Board of Education 1-26-20

001is requested as shown here salaries this is benefits a smaller increase in maintenance support services and instructional expense so without further ado i'll jump into instructional expense this budget category includes a number of items and you'll see them here in this pie chart on on the right special education tuition and special education pupil services which are typically consulting services you could see account for 49 and 17 respectively of this particular overall budget category which is about 5.8 percent of our of our total budget request and then instructional supplies textbooks new and replacement equipment staff training library periodicals media testing and adult ed supplies all included in the instructional expense category as you'll see in this next section so these are the specific categories that we just talked about and what i wanted to highlight is

002this particular this particular column here which is the change from the current year's budget and you could you'll see that the total increase requested is about seventy four thousand three hundred twenty dollars it's about a one point six percent increase the just the broad explanation we've held flat on most of these account categories because we need to make room for the large medical benefits increase so these line items from instructional supply textbooks software library curriculum media library media supplies testing and adult ed supplies we've held those flat to this year the only areas that we're looking to increase modestly are replacement equipment and new equipment which you know we reduced in recent years again because of budget constraints so we're looking to increase those by twenty five thousand dollars each in this budget request and

003moving back up to the top staff training there's a twelve thousand four hundred dollar increase that's primarily dedicated to some of the work that needs to be done you know as we're operating in you know the remote learning mode um and in some ways you know we need to make up for staff training that we couldn't do this fiscal year and in a few minutes you'll be hearing from ms carey about pupil services increasing but that's partially offset by decrease in our place tuition line for special education services this is a piece of information that we share every year and i know that it's kind of a busy slide because it has a lot of detail so across the top here you'll see that these are our special education costs by year starting with 1617

004through this budget request 2122 and you see that the categories we've we've broken out include you know certified personnel teachers non-certified personnel as primarily instructional assistants employee benefits purchase services the you know one of the large items that you'll hear more about is the tuition for our place students which is two million dollars for next year um instructional supplies uh transportation is a large portion of of this particular special education piece of the budget because the transportation is highly specialized for in many cases for individual students really what i what i do want to point out is if you look at all the budget categories that make up special education for next year it's about a 19.4 million dollar budget request it's about 24.8 of our total budget for next year 78.4 million and you

005could see that is consistent with prior years the special ed portion of our budget is about 25 of our total budget historically one line lower you'll see that the projected number of students that have an individualized education plan that's what the iep stands for you'll see that that is expected to increase over this year the percentage of total special ed students as a percentage of students is about 13 percent and you'll see that's increased from about 12 in that range five years ago and then you'll see here broken down the expenditure per student the um you know before i turn it over to miss carrie i can pause here for some questions but um robin ann has you know has quite a good presentation in store for you so i'm just gonna stop sharing my

006screen we could take some questions and miss carrie will then start presenting her screen and then we'll come back after she's done um ann i see your hand up go ahead thank you adam um my question is from the previous slide actually then all those lines that have no no increase or that are flat with the zeros in them yes so do we really need to have some of those categories filled well and my and my second question that sort of goes along with it is is a 25 000 increase enough for things like uh replacement equipment and such because we have so you know we've deferred some of these costs for so many years now i'm worried about having no increases anywhere i'll i'll begin by answering that you know those are the trade-off

007decisions that you know were made you know with the superintendent and ms solano as we as we built the budget you know you have to you know we try to come in with a reasonable number 5.5 percent is is a large budget request even though half has medical benefits we think we could get by with an uh a request that's parallel to the budget for this year you know are there trade-offs that are being made in doing so are there things that you know we won't do or or won't be able to do that we'd like to do i think the answer to that generally is yes but it will keep we'll be able to keep the school district moving in a good direction and i don't know marlene if you wanted to add anything

008to that and and that holds true by the way on not only the instructional but even the replacement equipment and the new equipment um you know we always at the end of the year look to see where we are in all our budget categories and if we can find some money because it wasn't spent in other categories those are typically the places we will allocate but from a budgeting point of view we're we're trying to balance you know what we need funding medical benefits and the things that we can go without i would agree with everything that you've said then okay thank you i'm i just really mostly want to express that i'm very concerned about this budget because of the medical benefits emergency that we find ourselves in i you know i feel like

009this budget does not move us forward anywhere because we're worried about uh taking care of those uh medical benefits reserves so that we don't you know run below what we're uh putting in that we're putting in enough so that we don't run out of money in those in that account um but that's not the way a school district should operate right we should always be moving forward we should be investing in um what we need to do to to teach our children in the future next year the near future and i you know i look at this bare bones budget on top of a bare bones budget from last year and on top of a bare bones budget the year before and maybe the year before i've lost track of how many years in a

010row um we haven't adequately funded uh a lot of areas that we need to fund and um i will be most likely suggesting that we um put more in our budget as we move forward but thank you for that thank you ann uh tim you had a question thanks adam uh yeah just uh with regard to ann's comment first about not moving forward i do personally feel as though not as though this was like a conscious decision that anybody wanted to do it but i think that the teaching staff and the other staff are making leaps and bounds in terms of technology this year not that it was a conscious choice but um i think it is it's an opportunity to learn um but my one question was it's an opportunity to learn what that

011i think will benefit us benefit the school system into the future what's my point with regard to the iep students so the number jumped up over the last couple years and i'm wondering if that's the two reasons that go through my mind is new students coming to town or is it a new measurement for students or is it both or other things i'm just curious did you want me to answer that i mean i kind of go through that in my presentation okay that's fine that's fine all right thank you okay all right um faith go ahead thanks adam um just so i get this um 60 66 of instructional expenses is in special ed correct roughly yes and those are essentially services mandated by the state is that correct so they're almost a fixed

012cost well yes you have to provide the services you know it i guess you can i know that miss carey's going to cover this tonight and so i don't want to step on um her presentation but you know the outplays tuition yes those are students that we absolutely can't um provide the services needed in district and there are a lot of services that we do provide in district that prevent us from outplacing even more students right so yeah i'm just i'm just trying to to put it all into perspective yes and then okay so then to follow up on anne's this is i'm going to tie this all back but what is the rate of inflation this year roughly in in instructional plot supplies do we is there is it roughly corresponding to the cpi

013or is it does it tend to be excessive especially when you get into textbooks and and um a good question and i i don't know that it's it's any higher than any other inflationary you know measure that you would use i i can speak certainly for you know instructional supplies that are more commodities paper and and pens and pencils um and some of the other instructional supplies you know those are on a state bit and those have been flat to last year from what we're seeing yeah i don't know if textbooks um also are in that same range marlene have you seen anything that is cause for concern next year no the only thing that we need to watch carefully is a lot of the software programs and things the companies gave them to us

014free in march when we went into covid and so people got used to some of these and some are going to enhance learning as we go forward and some we're not going to need anymore so some of those were free and after this is over you know we'll have gotten used to it and we'll have to pay for them um i don't know i just bring this back and i'm with ann i i am concerned um at you that we are cutting into basically the bone um and i don't know what to do about it i you know i really seriously i mean we're also looking at if this budget goes through as is a one mil increase for the town and i know my my job is to look at the school but i

015also do think of the taxpayers and they're gonna also get hit with town expenses so we are slowly seeing our fixed costs rise to the point where it's crowding out the essence of our district and you know i um you go to something like a mandate and i am certainly not saying we we go after the mandates for the special ed kids but golly there are other mandates that that the state is is imposing on us that that we have to fight back because it's just it's gonna we're gonna eventually get to the point where one percent of our budget is for for on non-fixed instructional expenses and that's it it's a scary scary trajectory we're on and i don't know how to stop it but i just want to voice my concern there uh

016we're we're almost in that rock in a hard place place so that's all off my soapbox thank you faith um uh from for from my point of view uh before we move on to uh robin's presentation um but mine i guess is uh the other side of the coin on uh on equipment i think it was new equipment and replacement equipment um you had identified 50 000 in newest expenditures uh between the two categories and i was just wondering if you had earmarked what specifically those increases were going to be for is it is it for like uh you know computer replacements or broken down equipment that that we heavily use i just wasn't sure if you had identified what that was for yeah for the most part it's going to be items that go

017into the classroom furniture for students you know so desks chairs same thing for teachers so it's not it's not computer equipment that's in uh in another category you know which we'll talk about under support services so this is more items that are specific inside the classrooms i would say is the best way to describe it it doesn't have anything to do with ppe or anything like that no no no no so this is like cap we're talking about uh equipment over 5000 like controllable equipment or is that kind of the definition there is that well it's going to be everything from furniture to you know some of the smart board replacements that we have to do it's just items that are you know common across across the classrooms in the schools outside of you know

018physical desktops or chromebooks those types of things are budgeted in a computer capital equipment account and you mentioned smart board replacement are you speaking about uh fixing or repairing the current smart board technology or phasing in the the newer technology that i believe you showed us i think last year even the year before that yeah this is fixing keeping what we have running and what's the estimate on on the new equipment like per classroom i don't even know if i mean this is not something maybe you're prepared to talk about but just as like you know what ann was talking about moving forward that was certainly a piece of equipment that we were talking about uh as you know about moving forward and advancing technology in the classroom and i wasn't sure if that was

019um something that we need to at least look at and prepare for for even this year or even next year it it's been an ongoing discussion you know within you know between our technology support group and our our curriculum group led by marlene um we probably will make a you know capital budget request when we're ready to do that because you know you're talking about replacing you know 300 learning spaces with you know a piece of equipment that depending on you know the size screen that we buy can be in the three to five thousand dollar range so okay we're not we don't have that included in this year's budget or the capital budget even okay thank you you're welcome um mother let's see marlene uh uh all right so is that a request from

020tavin marlene is that okay all right yes a request from the public to keep the budget um numbers presented so that they could see what we were referring to oh okay can you see it now yes you can okay perfect all right um i don't see any further questions so we will continue on thank you okay continuing on means that i will stop presenting and turn it over to robin and carey and hopefully i do this right i have faith you have faith you taught me well let's see can you see it yes and we could see it and we can see you yeah good good okay all right so um i'm thank you for having me here tonight to present our special ed budget and i'm just going to give you some background on

021our department on our students and our um what what we do you know on a daily basis basically you guys had a very good presentation on last year we did lots of showcases on some of our programs so i'm hoping i can give you some additional information and answer i don't want to forget about tim's question either so let's go ahead oops okay so this is our oh it's stop to present is it still presented yeah this is our team here um when i sat down to do our presentation i thought about everyone that makes up our team and makes up our programs and and really um really is what what uh makes us who we are um and at the last minute i added students and parents to that because they are really an

022essential part of our team um you can see there's a variety of different people here that make up our special education team and everything from nurses to aba instructors to social workers to ots to pts so we really have a nice a nice team here that really works together well um in supporting our students um you probably are familiar with this slide i showed it last year when we did our showcase on highland school in the aba program so this is our continuum of services um and what what shows is that we have services that are provided in the least restrictive area and then we run the whole gamut all the way to the most restrictive when i use the word restrictive i'm talking about how far away we are from the general ed classroom

023so the least restrictive setting is your general ed classroom with no special ed services that's the least restrictive and then your most restrictive is at the other end of the continuum where you're looking at things like homebound outplacement small settings so our self-contained classrooms in the district are designed because they provide intense instruction for our students those students have shown that they benefit from being in a smaller setting where they're they can have specialized instruction um and then we have the resource room support which really can vary a student can spend very little time in the resource room or they can spend their core subjects in a resource room and then they spend the rest of their day out in the general ed setting so this is a combination of resource and classroom setting it

024still involves specially designed instruction and it usually focuses on those core subjects it can also focus on study skills it can focus on those executive function skills that are that some students need to be taught explicitly and directly in order to be successful so depending on those areas of concern those areas of deficits will determine how much time a student spends in that resource room a majority of our students can be serviced through a resource room and through our inclusion programs so at the far end of the right you can see the fully included that's where we have our students spending a majority of their day in that classroom they might uh be in a co-taught classroom where a special ed teacher comes in and co-teaches with a general ed teacher they might be in

025there with the support of a special education um instructional assistant um or um and they might be in there also they would also have a lot of accommodations that would help support them there so that's that continuum of services and it's all based on the students needs and um the specialized instruction they may um may require so we started talking about numbers and here's where people were interested and had questions so this only moved this out of the way i got my camera let's move this up here so on this um graph you can see that our numbers have steadily been climbing um this is pre-k through eight students so it includes our elementary students our darcy students and our dog students and you can see that the numbers have been climbing so we're just

026a little over 350 this year um one of the things that i do want to point out on here that um we are seeing in our kindergarten class in our kindergarten students that are coming in the past few years we've seen a trend of students that are having a difficult time separating from their parents and coming into at the school setting um so some of our kindergartens have required um more more support um we typically see this with students that are very young and haven't had a preschool experience and so this is all new to them it's an all-new environment with new expectations and with um with with um the academic demands that that are required for a kindergarten student um so some of that climb i see um is that's one of the trends

027that we see with that um the other thing that we're seeing is as this as you've heard in the past the social emotional piece has been um really impactful on our students um and so we're seeing more students that are being impacted by anxiety um and so it can be it a lot of times it exhibits itself in the classroom for very very young kids it could be much more on the anger side more anger or aggression and on as the kids get older it's can be more withdrawn it can be um more of um school um a lack of a you know a decrease in attendance we typically that's a big sign when we have someone who is is um all of a sudden or over time is showing um increase in absences then

028there usually is a social emotional component to that the green line that you see drawn here i i i was in thinking about these numbers i wanted to kind of see for myself where when the dyslexia law came into place that was in the 2015-2016 school year and that's when the state required us to identify students um with dyslexia and so over the course uh since since that um ruling was put into place that mandate we have spent a lot of time on identifying looking at the tools and how to identify students with dyslexia so i think that some of that may have had some impact on those rising numbers we are catching students that are showing characteristics of dyslexia at a much earlier age putting in those interventions and i i see students get

029exited as the elementary supervisor we were seeing students be exited from special ed um by the time they were reaching sixth grade fifth grade so it's um a good thing that's been in place that we've been doing okay okay when we take a look at our grade 9 through 12 students with ieps again we do see a bit of a rise um the the the green line that i'm showing you there on the end there was a new mandate that came in and started in july of this year and that's when the uh the state determined that at previously our students that qualify qualified for transition years those are your 18 to 21 year olds um they would once they turned 21 they were then exited from special education with this new mandate that came

030in july they're saying it's now mandated that we have to keep our students that are eligible for those transition years through the age until they turn 22 so that happened in july so now instead of exiting a student at we are exiting them at their 22nd birthday so you i think we're going to see a little bit of a rise in that because we're now keeping our students we have students all the way down from three-year-old three years old all the way up until their 22nd birthday that's the range of students that we're providing services for some of the things that we have seen over the few years and we've talked about this in the past is most of the um the many students that are being identified at this level when you get to

031ninth and twelfth grade it's usually social emotionally based um it's due to maybe hospitalizations um and it's due to again students attendance is something we're looking very closely at and um and the impact has it has on those academic um academic success so that's our students from 9 to 12 and that includes our students that are in those transition years those numbers do okay so if we look at the total number of ieps we have a little over 500 about 556 students in the district right now that we provide services for which runs about 13.2 percent and if you compare that to the state the state we're looking at is the state average is 15.6 percent we've always kind of flown a little underneath what the state is but as in the state and across

032all districts we're seeing that steady decline that you can see in this here okay here's our out placements everyone's always interested in this slide so we can see that our out placements has have have actually dropped and part of the reason why i think that has occurred is you can see those two lines i placed into the graph the orange line to the left that indicates when we um put our bridges program in at doolittle so the bridges program um is a self-contained program that services kids with um that are typically impacted by anxiety and or um trauma and so we were able to provide an appropriate program within district um that our students are we were able to pull some students back and at the same time we were able to service students that

033otherwise would have been placed out um same thing then in 1819 school year we it we then added the middle school bridges program and also the rise program at the high school so i think these ins district programs has has affected in a has resulted in a decline in those outplacements because those programs are able to provide the services that the students need and we don't have to look at outside these are students who are typically placed out we typically have exhausted all of our resources within district we have gone to some of our most restrictive programs that we have in the district and we are still are unable to meet the needs of the student and that's when we have to look for outplacement um at that point the student is usually not benefiting

034from having access to to models to appropriate um peer age-appropriate peers and so um they really really need a more intense program [Music] once a student is placed in an out placement school we do continue to always look at when they are ready to return to the district we look for improvement we work with the outplacement schools and services and in trying to um to identify goals and objectives and identify strategies to help those students gain the skills they need where they can then come back into the district come back to our programs and benefit from being around their age-appropriate peers okay so i spoke about our in-district um programs that we have and the these are all of them right here and you guys um most of you were part of our showcases last

035year where you're able to really get some detailed information on each one of these programs these are our pre-k all the way up to the age 21 22 now so i'm going to talk a little bit more about those so really you can categorize these into three categories so we have our intensive programs that you see listed here so your pre-k your pre-k k aba your highland aba your light dodd life skills program and your cheshire high school life skills program so these are programs that are designed for students who require intensive specialized repeated instruction they're typically self-contained they have very small student student to adult ratios um so in many cases the students that in these programs oftentimes require a one to two a one to one student teacher ratio and so that's they

036require this the um the support of instructional assistants um to help reduce that ratio and to provide that more intense instruction so we do work on daily living skills in those programs there's typically behavioral needs and aba strategies apply we design our programs and our objectives and the tasks in the academics that the students engage in are functional and they apply to their daily life and they would be practicing and doing them in their daily life we r heavily we have a heavy reliance on data collection it's the data collection that really um allows us to able to see the small the small pieces of growth that the students are showing and then to be able to adjust if we need to adjust make adjustments in uh in order to improve um the growth um

037at this we also these programs are supported by your therapies your speech your language speech and language ot your pt and of course counseling and then some students are able to participate in adaptive art music and gym there's a lot of a technology that's applied and students in these programs many of the students that um requires all of this intense type of programming usually fall within the autism spectrum or they have multiple disabilities intellectual disabilities or even traumatic brain injury and so that's the intensive programs okay we then have our on the other hand we have our therapeutic programs so earth sorry i got to keep moving myself around there it's blocking so our therapeutic programs we have the do little bridges the dodd bridges the cheshire high school rise program the cheshire high school

038new start program and the hummuston alternative school so these programs are heavily embedded with counseling and with therapy there's lots of behavioral supports here it's the focus is on those social emotional supports that student needs again we are looking at a small student-to-adult ratio and again there's a lot of data collection to determine whether students are making progress also a big piece of this um these programs is the collaboration that occurs not only within our school-based teams but also with the outside providers so many students who are working with therapists or counselors or social workers outside of the school our school-based teams reach out and communicate we try to be on the same page and collaborate so that the student is getting a nice wrap around of services and everybody is consistent in what they're

039focusing on we're not contradicting each other many of the students that are identified and benefit from these programs are your students that are dealing with anxiety depression trauma ptsd mood disorder emotional disturbance or school avoidance okay our transition programs this those are that's our bridge to life our college life and our community life programs these are designed for our 18 year olds up through their 22nd birthday um we focus a lot on employment skills daily living skills those executive function skills social skills recreation skills and college courses both bridge to life and college life are located on the qu campus and that allows us to for one thing the students are with age-appropriate peers um and it also allows them access to age-appropriate environments and so um and they engage in different activities on the

040campus our college to life students spend time and actually take college courses at qu as well as the courses that we provide through our college life program and then there's also um employment opportunities and and work opportunities for them our community to life program this year is located at the park and rec um they we used to refer to it as the yellow house program but they have moved over to the um park and rec and that focus is largely on daily living skills and also on recreational skills okay so when you think about special ed and in cheshire we are very much aligned with what is happening in our district goals um we are have a heavy focus on the social emotional learning there is a strong emphasis on the castle standards the restorative

041practice ruler responsive classroom mindfulness all of the different strategies and the supports that general ed teachers are using we also support through special education and then also the complex thinking is another focus that's right aligned with the general ed and the way we focus on complex thinking in special ed is we're focusing on standards-based ieps so we're ensuring that we're setting high standards for our student students and that they're having access to the to the general ed curriculum we practice inclusive inclusive we have inclusive practices we try to um have stu we we look to have students participate in generally class classrooms as much as possible by providing them with assistive technology in our co-teaching situations there's lots of we we plan collaboration time between our special educators and our general educators so that the

042professional development that is being provided for general it is also provided for special ed so they're very much aware of what it's going to look like how it's going to be presented in the classroom and that way they can then make the adjustments that they need to make or the accommodations they need to make or to provide the instruction that students with disabilities would require in order to be able to benefit from the generalized curriculum so i think that all of those those practices that we do have in place it's is what has really enhanced our special ed program and has allowed us to to do so well on our state mandated testing okay so we always compare the derby this is the first half of derby because i couldn't fit everything onto the screen

043but we have cheshire over here uh where is it right here here is cheshire and when we look at just a couple of things to point out when i look at cheshire first of all you can see this this information is from 1819 so it is a couple years back but it's the most recent that i could get on everybody from um off of the state website so you can see and typically things don't change a whole lot from year to year when you're comparing them to other towns so you can see we're we're falling in this at this point we were 12.3 percent you can see as you look up and down the row for the ident students identified on ieps we're kind of falling right in the middle in there and i will

044show you another the rest of the chart the other thing um that i wanted to point out is when you look over at out placements way over here we are we were ranked fourth in the state as far as having the least amount of out placements so i know that that's always you know looking at that number is really concerning when we look at the cost about placement but we really are um we really do keep our students in district and we're able to do that with our programs that we have here so i'm going to go to the next one so here we're looking at some additional information from the rest of the dirk um and again i look at those percentages so we're kind of falling we're not the lowest but we're not

045the highest and um we know that the out placement is um we're in good shape with that so then what i did is i took um because i wanted to see you know if i took dirt b and i took those towns that were fairly close in population in numbers and enrollment you can see all these are all pretty close to us i wanted to kind of focus in on those to kind of really look at them so we can see that our numbers here they they kind of we've fallen again right in the middle we're looking at farmington newtown simsbury and south windsor here um so here we we're at 528 at this point and you can see we're kind of falling in the middle there when i go over here and i look

046at the outplace rank again we were fourth and then when we compare it to those towns that are similar in size um there's a little bit of a variety there it's uh it varies varies um so in looking at um let's see what else that i want to point out to you let's take a look at and we look at staffing students per staff and we have our sped certification our certified um specialist that we have in the district you can look at that in comparison okay all right so in comparison across the state when we look at and we break down our disabilities so you can see in the first column when we look at all the disabilities we are in the light blue the state is in the darker blue we are our

047percentage of students that are identified as special education is slightly lower than than what the state averages if you look across the graph you'll see we're kind of right in line with all with what is we are seeing as trends across the state when it comes to the students the percentage of students that are identified under each of the um the categories or each of the classifications um one thing that kind of struck me as i looked at this one here and where you're looking at the intellectual disability we come out at point um it comes out almost at point one at 1.0 you'll see that there's nothing there showing for the state and that's because on my chart it was so small it wouldn't show up it's actually .05 um so you know what

048accounts for us having a higher number of students in district that are are identified under intellectual disabilities i'm going to go back to tim's question about are we seeing a growth in numbers because of people moving is it the mandates i do think that part of the reason why we do see that piece with the intellectual disabilities is i think we students come up through birth to three i do think that students that families moved to chester for our education you've heard dr solon say that over and over again and our special education families moved to cheshire because of the programs that we have in cheshire um and so you know i you know i'll field phone calls at least three or four of them a year of people calling and we're looking at moving

049my child has autism intellectual disability or some other disability what do you have in your what programs do you have so um i do think that um that is a piece of it these are some of the recent improvements that we've been able to do through the budget through our budget system so we've been able to you knew a couple years ago we added three new school psychologists which was really uh impactful on helping our students and reaching all students not just the ones with ieps we added a special education teacher at darcy just last year and the 0.5 board certified behavior and analyst we also have over the past few years have expanded that bridges therapeutic program the rise program at the high school and then we also have expanded our transition program so

050now we're looking at the three transition programs at two at qu and then the program at the park and rec program with the community in life so those are things that have really enhanced our our programming okay so while this year we do not have any new proposals we're not proposing a new program we're not proposing additional staffing we are very concerned about the pandemic and the impact that it might have on students i think i've heard the number 20 of our students is out on is on remote due to parent choice or because of maybe there might be a health issue within the home and for their protection their students are staying home those students at some point will be returning back to our classrooms we do know that the pandemic is causing um

051the impact it's having on people is a lot of isolation a lot of um there's stress there are families that are having difficulty making ends meets because of um their job in employment situations so i am concerned and as a department we are concerned about when those students do return to school what are their needs going to be what are we going to need to help them transition back and also while we are while some students are even out on remote we are seeing some hospitalizations we are concerned about the change in the mandate so we now have to provide services up through 22 so it's another additional year of services that we will have to have to um provide um appropriate programming and so at this point i we're really asking and hoping that

052we'll be able to continue to support our programming um the we have programs that have been set up they've been put into place they've shown success and my hope is that we can continue to keep them um in the resources that they need at the level they are at at this time and so that we don't compromise the integrity of those programs so our hope is that the board of ed and the town council will support our budget so that we can maintain the high quality of education that we're providing through our special education department does anybody have any questions um well i'll kick it off because no one's oh there it is okay tim tim has a question i'll let you kick it off go ahead thanks adam um yeah thank you thank you

053for the presentation i had to step away for a few minutes with my kids i apologize about that uh you mentioned that there were uh kids entering into k and getting ieps there are they are they continuing on with ieps in general or after kindergarten oh because that's right because what you said was it's the kids who basically have um uh what's the word separation anxiety type or separation i forget what the the term is and my son is it do those ieps continue past kindergarten are they for for some for some but um for some we are seeing that we are able to they've made the growth we provided them supports they've made the growth and we then have been able to um reduce services and or access so um we there's a lot

054of work that goes in place before they get identified the team's work that each school-based team works to provide those um srbi services beforehand and so what we do is we put intervention strategies in place and we go through the tiered interventions before we end up at pbt when we get to tier three of those interventions it usually involves support service staff are very much involved in helping those students to um to with the behaviors and to help acclimate to the classroom and to provide the supports that they um that they require so in some cases it does result in an iep and then over time we are seeing that we can reduce those services unless of course there's an underlying disability in some cases we do we do find that there's more of a

055learning disability that's involved in it and so then we we're providing more academic support with that does that answer your question yeah yeah thank you thank you um you had said something that rang a bell in my mind um basically i was wondering about truancy in relation to in relation to the pandemic i don't know if this would be a question for you if you have a larger if your group if your group of kids is you know a larger uh is more representative or has a larger percentage of kids who kids with truancy issues than the broader student population um you said something i was just wondering in relation to the pandemic one of the things that's been a concern for me is you have some students where there is a problem and you

056have a lot of students where it's not a problem and then you have a lot of kids that are probably borderline and i'm wondering particularly in relation to pandemic if you've seen an increase and if there's anything that you've found that's helpful in addressing it um so usually what i see in special ed is is more the school avoidance and it's there's usually a social emotional reason and that's the that's that's what's really impacting the student in their engagement in school um what i've been hearing um from our social workers school psychologists and counselors for some of those students who coming to school um raises their anxiety they're flourishing and doing very well on the remote learning for some students who don't who may um who have difficulty with executive function skills and that is

057you know organizing themselves get making sure they're following their schedule signing on to um to google classroom when they're supposed to be on there getting their assignments done there's less of a connection for them and so i do see that some of those students are are struggling more um we do the staff does a lot of work in reaching out to those students who are not engaging and um and of course we're always looking at tweaking the supports that they have to try and get them more engaged um so i think i think you kind of see both ends of it with remote learning so in relation to the in relation to the positive that you were talking about um is that is this something that could continue into next year or if there's any

058legislation or anything in the hopper up in hartford if you could get that back to us and you know i personally would try to say something about it advocate for it because i mean if it's an opportunity where it benefits some kids i think it would be worthwhile to keep it as an option for you to think about and the parents to think about in the future i don't want it to just go away if it's something that really is helpful yeah i think that you know what as far as benefiting them i think what we're seeing is is that they're more engaged because they don't have to engage in that social piece but i do worry about them not engaging in a social piece so now they're very isolated and while they're able to

059get on and do their academics and um do it comfortably from their home their what their what's being what's can also be impacted is that social emotional piece and we know that we are all we're social animals and that um you know for a teenager to be in their room and be on a computer and while they're doing very well academically that's really not where we want them to be socially as far as going forward and thinking about whether or not remote will be an option into next year i i don't know that i think it will depend on whether the where we are at with this pandemic um but my hope is is that we can get all our students back into school because um i think that's better for them i think the

060instruction that they can receive is more engaging and i think that the relationship and the connections that they can make are um are much more beneficial sure no that makes total sense to me i'm just thinking in terms of options depending on the specific student specific situation i mean options i think are probably a good thing i think what they're doing is they're kind of avoiding those students that are doing well remotely because they don't have to come to school and they don't have to engage in that and what causes them anxiety is is you're kind of avoiding what the issue is and so so when those students are mandated to come back to school are that's where i'm concerned okay because it's very difficult yeah yeah um yeah and i just want to say

061uh the uh you had mentioned dyslexia as one as one uh concern and the opportunity to exit kids from their ieps while they're still in elementary school and i just want to say that's great yeah yeah we've done a lot of work with dyslexia and i and it's you know all of our staff is trained in in reading approach um in one or or two of the programs that are typically recommended and we're seeing good growth with that and so it's really very promising and it's really nice nice to see those students make those gains um so i i get a question about um which i don't know um if um something that comes up all the time is when we talk about out placements and we talk about the cost of an outplacement um

062so just to give you an idea um you know our out placements range anywhere from 50 60 000 a year that's the tuition for a student to attend an outplacement to close to two hundred thousand dollars a year so it depends on the intense needs of the student it depends on how what the supports are that the student needs and what type of program the student needs so it can vary i think if i were to you know so your average is somewhere in between there probably around 80 80 90 000 a year for one hour place um andrew you're up thank you well robin great presentation i really appreciate thorough and learned a lot but i have a question for you so with the outplacement is it less than 20 students out of the

0634 200 district-wide that are outplaced yes yeah we have a small number of students that are outplaced okay the change from last year to this year did any of the additional staff help to relieve or to keep that number down that we added last year in the budget the additional staff prevent outplacements um the so i i think that our programs allowed us to do that so having having you know the bridges program the aba program um the bridges program at the middle school and the programs at the high school and the alternative i think those programs do help to keep our numbers keep our numbers down for our placements absolutely okay and then one one final thing with the state mandate of adding the extra year to 22. um do you have an idea

064of how many additional students that's going to result to for next year um we did look at projections um we're always looking at projections and so um this year we actually had to call back i think it was three or four students because we had exited them accident exited them at the end of the school year and then the july mandate came out and we had to call them back and so um a couple of them have already exited again because they turned 22 in like november or december um but productions as far as next year i i do have that um i don't think i'll be i don't i don't know if i'll be able to pull it up i don't know right now i was just wondering what the you know it usually

065typically affects like four or five students i think okay okay all right thank you catherine i got a question yes sorry thank you adam um a couple of things so i know that you know we've talked a lot in the past and and you brought up tonight that people you know moved to cheshire because of our great special ed programs and i'm just curious um are there specific things that we do that other districts don't do i don't know if it's the bridges program and the aba you know those kinds of programs that just aren't universal throughout um you know other districts or what is it that draws people to cheshire specifically and i don't even know if there's an answer to this you know because every child is different all that kind of stuff

066i'm just curious uh well i'll just tell you what i've experienced and um you know what i the phone calls that i receive or when people contact to ask about our programs typically they have a child who um has some unique needs and so many times i will ask them well you know what made you decide to to call cheshire or contact cheshire and um i've been told that um their doctor or the neuropsychologist that evaluated their child has made the recommendation i've been told that word of mouth you know they know somebody that lives in the area um i think that um the programs that we provide i think you know parents i think we all would want um to keep our children within close to home and within our home schools and within

067our community and so when you have a program that you that is in our schools and they have access to age-appropriate peers i think that that's just a real a real plus and it's a real um attractive situation for families right yeah so the fact that we work pretty hard to minimize out placements probably makes a difference and the other um maybe this is just more of a comment than a question really but i think last year one of the things i i heard during those uh workshops and and um on the special ed programs is that you know identifying children as having special needs as early as possible um is going to result in you know a much better outcome for that child probably a lot sooner which means to tim's point you know

068exiting kids out of the iep um is more likely to happen more quickly you know if we are identifying these kids and giving them the services that they need i mean is that did i hear that correctly yeah early intervention is optimal i mean you want to do early intervention you don't want to create large gaps you don't want to delay and create large gaps for students um you know there's not just the academic piece to that but there's the social emotional piece to that because then what happens is you see a child that's frustrated and that has um that is uh turned off by by school so early intervention is the best if and um you know i've always felt if you can get in um provide the service um you know give that

069direct instruction and then and you see you get results from it then the student is you're closing that gap for them and then you're they're able to then stand on their own and and um access the curriculum without having special education so you know it's um it's you know it varies from student to student some students are requiring special education throughout their years some of them are able to um to exit um i think it depends on the disability i think it depends on um you know as you there's a lot of factors that kind of come into play with that right but early intervention is always the best option i mean because i mean we know when we when we teach teach the younger years are such our years of such rapid growth for

070students and so we want to capitalize on that right and i just i guess my point was that you know making sure that we are adequately funding that effort um really does pay off in a lot of different ways um right and that's exactly what my point is is that while we're not asking for anything additional we really want to be able to maintain these programs right you know i you know i don't want to i don't want to have to make changes or to reduce the services that are available in these programs because then you're going to uh that's going to have an impact um on on your effectiveness how effective they are right thank you thank you very much thanks adam faith good question um thank you robin ian for the presentation um

071i'm going to just cover a bunch of different areas starting without placement you're saying it's about on average 90 90 000 per student is there any is this all on the district is there any um any cost sharing through private insurance on the part of the families with these services um what uh for the academic we're we're responsible for the academic programming and so that's that's what we're seeing as far as those out placements go much of our outplacements are based on those academic programs that children's children require so that doesn't come into play under a person's insurance okay okay um and then um you uh vinny had a sly and slide in his presentation that showed that the cost of educate cost per pupil of an ie iep pupil is 35 000 per student

072we have our dis this is this may be more a question for vin um our average cost per pupil in the district is approximately 17 000 so then if we factor out i could do the math but i was english major so not too good but um if we fact if we take out the iep students what is that what are we spending per non special ed student yes you're saying if we take the the the per pupil expense we have now first subtract out the special ed cost and then recalculate yeah we'll add that to the questions that we'll answer next week okay thank you i understand i i get the question it's an algebra question i know it is yeah it takes a little bit of doing you know to to figure that

073out because you have to factor out transportation to make it equal because the the the cost per student that the state provides excludes transportation costs but our 13 or 35 000 that you had in your slide that includes transportation yes oh okay okay um if you if it's just a ballpark figure i'm just i'm just gonna do it see that okay um and then um with ieps i think roman and you started to go down i was wondering if what the if we have an average duration of a of an iep are we seeing trends that because that we're starting that they're starting to become more effective and therefore kids are exiting earlier um but i don't it sounds like in your in your discussion with catherine you it's all over the board um well

074it's i don't i can't really comment on if there's a trend with exiting um i think that um because you know the reasons kids are identified for ieps what we're seeing as a trend is we're getting a lot more students with the social emotional piece versus the academic of a a specific learning disability or a dyslexia um and so in typically we see the social emotional tends to be with some of our older children so while we're we're identifying students with learning disabilities and with um academic needs at the younger age we have what i see is that the social emotional pieces are coming out at the older students starting in like more so fifth sixth grade and then moving up towards the middle school in the high school years so early identification tends to

075happen a lot with the academic needs and then the social emotional piece kind of comes up but as far as like the average time that a person has an iep i i couldn't comment on that you know i think you know what i do know is that if you have a learning disability you always have a learning disability what we do is in special education is we work to teach you the strategies that you use to work around that disability and so that you can access the um the instruction and you can learn and you can um make progress but we teach it a different way we give you different strategies to kind of guarantee your strengths instead of your weaknesses and that way you be you students can make that progress and can um

076gain those skills okay okay yeah yeah um but in both cases whether it's social emotional learning or or um you know a learning disability you want to see them get especially with the sel kids get back to wholeness um you know yeah and i think what which speaks to you know when you look at the how we did on the last time we were tested using the s spa the spec state mandated testing um you know our students with special needs did very well um and so i think that speaks to the hard work that the staff is doing in identifying students giving them the accommodations and giving them the instructions they need and and exposing them to the the grade level standards so that they can meet those those goals and those those um

077standards okay on those those state mandated tests adam if you indulge me i have one more question and that is are you hearing from any other districts for example i saw in the numbers simsbury i think it was had 22 outplacement students and that and that data you showed um some extremely high number um are you they would to me would be a perfect candidate for our program um my concern is that you get into a place like simsbury and you've got a family with you know severely disabled child that we become a magnet are you hearing from other districts who are saying hey we need to do this as well and is there perhaps some guidance from the state to some of those districts to say look folks beef up your special ed programs

078you can't yeah yeah you know i i think it i think it would depend on i think you have to look at why the what types of programs are those students going out to so are they programs that you can you can do within your district or are they based off of hospitalizations are they based off of um students that need um programming that we don't have in the district um so i i think i don't know what sims very situation is or why they had that increase in out placements um i i have not heard from them as to why i think that many districts recognize that you need programs within your um within your district i don't always know if that's supported by you know if it's supported in the district to build

079programs like ours or similar to ours and also to provide the resources that are needed to run those programs so it just might might not be able to do that because they don't have the backing in order to do that i don't know okay thanks yeah okay andrew sorry robin um so i've heard a lot from parents about darcy school um so we're working through school modernization right now so it's not really a question because i don't want to put you on the spot but i just want to make sure that i'd like to schedule time to sit down and talk to you just about the program about the building and about the facility there because if that is moved um or renovations happen there or whatever ends up happening i want to make sure

080that you're um part of that conversation for sure great great that'd be great good all right thank you i didn't want to forget because you're here thanks um robin again uh thank you for this fantastic presentation this is always uh one of the most enlightening uh parts of our uh budget process because we always find out you know how the students are doing and and uh the kind of resources that you'll need for next year um for me um what i guess i'll begin with uh sort of to be piggyback on on andrew's statement there when i did the tour of darcy in the fall um uh i was told that we are one of the last systems in the state to do i think it's birth to three months and that's fine and that's

081funded on a uh i guess i think a grant um and that everyone else uses some sort of privatized system or don't offer it at all and i was wondering if you could uh expand upon that thought as to what is what is the what does the privatization look like and is having that in-house it's obviously having that in-house is beneficial and has has have we made any preparations for the day that if we are the only ones still using this grant will the grant go away and what do we do if that happens i think the advantages to having the eic program with it or the birth to three program in uh in within district really kind of gives us a heads up as to what's coming down the road and so we kind

082of have a an insight into who our students are going to be in a couple years and so i think that's really helpful um because um we can plan for that so otherwise i we're hearing you know once they turn three uh we get notice or they're turning three we get notice from um birth to three and that's when we would take our students in to our program but with birth to three we're kind of getting that insight and that heads up and i think that that's really helpful as far as the grant going away i'm not aware of of that i haven't um been a part of any kind of workshop or or something anything from the state that has talked about that i know that kim desert who is the principal up at

083darcy and she often does get um she often is involved in many of the uh the workshops and the webinars that are coming up out of the state and i'm not aware from her either of of anything changing with that grant okay thanks webinar in a couple of days you know my concerns of whether or not we have to lobby our our legislature to make sure that that grant continues if if we're one of the few who only who still use it so i was just warning you go ahead it would be hard to get rid of that because it goes back to that early intervention piece and how important it is and you know my understanding is the research shows that early intervention is far more cost effective than waiting down the road and

084then trying to provide those interventions it's usually far more costly to wait and provide services later on okay so my next question is about the high school and we've kind of touched on this subject um you know as a board we've been uh working really hard with administration to try and keep you know the schools open as much as possible and we know that you know the high school has has not been open full time and you've mentioned that uh you know your concerns about um how students will react to specifically you know underclassmen who have not really had that full opportunity to transition at like it you know during a normal year you'd have all that time to transition um do you feel that you have the resources to help those students because you

085know it could cause a ripple effect for their entire remaining career at the high school you feel you have the resources to help all of those students deal with um this you know final transition problem uh or maybe lack of problem or you know minor problem uh that they may have throughout their their remaining career and you know do you think we have the resources to are you prepared for that yeah um so the high school has been working really very hard to meet the needs of our students with ieps and um you know they look at each student on a case-by-case basis or each individual needs so our our self-contained programs are life skills programs that are for our our students um that require the more intense um supports those programs have been running

086um in their they're not on a hybrid schedule they're coming and they're having in-person classes because we recognized that those students um it's very difficult for those students to benefit from a um a hybrid situation because you have that that that change in schedule where these are children that that do much better on a consistent schedule and then also the in-person instruction that they require they're not it because of their disability they're you know trying to engage through through the google meets is very very difficult and hard for them so the um decisions have been made so those more intense programs are running full you know throughout the week and um those students are coming in so the staff up the administration up at the high school has also had to make decisions through the

087ppt process and determining if there are other students that are on ieps that may require or benefit from being in school instead of on a hybrid schedule but are in school every day except of course the wednesday that everybody is out so there are some students that are attending four days a week but that's that's based on an individual decision made by the ppt team because they're looking at that individual situation and um and and whether that child would benefit or needs to be in school for those four days as opposed to the hybrid model um can i predict what's going to happen down the road um i i'm not i i wouldn't say that i can predict it but i think that we need to plan for it i think we need to think

088about you know i i think back to when we when we went out on on remote in the springtime and then we re-entered school this year we we had a very thoughtful re-entry to coming back to school and we planned out how we wanted to slowly re-enter students and we did it by you know we broke them down by the out their last name and we had certain days designated so that teachers could reconnect with students and i think that you know in thinking about uh when when and if remote goes away we're going to have to think about doing that or what other strategies we can use too as we reintroduce our students back in what's the impact going to be for remote versus um in person well you know i you when i

089talk to parents or i talk to people outside the district the feedback that i'm getting the feedback that i'm getting from everyone is that we are doing a really good job on our remote teaching um i've watched teachers toggle between their remote student on their computer and their student in their classroom and it amazes me how they do that um but i what i what i am hearing is is that we are doing a really good job of that so you know i'm hoping that we're doing we're diminishing some of those residual effects that might happen um at least for our students here in cheshire um you know when i talk to somebody from another district and they're like you know are you remote are you hybrid and i'm like well no our elementary school

090is fully in person our middle school is fully in person and we're hybrid at the high school and um and you know and we're doing we're doing well at it so i don't know what that impact is going to be i do think that our school counselors and our psychologists our and our social workers and our special education teachers and our administration are are all going to be working in collaboration to determine what supports those students are going to need and and we'll watch the data you know the data is going to tell us a lot when we start taking we're supposed to take our aspects we're supposed to take our aspect testing this year we're we're going to be you know students are taking sats that data is going to give us that insight

091as to how we're doing um our curriculum-based assessments that we're doing that's going to give us the data so we can then determine how well of a job we did and if there are some gaps or things that we need to look at but i think that's systematic it's not not focused just on special ed i know for me personally i'm pleased to hear that you guys are completely aware of the situation and our seem seem to be ready for uh what could uh come our way next year when when all the students are reintegrated back into uh in per in person relationships again um uh finally um i don't recall if we did this last year we may have we may have not have done it but um at least in 1819 we did

092a i guess really an in-depth sort of uh school climate survey i think with the students and i don't know marlene if you can answer this as well was that something that we were going to plan to do again this year to kind of take the temperature of where everyone is before we hopefully all go back next year so i think you're referring to the safe school climate data which is actually a state department of ed requirement that we do it every two years and so our safe school climate committees at all of the schools are currently looking at those questions as you know most of those questions are state mandated and we will be administering that in the spring thank you that's great news um are there any other questions for robin okay seeing

093none uh is that conclude your presentation robin yes yes thank you very much thank you again for the great presentation i'll hand it back to vin okay thank you um [Music] trying to share my screen and i'm getting an error so just bail it to me one second here all right you see in the slide and you're seeing me yes yes okay terrific so i'm going to just pick up where we left off we're still in the instructional expense um portion we we completed these two lines for special education you know we we talked through the categories here just wanted to highlight a couple of things and then we'll move on to support services and the first is that the focus for the curriculum council for 2122 is business social studies agp is the academically

094gifted program and school counseling so those those particular areas are due to be analyzed and recommendations will be made to the curriculum council there's also some training needed with the next generation science standards social studies curriculum needs writing revisions again these are just some highlights of the instructional expense portion of the budget and then continuing to support math resources for the eureka k5 implementation as well as algebra algebra 1 and geometry and if marlene has any information to add i'll let her pepper it in here in terms of some of the textbooks that are needed for next year marlene indicated that we need a new textbook resources for algebra 2 for business courses as well as elementary math instruction and assessment uh also college career and civic life for social studies and then let me

095see lastly here um in terms of professional development you know it's really gonna it's sort of in line with what we were doing or scheduled to do this year with complex thinking and social emotional learning some some focus on english learners as well as next generation science standards and and the k-5 math program so marlene i don't know if you wanted to add anything you know to that that particular information that i just shared no i would say that if this sounds familiar because many of these things we had on the docket to do last year and they were not completed due to covid and they've been difficult to complete this year due to the fact that um there's so many things happening and we don't have the ability to pull substitutes and group people

096together for training in the world we once did so these things continue to be a focus for the foreseeable future okay thank you and this is just summarizes the percentage of instructional expense um as to the total budget so you could see over the last several years it has declined a bit but in general this category you know has been relatively held flat in terms of percentage you know of the budget you know going back for the last you know 20 years or so it has increased but in line with the budget and that ends instructional expense i don't know if there's any additional questions or you'd like for me to move on to support services at this point um i'm not seeing any questions okay so continue on ben thank you support services so

097when we talk support services we're looking at about eight point nine percent of the budget it was about nine percent in the current 2021 budget the the total request is 6.99 million that's about a 4.2 percent increase i'll show you the increased categories in a minute but support services 57 of this 6.99 million is transportation the the cost we pay daco as well as fuel and transportation insurance so again that's the lion's share of this portion of the budget about 12 is for other professional services which includes technology services and in particular paying our contract with apex technology that provides services of of a chief information officer and we do share that cost with the town as well as certain software that we purchase more operational in nature like munis as an example legal fees

098that are paid for advice that we need as well as for negotiations expenses related to the board of education holding our meetings and the like as well as the annual audit which is about thirty six thousand dollars per year so that's the second largest category the 611 000 the that's the energy performance contract again about six years ago now we did an upgrade um of about eight million dollars in our schools to um improve energy efficiency and we did that in the form of a 15-year contract so the 611 000 represents the payments that we're making over 15 years for the 8 million dollars in work that was done and that's offset by savings that we've realized in our utility accounts and you can see that the rest of these categories which are you know

099rentals and leases of office equipment but also using the pool and hockey rinks that's included in that category purchase of computer equipment i was speaking about this earlier so it's out of this um four percent of our budget that will buy you know computers chromebooks um some network devices although a lot of this that networking infrastructure for the schools in the town is part of our capital budget sports insurance physicals programs fall under other purchase services and again the rest of these are relatively small i'm going to cover them in the next slide so it's a it's a wide variety of support services that are captured in this particular category you'll see that the total request for an increase is about 280 2 000 a little over four percent uh as compared to this year

100and so you'll see some of these categories are just flatlined so i won't really focus on those the seventy seven thousand dollar increase here for pupil transportation is about two percent you know that's in line with our contract with daco it calls for two percent increases per year which is very modest and that's what we you know negotiated when we were we renewed our contract two years ago now this category i do want to take a moment to explain it's other professional services inc is increasing 184 503 there's just really um a couple of things that account for that you know the first is that we um change the the way that our financial system munis is hosted we we were basically um having that software on our servers and now we've moved it to

101a cloud-based service and the reason that we did that is there it was actually a greater cost keeping it on our own servers even though may not have been an operating budget cost there's a network infrastructure cost that we pay for those servers were due to be replaced so it was time for us to move you know our financial system to a cloud-based software service which will enable us to stay current with the latest releases of our financial software which again is munis so that accounts for about 35 000 of the 184 000 increase you'll also notice and this is the second piece this year's budget of 624 thousand 2021 is dramatically lower than what was expended in 1920. when our budget was reduced for 2021 you know first by the board of ed and

102then ultimately the council we cut very deep into this into this particular budget line so this was unfortunately way too low in this in this budget year so we when we trued it up we realized that we didn't account for the full cost of the service that we provide or pay apex which is 135 000 a year and we also have too little budgeted and legal services compared to what we need and and what our trend is so you know this 184 150 000 of it is really an adjustment to offset a budget that's too low in this fiscal year um so that's really kind of high level explanation of you know where we are with support services i want to take you a little bit deeper into a couple of these categories before we

103get to to questions so if you look at our transportation cost which again you know represents go back here you know represents three point um you know six million dollars um if you look you'll see that 48 of that cost is for our general education public school routes about 29 is for special education you know routes and costs nine percent goes to fuel equipment and repairs student activity so those are field trips as well as sports charters accounts for about five percent of our total transportation expenses private school routes these are the routes that we run for st bridget's which is mandated by state law we have to provide transportation to the private schools in our in our community four percent is for the voag wilcox and other schools such as sound school where our

104students attend we do have to provide transportation and then 45 000 or about one percent is for transportation insurance so that's an overview of the largest portion of the support services budget transportation as i mentioned earlier deco's contract you know is continues through june of 2024 when we renegotiated that contract we had a zero percent increase in the first year and now this year we have a two percent escalation and that continues for all four years following the first year so the average uh contract increase per year is about 1.6 percent with daco and these are the things that you know as part of the contract renewal we received you know our deco fleet is equipped with gps and cameras and they did pay for the new trailer the new bus depot office which is

105in in the form of a triple wide trailer so that works been completed and then just a couple of things i wanted to mention here in terms of cost savings on transportation um two things first of all 1920 actual costs it's okay so this is the fiscal year that ended this past june were lower because we were in remote learning from march to june i'm sure the board members remember that we you know did negotiate with daco um as required you know by the state we did get a reduction of about 20 percent for that period of time but we also saved because we were not running field trips or sports charters during that you know last three months of the fiscal year last year and this year 2021 what we are seeing is um

106because we are running very few field trips and we've run some sports trips but not as many as we're budgeted you know our actual costs this year will be lower than our budget and then all the other things that we've been doing in in previous years you know will continue um as we look at next year including um you know looking to consolidate you know bus stops and and keep those within board policy that is probably the biggest place that we can realize some savings so support services as a percentage of our total budget has you know really been flat over the last you know four fiscal years including this one um and you know we are expecting a slight decrease for next year and you could see you know kind of rose through this

107period of time but we've we've been pretty flat the last five years um you know this this big spike um was driven by the um energy performance contract so that cost went into this account and was offset to some extent in the utility account so i'm going to stop there and pause to see if there's any questions uh vin i guess i'll i'll kick it off um let's see firstly fuel uh looked like it looks like fuel is going up and if i recall um we purchased an annual contract for diesel is that correct we don't purchase an annual contract what we do is we try and lock um gallons at a fixed price so you know we look at at the market and we could see we see if we lock in a price

108so we're not pre-buying it um but we're not locked for next year yet so you know we just don't know what's going to happen to the cost of fuel so it's always a little bit of a of a guess as we we budget our fuel so we we did budget up a little bit but not much i'm just kind of flipping through the book to see where i am with fuel for next year it's like i already noticed that just regular gas i think was up to 250 uh this week if i recall maybe it was 240 and so i'm guessing diesel went higher than that um and so we've enjoyed pretty low fuel prices the last you know three four years and i just was wasn't sure kind of like at what uh per

109gallon you kind of locked in at for what kind of flexibility we have i'm not locked out for next year right no i understand but i mean as far as the budget number goes oh i'm guessing you made some sort of assumption there we did of course i don't remember what it is i just want to make sure there's a flexibility there i mean it's showing it it's showing at 3600 decrease decrease yeah decrease yeah so what one percent you know here's the thing about about next year too we're not sure depending on how the year kicks off with the pandemic you know hopefully things will be relatively normal even though we're decreasing from last year's budget by a small amount you'll see that in the in the prior years like the year before we

110spent 241 000 on fuel but that was 1920 when we were you know not running buses the last three months of the year so i think we're okay in that budget category i tend not to be too um i i tend not to budget too low just because we do have the risk of increased fuel prices right um secondly um if i recall last year we were transitioning to a new financial software at the high school has that occurred because i i remember a president that a presentation actually occurred on march 12th last year which was the day that we were shutting down uh where mike woods uh was showing us um the financial software they're using at dodd was steem superior to the one that they're using at the high school and if i

111recall there was a some kind of transition we were going to use that system wide and i just wasn't sure if if that had occurred or if there was a different plan um no so the the software i just remember that increase there the 100 yeah so you're talking about the student activity software uh that's what it is and is it yes okay yeah so that's that's separate from our main financial software but to answer your question we had transitioned dodd first and now all our schools are on that software high school so we we did complete that transition oh good because the reporting was so much better yes yeah okay um thank you um looks like we have some questions now uh okay i've lost shrek let me see i to know my time

112stamp i think tim you were up first thanks adam yeah just the topic you were mentioning before about the uh the fuel budget for transportation and i just want to reiterate what i think everybody in the meeting here i'm not sure about people out in tv land um but my hope is to both electrify and decarbonize our transportation budget the not so distant future and i think we can do it through a combination of solar and electric school buses the solar is here i think it's in the money we'll find out in the next week or next few weeks and i think the electric school buses probably should be happening within a few years um but anyway i think that's one way we can make some progress especially if grant monies are made available you

113know to purchase an electric or some type of a hybrid school bus fleet in the future but i have no doubt you'll keep us informed if you hear of anything i will i promise there's no doubt about that um i don't think there are any other questions or comments so uh vin i can continue on okay so the next and and really the last section of the budget is maintenance and operations um and so not surprisingly this the school buildings are a year older than we presented uh last year we're averaging 70.25 years of age uh the what i did want to point out just again i know the board members are well aware of this but our school buildings you know not only serve school use and you could see here these are the

114eight buildings that that we have um but we also support quite a bit of community events you know and you could see here at the high school this is 1819 this was the last full year of events obviously 1920 you know in march when the pandemic hit you know through this year we have not been using our buildings for after-school events but you know we have thousands of events every year when we're not in a pandemic so you know the schools you know do get a lot of use both by students and after hours by our community the maintenance and operations budget is intended to support all of all of the use of our buildings so the maintenance and operations budget you'll see here on this slide is about five percent of the overall budget

115the total request for maintenance and operations next year is this 3 million 948 262. it's about a 10.3 percent increase and you'll see in a moment where we're requesting that increase i think it's a really important to highlight that about 36 percent of this budget is utilities and heating for the building primarily electricity but also heat sewer water which you'll see that in the next slide about 33 actually goes for building maintenance and repair and a large portion of that is the cleaning services that we have to provide in our buildings every day about 20 is for oh i'm sorry the building cleaning services is broken out there at the 20 maintenance supply is about 7 and equipment maintenance and repairs about four percent of this budget as we dig a little bit deeper this

116is the um 1.4 million or 36 percent of the maintenance budget is for utilities and heating and you see electricity is about half of it you know i i will note that prior to doing the um energy performance improvements with amaresco you know our electricity budget and bills were running over a million dollars a year so you know they're certainly lower and as we've done you know additional energy improvements in our buildings even after the ameresco energy performance contracts such as converting the rest of our leds a rest of our lighting to led about you know pretty much about 99 of the lighting inside out our buildings are now leds that's helped bring the cost of electricity down you'll see that heating whether using oil natural gas and propane is about 25 of this portion

117of the budget garbage and recycling is about 11 water usage that we pay to the regional water authority is about 6 percent and then we have gas and propane not for heating but for cooking in our schools and that's about four percent and then about three percent is for sewer use that we pay to the town of cheshire so utilities and heating are about 36 percent of the maintenance budget so here's the remaining 64 of the maintenance budget cleaning services you know account for 31 of this portion building repairs and improvements you know even though we have almost a four million dollar maintenance budget only about 616 000 is going you know for repairs and improvements you know we do during the course you know of the school year some of these are planned you

118know a lot of these are things that we have to fix because you know things break whether it's plumbing electrical you know windows doors those types of things all come out of this portion of the budget you know grounds maintenance is about um 11 maintenance supplies 11 you can see those are just over 250 000 a year um and then snow plowing is the last one i wanted to point out we're budgeting next year a hundred thousand dollars for snow plowing um you know last year was much less than that this year we have a hundred twenty thousand dollars budgeted so we did reduce that it's it ranges so you know we we're comfortable with the hundred thousand it is though a little bit of a reduction from what we're paying this year and security

119monitoring services for our buildings is about two percent of 54 000 of you know the this portion of the maintenance budget if we look here this is the 3948 that's being requested it's an increase of 370 000. we're budgeting about a three and a half percent increase just for our utility lines you know that's in line with what we expect for next year we're not looking to increase the maintenance repair and equipment budget but we are looking to increase you know the funds allocated for maintenance and repairs of our buildings um you'll see that in this fiscal year 2021 we we did reduce this to 1.8 million we expended 1.9 million last year so you know we're really trying to secure some additional funding just to you know keep our buildings in the best possible

120shape that we can same for maintenance supplies you know we did increase this by about 665 000 so this 270 000 is is really in line with what we had to expend the last several years i will note that 450 000 that we expended for maintenance supply in 1920 a lot of that had to do with um the pandemic which you know hit us from march to june so we we purchased quite a bit of disinfecting cleaning uh and even ppe out of that particular line item so you know we don't need as much as we spent in 1920 certainly but the 271 000 is more realistic to what we need and we do believe that you know the the type of cleaning supplies uh and disinfecting supplies that we'll use in the future you

121know need to meet a bit of a higher standard and they need to meet the green cleaning standards as well so that that explains why we're looking to increase that and we have a modest increase budgeted for heat and energy same risk that you know adam you raised as to the fuel uh for our buses you know the same thing applies to heat and energy we do not lock our heating oil prices until we enter the new fiscal year our natural gas which is most of our buildings at this point um you know we're on a month-to-month contract actually we're just on the utility rate with yankee gas which is now eversource for most of the schools and we have one school now that's on propane which is darcy that used to be on heating

122oil so you know we're comfortable with the number as long as it's a reasonable you know normal winter without extreme extreme cold that that amount should be just fine for our um maintenance and operating budget um i'm going to pause there because really the next section of you know what i want to cover under maintenance and operation is the capital budget so i think this would be a good place to pause for questions and also make sure that you want to keep going this evening because the next section is probably about 10 minutes i'm not seeing any questions and i'm not seeing any opposition to continuing on okay so vin go ahead thank you sir okay so the the purpose of this next section is really to lead into the the capital budget request which

123at this point is um in the hands of the planning committee for consideration the planning committee does have a meeting scheduled for thursday evening as i said earlier at 6 pm to take a second pass at what was recommended for the capital budget the planning committee asked for some changes in the year one request which i'm just showing here for informational purposes in in one of the upcoming slides um so as as we talked about you know our newest building highland was constructed 50 years ago again that's our newest building and our oldest building that we're supporting is here where i am at hummingston which is 109 years old we have you know our portable classrooms a maintenance garage bus depot storage trailers you know even though we we did take away all the storage

124trailers from the athletic field at the high school we still have other buildings and other properties where we have storage trailers so we're responsible to maintain all of those non-building spaces we've got 760 000 square feet of buildings plus the roof systems overhead thousands of linear feet of sidewalks and parking lots acres of outside grounds and so when we look at how we fund the maintenance of our buildings and the investment in capital projects for our building it's not just the operating budget that that we went through which is about you know just on the four million dollars requested for next year you know there's a capital budget that supports long-term building improvements and so this is just a quick overview the capital budget is intended to fund building improvements you know as well as

125construction or purchase of equipment that's over a hundred ten thousand dollars the town council every year approves a five-year capital expenditure plan uh as well as funding for the first year of that plan and they'll do that in april to coincide with the approval of the operating budget for the schools in the town any expenditures over 500 000 if they're one shot or cumulative to total 500 000 do need to go to vote a referendum so after the council approves it requires voter referendum um and then i i think the rest you know that we fund anything under 100 ten thousand generally through the operating budget so for the years 21 through 25. let me just move myself out of the way here so this is the total request for the five years that the

126planning committee is considering it's 37.7 million dollars and you could see that it really is in areas that are basic i'll call them requirements to keep our buildings up and running window replacements are you know roughly a third of that 11 million dollars paving roofing sidewalk and masonry 22 about 8.1 million district cafeteria improvements at this point in time only two of our schools that have cafeterias have been renovated that's about 5.6 million to go hvac improvements 3.2 million other building you know interior improvements it ranges from some additional space improvements at highland at dodd 2.6 million code compliance this is primarily of this 2.4 million 2 million of it is here for the hummiston building this is a new request in the capital budget you know several of our schools the uh fire alarm

127control systems which are you know fully operational but they're dated and they're not addressable and they're not compliant with you know modern firing fire alarm control systems so that's for three schools 1.7 million dollars we want to continue the district laboratory improvements million dollars replacing flooring and ceiling tiles 800 000 lighting and electrical improvements 680 000 that includes an emergency generator at highland uh which you know certainly something that we could use especially after the the hurricane winds that knocked out power you know to town for a few days and then some improvements at the athletic complex which are relatively small about 350 000 so i know 37 million dollars seems like a very large number because it is but when you look at the needs of the schools and what we're requesting it really

128is for the basics you know to keep roofs you know and windows and and make some improvements to our cafeterias i would consider these all necessities um and there's no frills in this request and then as i take this down to of the 37.7 million how much is being requested for approval to expend in 2122 it's 2.65 million this is the request it's a little over a million dollars for roofing primarily there's a 750 000 of this million is a roof replacement that we have to do at dodd you know we're chasing leaks at dodd in in portions of the building so we need to remedy that uh window replacements at the high school we want to keep that project moving some hvac improvements at several schools is 350 000 and you can see the

129rest are smaller dollar amounts again the planning committee is is considering this and they'll ultimately bring a full recommendation to the board but that's the request for 2122 that's being considered in the capital budget if we look just historically the board has been requesting an average of about 22 million dollars per year in its capital budget you could see that in some years it was higher um as high as 28 million dollars and this is the amount that the council has approved so the average request has been 22.4 million the council has approved 18.6 million so the council has approved 83 percent of the five-year plan but that's not approval for the funding the approval for funding happens on an annual basis and so over the same period of time over the last 10 years

130the board has requested an average of about 2.9 million dollars per year the council has approved expenditures of about 1.8 million dollars per year so the approval rate on the requested one-year expenditures has been about 62 percent and so what this speaks to this is not a complaint about the board or the council by any stretch of the imagination what this speaks to is that between the operating budget which you know we we tend to reduce the the maintenance allocation whenever we have budget reductions so our operating budget is shy i will say um but so is our capital budget so over the years we have more and more improvements that are that are built up and i you know we call those facilities liabilities now we know that this community and is working on

131a school monetization plan um and and that is the good news and i'll get to that in a minute but we are looking to address this but you know not withstanding that we still have to plan for the capital expenditures as if we didn't have a school modernization plan so you know that's that's really the high level overview of where we are with the capital budget at this point um i did want to note though two numbers here this this number this 000 you know was relatively um low and it was based on a lower request from the board of ed and the amount that was approved for this fiscal year 585 000 requested 375 000 approved those requests were kept low because you know here we were working with the facilities master plan and

132here we know that a school modernization plan um you know recommendation is imminent so these are two really artificial lows low years so you know we are tending to back up our investments even further the last you know in the last five years i always like to point out and highlight that in the event of a maintenance calamity if we run out of operating budget money there is a building maintenance cnr fund we also call it the emergency fund that fund has a 233 thousand dollar balance the council did approve a replenishment in 2017 of 65 000. we only utilized about 16 000 in the last several years so you know that balance is there if we need it it does require a formal request based on a board recommendation to the town council but

133that funding is still available if it's needed and you know when we look at our capital budget you know i think it's always important to highlight that you know you you can look at it as an expenditure but what it really is is an investment and an improvement you know so you'll see these are just some of the pictures that you might have seen in the past you know these are the improvements we made over to doolittle uh i guess three years ago now this is the do little you know kitchen area and calf these are you know bathrooms that do little that's the concession stand in public bathroom building you know even the investment in roofs and removing underground oil storage tanks and replacing them with propane heat in the case of darcy this

134is the west gym floor that we did several years ago and this is a you know picture of the synthetic turf field down at cheshire high school all these improvements you know they look great you know when i um every time i step on the synthetic turf field i know it's a large investment but boy we've gotten our you know a play time up dramatically with that field and you know these are the types of things that the capital budget supports and it's important that you know we continue to support those types of improvements again the school modernization plan the council did approve you know funding so that we can hire professionals to help us in the development of that plan the school monetization committee consists of 13 individuals you know including three board of

135ed members who've been working really really hard to develop that plan uh and we do expect recommendations to be coming soon there is a meeting of the school modernization committee tomorrow evening and so that's this just kind of rounds out the maintenance and operations as we've talked we've we've held that relatively flat as a percentage of our budget for the last six or seven years and before we get to that i'll come back and see if there's any questions comments on the maintenance or capital budget um faith looks like you had a question then i think you actually answered it as as you're going through it especially on the five-year plan um as the modernization committee hones in on a comes in on a plan and starts to take shape and knowing which schools are

136coming in and off are you re-prioritizing your capital projects accordingly but um i think you addressed that if you want to elaborate that yeah no that that's actually a great question it's one of the it's one of the things that um i've been spending time on you know with not so much the modernization committee members yet but with jim jascott so that the next sequence of responsibilities for school monetization is to look at the financing overall so the in the presentation for the planning committee that 37 million dollar plan and the 2.65 million that they're going to be considering on thursday evening that's what we need assuming there is no school monetization plan approved if a plan is approved what will be presented to the school modernization committee uh over the next couple of meetings

137is this is what the schools need without a modernization plan and these are the reductions to that 37 million dollars assuming we make modernization plan improvements so that number will be reduced by you know approval by the committee for a plan so i'm not sure that i think i answered the question it's nebulous because we can't share the numbers just yet um and in fact what we're doing you know as part of the financial review what the modernization committee is we're not just taking the first five years we're then extending out the next 10 years for capital needs in our schools we're just using some modeling and taking it out a full 15 years and then deducting from what we would have spent if we didn't have a modernization plan based on what is being

138modernized thanks so that's kind of coming soon tim comment thank you adam yeah with regard to with regard to that long-term costs uh i've said it before say it now i did i absolutely want to see something like net zero schools net zero energy schools incorporated in this uh not that we would have to do it for for me to support it but i think it needs to be part of the discussion with regard to this presentation and also what the school modernization committee has been doing i appreciate it very much i look forward to hearing more from the school modernization committee but at the same time when we talk about the schools being 70 years old on average i'll just look at the high school and say yes you can say that high school

139was built in 1951 but it was just an l shape it was a much smaller piece it's been addition after edition so yeah our schools generally are old and can be modernized and i like doing that i'd like to do that but at the same time it's i feel like it's a little bit misleading when we say the average age of 70 years when i think it'd be more appropriate to look at the square footage the 760 000 square feet and see what the average age of that is i'm just putting that out there i mean this is we're going to be going out to referendum and i want i want what we do to be uh fully credible with the the why a wide swath of the electorate and i know i hear from

140people when they say that high school ain't 70 years old because it's just not it's it's it's pieces of it are one piece of it is and other pieces of it are less than that so that's all okay andrew no van you you cleared it up about the five-year plan i was just going to make a point about that but i do think it's important to say that yes the schools are extremely old but i don't want people at home to think that we're not doing investments into the schools as school monetization is going to come because if you add up the capital plan the maintenance and repair so just this year taxpayers are investing 4.7 million dollars into the schools into maintenance and repair of the school building so i don't want it to

141be that while we wait for school monetization that we're not doing things the schools that's out of money that is going into the school buildings so i just wanted to make sure that that i put that out there if i did my math right i'm looking at it's 2.6 of capital and two just under 2 million 89 000 for maintenance and repairs yeah i mean that's a fair statement you know we're certainly doing the the things that we need to do to keep the schools you know not only running but in good repair but you know we we certainly recognize that we've reached a point in our buildings that you really do need to start doing some you know renovations to really extend you know extend the life and you know that's one of the

142things that you know we you know to tim's point we've added on to our buildings over the years of high school as well as you know most of our other buildings dodd got you know editions norton got additions um but what we've never done in the history of any of the buildings has gone back and done a a renovate is new you know and what that and i know that's one of the things that's being considered by the committee um but what that does is it really takes a building structure and it cuts it and it basically makes it like a new school it's not new to the bones but you get 20 years of additional life out of that building and in that process you're not only modernizing the classrooms but you're also replacing

143the furniture and the inside of the building and so that is one of the things that we haven't done in cheshire and we have fallen behind you know our surrounding districts for sure all right thank you welcome um i'm not seeing any other comment um i just a quick question um from from uh for me uh on the uh the one year uh capital plan that's not official and i'm will be considered on thursday um the roofing project that dodd that's seven hundred thousand or seven hundred fifty thousand is that for the entire roof or the part of the roof no that's a that's a a portion of the roof i mean obviously dud's big building so i was gonna say that was a very low that's what i was yeah that's it's it's probably

144i'm gonna guess about 15 to 20 percent of the roof structure um you know and and what we've been doing at dodd like most of our schools those are rubber membrane roofs in most of our buildings including dodd and usually what happens is you you get failures at the seams and so we've been you know replacing the seams just to keep you know because the roof rubber membrane fields are good if by replacing the seams you get additional life out of the roof but there's portions of the dodd roof that were we're past that and um we just need to replace and we've been trying to keep you know the roofing costs you know not as low as possible but we've been replacing roofs as needed when needed because we are looking at you know

145making some long-term major improvements to all the buildings so we've been trying to keep things you know running and as leak free as possible by making repairs instead of outright replacements thank you you're welcome um are there any other questions i'm not seeing any uh vin uh looked like you're about to conclude so the wrap up here is um you know so we finished the the first two workshops the next meeting is thursday january 28th and that is the public information meeting board members responses to the superintendent's budget and adoption of a board of education budget if possible um and then following that there is another special board meeting that's been scheduled if needed on february 4th and the last point that we'll make is that you know the board does have to ultimately approve

146a budget request by february 15th and that concludes the presentation from my end for this evening finn thank you um yeah um i i would just like to say uh for those watching at home and um you know what this has been a year like no other and normally we would have a a little bit of a crowd to on on the thursday night meeting for public comment and so i do um hope that the public will reach out and and ask all the questions that they need to uh before we uh enter into our final deliberations um i haven't i i personally haven't spoken to um chairman peregini about this but i i feel like uh we'll probably need that additional meaning to have extra time to deliberate over this uh uh very special

147budget this is a this is a budget for me personally uh that i have not seen before uh it's a very unique budget this year and um i think we'll we'll need extra time to deliberate over this one um is there any other comment from the i guess the finance committee no sir okay no all right fantastic um i see uh that there is nothing else on the agenda for this evening um so i would like to entertain a motion to adjourn so moved second then a second okay all in favor it is uh looks like it's unanimous well uh thank you uh vin and robin for your great presentation this evening um again we have a lot to consider and a lot of information to go through so um thanks again for the great

148presentations thank you and thank you everybody thanks everybody