influx into this one
047grade and now we're beyond the threshold you know if we had 20 kids move into seventh grade we'd have to do something about it and when we do that it means we shift we take money from other places in the budget we have to hire those positions because again when we've had held that you know the the class size ratio is sacrosanct we don't mess with that we pull from someplace else we make it happen and so you know these these are the projections and again it's based on enrollment projections based on birth rates and people moving in and i don't know that it adequately captures the building that's occurring in the housing turnover and so we might have to be flexible come august but this is where we stand right now i don't think
048we've ever had a year where i'm as concerned about the projections as i am this year just you know given the environmental variables and we know the direction things are trending which is why i get anxious thinking about reducing those positions so um you know this has been an interesting session here and i know i want to go back to some of the comments i made the other night about my concerns with the um oh my god i'm having a senior moment um discretionary costs with regard to instructional expenses and i understand instruction is the whole package i mean it's the teachers it's the building it's the materials as well but jeff i found it interesting when you went back to 2003 2003 and are in our discretionary instructional expenses were 6.3 percent of budget
0496.53 versus now which is 5.63 okay so we're on a percentage basis only you know one percent different which could be a you know a huge percentage in terms of dollars amounts but it makes me wonder is there a a formula that that schools use or or gauge their performance by that that says okay in the area of instruction you know ninety percent of it is the teacher to student contact and five percent of it is the materials and the equipment and the capital and then the you know another balance is the capital the building yeah yeah because to me that's an alarming it's such an alarming thing to see that such a small piece of this whole pie is dedicated to um discretionary instructional sure expensive yeah i mean that's a great question i
050think if if there were a formula for success it you know in terms of the percentage of allocation in these various places my job would be wildly easier if i could predict definitively you know that if i spent 80 percent on personnel 12 on instructional supply and you know and down the line that that would create success it it but the education is is very dynamic in the sense that things are changing all of the time nevertheless you know we've we've stayed in a pretty narrow bandwidth of change over the course of 20 years with respect to uh how much we spend on instructional spend expense technology which isn't included necessarily in that ex instructional expense line that's more of an equipment line i will guarantee you has gone up now this year it hasn't
051gone up substantially because vin and his team mike papa deserves a special shout out have secured an incredible amount of money to pay for chromebooks and everything else so you know that bandwidth is a pretty narrow over the course of 20 years to vacillate really within a percent is still pretty close over the course of 20 years and again i would turn to the outcomes where our outcomes still remain very high um so i don't know that you know that reduction from a 0.9 of a percent has really uh i don't think it's been detrimental for us i think the the mix of ingredients that we have right now has been successful and this budget aims to kind of sustain that mix yeah i'm an instructional supplies i'm curious has any of it been shifted
052in the last 20 years like an it line budget or anything i mean out of that out of that that collection no not to my knowledge vin uh i mean you have a deeper history than i do where you pay very close attention to those lines but and just just to be clear i'm not speaking like it's even a conscious thing i'm just thinking in terms of the internet you didn't have so yeah i mean i think you know if you want to consider a chromebook an instructional supply or something like a smart board an instructional supply then i guess you could argue that as i as i just more or less postulated that there has been a shift okay toward those you know toward those resources that we consider part of a contemporary educational
053experience so yes and no right nothing formal it's not a formal but but certainly um you know in practice it's been that way um i guess i'll [Music] take this opportunity to ask a question um or i'll make a comment first that this is one of the the most difficult budgets i've gone through since i've been on the board or even before the board um uh i'm having a hard time going through line by line to really distinguish you know what what's a need what's a want you know that that kind of thing um and sin you know since 2018 i've always felt like a lot of these budgets are very reactionary like it's always like there's a problem we have to solve the problem um and i'm sure you know there's obviously a lot
054of planning for the future in these budgets but i guess what you know kind of absorbing all the commentary that's going on tonight is that you know when you look at it it comes down to that most of our budget goes as we discussed many times it goes into you know personnel and budgets and we know that we're having a uh i'm sorry benefits and um you know we're going to be going into a i guess i guess a great problem to have as we're going into a period of expansion right where we were flatlining like literally like two years ago looked like this like this town was dying like people were like are we going to be here yeah how are we going to consolidate things right and now it's like exactly the opposite
055um so i guess my question to i guess for you know maybe it won't be as relevant for this year but you know now that we're in this expansion mode and you know we're looking at you know three teachers this year have you guys uh has your staff put together a plan as to what expansion is going to look like from a staffing standpoint for so that we can you know budget appropriately so that you know these increases aren't as much of a surprise that everyone knows you know going into it that um you know these expenses are going to be necessary and and what's it going to look like sure it's a great question adam and it is it would be obviously intelligent for us as a leadership team and you know board included
056in that process to kind of try and forecast what that would look like and you know it's really contingent on how how hard do we want to hold to the belief that we want to sustain current class size because that makes the exercise much easier if we believe that class sizes have to be dramatically lower then obviously that influences the math and vice versa the best way to forecast those projections is through great enrollment analysis what we historically have done has we've provided uh we've been provided that analysis through new england school development council i know you've heard nasdaq before that's grounded in birth rate which is helpful but what we're seeing in the community is an unprecedented level of housing turnover and construction like this boom that we're experiencing to better project enrollment it
057will be very helpful to have slam who coincidentally is doing that enrollment projection for us for school construction provide us that information the the town is soon to [Music] release the funding uh projected to next i think it's february 8th release funding for them to complete that study so we'll have a secondary benefit of not only you know the initial benefit of looking at school construction but a secondary benefit of having very closely studied enrollment numbers to help us project for future growth i wouldn't want to do that now exclusively based on birth rate right um so so that being said so the the three teachers that you um have in this budget are based on current enrollment or or project the projected number from the slr report a little of both actually adam so
058the the number that we use in our budget book is the nasdaq projection but i i know i illustrated that as we sit here today actually not today as of whenever i gave january 7th i think i gave the initial 13th whatever the budget presentation was we sit five students away from next year's enrollment already which was higher so you know when i plant the seed about come august we may have to make some adjustments again come april i may even have a better sense for where we stand when you know ben marlene and i start talking to the council about what the board budget looks like the enrollment may have changed by then because what we've seen throughout this year is a huge upswing of people moving in carol would we have two calls
059this week um and it's you know we just are seeing people move in at a high rate during the year that we don't see as typically as we have this year and so you know come april i may even have a better sense of where our enrollment will be relative to that nasdaq projection and then certainly you know we're anticipating that information from slam by then too which will even a clearer picture of what the projections are because they do consider all right you're building x number of houses x number of bedrooms in those houses you know what here's the ratio of kids per house like that and so it'll give us a much clearer picture of our projected enrollment but for right now we're using kind of the best information we have that's it
060actually to adam's point um you know today we had the news about chef versus o'neill i know it only right now impacts harford but it could potentially i mean we're our open choice is just to new haven right so that's another thought right there where we we need to look at the open choice being more expansive and and hopefully are we're competitive enough that we get uh even increase higher enrollment so what are we doing now that we have this news and to get ahead of the game what are we doing about that sure so we've as you know at the last board meeting increased our open choice allotment to new haven choice is the operative word in that you know phrase and we currently do not fill not we cheshire public schools we offer
061the seats the students in new haven don't necessarily make the choice we don't have enough applicants to fill all of those open seats and that you know when we talk to families the biggest reason is the way that the catchment areas are configured we are the farthest drive from new haven to come to an open choice school students i mean until this year had to get up i don't know remember the exact times mary but it was like the bus was at 5 30 in the morning or something for high school so we said that's absurd added like 10 more seats at the high school we had interest in those seats we added those seats that they could split the route into two runs which pushed it back literally 40 minutes and so we're trying
062to find ways to accommodate and support participation in that program um but at the end of the day if it's still open to choice it's you're asking a kid to make a big commitment i'm just thinking even waterbury next door right so they're not in our catchment area yeah um as the state defines it waterbury students you know tend to travel west obviously west and north uh is their catchment area might that change who knows um and certainly we'd welcome students from other communities under those circumstances but uh you know the chef decision is really well submitted today i'm sure you know may influence things down the road yeah to be seen but you're right to have that on the radar for right now i mean i think we overall are a victim of our
063own success in a way and we are because you have been successful and you've done more with so little um i i mean i'll be honest this budget does make me depressed because our kids and our staff are old i mean i feel like we've just been giving giving and they have the return on investment has been phenomenal and so i just can't find into ann's point that 2.44 should really be higher um so that's that's where i sit right now and i need to kind of process all this but overall we need to be a bit more proactive so um jeff to go back to the um enrollment so i'm looking at um just an overview from nasdaq um that shows the percent change now this is connecticut overall the percent change of on
064student population um from 2018 to 2029 at a negative 9.2 now that's connecticut overall so how i don't have the whole report obviously how does this i we have seen growth and i think it's a lot of it is coveted growth and yes there's a lot of development going on um but do we know that this is going to be sustained because sure this popular fair question is shrinking somewhere sure maybe we're the only ones growing but yeah it's a fair question faith and um you know we have to make these projections based on the best data that we have available i think to adam's point earlier and where we would look at things like people selling homes and moving in stuff like that is that's certainly a variable and i think we can project
065certain uh enrollment based on that but i think we use nasdaq because that's an anchor those are people who already live here birth rate and so when we look at the you know the last several years of birth rate there was a sustained period where we had 250 270 births a year things like that we have for i think it's next year's kindergarten class a birth rate that's over 300 and that is sustained for an extended period and what nesdek considers is that in throughout our history is a school system you know recent history as a school system there's a an enrollment rate of roughly one and a half per birth rate so you know that also does include that obviously is a way to try and calculate families who move in for the purpose
066of schooling you know i say people don't move here for the night life you know but they do they come here they are coming here oh i think they're coming for the nightlife soon they are coming soon you opening a club on rondo i don't know well this it's true that's true rebel level communications amongst others so it is exciting you know as is i i can't remember i think maybe it was you sam who said it's it's a great problem to have adam you mentioned it that you know we are growing we're vibrant community education though remains the anchor of that community and i think you know an investment in our school system is is certainly an investment in our children and their future but it's also an investment in this community and andrew's
067ability to re recruit people to this community and your ability to sell a home if you live here for for top dollar you know there may have been people raising concerns about taxes at different points and the point that you know school is the is the lion's share of where the tax dollars get spent but when they sold their house for top dollar you know that that that's why so yeah i mean it's definitely it's a system and we play an important role in that system and you know taking care of the anchor is really important need to state the obvious here and kind of echo what everyone else has said you know i've spent time going through this book we discussed it multiple evenings and we're looking at really a 1.8 million dollar increase
068when you take out the medical health benefit and like to me it's you know there's not a lot of there's nowhere i don't see where we could really cut um after hearing robin and carrie the other night i mean our responsibility for special education is increased we're going another few years out to provide services we have more state mandates we need to have this transition coordinator i think that position is you know i don't see how we get past that i'm a big supporter of keeping our class sizes where they are i know how hard these teachers all work i know how that benefits especially the younger so k through six by adding these three teachers i think it's 18 students if we're using the 2000 2190 students so i guess just my real my
069point here is is i think what we really need to be doing is petition town council to help to support the medical you know to get some of the federal money in here in order to offset that because a 1.8 million increase in a 77 million dollar budget is like is peanuts especially with the rising cost of everything else that we're looking at in the increase of enrollment any and that's that's a big yeah big driver in this budget obviously so i mean usually we have all these line items that we go through and we can kind of debate but there's not a lot of increases other than looking for additional teaching positions in order to as a reaction to the increase enrollment right it's it's and it's it's that and that's why i called
070it a sustained budget because we're not driving down class sizes as a matter of fact we're you know as i indicated at an all-time high really in a lot of places where we're sustaining the same high quality that we have in the same cost-effective manner we have in the in past but it is an increase obviously made more glaring by the medical benefit piece and i will say i really bristled today and then not to call out the herald but i guess i am in an article you know it wasn't wasn't the fact that vin made fun of the likeness of me in the editorial cartoon not having a lot of hair because i think this haircut makes me look like i'm losing my hair but i'm not and it wasn't that it was in
071the article when it indicated that the increase in our budget was driven by several factors and the first factor they indicate was teacher salary increases i wanted to freak the teacher salary line is is only going up i mean in terms of the teacher pay scale increase is only it's less than two percent the raise it's not driven by teacher raises getting you know exorbitant or anything like that that's that's really made me upset because those people are working too hard and i feel like you know almost getting blamed uh you know 5.3 is way out and that may not been how the article was intended and i know i'm just hypersensitive to that but i want to make that clear too that it's not this is as you stated a substantial increase grounded in
072again medical benefits and enrollment but it's doing the same stuff we've been doing which is cost effective in and has a high return on investment but i think what concerns me the most is that um there's just something not right structurally and this isn't going to you or to vin or to marlene or the staff it's just i look at that medical benefits number and something is happening that's just almost out of our control and um you know it is petitioning the the council is just it's a band-aid we i you know is it the consolidation of the health care industry is it you know the the changes in the way um health packages are now or you know that from experience rating to community rating that you know was imposed with obamacare with the
073uh you know in the pricing of plans something is just out of our control and i i don't know how to fix it i don't know where to go but we have got to do something because you know we lear really we're saying with the instructional expenses they're not that far off from the from where they were 20 years ago but they're going down they're taking these that big huge monster is taking more and more and more away from what we're supposed to do which is teach the kids and i i think you're expressing something faith that i will guarantee you is felt and heard in board meetings across america and i'm not talking about just board of education meetings you know professional or boards that govern businesses that the cost of health care is
074a substantial issue in all lines of work or for individuals who you know unfortunately may not be employed i mean health care costs are a real concern at the same time i know that you and everybody in this room has a deep commitment to taking care of our the health and welfare of our staff and so how do we navigate the increasing because i'll tell you our teachers our bargaining units they will say the same thing because every year their cost goes up too this isn't just something felt by the people in this room and the taxpayer this is something that our employees myself included have cost share increases every year as well so i mean it's definitely a significant issue i think if we continue to work with the town council on a local
075level of how do we best navigate it i mean vin showed you data about how the town of cheshire has navigated some of these challenges at a better clip than others but it's it's huge it's a massive number it's very expensive and you know vin i don't know if there's anything you want to add there but i think this year's 2.2 million dollar request i know we were talking about the 1.5 million that was infused if you take the 4 million that we're requesting and reduce it by the million and a half so in other words instead of funding it directly to the medical benefit reserve if it had been contributed to our operating budget this year's request would have looked more like 3.4 so we kind of created this cliff and it was a
076risk that everybody was on the same page it was the hope that claims would not go up as much as they did um so my point is part of what we're looking at is self-imposed and part of it is the reality of the cost of claims any in either case i think faith's concerns hold water though and that i mean even without the million and a half or whatever you just look at what is the cost of our insurance and what you're not seeing faith is the substantial amount that our employees pay into that all right so take whatever where you see in our budget in terms of the cost to us add a whole lot more because we pay into it and then and that's the cost and that's such a big number that's
077the concern that's the question yeah but as i said to adam the other day i mean we've always had cancer patients we've always had replacements why why are they suddenly so much more expensive it's not like we have a rush on them our numbers of cases are probably very similar why is that single case that much more that's and that's what scares me because that's what's going to come back to really erode what we can do here and just and i raise it as a concern i wouldn't mind seeing some of the mandates coming out of the state slowed down a bit and i hope that legislators are listening to that we've got to kind of um deal with what we've got and keep the piling on doesn't help help us either um i i
078don't know i just wish we as a district could have a little more autonomy so we can figure this out but anyway i those are my concerns and just not really sure how to deal with it well you know um and faith to your point i just remember you know my first year in 2018 i think the um the projected uh claims expenditure per month i think was like 725 000 a month made me a little lower than that um and now this budget is one million dollars for this right and next year right so i mean that's a massive exponential increase yeah 33 yeah thank you for that sure so it's a big number over the course of a short throw yeah i mean it's yeah it's a very short period of time to
079have it go up that quickly um so i mean and you know we've been talking about you know risk structure and you know and uh you know our our uh consultant on that um you know seems to think that maybe it will improve i i'm not as optimistic it's hard to be optimistic in the late of 33 yeah because we're at what plus one year from the i guess the five year average drop-off that we usually have yeah right right so um it's just that number is huge um so uh do we have any uh addition and you have an additional question okay sam i was just thinking of the um teaching contracts you know if you have these three positions um just competitively how confident are you in being able to fill them and
080you know and my other thought on this is where are we in developing um minority teachers and recruiting them so to answer the first question about um how do we feel about our confidence in filling elementary teaching positions i would consider that very high the the folks in this room can tell you that we get a lot of applicants um give me a fair number diane uh dianna amy you guys on it elementary teaching position for so you know today marlene and i interview if you couldn't hear that uh diana was saying a hundred positions um amy was saying 80 to 100 position uh applicants excuse me for a position i mean it's incredibly competitive marlene and i interviewed a person today um it was a final interview to replace a position that got vacated
081and this person was telling us you know i'm dying to work i'm so excited to have the opportunity the culture the support the you know this building is a great uh place i know somebody who took a position here in the last couple of years and you know said it was it was great and so you know i'm very confident that we will find talented people um and we won't necessarily have to pay we'll find talented people at a lower price point too when you have 100 applicants you can hire somebody who is really talented two three years in and you know will be a tremendous teacher as opposed to when you don't have that applicant pool and your choices are maybe somebody right out of school who's who's really green somebody who's got 15
082years experience that will be a substantial budget impact and maybe isn't much better and you're trying to figure that out when we are doing well with recruitment with respect to teachers of color that's an area where we need to continue to improve on and have worked closely with southern um now central to try and recruit uh black latino hispanic asian teachers to diversify our workforce and you know the the work is proving to be more about planning the seed in high school students that matriculate through because you know particularly with southern what we've found is that they you know southern has a recruiting pool out of the new haven area and students will come to new to southern they'll do a great job they'll get their degree they want to go back to the community
083and make an impact where they grew up and unfortunately we don't have that sort of cyclical pool so we've been um advertising doing targeted advertising we um this year might you might remember that we're working to have a candidate in the aces program that will allow us to take somebody working in our community now uh we have a an individual that we would like to bring in they get trained as a teacher under our support we can use open choice money for that and we make a commitment to them that they'll be teaching here for two years at least and they can hopefully will stay with us um and the the nice thing is we can make a commitment to that program because we know we have growing enrollment we know we're going to have
084openings over the next several years so that's one way to just kind of bring people in train them and hopefully they stay here with us but we we're always trying to do more in that respect i only asked that because i thought the state did have some sort of grant that if we did um have that as a high priority that they'd be able to help fund that i don't know then if you've heard of anything but i yeah that's still uh in legislation in terms of they've funded programs through crack started it the cooperative regional education council in hartford greg florio runs that and they started that program and it's the funding has made it possible to stretch to aces and the other regional service centers we'd like to see more funding that you
085know we can use as a local district rather than the open choice resources we have not other districts may not have those resources but we want to be able to use that to engage in this program to to better diversify our our workforce thank you okay some questions about the results so um just going through state and federal grants started at the back we'll work my way forward um how how confident are we it said requested are we confident that we're gonna get these grants that are listed on page one under that tab everything that's there is um really been perpetual it's solid okay and then with regard to the open choice program i thought that you had said that we are gonna be be we just don't have space for all of the students
086that we we're going to be our numbers are reducing because we don't have the seats yeah we haven't added many more additional seats as you know over what we currently offer so are open choice grants here are they still going to be the same or are they going to fluctuate based on students actually you know based on what we have this year they're probably they're actually likely to increase okay because of the the way the formula works is there's three thousand dollars allotted per student right with additional allotments um when you have uh in excess of a certain number of students within a building based on the building's size so like at cheshire high school where we dramatically increased uh the number of open choice enrollment the number of open choice seats that will probably
087see a bonus that we don't have factored in yet we don't know what that number will be at this point okay so that's a bonus for this year and then if we have fewer students next year then we will just be but we didn't budget the bonus in because we don't know exactly what it is we thought that might be irresponsible okay see what you're saying um okay and so i it's the same question all the way through are we you know title one grants and title two grants we're confident that they're here so we don't have to worry about those okay all right um perkins grants too pretty much steady year to year except for that exception the year that we had applied for that extra sorry that's except for the year that we
088applied for that extra funding okay all right um and then i just curious going through vocational education we get grant money for voting no vocational i'm sorry i'm thinking never mind i'm going to take that question away yeah we pay for boag when we do okay but we also get grants for vocational i was right yeah sure perkins would be an example almost okay it's a federal grant okay uh all right and i just held me here why do we pay st bridgets and pressure account because of state law we're we're required to cover the nursing services and transportation for in-town students to both st bridges and cheshire academy and correct me if i'm wrong then we do pay saint bridges and we haven't um the money hasn't been requested from cheshire academy or how
089did that how's that work the money is part of their charter church the academy refuses grant money state federal grant money is part of their charter okay so they typically always respond no that they don't accept that money whereas places like st bridget do accept the money um keep in mind when you receive federal money or state money there are expectations tied to that money right and sometimes the amount of money isn't worth the expectations that come with it in you know some circumstances but you know they don't accept it so we either never receive it or do we get it and then have to return it or is it say we have x number of money and when the academy refuses it that gets factored into what we get and what st bridget gets
090okay um okay robin that includes social work services too right um whether a student might be impacted by disability and that we go through the valuation process they don't get an iep can get a service yep and these are just kind of random are we do have we anticipated how many retirements we're going to get this year um no no it's early yeah we're still really kind of early for that we would probably have a better sense in april or often times you know teachers it's in the contract that they should notify us but i think it's may 1st but you know if a teacher tells me on june 8th i'm you know i'm looking to retire i you know it's not i don't say no thank you you're held for the next 30 days
091of the next year so it's hard to hard to know okay do we offer like a retirement workshop early on just for those that are sure thinking about it yeah actually i would say the union does a lot of that okay and then you know it's it's not an easy decision so teacher retirement is usually 35 years for a quote normal retirement and when you've been doing it for 35 years some people have a real hard time making that decision and i understand it and so we deal with it okay that's that's all for now um can i make call you on some other questions that i have if that's okay okay are there any uh additional questions all right um seeing none our next agenda item is possible action for the finance committee um
092oh tim i don't know if there is anybody from the public just to make that official i can take it yes uh for the right for those who are not here with us in the cafetorium uh there is no one in the audience to make public comment at this time uh there is still our our meeting is still ongoing for for a little while so if you do if you're watching at home and you have comment um you can leave comment at cps budget at cheshire.k12.ct.us those emails will go i think went directly to uh your email jeff it's your inbox i was just checking my email yeah and we don't have any updated questions other than what uh mr besters shared okay so they're still you probably have maybe 15 minutes before we wrap
093up here um but um so for possible action uh for me i i i still haven't gone through everything yet to make a completely informed decision as to uh how i would like to vote right now um i don't know if uh either of you have any thoughts right now i think i said it earlier i think we need just a little more time to process this all i know fate's going to have some more questions for mr mattiano so i think yeah okay and traditionally what we've usually done we'll have a uh potentially on february 3rd we could have a finance meeting before uh the uh the main board meeting so that uh hopefully we'll be able to advance a motion to the full board uh and then we can uh hash it out
094further from there so uh so i guess for now um i'll speak to uh chairman peregini um and i'll let him know that perhaps our plan is to you know to have something ready for february third the evening of february third um okay um that being said that's our last agenda item so um i'll attend a entertaining motion to adjourn sam second all in favor thank you this meeting is adjourned