Board of Education Budget 1-25-22

001are again at another wonderful board of education budget meeting um i guess i'll officially uh call to order and uh ms jaginski can i have a roll call please oh my god um carol you're not on mute but obviously your microphone's not working if you want to sign off and come back on that often resolves the issue in the interim i can call the role okay here mr martelly here miss ham here miss robersenberg here uh mr white here miss harrigan should just join i thought sure okay there we go uh mr paragini okay mr chair you have a quorum great uh before we begin um do you hear piano music okay well my son is playing piano upstairs i wasn't didn't realize i hear him playing piano just want to make sure he's not

002picking that up okay cool um all rise for the pledge i 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 justice for all quick draw on the pledge yeah we're having low production value this evening this is this one isn't going to win a grammy for best local production no or not uh emmy right excuse me uh doctor sullivan is certainly uh is there any audience comment from uh previous meetings or uh currently before we begin no sir okay um i guess i'll uh i'll turn the meeting over to mr maciana thank you mr grippo and good evening welcome back everyone so i do have um you know our second budget workshop is this evening the agenda

003is as you see on the lower portion of the screen here tonight's review will include instructional expense and part of instructional expenses special education services so we will have a presentation by ms robin ann carey who's our director of pupil personnel uh we'll do support services maintenance and operations including an overview of the capital budget and then you know we will conclude that would um complete the entire review of all the accounts at a high level this evening so i will jump right in um and i will stop if i see questions as we're going along but just to have some quick review the budget that was prepared you know is aligned with all the district goals including complex thinking and social emotional learning uh the the budget assumptions haven't changed the the two major

004items that are incorporated into the budget as we've discussed are a projected enrollment increase at the elementary level uh the need to fund the medical benefits accounts the um total budget request you've shown here the the 81 million 114 420 is the total request which is a 5.34 increase or 4 million 113 368 and you could see here that the the bulk that red pie chart section 2.24 million that's our employee benefits you know our largest portion of the budget increase which we did spend considerable discussion over on the at the meeting we had on the 18th last tuesday uh followed by 1479 for salaries for our employees so this is jumping right into extra instructional expense um as you can see on the lower portion of the screen i just need to move this

005out of the way 5.6 of our budget is dedicated to instructional expense it's about 4.56 million dollars over on the right side you'll see that of the total of 4.56 million is what we call special education tuition that's students that we cannot provide services for in the district that we place out of district 2.25 million is dedicated to that miss carrie when she presents will provide some some detail as to what that encompasses and why we do that the second largest portion of instructional expense is what we call pupil services this is primarily consulting type services that we offer to students who are identified and have special education needs then the remaining portion of instructional expense includes instructional supply textbooks new replacement equipment staff training items that we need for our library and testing and

006adult education supplies if we look at instructional expense this is a page right out of our budget book these are the line items over on the left that i just mentioned but if you look over to the far right you'll see that essentially what we've done with the exception of a modest increase for pupil services and a modest increase for tuition out placement we flatlined uh all these line items in the 2223 budget request now um i i do want to add a couple of pieces of information that i think are important first of all holding the line items flat um doesn't mean we aren't spending the funds that we need for education we believe we are the way we will manage this budget as we've done in prior years where we've had to flatline

007these particular accounts is that we you know work really hard to prioritize what we need when we need it if we need to make adjustments you know and use money from another account category we always have that option but you know we do believe that we have enough here that it will not hurt education of course if we if we had more we we might prioritize other things but i i believe that we can get by through this this budget year with what we've included here so the point that i i really want to emphasize is we will not let education suffer you know we believe that we can live within this budget request this this next year and again as dr solonet explained a significant reason why we we've um looked closely and reduced

008or flatlined our budget requests is that we do have a large amount of funds that we have to supplement into the medical benefits of contributions this year so with that i did want to jump into special education costs and then i i will be introducing uh miss kerry in a moment and then we will be coming back to those budget line items if there are specific questions that we need to address so what you see in front of you i will take a moment to explain this is the total special education costs by fiscal year um and so if you look at the first year that's shown over our next to the furthermost left column 2017 2018 the actual cost of special education when we take all costs into consideration that staffing both certified and

009non-certified the cost of benefits for those employees that serve our special education students items that we purchased the outplace tuition cost transportation costs in 1718 those costs were about 17.3 million that year our budget was 70 million 126 to 88. so about 24 of the 1718 budget was allocated and dedicated to provide for students that were identified as having special education needs and you could see down the lower part of that same column at that year we had 521 special education students which was about 12.3 of our total population and 33 219 was the average expenditure per student so now if we look all the way over to the right uh you'll see that there's a there's a couple of things that are worth noting but as far as in 2122 the percentage of total

010budget that was allocated for special ed didn't change much it's still in that 24.8 percent of total range of course the cost has increased because our budget has increased over that period of time but what i've circled at the lower portion of the screen is that the number of students increased you know pretty dramatically as compared to increases in per year so we went from 556 to 584 students and then we're projecting uh next year to go to 610 so there is an increase in the number of special education students that we are seeing and miss carrie will cover that in her presentation and you can see the percentage of students with individualized education plans you know has increased to 13.9 this year and we're estimating it will be about 14.6 in the 2223 budget

011year that we're we're presenting um so i'll pause there for some questions because robin i assume you're ready to load up your presentation so i'm gonna stop presenting um when we finish answering questions and so mr gripper i see that there's at least one question from mr white yes mr white go ahead oh thanks adam yeah i'm wondering about the um i'm not sure if robin will be speaking to this but uh sorry i got a pop-up window on here um i'm just wondering about the cause if we have an idea of the the reason that the number's going up is it better identification of students changing in law a change of laws nice picture then um yeah i will try to answer that okay okay okay no that's fine i was just making a

012note to myself because when i get to the part where i'm talking about some of the um what our numbers look like um so let me go ahead faith um thanks all right thanks you i raised my hand and you gave me permission um if i could and been i don't know if you have this number available um can you give us a cost per general ed student the the cost per general ed student if we look at 20 122 is about a little over 18 000 185 i can give you the exact number but it's i thought that was the average cost per student which included the special ed uh it does okay so the the per pupil expenditure that 18 000 um that we quote that the state provides is all students yeah

013but if we carve out and that's what this illustration is doing if we just look at special ed costs divided by special ed students it's higher than the per expenditure i understand so i guess i would like to know what the average cost for non-special ed student is as well i if we could see that and what you're budgeting what you anticipate the budgeted amount per student to be yeah i'd have to do some math on that faith but i'll write that down as a question thank you sam you had your hand up what other variables is well like title one money or uh you know idea money you know wherever i mean if you're looking for a true local cost versus just generic cost sam go ahead i'm going to wait until robin finishes

014she might answer this already in her presentation sure okay okay first i wanted to thank you for having me here tonight um to share some information with you i'm going to try and keep away from the special ed jargon but it's very difficult to do that so if i do mention something or use an acronym and you have questions about it please don't hesitate to ask me for some clarification okay there we go okay so some of you um who had come to our showcases last year when we focused on special education may remember this slide here showing our continuum of services when you look to the right hand side of the um of the slide and we're looking at the continuum we're looking at students that are fully included into the general ed classroom

015so special education services are pushed into the classroom supporting the students with the general curriculum and they're learning amongst their peers we consider this to be the least restrictive setting for students because they're in the same setting and getting the same type of instruction along with supplemental instruction and accommodations in order to be successful you'll also notice that i only i also included not just the classroom as the least restrictive setting but i also included the community because we do have students in our 18 to 22 year old programs that go out into the community as they learn their vocational skills and their transition skills and so they are amongst the um the uh their peers within the community in the community settings um as you move across the um the continuum towards the left

016um you're getting more specialized instruction you're spending less time in the general ed setting and more time in the specialized setting so you can see we have what we call resource support and typically resource support is provided in a small is in a smaller setting and what i mean by that is not that the classroom's smaller but that the groups of students are smaller and so we have smaller groups of students we have us we have a smaller adult to student ratio to provide those added supports and to provide that specialized instruction typically this is in the core subjects of reading writing and math as you move farther to the left and you're getting farther away from the general ed classroom we're now looking at more of a self-contained program and what that means is

017that our students are with for the majority of their day they're with disabled peers so their peers um that they're learning along with in that classroom setting are being serviced under an iep and have more intense needs um the smaller setting also you're going to get more specialized instruction and you're going to have more supports and you're going to have more um a smaller adult to student ratio and that's because their needs are much more um much more impactful so we provide services across this continuum and students at some points in their school career can move from one um setting to another setting depending on how their needs change and as they grow so here's what we were just talking about the number of students so you can see over time our our numbers have

018crept up slowly um typically the change from one year to another year has been pretty small um until you get to the very end of our chart here where we can kind of see more of a steeping um uh increase um this in this uh typically we do see some changes it's very fluid with our students and our student numbers the numbers that i um pulled from are our october 1st state um recording numbers so on october 1st when i pulled the numbers for this school year we were looking at 582 students being identified as students with disabilities and having an iep as of a week or so ago i pulled the number again just out of curiosity just by going into power school and we were up to 600 so even between october 1st

019and now we're seeing an increase we're steadily still seeing an increase on that um some of the reasons that i think that we're seeing that increase those numbers i did actually meet with our school psychologists and our school counselors last friday and i kind of pulled them because i wanted to get their impression they're in those ppts they're in those the decision making when deciding whether student qualifies or is eligible for special education services so i wanted to kind of hear from them about it one of the things that they did point out is that they are seeing that the impact of cobit so we went through a period of time where our students were remote totally remote in 2020. last year we had um depending on what level students were in um whether they

020were getting a full in-person program or they were getting a hybrid program and then of course we had families that actually um opted to do a full remote program um because of various reasons and and the needs that are presented by their their own family um situations um so one of the things that we felt what that was impacting our numbers and our increase was the impact of cobit so during that time we did see some students lose their engagement in learning and when you're talking about a remote learning setting or situation often oftentimes these students are um learning off of you know their their in class through their computer through the remote learning there's lots of distractions that are going on within the home and there's lots of distractors that teachers as they're instructing

021can't really control so one of those factors i think that is impacting our rise in numbers was a loss of engagement now currently in district we're working very hard on acceleration because we recognize that there is an impact from cobit and that we are seeing that student we need to bring that student engagement back um the other thing that um we felt that was also impacting our numbers was social emotional needs so again looking at what some of the impact of what we saw with goat with coven our students that are impacted by anxiety and depression being remote or being out of school being away from their peers being away from that structure has impacted their anxiety and their depression and so again we are seeing some students that may have been functioning fairly well

022even with their anxiety and depression but since returning and since now having a full day full program all in person you know we're seeing some of that impact that was uh one of another uh thought um also um dyslexia so there's we've been having a real focus on dyslexia over the last few years and in doing that we've gotten better at um diagnosing at assessing and at determining eligibility for dyslexia and so i again i think that that is another area that has impacted us um i believe dr solin shared with us the predictions of what we thought we'd be looking at as far as our numbers in this fall and we're finding that we are having students that are moving into the district and some of our numbers are actually higher um in our

023population and so along with a increase in population you're going to get an increase in special ed as students move into the district um so i don't know tim if i did i answer your question uh yeah yeah definitely okay all right so i'm gonna use the number 582 because that's the number from our october one reporting and if we delve a little deeper into that number um if i divide that into two groups and there's a reason why i'm doing that and i'm breaking it up between seventh and eighth grade and not putting dodd all together in one of these groups so we have our pre-k through grade 7 students we're looking at approximately 324 students that have ieps and pre-k through grade 7. when we look at our grade 8 through 12 or

02412 plus because remember we're educating students up to some students up through their up till their 22nd birthday we're looking at 258 students so that's about 44 of our population is falling into that 14 to 22 age range and i'm gonna go back to these numbers a little later in the presentation if we break it down a little more and we look at the primary disabilities the prevalence of those different disabilities you can see how they break out here the largest or the the most students we have that are identified under a disability are falling under learning disabilities keep in mind learning disabilities that includes that group that is identified under dyslexia it includes kids that are identified on dysgraphia under discalcula and those are disabilities that lie in the reading writing and math area

025i want to make sure i did it in the right order it's how i how i said them the ohi or other health impaired in the aqua there those students under that classification typically are identified as students with attention deficit or attention hyperactivity disorder it can also be our students that are identified under anxiety and or depression sometimes you will find that students with anxiety and depression are identified under what we call our emotional disturbance classification that's in the orange at 80 percent we in the past most of our students would fall under that classification but over time we've really teased out and distinguished the difference between emotional disturbance and students that are impacted by mental mental illness such as depression or anxiety um through ohi um emotional disturbance um students who identified under that

026tend to be more students that are more behaviorally impacted and um exhibit also exhibit those behaviors over a period of time into a marked degree oftentimes you'll see the diagnosis of oppositional defiance disorder and that is a diagnosis that a student would qualify for special education services possibly under emotional disturbance autism spectrum disorders make up about 15 percent of it in our population and again i'm going to emphasize spectrum disorders because students that are impacted by autism can vary in how it impacts them we can have students that are very um bright and um and intelligent and uh pick up on instruction very quickly and and are able to excel in the area of the academics but then they have those deficits in the areas of social skills and pragmatic skills um and they have

027difficulty maneuvering through the social realms and the social environments at the other end of the spectrum we can have students that are highly impacted by their autism in many cases they will have cognitive deficits they'll have delayed language delayed development in their they might have occupational fine motor motor skills delays as well and and need the services of an ot or a pt they can also have a very a variety of behavior behaviors that they exhibit or that they that becomes very impactful on their ability to access instruction um intellectual disabilities are ours typically has falling around four percent of our population um these students show can show from mild to severe cognitive deficits and they oft and they also um show deficits in the areas of adapters life skills they need to be taught

028explicitly those life skills and those functional skills that many of us conduct on a daily basis just in our daily living the last piece of this pie that we're looking at here in the maroon is at eight percent is our students that that fall other on other other categories under other categories so those categories might be multiple disabilities hearing impairment visual impairment developmentally delayed or traumatic brain injury and there are others when we look at the prevalence over time you can see how each one of them how it change has changed over time within our district um when i look over at the far right hand side and i'm looking at that that you can notice the very difference in the growth of our students under learning disabilities and that goes back to what i

029was saying earlier about some of the causes and how it's impacting us um you can also see as you look at the um the green bar that's the that's covering our students identified under ohi other health impaired and again we're starting to see that uptick in that area as well as autism in the red when we compare our prevalence to the state prevalence or the state average our bars are in red here and you can see the state in yellow we can see that in across the state the prevalence rate for learning disabilities speech and language impairment and let me just look real quick are typically um more prevalent in other districts across connecticut in our district we find that we are um we have a higher prevalence of students impacted by autism emotional disturbance

030intellectual disabilities and and ohi ohio and so you know i i wanted to delve a little deeper into that because when you're looking at those four disabilities you're really looking at some very um students that are very impacted by their by their disabilities okay all right so if we take a look at our students with autism students that are identified under emotional disturbance intellectual disabilities and multiple disabilities we're looking at approximately 170 students out of that 500 plus number which is about 29 of our population students that are impacted by these disabilities usually require intensive supports now i'm not saying that all students under autism require intensive supports but there's a high chance that many of them are needing more intense supports those supports could look like many of the things i have listed here

031they may require there is a safety issue they may require ex very explicit discreet instruction some of that instruction may involve daily living skills such as toileting feeding dressing some students especially when we look at students with multiple disabilities many times there's a mobility um disability in there that they need help with transitioning from place to place many of our students require breaks such as movement breaks or sensory breaks there are communication needs which we then often incorporate assistive technology to help the students be able to share what their wants and needs are and we do a lot of following on data collection um to be able to address those behavioral needs of this of students impacted by some of these disabilities oftentimes you'll find that um there's the need to really reduce the adult

032to student ratio in order to address the needs the intensive needs of these students and in many cases you might find that the student requires a one-to-one and so we we do incorporate um many ias or instructional assistants in order to support these students and help to give them access to various settings okay looking at a quarter of our students having these intense needs we've developed over time several in-district programs to meet the needs of these students so there are two two types of programs i categorize them as two types of programs in our district we have our intensive need programs and we have our therapeutic programs um we went over these in um in detail in our showcase last year um for most of you um and so just to briefly overview them we

033have our darcy our highland and our god programs that address mostly students that are on the autism spectrum that have a much more severe needs um and may service other students within those programs too but those are fairly self-contained programs and so they're on the far left of that continuum of services where you have a smaller adult ratio and you'll be able to fi to provide very specialized instruction i forgot i should have included the cheshire high school life skills program as well that's our our program that um works with our students that may fall into those four categories of autism spectrum disorders or multiple disabilities and intellectual disabilities on the right hand side we have our therapeutic programs these are our programs that typically address the emotional needs of our students in district or

034our behavioral needs of students and district not too long ago we opened up our doolittle bridges and our dodd bridges programs to address the needs of our students that are impacted by anxiety and depression and or trauma and then you also have our self-contained program at the high school the rise program and the new start program i did include hummuston alternative education program on here while it's not a special ed program it's an extension of the high school and in some cases we have found that our students that are dealing with a lot of stress or a lot of anxiety do flourish and and require a smaller setting as the hummus and alternative program can provide because we've been able to have these programs in district and we've had the um resources to run these

035programs the way they should be run and with the supports that they need in order to meet the needs of these students we've been able to really keep our out of district placements down it was back in i think it was 1718 that we started to introduce our bridges programs the therapeutic programs for kids with anxiety and depression um and so you can see our numbers had gone up but then as we began to develop the program we're able to pull students back into the district and we'll be able to keep those students that were coming up and through the um process being identified as students needing those types of supports we were able to keep them in district as well so we've really been able to reduce our numbers um in out-of-district placements when

036i looked at the numbers of the students that are in out of district placements over half of those students are falling under our autism spectrum disorders and or emotional disturbance and they require a much higher level of support than we were able to provide within district okay so that's kind of a picture of what we have in district what our population looks like and um how and in some of the supports that we've been able to use and be very successful at providing programming for students with disabilities um i don't know if some of you um might recall but last summer um there was a state statute that was changed that required districts to now keep our students that are eligible for transition um transition planning through the age of when uh through the age

037of 21 and exiting them at age 22. prior to that the way the mandate was um interpreted was that once the child turned 21 we then exit them from the program so since last year we are seeing that because of the change we are keeping our students longer now comes this summer a new mandate comes out effective this july we now are required to provide transition programming for students no later than their 14th birthday so if you have a child who has an iep and um require it um all students that have an iep prior to turning 14 during that year you're reviewing their iep you must address transition needs so we're now looking at a a group of students from 14 to 22 to they turn 22 that we're providing these transition services for

038when i looked at the numbers of eighth grade students you're looking at anywhere from 35 to 40 students that are identified with ieps at that grade level at some point during that school year they're going to they're probably most likely going to turn 14 some will turn 14 in seventh grade some will turn 14 just as they enter ninth grade but a majority of them are going to fall into their eighth grade year um so you're looking at 35 to 40 students and then for our transition programs we have 10 students that are currently in our transition programs that will be supporting up to the age of when they turn 22. when you put that together you're looking at anywhere from 40 to 50 students that are impacted by this just in this school year

039that are impacted by this transition mandate so what does that really mean you know you hear the word transition what does that really mean well um the state has identified um 16 transition standards those standards are really focused on ensuring that our students with disabilities have the skills once they leave us to either to to live their adult lives to ensure that those that are a able to be employed will be able to find a job and hold a job and and be successful those that are are able to go on to college or college or university will have the skills to maintain and remain in colleges and universities and not fall into um uh into leaving early and not finishing their degrees and then those students that may go on to continue to need

040supports through state agencies or through various different settings such as a home for student for p adults with disabilities they their need to learn those independent skills skills such as budgeting skills such as how to um dress appropriately how to do laundry how to make a sandwich how to um take care of themselves to the best the most extent possible for them so you can see some of these standards focus on self-advocacy and independence recognizing strengths recognizing when there are challenges and what supports are out there to help and um also looking at demonstrating appropriate social skills and social interactions being able to access health resources health care resources and community resources and um and also technology so the state identified these standards and this is what we're these are the goals what we're looking

041at for our students to be able to do once they leave us excuse me okay so what are transition services so transition services are provided through the development of goals and objectives for a student's iep students are provided service hours of direct instruction and that instruction takes place in three two or three areas it takes place in training and education it can take in it takes place in employment and in some cases for some students with um cognitive deficits and or adaptive skills that are delayed they require independent living skills in order to determine the needs of our students we employ a result-orientated oriented process okay so this chart as busy as it is i'm going to simplify it for you but this is basically what looking at transitioning services the process that we go

042through as we begin to look at a student so just make it simple a little simple first thing that we do is we employ assessments we identify and we um uh use these assessments to identify students strengths to identify a student's area that needs to grow and then we take those assessments and then we determine what goals and objectives we're going to incorporate into the students iep or the students plan the students program we look at the three areas that we want to address that career employment area that post-secondary education or training area and then for some students the independent living area so we develop the goals and objectives and then over the course of of time we addre we explicitly teach them and we monitor them we monitor for progress there um this also

043helps us to identify other areas that we incorporate within the students program such as there might be some job shadowing or some employment opportunities or some job training um there and that's where we move to the community and so our students will go into the community with supports and will explicitly be taught some of those skills that are needed in order to be successful once they move to that next stage in their life and we continuously this is kind of we continuously employ this process you know we might do this at a younger age and then as the student gets closer to finishing up at the high school we might again go through the process of assessing and determining those goals and objectives and we're our next um direction that we're going in so it's

044a very um result oriented process so i'm bringing you back to this slide again because i want to go back to how that mandate impacts us in that process so out of our 582 students with ieps we are looking at approximately 258 students that will go through some piece of that process of looking at what their strengths and weaknesses are what we need to work on in order to make them successful in their if they decide they're going on to a college or university or if they're going straight into the work world or if it's a student with mark with more needs that is going to be educated up till their 22nd birthday and will need far more explicit instruction in employment skills social skills and um in the daily living skills any questions so

045far looks pretty quiet okay oh see sam go ahead yeah robin can you this kind of goes back to somewhere at the beginning what is the typical case load per sped or if you can delineate versus resource room question versus pull out too okay all right so you've got a couple things in that question so i'm going to make sure i answer all of it so when we talk about typical caseloads okay when we're looking at students that are in self-contained classroom those caseloads we tend to keep them smaller because as i said before they have they require a lot more supports they have more intense needs and this teacher-to-student ratio is smaller so when we're talking about self-contained classrooms um we try to in our autism program we tried to keep it around eight

046um because once you put eight adults in there eight students in there and those students oftentimes require instruction to take place within a cubby so that they are fewer distractions it doesn't leave you a whole lot of room in that room um and so we do try to keep those ten to be on the smaller side um as uh also as you move up into your transition programs again we want to try and keep those numbers down because of the needs of the students um for a resource room teacher that can vary on school it can vary on the level um we with the resource room teacher they can provide services as you stated in the general ed classroom where they're pushing in those services or they can they can also provide them where they're

047pulling students out too small group and a more more restrictive setting less distractions and provide more explicit specialized instruction so the those case loads in looking at those right now um we're averaging at the elementary level we're averaging around 15. so it it runs somewhere some case loads are as high as 19 and some are a little lower than 15 but we're averaging around 15. our case loads at the middle school middle school each middle school team has a special education teacher on the team as well and so those case loads are running somewhere around 10 to 12. also keep in mind that we do utilize our special education teachers to help support at tier 3 of srbi so at the elementary level at the middle school level you might find that a special education

048teacher is pulling in a student who has been pulled into the srbi process because they are showing that they have some deficit areas that need to be addressed and they may require special education down the road once the srbi process is completed and so many times at tier three we utilize our special education teachers to also support those students too that was going to be my next follow-up question yeah yeah the secondary level case loads are much higher and it is much more difficult at the secondary level because students are not pulled within a team students are all off in following their own schedules through their own choices of coursework and so up there we're averaging around 16. so some of our teachers can have into the 20s and some of our teachers can have

049less than 16 but it depends on the needs of the students the number of hours that the students are requiring in services and whether those services are being provided in the general ed classroom in a um inclusionary setting or if they're being provided in a resource setting okay and out of your whole total is i'm gonna assume that you're including the 504s in that 582 i think it was no 504s are separate 514 is a general ed accommodations plan so those students are not special ed students they're students that have been identified with a disability but they require not specialized instruction they require accommodations or modifications and so typically their services they they are in the general ed classroom all day but they have these accommodations or modifications so they are not included in that

050number okay i just wanted to make sure thank you yeah faith you had your hand up i did thank you um i actually have a lot of questions okay might answer them okay i just want to make sure i'm understanding um the graphs various graphs and data points correctly so out of out let's go back to out of area placements we are actually seeing a precipitous decline in the number of out of area placements because of the quality of our in-district program but our actual funding is holding at either holding steady or rising if i recall i'm looking at or out of district well for our district as appointments that's good actually okay so what we're seeing is that the students that aren't out of district placements require a very intense program those programs are

051more expensive than some of the out of district programs we've utilized in the past because we've been able to keep many of our students in district and we have the resources to be able to provide them with the appropriate program we're able to um the ones that are then that we end up having to outplace we've exhausted our resources we don't have what they need in this setting and they require a much higher level of care and so those individual placements are more expensive so that we've fallen from 2040. so roughly okay i'm not a mathematician but i get the percentage i can see it in my head um okay um so the cost yeah if i can maybe explain it this way um so when we started our bridges program many of our students

052that exhibit behaviors similar to those of the students in the bridges program would have required an out placement um had not had the program in the supports in district um i would say the average cost of an outplacement for that type of program would run you about 60 seventy thousand dollars today sixty to seventy for just the tuition not the transportation okay but we have some students that are in out placements that are costing us well uh costing us in the high hundreds uh hundred thousand dollars because of the severity of the needs and like i said the level of care that they require is um is far more in many cases that you know you're paying a tuition cost there might be other costs that are involved such as a one-to-one some some placements

053also have additional costs when you're looking at a one-to-one order two on one so situation where some students have required two adults to be assigned to them for the day because of the level of aggression or the level of behavior that they're exhibiting okay we have some students that are medically fragile too so when a student is medically fragile that programming tends to be on the higher level too okay thank you um and then a couple of questions regarding dyslexia how young are we diagnosing dyslexia um they're we do a lot of benchmarks in the general ed um through our general ed curriculum and um we are working very closely the special ed department kevin hanlon and myself um kevin has actually pulled us into some of the srbi meetings um some of our special

054educators to really look and focus on dyslexia and so we are looking at those benchmarks so oftentimes i i you know i would say second third grade we are dead we have identified students even in first grade as dyslexic we've gotten better tools we've gotten more knowledge on it and so we've been able to kind of pinpoint and be able to provide the very explicit instruction and systematic reading that they need in order to make progress because any pro any any strategy that you apply for a student with dyslexia is going to take time for them to close that gap um even with the specialized instruction and the systematic reading so the earlier the better so we are where i'm seeing more of a trend of really moving down those primary grade levels of identification

055yeah okay i just um and again i am not a reading specialist or anything but i mean how it's such an early age i guess i question how does one distinguish and this is probably a discussion another time it's not really a budgetary question but how does one distinguish between a child just learning to read versus a child with dyslexia and and there are red flags there are red flags that you can there are lots of red flags that you can look for but every dyslexic child now has to have an iep if you're if your student is is found to have dyslexia they would um you would well that's kind of do they have to have an iep if they still require the explicit instruction the specialized instruction then yes they need an iep

056we have some students with dyslexia who have gone through several years of explicit direct instruction and are now reading close or on grade level and only require accommodations so we do have some students a small small percentage i would say of students that are identified as dyslexic that only require accommodations and they only require a 504 plan okay so that was another question there are perhaps degrees or uh where okay um the intervention is not as extensive for some others that's good um okay so of the um the new mandate for transitions um what was our age before age 14 um well they identified a few years ago they identified age 14 for students with autism but now it's the age 14 for all disabilities um so prior to that it was by their 50

057their iep going into their 15th 16th year and does the state provide any support funding for this or this is carried by the district um there's no mandate that i mean there's no funding that's attached to transition um i i expect i suspect that you know it comes under special education so you have your idea grant that we get each year that's supposed to supplement the cost all right i liked your word supposed to well it's never 100 it's never been a hundred percent right and um this reduc this bringing it down to age 14 this is all backed by data um the efficacy and the outcomes are backed by data well no just generally the decision by the legislature or the department of education they've got data to back this up that this is

058actually going to be a benefit um when the mandate came out um from the state i it did not include data or it did not include i'm sure there must be some reports out there that they made and pulled this together i you know i think in general um we see that getting our students to start thinking about long-term goals and think about um where where they want to be at some point and it changes over time you know someone who's 14 years old might be sitting here saying i want to go to school and i want to be a doctor or might be saying i don't want to go to school i want to i want to i want to learn how to be a mechanic i enjoy doing things with my hands but

059that can change over time i think at one point i said i wanted to be a doctor then i wanted to be a lawyer then when i said i wanted to be a teacher you know so and and i knew that by the end that's where i was going so it can change over time i think what the state is doing and recognizing is that our students with disabilities tend to um need more time to gain skills and so i think what they're doing is trying to target particular skills that will make our students successful when they go on to a post-secondary education or they go on to seek employment i know there is data and research out there on college students when students with disabilities enter college their success rate and what they were

060finding is is that there was a high percentage of students with disabilities that were not finishing their degrees they were leaving school at the college level for various reasons and part of that was were they really fully prepared to enter college with those executive function and those independent skills that are so necessary to be successful there okay thank you okay sam sorry robin just one more i'm just going back to the um the budget here we don't offer extended school year or is that incorporated into services somewhere do we extend this school year is offered and we do uh we run an extended school year program every summer okay so the where is which line does that fall under as far as in instruction i'm trying to figure out it's probably under special education services

061it's probably incorporated within that i don't know vinnie do you know if it's separated out it's not separated out so to the extent there's a payroll expense it's going to fall under the certified or non-certified staff we don't break out explicitly the cost of extended school year services we could look into doing that but they're not readily available i'll answer that way i'm just trying to figure out how much the extended school year cost separate from the typical school year have to work on that sam to get the number thank you you're welcome okay tim go ahead yeah i was wondering um you were talking about kids who get moved from some kids do get moved from i believe your words were from an iep to an accommodation to a 504 plan okay what's what

062does that mean to the kids when that happens well if a student if it's i'm wondering specifically the the child the student what is the student's reaction does it matter to them are they indifferent are they happy are they sad i'm just curious i think it varies and i think it probably would also vary with age you know i hear from parents and i hear from students as students get older that they don't like being taken out into separate settings sometimes some students don't like to be taken out from separate settings um some students find being taken out into a separate setting reduces their anxiety and they like it so it can vary it can really vary i couldn't pinpoint exactly what how people or how students feel about it so you know when teams

063are making that decision we look at a lot of information a lot of times there's assessments involved and we're looking at the students readiness and you know do they still require if they still require explicit instruction then they're going to still require an iep if they're flourishing and they're doing very well but they require some accommodations such as extended time or breaks or maybe um you know being able to take a test in a quiet area with few distractions then moving to a 504 makes sense okay thank you some students some students come right off an iep and don't and are exited they no longer require the special ed or the instruction and go right back into the general ed setting with no no accommodations so it depends on the situation and one other one

064other question for vin and i this is intended as a very very i'm hoping for a very brief response on this though i imagine it could be a big response but brief is what i want or hoping for so what i what i'm just thinking what's going through my mind is for the last uh so i'm thinking about school modernization and in the past 15 years we've had a downward trend of students drop what from about 5 200 down to 4 200 students something like that and in the numbers and that was generally a downward trend then at the numbers that we're looking at here earlier in this presentation we saw the past eight years where um this was trending up from 500 up to 600. in terms of school modernization and projected enrollment is

065this how detailed does the projected enrollment get does it sort of incorporate uh these students i mean the the short answer is yes okay and then in the educational specifications when those are done you'll see that there are specialized carved out spaces for special ed in each of the two buildings that we're talking about okay so it is so it is addressed via school modernization okay yeah that might be i i might have more questions at another time but i don't think for right now so thank you then okay i would add to tim that right now we're just initiating a whole another uh enrollment review so sure no but i'm assuming that what you're doing is you'll be putting in new assumptions but the model that you have should already the the projected enrollment

066should already be incorporating these two sort of opposite trajectories at least over say the past 10 years they're very they're very opposite um yeah all right thanks jeff um i would also add that the um the increase in special ed that we're seeing is not unique to cheshire it's happening across the state okay all right so now looking at um how this um mandate this mandate sorry robin i'm sorry andrew yeah one easy one robin and thank you very much for the presentation as always ieps excuse the ignorance on the on the topic who develops the iep is it a combination of certain teachers and parents and the student is it can you just i just don't know i just hear the iep tournament to use it's thrown on all the time and i just

067don't know sure so um there is a what we call a ppt process it's a planning and placement team and that team is made up of several people it's the general ed teacher who is the expert on what happens in instruction in the curriculum at that grade level you have a special education teacher who services or or supports students in that grade level and then you have of course an administrator which is typically the principal um and the parent is part of that team and you may so have some other support services or therapy such as a speech and language pathologist a counselor could be a school psychologist or a school counselor an ot occupational therapist or a physical therapist depending on the needs of the student so when when the ppt or the referral

068process is initiated that team comes together and determines whether they're going to move forward and do some assessments and determine eligibility and so there's various assessments that they use to develop the iep so we use standardized measurements we use curriculum-based measurements we use observation we use feedback from the parents feedback from teachers um sometimes in some cases it's feedback or information that the student provides and in taking all of that information we look at the strengths of the students and then we look at those areas that are areas of concern and then then we begin to to develop the goals and the objectives in the areas that are identified and then those goals and objectives will guide the instruction and included in the students iep is also accommodations and modifications so there might be accommodations

069for their environment there might be accommodations that are for testing or for behavior and then we address state mandated testing because our students have to take the espa and and then of course for depending on the age of student when they hit 14 you have your transition transition goals and objectives and so then it's all laid out what those services are going to be how those goals and objectives are going to be addressed and that plan is good for one year um you have to revisit it before it's a year is up and then every three years you redo the testing you redetermine eligibility you go back to those standardized measurements and conduct that evaluation to redetermine eligibility so that's kind of the process in a nutshell and that's what makes up your iep great

070i really appreciate that thank you you're welcome okay uh sam uh yeah one last one then we'll continue on with the presentation sorry i was you know i was gonna ask this earlier but andrew's question kind of reminded me so i know it's obviously ever fluctuating um did we have we have an increase but we also have hopefully students you know testing out of or leaving you know special ed within the year two and what are our numbers there for this year did we have a larger amount versus the increase into you know the goal of regular education is to make sure that we don't get to special education um so in the reverse hopefully we are able to provide services where students are able to you know exit special education you know i don't

071have the numbers of how many students we have exited um but uh i think it would make it interesting data to look at um to see how many students are exited across the year but i think that it can very it can vary it can fluctuate um just like our numbers um coming into district can vary and fluctuate throughout the year um so you know we some students once they're identified do complete their their school career on in having an iep and some don't some do me they close that gap and are able to um exit out of special education but i i don't have the numbers on that okay thank you okay should i go on yes please yeah i'm almost done almost done so um so in looking at the impact of our

072new state statute that requires us to provide transition planning and transition um goals and objectives for our students from age 14 to 22. this impacts approximately 258 students in the district um so in order to address and comply with that state statute we're looking to add a transition coordinator a transition coordinator is someone who supports the transition process so it will this position will support our students from age 14 to 22. it's going to support the development of employment and other post-school adult living objectives that we've identified um if appropriate the development of objectives that address daily living skills are going to uh can be addressed and also those functional vocational skills now keep in mind that one-fourth of our special education students are going to require that explicit instruction with those daily living skills

073and with those vocational skills so a transition coordinator coordinator will support our teachers in supporting these types of programs and this type of instruction for our students transition coronary also oftentimes is the liaison between the community and the school and is able to incorporate and find job related experiences for our students with disabilities currently right now we have several students many students that are utilizing the goodwill site as a a place for them to job shadow and learn those job related experiences we really would like to expand and look at other community places of employment to help our students and a transition coordinator is someone who can help bridge that between the community and the um schoolings um there are assessments and progress monitoring tools that are necessary in order for us to identify those

074goals that students need to work on and then to monitor them to see if we're making the progress we need to make in order to as we progress towards our goals you see listed here maps and paths planning that is a specialized planning that that can take place for students as they get into the 14 and to 22 age bracket and that planning is person-centered planning it really helps families and the school to come together and to be able to project or look into the future at where do we see this child once they leave cheshire public schools and then it helps the family to then identify these steps need to be taken in order for us to get there in order for their children to reach their highest potential and so maps and paths

075planning are something that you we have people we have a few people in the district that are trained for that one being myself but a transition coordinator is someone who would help and assist with training people to do this to do this type of programming and also to actually conduct a maps or paths planning the transition coordinator is the liaison as i said before between families students state and local agencies and community partners those state and local agencies are dds and brs the department of developmental services and the bureau of rehabilitation services those are the resources that our parents are going to need for their children once they leave cheshire public schools those students with that are far more impacted by disabilities are going to need the support of those agencies and the programs that

076they provide and lastly our transition coordinator is going to support our department and our team into employing a consistent results oriented process excuse me uh faith you had a question i do um robin who will do this job if this position is not approved how will you accommodate these these tests well um we are doing some we are doing this are we doing it to the level and the quality that i would like to see and that i think our families expect um i don't i i it's falling on our teachers our special education teachers it's falling on our school psychologists as i said i'm trained in maps and when i was the elementary supervisor i did conduct a couple of those um those pro those meetings for families um so you know we we

077do pull from different places and different resources um but i think that if we really um need to up our game in that and i think that um pulling a transition coordinator onto our team would really allow us to do that i made a few phone calls around because i was curious to see our other districts in the area and many of them incorporate at least one transition coordinator within their district um and in some cases some of them have more than one i would add to that you know the question also i mean it would be in essence a reduction in service provided spread across the people who already service this population the infusion of special education students as they move into the community particularly at the middle and early high school age but

078also the addition of another year at the transitional level after traditional high school is a significant infusion of students with the same demands so if you know it'd be the equivalent of saying that the elementary grades we're going to put x number of new kids into fourth grade what happens if we don't add a teacher there to address that well there's a diminished level of service and a substantially higher ratio i mean i think you know that's part of it now what robin is suggesting is not only you know balancing the ratio by adding this position but this is somebody with a specialized capacity that not only balances the ratios back out with the infusion of students but also makes the work more efficient because this person's a specialist and given the volume of students

079that we have uh it makes sense to have one person being able to appropriately service at a high level many more students efficiently and and i appreciate that very much um i i understand what this will do um i'm just i'd be remiss i'll take my hand out oh definitely a fair question i just wanted that balancing you know that you know i know and i understand so is there um you know the process that's going to come back at us and so we're going to have to we're going to have to look and so is there is this something that could be if we did a a hat you know a half-time ft position is that something and then eventually add the hours i'm just anticipating sure the whole process yeah i think that's

080a really good question faith and it's a you know it's definitely um a question of somebody who's kind of been through the process and is trying to anticipate some of these challenges and it makes a lot of sense i think you know the the piece about half time or something one of the real challenges that we run into is that to get some someone in more of a specialized uh skill set the halftime almost has to be a flukey accident like i just had a baby and i don't want to work full time and those things can periodically happen i mean we've we've kind of caught lightning um here and there on random experiences where somebody's like well you know i'm ready to retire but maybe i'll just cut back to 0.4 and it's like

081wow we need a 0.4 this is a you know fell in our lap um but generally speaking it is harder you know when you reduce away from full time to get some somebody uh like i said not that we haven't been lucky before and and been able to do that but uh that makes a little bit more difficult i think it when we present uh when we start to look at the consequences of making reductions i think that would be a presentation point you know like the consequence of making reduction here versus in other areas i mean i'm sure at some point we'll be covering that yeah i have some kind of concerns about that too because our 14 to 22 year old students range across several different buildings and so you have dodd students

082at dot you have students that will be at the high school we have our qu students that are at two sites on qu we have our um program that is our community to life program um that is currently housed at the park and rec and we have our hummuston students too that would would benefit from the transition coordinators level of expertise and knowledge tim um would you mind holding on uh robin it looks like maybe you're in the home stretch here i am i am uh okay just i just wanted to summarize that you know um we're looking at a a 1.0 transition coordinator really the most important thing if i had to stress it would be that in order to comply with the state mandate in the state expectations as when it comes to

083transition services we really want to support a consistent oriented process with fidelity we want to support our growing population in the need of transition planning and services we want to support our families as they connect with agencies and think about where how they can best support their students once they leave cheshire public schools and then we want to support our school-based teams in their ability to assess plan and implement our transition programming um you know my hope is is that we're going to be able to maintain our current resources you know i described all those in-house programs that we have that do require resources as well as those students that are being serviced through resource rooms and in the general ed setting my hope is to be able to maintain and support the quality program

084that we've been providing up until this point so that's my presentation if there's any other questions tim you had your hand up before did you still have a question go for it yeah well i'll just make the comment right now that uh jeff i hope you have um with regard to a part-time transition coordinator i do hope that you have that in mind if something might pop up like that because you have a pretty big staff and i imagine you might have that happen again uh if you have the budget for that so anyway just something to have in mind thank you thanks okay uh well robin um thank you for that fantastic presentation um i guess i do have a few questions um i guess uh firstly as far as staffing goes several years

085back we had a large increase in our ias i was just wondering if if you thought that you know we were kind of good on that front or uh was there an expansion in positions um for this uh coming year or is there an ask for coming additional positions there um i haven't requested additional positions um but what does impact our ias is when we have students that move into the district that are currently identified and have an iep and on that iep it states that they're to have ia support um then we have to adopt that iep so sometimes that is when we are making a request for an additional position um so as students move into the district if the other thing that i see is that when you're talking about supporting our

086in-house programs again these are students with some very intense needs and so it's really necessary in order for them to make the progress and get the instruction that they need that we really have to reduce the adult student ratio and so in that case that's when we utilize our instructional assistants to help us do that um when you're talking about supporting students in the general ed setting in an inclusion setting um oftentimes our ias are there to help us support do that too so if the special education teacher is in the resource room providing direct instruction but a student is in need of supports and accommodations while in the general classroom we utilize our ias to do that as well so while we're always very very careful and we look at when we're talking about

087adding instructional assistance we try to look at it at a more process oriented procedure like this year we're talking a lot about using an ia protocol where we're kind of really having some deep conversations about when and where does this student need support and what would that support look like and so as the supervisors and myself are looking at ias and where we're placing them and where we're providing the support we're also utilizing that ia protocol in making those decisions one of our other biggest goals in district four special ed is we're focusing on executive function skills and building independence so for those of you who aren't familiar with executive function skills those are the skills that allow us to play plan be engaged sustain through tasks start tasks um really understand time management and

088to really self-regulate and when we you go back and you look at those areas that i said that often require additional support for students a lot of them fall under executive function so one of our initiatives that we're really focusing in on is helping to build those executive function skills in our students with disabilities and which should result in students being more independent so that we can pull away from those supports such as an ia they may not need that kind of support if they can develop their executive function skills so that's just another way we're approaching and trying to address that um in regards to the to the bridges program sounds like you've it's been a a great success um as you said it it's it resides uh mainly at doolittle school um and

089so i guess the sort of piggybacks i think it was andrew where tim had mentioned about modernization um is there any thought to leaving the bridges program at doolittle or when we um have the i guess the new new potential campus let's say in the north or in the south um constructed that bridges would move uh to one of those spots or did you think it would probably remain it do little um well i do know that um doolittle um is filling up um whether the bridges program would be moved to the new norton or the news i i haven't had conversations about that as of yet um but i know that um you know as we look at um right now we know that kindergarten for doolittle is located in two locations it's located

090in darcy's locating doolittle so that's i think another thing that has to be taken into consideration so it may very well mean that do little moves but i haven't had any conversations happen yeah i would say right now um and for the foreseeable future the answer is no we wouldn't look at making a change there it's not part of the educational spec process that we've engaged in for both norton and for the north end school so you know of course over time you know things evolve and we make changes and you know we would um evaluate the conditions on the ground you know years down the road but uh in terms of an initial move when buildings open no that's not in the plans yeah what's nice about it being at doolittle is it is

091kind of centralized so because it does pull from all of the elementary buildings i was thinking that but i wasn't entirely sure yeah yeah um so i and my next question is um for the uh out placement you know every year i think was a couple years ago we we had outplacement unexpected unexpected outplacement expenses i think they went up to almost as high as 500 000. um and it looks like our the need has dropped significantly and you you've explained that for the most part and i was just wondering is it because our in-house um programs are so successful or is there a little bit of a covered concern in there where some of them may be more fragile students their parents don't want them to be outplaced or have there been any other

092additional accommodations where they have to be where they've been schooled at home instead of being outplaced or anything like that um no i have not seen an increase in students being um homebound um where they're schooled at home or be or students um opting to disenroll and be homebound or to be home schooled i haven't seen any numbers that have made any kind of impact on our outplacement numbers um i i think that um you know i'm hoping we're not going to jinx ourselves now that we're talking about this but you know we are in a good place um right now but you know things can change you get a student that is moves into district that has you know incredible needs or you have a student that is placed in district through uh dcf

093um in a foster placement in cheshire we you know there's there's all sorts of things that can occur and i do recall several years ago we had a couple dcf placements in cheshire that were students that weren't out or very expensive outplacements and that that impact our um our budget there and um my last question before i get to and i see your hand there ann um is the only position you're asking for this year is that transition coordinator yes yes it is okay thank you and go ahead robin thank you for that um wonderful illuminating uh presentation you're welcome as always um and going back to the number of students with ieps and the fact that you gave that um we've seen an increase in that due to covid yeah correlated to covet uh

094related so do we expect to see as um kovitz stuff has kind of starting to at least um dissipate a little bit or students are becoming more comfortable with um with their situation in school under covert restrictions are we seeing already those numbers sort of going away due to covid stresses or or not yet or and do we expect to see some num some of those numbers go down um right now i i think we're still on kind of the upswing i'm not i'm not really seeing that the numbers are coming down but i think that as our ppt teams and as our school-based teams begin um to grapple more with is this a result of cobit or is this the sign of a learning disability and begin to tease that out i think that

095we're going to find that um that where that the growth is not going to happen at the rate that it is happening right now um it will probably return back to more of a normal growth rate my hope is is that if it's truly that these are students that were impacted by cobin and some of the the things that were presented through um over the past year that we're gonna see those kids that were identified as make that they'll make good progress once they have their plan in place and those um those interventions are in place and then they'll they'll um respond to them and then maybe we'll see them actually make progress and maybe close that gap and then be able to exit off of the iep if if it's truly a learning disability

096then they're going to continue probably on that iep then a little longer but my hope is is that we would see those numbers start to decline and not to grow as rapidly as they have this past year great thank you for that answer and i didn't mean to suggest that you or anyone else has a crystal ball and right so thank you you're welcome faith uh you had your hand up yeah um i did robin and i i too want to say thanks really this was um quite a job that they're you know presentation that you put together and i don't think i thanked you appropriately but um and at the risk of adding one more thing to your already full plate i do agree with sam um i think it would be helpful for

097everybody including your team to track how many kids exit the the program annually because that's truly the success story uh if you can get these kids off their ieps and into a 504 or something or even off of 504 i mean that's that's a coup and a win and so um it would be a good way to measure the the success of the program sure i'll see what i can do see what i can pull up yeah we definitely track that on an annual basis i mean we don't have year-to-date numbers on that but it is something that we monitor um i've uh two more questions um for now that the transition program has expanded to 22 uh 22 years old um i'm trying to think of the timing was there any at any time

098a gap where like someone who was 21 had matriculated out but then you did they have to decide to come back or did you find that you they had been sufficiently transitioned that they didn't need that extra year yeah that that did happen that when that came into play of um july of 20 um there at that time the pps director tracy hussey reached out to those families of those students that had aged out at 21 and offered them an additional year so that they would then be with us through until their 22nd birthday so that did occur some some families did take us up on that some families did not they had already had their students placed in programs or had already gotten them settled into um um you know services um and did

099not opt to come back thanks for that i appreciate that um and my final question is um so you had you said that the the numbers the numbers you used for your report were i think was a 352 right for total special ed students it was something like that 558 552 five bill gee sorry yeah um and then but when you looked at it more recently we're up by like 12 students or something like that do you know what aid yeah do you know what age group of those students were was it across uh all ages or was it like let's say just in the elementary age or anything do you know um i didn't look that deep into it to see if it was one particular age group or not um but i think

100um based on my conversation with our school counselors and our school psychologists i think at the upper grade levels the students that we're seeing more more likely to be identified are students that are being impacted by anxiety or emotionality there may have been some hospitalizations that have occurred and then so now and and the student is now eligible for special ed um at the lower levels i think at the elementary levels i should say i think that the school psychologists were seeing more of the ld learning disability students coming coming across the table for them and in that case that's where they felt that um the impact of covid and looking at standardized assessments and the impact on standardized assessments it makes it very it convolutes making those decisions as to whether a student is

101really being impacted but is this student really being impacted by a learning disability or is this a result of remote learning less engagement maybe was um to you know engage in out of school um for a period of time so so these students uh post october one weren't necessarily like newly identified um let's say learning disabled students these were potentially mental health um i think i think it's probably both it's probably both because like i said i think that what what i'm hearing more so at the high school tends to be towards the mental health at that age typically if this child has a learning disability it's been teased out by that it's very rare that we identify students with a learning disability by the time they're in ninth to twelfth grade majority of the

102time it's it's we can we identify that at the early stages so it's so just so i'm understanding so when if there's a mental health issue issue with the student it's more like um their issue has been identified in this so when they when they're perhaps are entered into your program it's more of on on the recovery phase and not like or a treatment phase and not um uh i'm trying to say like you know there's the initial incident and then when they've kind of come back from that when they're trying to transition back is that kind of how it's used or is it not it may be someone who has been treated in the past or maybe seeking outside out of school private services for to help them deal with any kind of anxiety

103or emotional issues that they're having but now it's risen to the level where it's blowing over into school and so when that happens and now and you might see students that are maybe their uh their rate of um absence is rising they might be pulling themselves out of some of the social activities that they used to be involved in you might see them their grades dropping and so those might be some of the red flags or the indicators anytime we have a child that is hospitalized um because they're struggling with something we or we always go to ppt to at least review the information to see if we sh if we should go forward and do some evaluations and see if this that child is actually impacted by a disability thank you i appreciate that

104um are there any additional questions can i just add a real point a real quick point for clarity around special education identification and in that process um you know the team evaluates a student and identifies a particular learning disability perhaps or sometimes as robin said there are other emotionality issues that are connected and special education doesn't cure those things right special education teaches compensatory practices the skills for kids to be able to work through them work around them learn different strategies to tackle problems um so i want to be careful with the idea that you know exiting is very much a goal um to and what that you know would mean is that the child has developed the skills necessary to compensate for whatever the original identification was and that's really the goal it's not

105a cure and we identify goals for students to meet um along that process and and that's really what the emphasis is in that ppt meeting that you know andrew was talking about earlier we once you're identified we come back and we take a look at what compensatory strategies are we focused on teaching this child to to what end what goals are we trying to you know get them to accomplish um and the team agrees on those things and then we move forward and so over time it's tricky because you know the things become more challenging academically and more sophisticated and we teach new skills and the goal is that like you know we've said before to exit special education but um our the child's success and failure is not grounded in whether or not they

106are exited from special education and you be continuing special education for an extended period of years and be very successful in that process to the point where you know i as a high school principal and i know that you know robin's seen this plenty of times where students okay we've we've met these goals and then parents and students may say well you know to tim's point earlier i don't know i don't want to get out like no this has been it's been great for me um so you know i don't want to caught in a trap where success and failure means whether or not you got in or out but it's about how you're meeting those goals so just want to throw those two cents in and rob certainly you know if i i missed

107anything there no no you said you said it well because we know that our many of our students with disabilities go on to college and there's no iep at college you know they they can get accommodations they can disclose their disability they can get accommodations but they're they won't be getting a a plan such as an iep when they go there and and you're absolutely right that they learn how to compensate for those areas that they that are deficits for them or that they struggle with um so they find the strategies of the tools um in order to um you know build that bridge so that they can be successful so yeah you said it well jeff who knows uh sam you got a question yeah actually now that dr zoe mentioned compensatory did we

108have um are we playing catch up to compensatory i know there was a huge issue obviously over when we went into covid and it's across the state that you know we owed our kids instruction um so where are we as far as cheshire is concerned where are we with that and are we continuing to make that up as we go along this year uh well we um we are applying the same um strategies that er that general ed is applying as far as acceleration goes um i mean that's been what special ed has done all along and as you know we were very fortunate in cheshire that um when the stage when we shut down it was just a couple days before our teachers were on um on the computers and were providing that remote

109instruction and um i have to you know hand it to them how they really uh really thought had were thinking out of the box on how to present specialized instruction through a remote venue um i i actually had seen many screencastifys and and wilson instruction programs for students with dyslexia that they um that they were utilizing and how they were presenting it through the remote avenue and then fortunately for our elementary students which are most impacted by um by um their disabilities um they were in person all last year so for them they were they were present in getting that direct instruction for our students that were at the high school level that um were in participating in a hybrid model if we came across students that were struggling in that hybrid model then they

110went back to ppt or they pulled those students in and some students were able to come in for four days a week versus the two days a week um and so you know we tried to accommodate um our students that um just weren't having a difficult time with that remote so as far as compensatory services that's a decision that's made um in with individuals and through individual ppts um and so as they look at the students progress and they look at if there was some regression or some loss of skills and the rate of that recovery that that student is experiencing then they are making those decisions as to how they're going to address that that loss no great i definitely you know obviously cheshire was at the forefront in providing that and having kids

111are all in especially in the elementary side i just didn't know where we where we fell on that spectrum as to um ensuring that you know students were receiving the hours of services that we were supposed to be receiving to a certain quality obviously um yeah i mean we when we were um on remote um you know we had to develop our remote learning plans and we had to take a look at our students ieps and look at the amount of hours of services they were supposed to be provided when in person and we had to determine what were we still able to do from the remote remote classroom and what could we still apply in really you know the state wasn't looking for us not to reduce services during that time they were really

112looking for us to implement the iep to the best extent possible as it was designed so thank you robin thank you okay there any further questions all right well uh robin ann uh thank you so much for another excellent presentation we thank you for your time this evening thank you and uh we have a lot to think about thank you thank you i guess uh we hand it back to vin i think okay well thank you so i'm going to um wrap up instructional expense which you know this is the section we were just covering with some noteworthy information related to curriculum writing and professional development you should be able to see that on the screen so for curriculum writing just a few bullet points here um you know the summer curriculum writing uh workshops

113went extremely well last year so you know it's certainly being planned for already for this summer uh some of the work that needs to be done has to include new standards and incorporating district focus areas the curriculum council focus the curriculum is is reviewed on a five-year rotation for 22-23 the sections that are being reviewed by the curriculum by the cheshire curriculum council excuse me are language arts in english and special education on the next generation science standards front there is training that's needed to support the alignment to those standards again all this is being incorporated and planned for within our budget and then the next to last bullet there talks about the social studies curriculum revisions are needed to align with new state standards on the instructional materials and resources we do need new

114textbooks and or resources for the earth science programming and also for the manufacturing fundamentals which is part of the cte program and then on the professional development front similar to what we've done in the past you know the pd will focus on complex thinking and social emotional learning which are key district goals also a big focus will be on english learners this is in line with the state's emphasis and also we've seen growth of english learners in cheshire and so they'll be coaching you know sessions to implement strategies for english learners um and then that last bullet talks about instructional shifts necessary to deliver the next generation science standards so those are all factors that will be incorporated into professional development as far as instructional expense overall as a percentage of our budget this is

115similar to what we saw with all the other areas we presented instructional expense has been relatively flat as a percentage of our budget it's not been funded over the years just as a percentage of the budget it's it's held in that 5.6 to 6 range is what you see on the chart here so with that i'm just going to go back and ask if there are any specific questions on the line items related to instructional expense and then we move into support services uh vin just a quick question on instruc instructional supply firstly um you had budgeted uh 440 for this year but we're way above that um but so for next year was there so what what caught what's causing that bump right now and so is that funding level uh still appropriate as

116do all of our classrooms have the supplies that they need for excellent education i think the answer to that adam is that we'll prioritize to make sure that that education isn't compromised and when you say the bump are you looking at the 482 that we expended in 2021 um yeah am i looking at the wrong year yeah no well the 480 000 that's what we expended in 2021 yeah i'm i'm sorry that's okay about so as long as you think that we have enough uh our that 440 numbers is a good number for uh to keep our levels steady that's all i guess that's what i was asking i i think we're good there thank you stay i'm glad ben what we can't really see this as well but um what's this 60 000 it

117seems pretty consistent to maintain the library periodicals is that what i'm seeing right now yes the 60 000. that's this year's budget we've and that's what we're budgeting for next year so what's happened um you know with library over the years is these line items have decreased because we're relying so much less on printed materials and we're using more online resources so that that budget seems like a reasonable number you could see in in 2021 we expended 43 000 does that answer the question sam yeah i just i mean because we're going so digital what would be the need for the 60 i just don't yeah the expenditure is not zero for you know the items that we need for library so there are still expenditures that go against you know library periodicals and the

118two lines below that for library media supplies if i could jump in i would also add that that 43 000 in 2021 was also the school year where we shut down in march right so that's important to remember i want to stress that while we have certain textbooks and i hate to even call them textbooks because they're not their platforms which have material in them that are videos um that are more manipulatives those things certainly are electronic but i want to stress the importance of getting hard copy regular books in the hands of students and how we don't want to shortchange that in our libraries for our schools or in our individual classroom libraries you know you we've recently done a lot on our ela progressions across elementary and middle school we'll have one at

119the high school soon and the focus that we still have on reading hard copy text hope that helps and for anybody that i mean this might be difficult to read in the budget book itself um you know under the instructional tab this is on page 11 the you know and basically ben's just walking through you know the line items here and it kind of outlines what the library books periodicals is and library media supplies and i'll just keep we'll just keep subsequently walking through it make it easier if it's easier to follow that way hey you had your hand up i did thank you um i i probably should have written out this but i'm i'm looking at this um budget i have to say i am incredibly distressed by it um and and then

120the reason i asked for the per pupil expenditure on um you know the the non-special ed student the the general ed student is that and i don't want to take away from the special ed um but i we're taking away from the general ed students and as a if i were a parent i would be mightily concerned i mean i look at replacement equipment we spent 326 000 in replacement and 236 000 plus um you know in 2021 and now we're saying that we're gonna be able to get by or we said that we would get by with a hundred and eighteen thousand seven fifty and a hundred and eighteen thousand seven fifty for both categories last year and we're going to do the same there we're working against high inflation this equipment has to

121be has to be suffering from wear and tear [Music] every category is not what it is even though the dollar value is the same as last year it is not what it was last year because it has just been reduced by an inflation factor of six percent or whatever we're looking at and you know i'll say more at the final meeting but to have to cut we're beyond cutting to the bone we are in the bone and we're at a real rock and a hard place here because i don't know how much this town can carry um so i just am expressing my dismay over this it's it's i there's nothing i can do but i don't know if anyone else is seeing the same thing i am if i could just add one one

122point before um the next question so if you look at the line replacement and new equipment in particular um expend it for 2021 keep in mind as you know as we manage through the budget year as we get into april may june if we have accounts that are below their budget and we can allocate funds to replace or buy new equipment that's what we do and that's what's reflected in the 2021 expended and so my point is yes the budget for 22 23 is below that level but if we wind up at the end of 2223 where we have availability and we have a need and replacement or new equipment or any other of these accounts we would allocate it but from a budget point of view you know we're certainly trying to strike this

123balance i think that's what you're getting at faith between you know what we can afford to budget and what we would budget if we didn't have right this year's limitation you know being driven by the enrollment and medical benefits so we'll do it what we always do is we'll prioritize as the year goes goes through and then um you know make expenditures accordingly spam i i have to say i'm with your face because as i look at the binder it just stresses me out a little more so um and and i guess to help with the decision making i'm hoping that we can if doctor sullivan or vin can can prioritize the that wish list and the needs you know obviously the medical expenses you already have a plan to work on it to collaborate

124with the town to try to find a solution for that but it's right now it's just hard pressed to find solutions for the other items and still maintain and accelerate our students you know so i guess what will be easier going back to my comment is what are the top priorities if we had to do without certain things what would what can we not do without medical obviously being already on the table well i don't wanna i don't wanna throw gas on the fire salmon and faith but when you look at the um the binder you'll see that you know pretty much as you flip through line by line there's a graph for each item that shows the historical you know allocation for those various lines in a lot of cases you'll see that you

125know there's a downward trend in spending in those lines because over time you know the budget's just been squeezed over the course of you know my experience here you know dating back to when i worked at it dot but um we've also worked very hard as a board and is a leadership team to identify core priorities that yield high return on investment and in doing so we've able to be that much more pinpointed as i think you're suggesting sam you know what what are the high leverage areas here and our achievement has dramatically improved and our services have you know diversified in and improved so um yeah i think we've just been leaner and more effective in terms of the items that were moved forward on day one in our budget presentation in terms of

126like these are new positions that we're adding those were all designed as i think i mentioned that day to sustain services so to not you know really make leaps and bounds if we're talking about making which i think is pretty good by the way sustained services what we provide is is you know pretty darn good for our community to build upon what we're providing is definitely important um and that i sent that document to the board uh i don't know a week and a half ago and feels like a week and a half ago and covet time that could have been like tuesday i don't know but um tomorrow why don't we or excuse me thursday during when the time lapse again why don't we go through that um because you would ask that question

127in one of our i think the first night i presented the budget and we can go through that together i can kind of pinpoint you know like for you and the community what we're looking at and why is priorities yeah that would be actually very helpful dr solon um you know just speaking as an individual you know i personally would not want to take away the direct impact on students anything that would have a direct impact on students and the growth and progress of students moving forward because we do need to accelerate our students to be competitive right or to maintain our our competitive status so um i think that you know we have all these numbers thrown at us i i am looking at the binder every single night and i just go back

128to what is truly doable here what is what is reality at this moment in time and i also think that you know we need to be paid back what was given last cycle and that's going to be a bigger argument but that would be helpful thank you sure um ben continue on please okay so this wraps up instructional expenses i will jump into support services which is 8.7 percent of our budget you see up at the top the support services accounts uh the 22-23 budget request totals 7 million 85 879. it's going up 2.3 percent important to note that the vast majority 57 of the support services line is for student transportation which i'll show you some more detail on that in one second and then the smaller percentage is the the next largest category

129is other professional services which you know that budget accounts for technology services including apex who's our network service provider board of ed legal services audit services that we pay um sos our auditors for uh the next largest slice that energy performance contract of 630 0490 that is for the um mresco energy performance infrastructure improvements we made about eight years ago now and we pay those back over a 15-year period that's what that represents and and the rest are smaller amounts that i will go through in the next slide and i won't mention that i will come back to the point about allocating some funds because i do have some good news to share with the uh with the board members tonight so this is just the same look from the budget book of our support

130services line i will highlight just a couple of these quickly um rentals leases that's going i mean it's not a large dollar amount it's 22 000 increase but what we do this particular account supports rentals of the multifunction printers that we use as well as rentals of pool and um hockey rinks so it's a pretty broad category the reason this is going up is because what we've been doing for about the last it's getting close to 10 years now when we rent these multi-function printers so it's copiers they also serve as printers and they also serve as scanners what we've been entering into is municipal lease agreements where we could buy the machine at the end of five years for a dollar so we had quite a few machines that we had purchased for a

131dollar that we've been running the last three or four years so we're not making any payments only for the use of the machine so those machines finally reach the point where they're no longer viable so we had to enter into new five-year minutes for leases on some machines you know to the tune of about 20 000 or so so that's why that line item went up an important line to look at here is the pupil transportation line that oops didn't mean to do that 3627 790 if you could see where my cursor is you'll see that we budgeted that flat we were able to do so despite a two percent contractual increase and i'll talk about that in a minute but you know we are finding you know savings with root consolidation you know which

132we've been doing for several years now so that's some good news um you know even though our contract cost is going up by somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 000. we'll we'll save that with some other reductions property insurance and liability insurance you can see those are going up by significant percentages doesn't really have that much to do with claims that were filed here in cheshire it just has to do with the general cost of property and liability insurance hd seeger is our broker they are shopping these were early estimates um but those increases unfortunately are in line with the industry trend um and you know hopefully htc will be able to find some coverage that isn't quite um that high in terms of an increase but i'm doubtful that they'll be able to do

133that the rest of the line items um transportation supply we are increasing that budget anticipating that you know fuel prices uh and this is primarily fuel for the buses whether it's diesel or gasoline so we increase that because we don't know fuel prices will be higher next year we'll be able to lock those uh those prices so that's just a high level review of the of all the lines so transportation which again represents about 57 percent of this line item um i and i see mr martelly's raise his hands i'll just explain this and then we'll pause um of our public um about student transportation about 54 2.1 million is for our general public school roots special education is about 23 or 945 000 uh the next slice there is is for fuel equipment and

134repairs that's 353 000 just to be specific the repairs are for the board of ed vehicles that are owned that goes repair services are covered under their contract but the board owns about a dozen vehicles and we maintain and repair those student activity what that refers to are the sports and extracurricular runs that we do um private school roots that is the transportation that we provide for st bridget students which we are required to do it's it's mandated um the 162 000 so students that attend boaag schools uh wilcox and other that's transportation we're obligated to provide and finally that last slice is uh transportation insurance so that just gives you kind of a high level picture of you know where the transportation dollars are going again that's that's 3.6 million plus the 353 000.

135so this is our you know outside of salaries transportation is our largest line item and um i'll pause there mr gripper for questions andrew you had your hand raised sure van can you just go back to the last slide with the insurance number yes so is that am i so it's a 40 000 liability insurance increase so we use hd seeker so do we shop that to multiple parties i mean that's a 40 increase yeah that's that's what hd seeger does they shop um different carriers for us as our broker so between property insurance and liability you're looking at a 60 increase well no it's whatever 35 of those two lines combined right the average of 23 plus 39 percent right yeah it's it's a huge increase um higher than we've seen in many years

136is it because of like claims or is that just the industries dictating that yeah it's the industry it's it's the it's the broad claims that are happening you know with all the um hurricanes and and other events that have driven up insurance costs this is how the insurance company make it up it's really not uh because we've had extraordinarily high claims at all it's the industry and they're seeing this on the town side as well unfortunately maybe it's time to look at htc here i mean i i know that they're you know they do a lot of municipal um coverage but yeah i mean in fairness you know hd seeger um i know we had talked about it in the benefits section but you know they did shop at workman's comp insurance and so we

137saved about a hundred thousand dollars this year moving from kerma to travelers and for the next year we're expecting savings of about 72 000 against that line so it really is market forces that are driving this um and again hopefully we'll get some better news when the shopping process is finished but that's where it is currently thanks man okay timmy you had your hand raised sorry man i'm not sure if i missed this but i'm just looking at that transportation line going from 3 million to 3.6 million from extended to 2021 yeah to this year's budget what's so i mean okay we didn't do a lot of transportation runs in 2021 because of the pandemic so we were well below our budget at the 2.9 million if we look back at the history you know

138the three we've been in the three and a half million dollar range so that was a covet pickup it's really sort of um it's not the regular daily school bus routes morning afternoon it's the sports and the activities and stuff like that ended up getting reduced i know sports were reduced last year so because you were still doing the bus routes well it was a combination right so yes we were doing the bus routes but you know for example the high school was um you know there was no uh no bus routes for the high school on fridays okay yep all right gotcha yep yep yep okay so it was a combination of things yeah so the 2.9 million that was the actual expenditure let's call it a covert anomaly sure no no no okay

139that that makes sense and the um the one other thing that i'll just point out as unfortunate as as it is with these uh i've seen it recently the catalytic converter that's including with our own vehicles electric vehicles don't have catalytic converters so electric school buses hopefully in the not so distant future so another benefit pros are pros and cons to everything but that's one pro for electric thank you vin you're welcome thanks evan uh faith have your hand raised so uh this i i know we we purchased this the property and the liability insurance with the town and this may be a verboten question but have we ever considered or explored regional risk pools like ex cooperating with other towns and expanding our purchasing power well on these these two lines of insurance no

140we've i mean we've been uh with htc girl although we've shopped you know for different brokers we've been with htc girl who's been placing our insurance for several years um on the there's two places where we are taking advantage of risk pools you know one was when we were with kerma for our workers comp insurance which as i said just a few minutes ago we did exit kerma because we got a better rate from travelers and the other place where part of a multi-town municipal arrangement is our stop-loss insurance for medical with ct prime you know that's ten different um municipalities and or boards of ed that that cooperate with that but um that's a good question faith i mean we're we'll look at we're looking at this a little bit closer as to you

141know what are we going to do with those two particular insurance lines so we really had insurance from karma like bad karma oh not karma kerma c-i-r-m-a but that's a good one all right nevermind thanks okay okay then go ahead yep all right so um just to wrap up on on transportation the um you know that go is our provider that contract runs through june of 2024. you know there's two percent escalations per year up until the last year of that contract which is a couple of years out and the way there's just a couple of things i wanted to mention um we are in the process of upgrading the software that we use to for routing and one thing that's unique about cheshire is that we plan the routes for the buses based on

142where the students live you know we don't let our service provider of that go do that and so you know our transportation manager luther miller you know does a really really good job of looking to you know improve bus routes consolidate stops wherever we can and that's been a significant savings over the years other things that we've done even though we didn't have summer school last year you know by changing the the locations where summer school is held to highland only you know we've reduced the number of buses that we need over the summer and this is we only provide buses for summer school for special education you know we do some route sharing for special ed and and technical school routes with other districts we are a member of aces where we do some

143route sharing on the special education side we we've been in contract with them i believe this is currently our third year you know we do try and mitigate you know costs wherever we can with fuel prices by locking in and then we've looked at programs such as you know can we have students opt out and we do that if for example a student at the high school is issued a senior or junior parking permit they're opted out of transportation so we can you know reduce the number of students that you know would be assigned to a bus run so we're always looking at ways where we can you know reduce the cost of transportation to the extent we can um on the operations side i'll pause for the question before i give you the breaking

144news here all right thanks and with the buses vince's you've been here have we reduced the number of buses yeah we have over the years and you know we were over 40 bus runs at one point and you know we're i believe it at 37 or 38 this year i'd have to just double check the number but a a regular ed bus run is roughly 60 000 a year so it's significant savings when you're able to reduce a bus run the special ed runs they're not um they're not quite that high it's about forty thousand dollars per year those are smaller uh buses and we also use vans in some cases which are even less expensive to run you know plus we have as i was saying we have a dozen vehicles you know with

145board of ed drivers that are significantly less expensive than having that outsourced dad go okay trying to get a lot of bang for our buck all right you ready for a little budget good news yes let's hear it i really do so we've gotten two grants approved in the last um 60 days that are very significant and i'm very pleased to let you know the first one is uh through the emergency connectivity fund which is basically an e-rate program um we received 649 that is used to replace student chromebooks that either are or will be at end of life now this is a grant that michael papa our technology director works with e-rate online which is a service provider that we use so that that award is already in effect it requires zero outlay of

146funds from the schools now we'll be able to purchase roughly eighteen hundred student chromebooks with that funding we have roughly four thousand two 200 chromebooks either in students hands that they take home or that they leave you know here in school and they use during the school day so our fleet of chromebooks is very very large this 640 000 essentially what it does is it is it frees up money that you know we have you know in our budget for chromebook replacements um that we'll be able to use for other things such as to upgrade the smart boards from smart ports to smart flat panels we funded the smart board project through capital we have not been doing that in recent years we're funding it out of our operating budget and again whenever we free

147up a budget line like the account that we would use for chromebook purchases which is the capital equipment account we can use it in other places so you know if next year we do have a need on the textbook line or you know on the on the library periodical line you know we can allocate the funding to do that so that's grant number one and then grant number two slightly different grant type but in june we applied for round five of the school security competitive grant and we [Music] were awarded 959 687 dollars now this grant is specifically for physical building security improvements it's a reimbursement grant we get 45 percent reimbursed so to get the 959 we have to spend 2.1 million it's important to note though that we do have funding allocated from

148our capital budget for some of the security improvements that we applied for this grant for not the least of which is the person traps that we installed at four schools this summer um so again very significant you know grants which you know either relieve our operating budget in the case of the first one or provide reimbursement against capital expenditures in the case of the school security one okay so that's my good news for this budget season and i see mr gripper there are some questions yes uh firstly uh vin congratulations to you and your team as uh mrs rosenberg also said um that i know that writing grants can be a tv tedious process so uh that's uh those are some big wins there um let's see i guess since faith's name shows up first

149faith you are on your hand go ahead kudos on that one on those two those are great hey um are you restricted in your ability your ability to shift accounts um do they have to stay or funds do they have to stay within the specific account or can you shift funds between accounts the way that process works is that we will offset during the school year generally we stay within the account line so support services stays within support services okay so we don't transfer funds we'll overexpend one where one is below budget and then the board formally approves at the year end the transfers between those account groupings so certified non-certified support instructional services maintenance and operations and medical benefits so that's how it works we don't do intra year fun transfers um so when

150we look at the monthly finance reports you know we we do spend some time and more so as we get to the end of the year showing here's where we're over here's where we're offending it and that's how we manage the budget and um you know stay you know of course we always have to stay within our budget the technically the board members are responsible if we ever go over our full budget right which will not happen on my watch i value my job so we'll always be within budget so just to make sure we can't say take 649 000 from um our equipment instructional equipment and put it in oh i don't know health benefits or um we could do that if if if that was illegal to desire no i'm not saying it

151is but it just could you could as long as you're within the total appropriation of the you know that's provided by the council you could do those kinds of shifts okay and there's as i say there's really two ways to do it over expend you know in one account where you and offset it with accounts where you're below budget or you could do formal transfers we've not done that you know here in cheshire previously but it could be done thank you you're welcome tim thanks adam hi vin thank you for doing this with her with regard to the first grant i is it i'm assuming it's safe to say that any of these new chromebooks would be in compliance with data privacy laws yeah none of them everything that we're doing none of that would

152change in terms of you know how the devices are managed um the protections that we offer through those devices i know there was a data privacy presentation i guess a month ago you know by our technology team and mike papa technology director so we would buy devices that is you know certainly compliant and you know while we're on the topic so what happens with the chromebooks is the chromebooks rely on the google platform um and there's a you know essentially an expiration date where google stops updating a particular device with the latest version of google software so that's when they're determined to be end of life it's really it's not so much our decision if the device is working and it's compliant and it can continue to get its operating system off the updates from

153google will keep them running but we do have a large number of devices that are reaching end of life you know this year and next year that need to be replaced and so that's what this allocation is for and again it's only student chromebooks we cannot use these funds for any staff chromebooks thank you for that yeah uh um i guess i'll just say as a as a parent i the date of privacy i i personally wonder if the the laws go far enough i mean google's gonna be light years ahead of any laws as far as i'm concerned and they do make money off of data as far as i know so it's just a general concern for me i don't know what the answer is i couldn't begin to tackle it but it

154is um it is concerning i mean it's not just google it's facebook all these social media that i assume they're making money off of data um so it's concerning um anyway thank you for going out and getting the grant i do appreciate it uh just a couple of other things um this isn't i mentioned this because we did some infrastructure upgrades to the network um 295 000 that was a capital project appropriation that was our net cost we had a 492 thousand dollar capital appropriation but we received 197 000 any rate funding for that equipment so again this goes and speaks to the fact that we do try and find every available um funding reimbursement grant or in the case of e-rate funding we do take advantage of those programs when they're available as we've

155seen our smart boards start to fail we are not replacing the old smart boards with the projector mounted smart boards technology is dated so we are moving to the smart interactive flat panels we waited a long time to make this purchase decision working with marlene and the curriculum staff as well as technology we shopped a bunch of different boards and uh it's kind of fortunate that we waited because smart came out with an interactive flat panel that's um at a very attractive price so we've replaced 83 boards over the last year or so and there are 28 boards that are on order that are being installed you know march 22nd so this means that we've replaced roughly a third of the of the boards over the years and we'll continue to make progress on that

156as i said that grant that we receive will help us accomplish the goal of replacing that the smart board equipment we just moved to a cloud-based fax server that saves us the funds from having to buy server equipment in the future and we've eliminated the telephone line cost so this is you know web-based fax server we no longer have fax machines in in the district faxes basically come through email now and then the last thing i wanted to mention is employee compliance training and professional development again this has been a focus in school district operations so we were able to take the alice um violent intruder training and incorporate it into the vector online learning platform which we've been using and then we also launched a pd program for our classified staff this past year

157these are just updates they're really not budget requests but i thought it was important to share just because we're on this particular topic so what i'm going to show you you know on the next screen is this is a report that comes out of the vector online training program and if if you look real quickly so one of the required online training programs is bloodborne pathogen exposure prevention for our certified staff 400 employees completed it so 99 of our employees completed it we have a very deliberate um follow-up process to make sure that our employees are keeping on top of the required annual training and that's what you know all these items represent bullying recognition cyber security email and messaging safety first aid if you look at the total as of this report which was

158run last week 97.7 percent of the required training has been completed that two point you know three percent that hasn't completed a lot of that has to do with employees who are on leaves it's not employees that have ignored us um because we don't let um employees ignore us so we are really in great shape since introducing this platform and then as i mentioned a minute ago we rolled out alice training we used to do in person we are able to now do it on this vector platform and so we just launched that a couple of months ago 91.3 of our staff has completed that training so we are following up with the you know roughly 70 employees that are listed here is not completed again some of those employees may be out but this

159has really been helpful to ensure compliance with you know mandated as well as optional training and then this is just a quick snapshot here if you look on the right side this is professional development that we rolled out for non-certified staff communication skills conflict resolution customer service that we use especially for our maintenance and our technology staff interpersonal skills teamwork this is something that our you know non-certified staff has been asking for for years to give them more professional development opportunities that are specific to their jobs and so i'm really happy with the success of these programs um and a lot of this training we are doing as you can see on the left we're using google webinar google oh sorry google webinars scott's quick bites that's scott conway um you know one of our

160you know technology educators we're using deer oaks which is our employee assistance program provider and then we're using hybrid video instructor led interactive workshops so these are not high cost training modules but they've they've proven to be very very um successful and our employees you know appreciate it and so that wraps up support services which you know you could see just looking at if you drew a trend line it has has been increasing it's been kind of up and down but the general trend line has been increasing a lot of that increase has to do with the cost of student transportation and i will pause there to see if there are any questions on support services ben i don't see any questions okay last um section here is maintenance and operations and so i'm gonna

161jump in um and unless you tell me to not go mr grippo uh well let me uh how long is uh how many slides you got ben um it's about 20 slides but some of them are going to be really quick there's not a lot of detail that you haven't seen in these um all right we don't need this one yeah we've seen this one plenty so um yeah go ahead go ahead oh you when you want me to stop i'll stop people everybody knows this average age of our building is a 71 years our schools are used not only as schools but schools and community facilities so you could see on the right hand side this is pre-covered but our buildings get a lot of views and i i know that the board members

162all know that and ms rosenberg is new to the board and i'm confident that she's aware of that um this is what this slide would look like in three years if we go forward and get approval for the new north elementary school and the new norton elementary school so we would have two buildings at a year old so our average age would would come down quite a bit obviously we'll still need to maintain those older buildings until they come offline but that would be the impact of school modernization phase one and i apologize that's the next generation phase one plan to us uh maintenance and operations five percent of our budget it's about a four million dollar total line item important thing though that i'd like to point out is of our maintenance budget of

163it goes to electricity heating garbage and recycling water gas propane and sewer use so you know even though it's a significant line item at four million dollars a significant portion of that does go to utilities and heating not to repairing buildings so the converse is what are we using for maintenance lines outside of utilities and heat and it's about 2.5 million however 31 of that is cleaning services um so the the amount that we allocate for building improvement is a few lines it's 596 000 for repairs and improvements to the buildings another 251 000 for grounds maintenance plus this um 297 000 for maintenance services those are outside providers that we use other than the cleaning service you know the rest are relatively small dollar amounts this is uh this hundred thirty thousand is our

164snow plow budget um so far this year we're looking pretty good however i know that there's a large star storm predicted for saturday hopefully we don't get um anywhere near the amount predicted but you know the snow plowing if we have a good season some of that 130 000 is freed up so that we can uh use those funds for other things within the building repair lines these are the lines the increases as you can see in the budget book they're relatively modest we did up heat and energy for next year simply because we don't know where fuel prices are gonna go hopefully they do subside um as we enter the new budget year we also budgeted you know i'll call them modest increases for our maintenance repair and maintenance supply line but there's really

165not a lot of increase requested in this uh this year's budget for maintenance and operations um the next section really would take me would take us through a high level review of the capital budget um so i'm going to keep moving on the um [Music] capital budget just to be clear capital budget is used to fund building improvements that are of a non-recurring nature and there are 110 000 or more um council approves a five-year capital expenditure plan but they only fund the first year in that plan and then any expenditure that's capital expenditure over 500 000 requires voter referendum this is proposed it hasn't been reviewed or opined on by the planning committee of the board of ed so this at this point is a proposal you know from uh you know dr solon

166and i and you could see that for the next five years the request is 32 million um i will note that it excludes chapman norton darcy and hummingston because those are the schools that would be affected if we go forward with the and get approval for the next generation plan and you could see roughly the categories there's no change here over prior years window replacements 9 million paving roofing sidewalk masonry 6.8 million improvements to the district cafeteria 5 million hvac improvements 3 million these are all items that are just necessary to keep our buildings in in good repair and operating efficiently if we look at of that 32 million instead of looking at it by category look at it by school you could see that not surprisingly high school is 11.8 million of the request

167followed by dot at 7.2 million followed by doolittle doolittle is a little bit of a surprise at 6.6 million but they need a roof system that's three million dollars that's included in the in the capital budget and then if i just highlight what's the request that we're asking for funding and money for 2223 it's in these categories window replacements million three roofing uh sidewalk and paving 975 000 district cafeteria improvements of 845 that's primarily for highland school um and then you could see the rest of the categories and again i'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because it will go before the planning committee for additional review soon we are supposed to approve the capital budget at the same time as the operating budget over the last decade the boards requested

168an average of 24 million the council has approved about 19.6 million so the council has is approved the five-year plan at about an 81 rate however if we look at just a one-year funding approval the council's approval rate has been about 66 so we're really not investing enough in the buildings based on the requests some years like you could see here in 20 20 21 the request was 585 000. you know we were working aggressively on the school monetization plan we trim our requests down to bare bones but we really do need to start increasing the capital investment in our buildings beyond those buildings that will be replaced through the next generation plan we do have and we're almost done i did want to just point out as i do every year we do have

169an emergency fund in the event of some type of a of a repair need that we can't cover through our operating budget it's called the building maintenance cnr fund you know any disbursements from the fund which currently has a 233 000 balance needs to get approval of the board and then approval of the town council but you know that is there and you could see based on the list we've used it in the past for boiler replacements emergency roof replacements work on the utility tunnels in the high school back in 2011. so this is you know in the back of my mind i always know we have a little bit of a backstop for a moderate repair need that we can't cover you know any improvements we make you know in particular through the capital

170budget you know we we have to look at them as investments the pictures that you see here at the top left those are the three new boilers that went into doolittle this past summer over on the right side that gentleman is richard clavette he's our facilities director he's at highland standing next to the two brand new condensing boilers that were installed this summer and then that bottom picture i put in there because the investments we make in boiler plants are important and those the boilers at highland and doolittle and in particular at doolittle which were original to the building those needed to be replaced but that doesn't do as much for us as securing our building envelope so the bottom picture are the windows that were installed at cheshire high school a couple of years

171ago it's very very important that we continue to improve on our building envelopes many of our schools have original windows single pane glass really norton is the only one that's fully double paying glass and that's why when you look back at the capital budget you see 9.1 million dollars for windows you know we'll save significant dollars by replacing windows at these older buildings and so that's my story on that particular slide maintenance and operations as a percentage of budget has been held relatively flat we do what we need to do in the buildings and going back to some of the points that were made earlier you know when in doubt we apply our funding to educational needs but we do keep our buildings maintained and so that's it for ops and maintenance i'll pause there

172for questions because that does that does conclude the presentation for this evening andrew go ahead i'd just like to if if we could schedule something maybe just the planning committee sam uh tim and i i'd really like to go on a field trip then and and we're proposing and um more so just you know window replacement i understand we need window replacements in order to improve the envelope with the various school buildings but you know as we're planning these projects moving forward i just want to make sure we're really careful with where we spend the money um i know i've said that all of our planning committee meetings but i'd like to see some things in the field because i haven't you know i haven't seen some of these buildings in two years and if

173we're gonna prioritize and we're gonna have to make the case the town council i want to make sure that the case who makes the town council i'd like to be able to support that discussion in any way that i can i would i mean we would love to do that you know we've done it for the board and we've done it even for the council and you know in some years but i think it would be a great idea i'll talk to you offline tomorrow and we could schedule something that works awesome thank you you're welcome tim thank you adam um yeah just in terms of scheduling something i'm timing on that would that be before we vote in the next week or so or i'm thinking something before the council votes or before the

174council opines on it saying march or april just the thought on that um vin with regard to uh roofing um does roofing cost more if it if it um is built for a heavier weight load well uh to to allow for a heavier weight load that would require you know re-engineering some of the structure you know it's not the roof system it's not the replacement of the roof it's not the rubber membrane or the insulation layer we'd have to shore up the actual design of the of the roof systems and especially the large roof systems over gyms and you know cafeterias all those large spans so um yeah not such a simple thing no okay but it can be done yeah there's some money i get it and what i'm talking about what i'm thinking

175what's on my mind is uh you know another pro of uh sustainable construction if we can avoid those hvacs on the roofs using geothermal as an example uh that would be a potential savings right there and again pros and cons and everything um let me see i thought i had uh oh and one other question um do you do i don't need it right now maybe it could be for the planning committee but have you had any sort of update from energy resources on the solar arrays that had gotten proposed for was it doolittle and highland i'm just curious have you talked to him in the past six months no but um well i've talked to them in the past three months they know that they owe us the the next set of diagrams and

176an update and interestingly tim i i did notice that is on my calendar for follow-up uh the next week or the following week so i will i will reach out to them okay great that yeah that's it uh but maybe put it on planning if it's worth talking about whenever we meet in the next month or two thank you okay uh so then uh that you said that concluded your presentation for the evening we are we are actually done with the administrative review of accounts so yes we are done for the evening so the next meeting is the public info session on thursday okay so um so my thought was that since there was going to be public informational that um unless there was any um unless i'm getting a lot of pushback from the

177from the board that we would have that in person i think at the dodd cafetorium i think is where uh the thought was there that way if someone would wish to speak they can come and speak in person instead of sending an email or something like that um and uh for sam who hasn't um done this before that the next meeting is a little weird because that's where we'll all discuss our thoughts on the on the budget and add uh either motions for the for the finance committee anyway motions or changes to the proposed budget and then we can discuss that um and uh perhaps come to a final motion to bring to the board for full discussion um so the the next meeting so it's a look kind of weird you don't get the

178like have a subcommittee meeting beforehand every this all the discussion is done in public um which is why i think it'd be great to do that in person um is there any uh comment or or pushback on that at all i i mean i think it's i think it's definitely better if we do it in person to allow people to come speak i think that would be more uh inviting to people and i think it is important so i i think it'd definitely be better to do it in person yeah i agree i totally agree with tim and i just need another session to digest a little more and i know dr stolin said he was going to get some more information at least to um tease out some of the initial questions i already

179had so that's fine with me sam when you say you would like another session do you mean like um thursday is good for you or would you say um are you preferring to maybe we have more discussion on thursday and then push out our potential final recommendations of the full board out to um next tuesday what is your thought there i would like a thursday to be another discussion especially since you know i did ask some questions tonight and information will be forwarded um okay and if it's you know depending on what is provided we might be able to act on thursday but i'd like to have us have thursday as an opening an opportunity if need be to dive a little deeper into anything that's presented on thursday okay i personally don't have a

180problem with that um i get i'll i'll speak with tony uh since he's not on the meeting tonight to see if he has any uh thoughts on that but as far as the the committee goes um we have time uh vin right we have up until we we have to our drop that date is what uh february 15th right correct for the board to approve a recommendation correct i think technically the board is supposed to transmit the budget to the town by february 15th and as as of right now there is the public info session scheduled for thursday the 27th and you there is a special budget meeting of the board to adopt the budget on the calendar um for february 3rd that's the following thursday okay yeah adam i'm comfortable with that timeline that

181as set right now great okay good uh tim yes yeah so uh so i'm not really that concerned about how it plays out but if we don't vote if we don't vote on in two days on thursday january 27th i i hope that you and really tony just keeps it open so that if it works out we just have a finance committee followed up by a full board meeting on the 27th with a vote at that time and if it doesn't if it doesn't work out it doesn't work out but if it does then i'd rather just um do it all on one night the finance committee vote and the full board vote on thursday next thursday if that's what if that if it's just two oh sorry not the 27th i apologize february 3rd

182yeah yeah yeah yeah so we have two days finance committee meeting but no vote and then have a finance committee in a full board vote on thursday february 3rd however it works out yeah i think i just want to be open that makes sense to me too yeah we'll we'll see how we'll see how it plays out but yeah that that's yeah that's a good timeline still um okay um so was there anything else um if not i think we'll be having an in-person meeting on thursday i believe that's at uh seven o'clock again yes okay great um so seeing no other business on the agenda uh can i have a uh motion to adjourn uh wait let's let me take it from well i i can only see tim and andrew here is there

183oh yeah we're this is of the hole right so tim uh you made uh you made the motion andrew it looks like you're seconding um i can't see everyone so all in favor aye um i can't see everyone else yeah yeah the emotions