Board of Education 1-14-21

001good evening welcome everyone happy new year it is january 14th it's 7 30 p.m we have a meeting of the board education to uh see for the first time the superintendent's proposed operating budget but before we get into the juicy details uh mr zesky kind of a call to order sure mr grippo here ms hallen here miss hamm here miss harrigan here mr martelly here mr peregini here and mr white mr chairman you have a quorum thank you carol uh i ask that uh we all stand for the pledge if uh jeff you want to put up the flag it's awesome i pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of the united states justice for all well again good everyone thanks tim uh uh for joining us thanks team happy new year

002everyone it is the first time we've gotten together since uh well before the new year hope everyone's happy safe and well and to those watching same there before we get into it we really have one i'm an agent tonight and that is the superintendent's proposed uh 2122 operating budget which i know is gonna be a very important topic this month uh before we get into it uh do we have any audience uh correspondence uh jeff at this time i know we haven't checked that mailbox price since the last meeting at least in life yeah i have not received any correspondence regarding the meeting okay well that being said uh board members uh this was a special year in a fortunate situation we normally don't get the budget book until the actual meeting when we sit

003down to it but we all got it delivered uh this afternoon so hopefully you do have it uh if not please let carol know so we can actually follow along uh without the selling team so that being said uh jeff vincent marlene we'll turn it over to you thank you very much mr paragini um as you indicated this year is a little bit unique uh that you have the three of us here on camera at one time i want to just take a moment before i kick things off to thank not only and marlene but the team of people who've worked so hard together to put this budget together under such unique circumstances heather santee greg gibbons our administrative team carol jaczynski there are a host of people that worked really hard on this process

004and of course none of this remote work ever happens without mike salamini so i appreciate all of their hard work and your patience as we work through pretty unique circumstances in order to provide the presentation in the most typical way possible marlene came up with a good idea utilizing a couple of our different platforms so that i might be able to present full screen but also have my base live embedded in the presentation so you can kind of see me as i walk through the presentation i'm generally a more animated speaker so i think this kind of helps make it a little bit more natural if you will so if you'll bear with me one moment i'm just going to run over to my office and i'll kick things off marlene will entertain you in

005the meantime okay how are we doing okay yeah we can see in here yeah excellent um so again you know i appreciate everybody's patience as we work through this new method here to to present the budget and every year i like to try and remind everybody in the community really what is the board's role in this process what is the superintendent's role in this process basically board members have the duties is outlined in state statute to provide adequate instructional books supplies equitable allocation between schools proper maintenance of facilities and a safe school setting my responsibility in that process is to collaborate with our district leadership team to hear from the community and the the staff about how do we do this and build a fiscally responsible budget that ensures equitable and developmentally appropriate educational experiences

006between schools and fulfills those other statutory obligations as well as advancing our board of education goals and as you know about five years ago now the board of education after substantial work with the community everybody from students ptos across the district ptas our administrative team teacher teams students uh business leaders in the community just decided that we had to focus in two places complex thinking and social emotional learning and i think that's critically important because those have played a substantial role in shaping our budget decisions over the last several years so i just want to hit on this about why is social emotional learning important and because i i think you know i've heard in years past like not you know members of the board but uh some people who me weren't really connected to

007the school system ask you know why seo and there is great research to indicate how critical a factor it is in student development and by just looking at the bullets on the screen these are things we want from all of our students in our community so sel is an important part of what we do so what we do in our budget is provide so much for 4 200 of our current students it's not just reading writing and arithmetic it's also personal development as we talked about with sel goals but we also have to think about things that maybe don't necessarily jump to front of mind like transportation and heating and utilities and building maintenance it's everything that we put into this uh educational experience including diverse opportunities for students to engage in extracurricular growth opportunities

008and this is why we provided at the end of the day you know when you travel around the district and you see students gathered around and this really is a bittersweet photo because it's great to see the students together but it reminds me how much i miss seeing the smiles and the teachers miss seeing that uh in these days of of cobit so reflecting a little bit on our path i mentioned that you know we did adopt sel and complex thinking about about five years ago and as i said that's been an important part of our decision-making process so you know the addition of school counselors and school psychologists and at one point we were 17th um out of 18 k through 12 school systems in dirt b in terms of students per mental health

009provider we're now 13 and our students are better because of it they're receiving better services on the complex thinking side of things we've added elementary and middle school math coach positions we added elementary world language we've added professional development and we've seen our achievement skyrocket i think is a byproduct of both of these things simultaneously once 35th in connecticut five years ago in terms of our achievement now fifth which you know we certainly outperform many districts with with much much higher per pupil expenditures and different sets of resources than us our budget environment this year is a little bit unique as usual we have internal uh influences and factors to consider student enrollment and that's a going to be a different story this year than what you're used to hearing our contractual and utility increases

010special education the facilities themselves have received necessary attention through the school modernization committee in our community as a whole their average building is 70 years old in out of ada compliance in addition to having dated hvac facilities or services air conditioning is really non-existent in our school system air filtration is limited to non-existent so these are things that are key pressing items that we're also trying to address through the school modernization plan and capital budget but also have to be considerations in our operating budget medical benefits unfortunately you're going to be hearing a lot about tonight and that's a also a significant driver in this budget externally we always consider the state of the state um and of course we're operating through the global pandemic but i am going to talk a little bit how

011that global pandemic well influencing us is not part of the operations budget we have to thank vin again leading the charge working with our administrative team and our finance folks and central office to try and determine if and hopefully that's a huge if covet is a substantial factor in the fall what would it cost us to provide interventions that allow our students to attend and that will be part of one of our budget workshop shops down the road this budget as presented this evening does not consider those factors this is just our standard operating budget so stay tuned for more on kovic budget each year we start by asking our administrative team you know what are the things that you feel are important for your school or your program to move our school system forward

012we take that information and compile basically a budget um this year it was eight percent increase over the 2021 school budget um that's not obviously uh necessarily feasible and so our team spends a lot of time you know boiling down like i said running through that filter of social emotional learning complex thinking looking at those internal and external factors i just outlined and we're also uh certainly conscious of our history and our history uh is a a super far cry from eight percent i'm not saying that it should be eight percent but it definitely is not reflected uh in recent years so the last five years are the lowest budget average that we've had since before 1976 and i i don't even know it might be the worst ever um but i wasn't able to

013look back before 1976. in 1617 we had a mid-year reduction in 1718 same thing each year under 1 16 or 18 19 we did have a two percent increase last year as you know that we were impacted by the pandemic and returned uh one million dollars to the town and held two 200 000 in a rollover account so our net expenditures last year were 0.66 this year our budget increase was 1.69 it is almost impossible to run through a five-year budget history with one percent increases when contracts utilities insurance far exceed that and so what's happened during that time is that we've uh had to forgo advancement whether it be uh additional world language or some of the other position security manager will touch on that momentarily so we've forgotten advancement all we've focused on

014is scl and class size basically we've cut everything else to raise our thin levels and we've increased fees participation fees went up and nobody likes that um the last straw that we had last year was recognizing that we had a little bit larger claims reserve for our insurance and made the definitely justifiable decision at the time of budgeting to pull from that reserve my point being there's really no place else to go and unfortunately our clean reserve needs attention as i will get to momentarily um but we're really in essence at rock bottom in terms of pulling more out of this without significantly impacting staffing where our budget is grounded in personnel that's the lion's share of our budget and really we don't have anywhere else to go which obviously impacts class sizes and impacts

015programs and this isn't meant to be a speech about being dire as much as it is just presenting the history and where we are so our per-pupil expenditure when we explore um where we are relative to our peers we spend on average two thousand two hundred and sixty four dollars less per student than the average school system in connecticut that would mean that if our budget were funded on the average per pupil expenditure across connecticut last year's budget would have had to increase by 9.4 million dollars that is a huge amount of money um and i think it represents not only an incredible value but you know maybe even an opportunity for investment in facilities down the road so as i mentioned how do we uh take a one percent increase on average over five

016years and still sustain service and still improve well it starts obviously with focusing on what matters and marlene and kevin marlene solano our assistant superintendent kevin hanlon our k-8 curriculum coordinator our reading and math specialists our administrative team and our teachers deserve all the credit in the world for focusing on what matters and making that be productive for our kids on top of that we've seen a decline in enrollment we'll talk about that momentarily we've held or reduced line items over the last five years often times sacrificing maintenance to maintain staffing we've engaged in more shared services things like our technology contracts and insurance with the town we've certainly been as efficient as we we can be to deliver our services unfortunately as i mentioned upping participation fees and we've engaged in substantial contract renegotiations

017for things like copiers but also with personnel to ensure that we can remain competitive but also remain fiscally solvent finally as i mentioned before we we've dipped into the medical benefits reserve to be able to uh stay afloat here so when we look at building a budget you know there are three different buckets that i i really kind of consider one is if we were to maintain our level of service as it exists today so we're not cutting programs we're not adding programs we're maintaining the services that exist now what about restoring program so for example you're going to hear tonight about our medical benefits reserved has to be restored really that's not an area where we have choice if we're going to pay our medical bills so we sometimes restore line items uh perhaps

018to previous levels uh that would be considered a restoration and finally you know we consider advancement so taking a look at our current programs for example when we added a math um you know coach or uh added additional school psychologists we advanced our programs this budget uh this year is coming in at 5.22 and that number is obviously uh exceptionally higher than our history um as you can see i've never the highest budget i've ever recommended is 4.05 so uh i'm going to go into a little bit of why this i'm of course i'm going to explain why we are at in this position i talked about you know contractual maintenance excuse me maintaining our our current level restoration and improvement in this budget zero percent is toward improvement the twelve thousand dollars you see

019there is targeted in professional development we hope to offer a course next year uh black and latino studies as the state is offering and mandating for the following year but we need to we want to roll that out sooner additionally we want we need additional professional development as the state has required high school graduates to present a portfolio project that's important we didn't hire a position as we um hoped to do in years past we're going to need some more time to be able to address those those two key needs um the contractual increases are things as i mentioned like utilities transportation our staff the vast vast majority of our staff are under collective bargaining agreements and so this is the the end result of that 42 of our increase is to transportation and those

020other contractual increases unfortunately fifty-eight percent of our budget is tar of our budget increase of that five point two percent is dedicated to restoration and we'll talk about where those things fall into place here so the restoration is really again around medical benefits the lion's share with a small amount restored in the the budget to address maintenance issues across the district then i'll go into much greater details on these as we hit on our budget workshops but um i just wanted to to give you the the highlights if you will so our recommended budget as you know is a 5.2 percent change and this is how that is broken out overall in our budget so our overall total budget as you can see at the bottom is 78 million 487 52. 80 of that is

021salaries and benefits um it as i said you know our organization is people heavy teachers ias nurses secretaries administrators all designed to support our students and the what you see here is that 63 is uh targeted towards salaries 17 is employee benefits as i said the total being 80 the other three pieces of the pie are kind of ever shrinking support services instructional expense expenses including special education and maintenance so some of the detail about where are the major budget increases these are the lines that have increases of 100 000 or more again medical benefits 1.877 million dollars at the end i'm going to really highlight where we are with that and why it's that number teacher salary increase is about three-quarters of a million dollars maintenance and repair as you can see these numbers

022shrinking down reflective of the amount of increase so by category the increase for salaries is 2.32 percent um it's a it reflects not only the pay increases but any adjustments in the number of staff as well um benefits is again where that huge increase lies it's more than 17 and a half percent our maintenance and utility increases instructional expenses including special education and support services which includes transportation so again the budget increase for 2122 is a total of roughly 3.9 million dollars with 1.8 of that going toward medical benefits the revenue side this is our anticipated revenue for each of the the areas that we draw revenue for and that revenue is not calculated as part of our budget that goes to the town so our actual net operating expense would be 68 million um

023but like i said this money is revenue that is received on behalf of the school system to the town so what if and you know i talked about fee collection and how that increased i think it was 1617 that we increased the fees that information is in your budget book the rental fees again this is based on 1920 was a real anomaly given the pandemic 2021 also not really anything you can budget on our hope is that we return more to normal next year our building fees in the last full year were the 13 000 the custodial reimbursement um well the custodians when people come in again it's about 40 grand that we collect there participation fees 163 000 parking fees which offset the cost of um in a pool of maintenance uh of the

024the parking lot areas and striping at the high school but across the district um and then we paid that year 33 almost 34 000 to the town for use of the pool for our swim programs so again they're all they're collected to offset the cost of us running a program these are fees that don't necessarily go to the town but are expended by us as part of our overall budget in maintaining our school facilities and athletic programs so you know i talked a little bit about foregoing some of the the areas that not only we as a an administration hope to move forward but also as a board so i think it's important to know that many of these items are things that had been supported in the past by the board ultimately um when

025our our budget came back from the council we had to make difficult decisions about what wouldn't be moving forward based on superintendent recommendations and these are some of the things that we haven't been able to implement over the last several years and we would love to put forward in this budget but we didn't think we could do so responsibly given the already substantial increase that we've had to dedicate toward insurance so you can read some of these uh items and i'm certainly happy to answer questions on them but as i mentioned things that the board had hoped or wanted to adopt right at the top math intervention technology coach security elementary world language none of which we've been able to build upon based on our budget circumstances so another variable that's really influencing this year

026is our projected enrollment and our pre-k through 12 enrollment on october 1st was 4070. and if you have a great memory earlier in the presentation i indicated that our current enrollment is 40 to 12. um now if you add our 20 or excuse me 33 open choice students to that that group we just are over uh 4 100 and then we've also added an additional 80 students just enrollment only since october 1st so what we've experienced in years past is a decline in enrollment and if you've been following the school modernization we've kind of hit the valley we're at the the trough of the wave and we're starting to increase again and i think this data helps lend strong evidence to that to know that um next year this is nasdaq um as of october

0271st projected 85 students up we're already up 80 students from october first in pre-k six since october you know let alone by next year so what we are seeing is that swing back up in enrollment um and it is a factor budget so some of the information from the nasdaq report i mean they they hit on the case of cheshire having higher than typical home sales recently but also a high birth bubble that would impact us for kindergarten next year that we really have to be considerate of in our planning so our projected student enrollment for next year you can see this is just further broken down by grade now and um this is grade 12 and you can work back to grade k this is our pre-k column here i'm sorry it doesn't have

028the headers but we um next year that's where you see the net minus 18 but again that was projected back on october 1st so i wouldn't be shocked if we're actually in the positive come october 1st of 2021 that the rate things are going our enrollment as we are predicting for next year dictates the number of sections we have so at the elementary level what you can see is that with that increase a substantial increase in the number of students uh we are currently at 17.8 students per teacher in the elementary schools as you as anybody who's been on our board a while knows the community i think is probably most sensitive to student for teacher ratio and so in addition to our scl and we think it's part of our scl component honestly but

029scl complex thinking is part of that scl component is the student teacher ratio so it is going up slightly but certainly well within our our past numbers our past range and so this is what we feel would make most sense for next year the total number of teachers you can see however goes from 111 this year to 113 even adding two teachers with all the increased enrollment we've had it's the average number of students per teacher still goes up so when i say we're you know we're influenced by one of those factors being enrollment this is exactly what i'm talking about so again projected class sizes these are the average i talked about our numbers being within that relatively within that range next year we're projected at 18.3 as i just mentioned for k-6 and

030if you look across that row you can see that you know at our highest we were at 18.8 but we're we're in that realm of where we had been historically at the middle school however what you've seen is a little bit of a decline in enrollment and that um that valley is right now passing through the middle school in terms of the low point of our enrollment and that number uh pernesdek is and myelona mcbroom's recent study is projected to swing up too where we are for next year in terms of our enrollment numbers uh roughly 22 in grade 8 23.3 in grade 7. if you look across grade 8 is probably it is the lowest we've been recently but reducing teachers there makes it the highest we've been in a long time and it

031i really do not feel coming off of a pandemic where a lot of our kids have had very unique academic experiences i do not recommend making a reduction in staffing there it may be that we have to um based on town council recommendations but i would strongly advise against that um in in grade eight as students are preparing to transition to high school coming off of the pandemic i think it's it would be a very poor decision from an educational standpoint so what you see is the class size trend um for seventh eighth in elementary school uh where you see a little bit more uh variability here than you do with the high school what's going to happen is these numbers are going to start to swing back up again as the higher classes from

032the elementary school transition that next year but the subsequent year into seventh grade and 8th grade those numbers will bounce back and start to pick up again here at the middle school at the high school when we look at staffing the even though the enrollment is down a bit at cheshire high school uh when you look at the number of certified staff and number of students per certified staff member in our uh 21 dergby high schools cheshire high school ranked 17th so it's not like we're flush with staff at chs either uh it's a pretty lean operation and you know like i said we're still finding really good success across the district but it's not a place where um it would be recommended to be cutting staff increasing that ratio again coming off a pandemic

033particularly at the high school where students aren't even attending every day so again you know if you look at the broad context of factors it really um we are trying to maintain our ratios as we move into the 21 22 budget year this outlines uh the changes in each building and how that with the addition of two staff we're still moving up um in our ratio account the other reality is and myelon and mcbroom talked about this in their report is that we're seeing a huge influx of kindergartners next year there were a number of people who if given the choice decided to hold their children out of kindergarten this year there were also a substantial number of births that correlate with kindergarten for this upcoming school year between those two factors we're going to

034see a pretty large run in the kindergarten class next year to the point where there's just not enough room in darcy and that's outlined in the milan and macbroom report to the point that we're going to have to shift it's my recommendation at this point to move two classes of kindergartners they'll still be kindergarten at darcy but two classes will have to move back to doolittle and um we have to do that simply because we don't have the space to accommodate uh at darcy and so you know people question the enrollment numbers and people question the my luna my lone and macgroom study this is a real problem that we're facing and it is showing up on our our pre-k doorstep now and so that's really going to be something that both the school modernization

035and us as a school system confront in the coming years so durgby i i do like to just uh walk you through what do other people like cheshire do what what do other school systems like cheshire uh derg stands for district reference group it was a group assigned by the state many years ago like communities and cheshire spends uh the near bottom of our our group um our return on investment when you look at uh our s.a.t total score in our our connecticut rank in how many dollars per sat point do we spend we're 10th in connecticut still very high and we outperform all those other schools that were above us our s back performance again fifth in connecticut you look at the school systems that are performing ahead of us new canaan you don't

036want to know what they spend per student our special education performance this is really something um perhaps that i'm proudest of is that our state rank is very closely tied to our increase in special education performance all students are challenged to be complex thinkers they can do well on the state assessment they can do well in labs they can do well in projects they can do well on writing pieces they if you're a complex thinker you can be successful and that is very important for all students to be successful and our special ed students are leading the way there we're very proud of their success our overall ranking for special education also fifth so again something to be incredibly proud of where our students are performing so underscoring the fact that we do present an

037excellent value it's spending 9.4 million less than the average connecticut school system but fifth in terms of our performance on this back we are we have a national blue ribbon school that we're very proud of highland was just recognized this year by special olympics and they're the first connecticut elementary school named a special olympics champion school so there's an incredible amount to be proud of for the cheshire public schools again the high school it's it's not different we've seen even this past year a very high number of finalists semi-finalists and committed students for national merit 12 national ap scholars which represents an increase in spite of declining enrollment our numbers with ap scholars are growing so we're very proud of that as well and i you know i do like to take an opportunity to

038remind people and the board is probably tired of hearing me say it and i i have worked in this community for 15 years and have great respect and for the the community as a whole but i've heard from so many parents we move here for education and i jokingly say all the time half joking people don't move here for the night life and protecting our school system is protecting home values it's protecting the vibrancy of the community and there's a lot of research to say that including you know from duke university that they did a meta-analysis of a number of studies better quality schools increased real estate values of houses in their areas improving schools can be a method for improving neighborhoods and stimulating economic growth so this is not just you know for our

039operating budget for but but for the bigger picture of school modernization it's research based it's important to protect our home values in this community so as i said there's there's three key elements to supporting our school system tonight i'm i'm covering the operational budget last year the town of cheshire made a shift and decided to put the capital budget school building and facility long-term improvement projects on the same calendar is the operating budget review schedule so we're going to talk a bit about that and then of course school modernization is for even longer term so the capital budget just a quick overview we did discuss this at um at the planning committee meeting held on the 11th and vin will go into this in incredible detail i did i just again need to remind you

040that this five million dollars in the 2122 uh budget and for people watching i know our board is well aware that this is not part of our operating budget this year this is money approved by the planning committee to be reviewed separately from our operating budget to be addressed uh at a later date by the town which we would um implement projects that were recommended and like i said mr maciana will go into that later in our budget process so the key takeaways for tonight as i try and close the book on this opening night and give you time to step back review all the documents for people watching online they will be available on our website immediately following this presentation that includes my presentation and our entire budget book which has an incredible amount

041of information which so we don't even as a as a school board stop and start asking questions tonight there's just so much to digest tuesday we will return and uh mr maciana will give a more detailed presentation and we'll have the opportunity to uh engage in questions at that time so the pandemic is a is a real wild card that's not considered in this budget process and as i i've illustrated 48 of our budget increase is grounded in uh insurance and i'm going to really try and give a quick overview of that momentarily the remaining 52 is preserving current service as i showed you i think it was twelve thousand dollars would have been considered advancement which isn't even one percent of our increase and certainly well short of one percent of our budget cheshire

042public schools uh is an outstanding value for our community and i again want to just take the opportunity to commend not just our administrators teachers ias the people who work in our buildings but particularly this year our students have been amazing um to show up and give their best effort every day and in spite of the fact that they've lost so many things that they enjoy in their life whether it be sports or music or theater just being with their friends and as of course our parents as well who've been so supportive of their children and of our school system during this really challenging time in our our history so the finance thing just to kind of put a bow on the insurance right now i'm just going to walk you through a bit of

043the timeline our budgeted insurance contribution run rate is 725 000 a month and these are round numbers it's not to the penny but it'll give you a sense of why we are where we are i opened by talking about the fact that we made the very reason decision based on our history and the amount of money we had in our medical benefit reserve account to budget 725 000 a month because our expected claims and our history indicated that it would be about eight hundred thousand dollars a month in doing so we figured we would slowly bree bring the pool down to a more appropriate number typically at the low end you're looking for two months of claims reserved um at the high end three and a half maybe and we figured that by undercutting that

044account we can preserve services and also bring that reserve account down to an appropriate number unfortunately our annual claims from january 1 or excuse me july 1st of this summer to the end of the year our average claim for the month has been 1.1 million it's exceptionally high and it's not got anything to do with covet which is almost shocking uh it's unfortunately due to um several very expensive medical situations and that happens and you feel for those families the way it impacts our budget is that um it's you know not something that you can know will happen obviously hope doesn't happen but that's what we've experienced so the remaining claim reserve we have is one million dollars at this time again if we're looking for two months worth of claims at the minimum right

045now we have one month at our current run rate the good news is that we are projecting our claim period from january 1st of 2021 through june 30th to be substantially below the 1 million dollars it probably won't be 725 000 which mean we will continue to draw down that reserve but it should be based on our history and the law of averages things should regress toward the mean um that we expected to be significantly lower than a million dollars a month so what we've budgeted in our operating budget for next year that 1.8 million dollar increase that you saw that's increasing our our monthly claim budget to 900 000 a month so that number isn't designed to build the pool back up we we're hopeful that it will but um that would take you

046know great claim months and who knows maybe that's on the horizon given the very poor months we've had but you can't necessarily predict who's going to get sick when we use our historical data we work with usi our insurance broker and we try and predict the best we can and we'll refine that and then we'll present that later in the month as we get closer to the end of the budget process but i just wanted to give you a sense of not only our history and where we are with our our finances that gives you an explanation of our insurance but also why we are where we are and why we need to fund the way we are um and so you get a better sense of you know what are we actually budgeting so

047that the board is in a better position to decide if they feel like that number needs to to go anywhere up or down so again um there's a lot to that and mr maciana i'm sure we'll be going in great detail as he always does around our medical benefits account but with it being such a huge part of our budget this year i wanted to make sure we hit on them finally i want to say thank you um to our special budget book all-stars this year they're both students from norton sheridan and colton uh and you know it's it can be hard to read a smile through the mask and these guys make it easy so they were just you know in an otherwise what might be considered a dark budget we wanted to start

048with a real bright spot and those guys did a great job and we appreciate them allowing us to put them on the cover of our budget book so sheridan colton thank you guys um and again i just want to close by you know thanking the board i don't think people understand the amount of hours that our board members not only put into the budget process but make this 12 month commitment for no pay sure they get to interact with me marlene and ben on a regular basis which is probably in its own right a gift but it's falls way short of what they deserve and i also you know again have to thank our full community particularly during this really difficult time because your commitment and flexibility to our kids and school system has made

049a world of difference for them it's allowed us to be in school way more than anybody else anticipated substantially more than our peers and again i just want to thank all of our teachers our staff our families and most importantly our students for making that possible so i'm going to jump off of this meeting i'll run back in and join the group and uh i will put up this next slide because i know how mr paraghini likes to make sure that everybody knows and we welcome your participation this is our schedule of upcoming meetings thank you jeff i'll wait till you uh show up the next room to move forward thanks again for your patience no problem thank you dr sullin uh i just want to correct one thing uh jeff it's uh not a

05012-month commitment it's a 48-month commitment you know it's so it's a long-term commitment screwing up that that being said uh i'm sure we'll have other members chime in after this but i do want to thank you your team our school district for all the work that goes into this budget especially this current year i know uh quite frankly i'm i'm really pleased with uh this ability to pull this off uh in a thoughtful manner especially with covet and what uh your entire team deals with every day so thank you to everyone on that uh i i was wondering and just for folks watching at home we get these budget binders and uh we did get this awesome photo and i'm wondering uh at some point i can get their autographs on this just to for

051a nice little keepsake memento but we'll address that later uh that being said we normally don't discuss the pseudonyms proposal in great detail at this meeting but certainly if board members have some comments or uh some high level questions so i'm going to entertain that i know this is a very important budget for me it's and um catherine and it's probably the most important one we've had to deal with in our time on the board so uh before we get into the comments uh and at the end of the meeting we'll through schedule again we will have a series of budget workshops led by the finance committee uh mr grippo and his team uh and usually these are fans committing means at a hall where uh because of so much detail finance community drives the

052meeting board members get the chance to attend and ask questions those are open to the public and they will be live stream at least the first one uh so there'll be plenty of opportunities over the course of january uh and up to february with the board to submit ideas questions concerns from the public and i urge folks to really pay attention to this one it's going to be uh interesting and even more opportunity when it heads over to the town side for review um in february march so that being said certainly one if there's any comments or questions on the board you don't have to but it's really willing to take them at this time let's go with adam and then tim thank you mr chairman um firstly i i held with tradition and i

053didn't look at the budget book when it arrived at my house today so i was i wanted to go in fresh to to watch the superintendent's uh presentation and um i i was for the most part pleasantly surprised so far haven't been able to to get into the details yet but uh i look forward to uh looking over uh over this budget with the uh the finance committee uh to get into the details and um and see uh how we can better uh serve the school system for next year thank you thanks adam uh tim thanks tony sorry i have a guest here um jeff with regard to next year just curious your immediate your your current thoughts on covet ending if it does do you do you continue remote learning uh that's a great

054question tim the state has been talking about that and i think you know based on vaccination timelines and the fact that students school-age children wouldn't be able to access the vaccination that the state is strongly considering allowing remote students again next year but i i there's nothing definitive uh to that point yet okay yeah i'm just i'm just imagining there's probably some parents out there who would be interested in something like that maybe not a lot but some at least um you had mentioned the uh what was it so i'm just curious you mentioned the average annual dollars cost per student versus the state and then you also mentioned the student teacher ratio versus dirt b i'm just wondering if there was like a reason for that using like two different measures or i'm just

055curious if i if you have those somewhere else and you could send them along at some point i'll be honest the schools because many districts have multiple high schools have to be looked up individually and for me to engage in looking up every single connecticut high school didn't really seem like you know at this point the best use of my time so i just narrow it down to um district group b the towns that are most like treasure now in terms of the per pupil spending that presentation had both the state average dirty schools or the districts listed so they're both all right sorry about that i missed that part we'll cover workshops too thank you um yeah i thought i saw a headline today was there a ciac update today there was um the

056cfc is permitting districts across connecticut to re-engage in athletics only certain sports those deemed by their medical board as moderate risk are permissible they include boys and girls hockey boys and girls basketball and i think there's one other that i regret not remembering uh no track wrestling uh competitive dance and cheer are not uh considered moderate risk sports and are unable to participate but um our our advice was on in consulting with uh health professionals and our uh attorney cisc is requiring or strongly suggesting that uh parents sign off on a waiver uh and so our attorney's already reviewed that and athletic director will be making that available for those moderate risk sports okay thank you and i think so i think it's the last thing i'm just wondering you had mentioned that uh year

057to date we're up you said you've added 80 students since october 1st yes do you have do you have any reason to believe like that'll double again and you'll add another 80 in the second half and the thing that's going through my mind literally is do we end up we're trying to deal with space but do we end up in a situation next year where the space constraints are so tight we really have to do major changes i mean beyond beyond where we are right now yeah i think um people at darcy would consider two sections moving to doolittle a major change uh and that would still have us at capacity at darcy we are capable of making some adjustments if 80 students move into the district uh into next year okay it's subsequent years

058where that trend is predicted to continue where i you know each year draws a little bit more anxiety obviously in our ability to be able to manage that okay thank you sure uh before i go onto the next question uh dr sally i did get an email because my my daughter still joined the high school uh from the athletic department talking about the winter sports uh the letter is actually from uh steve your phone it does detail what's going on in the sports involved it might be good to get out to the board um just so we're all work but thanks yeah that was really literally like late breaking update today so thanks for bringing that up um gonna go back to adam and then to andrew so adam you're up again thank you uh

059two it's gonna be two questions uh first one is for doolittle um i thought that our classrooms were at capacity at doodle uh so where are those two new kindergarten classes going to be going when i said that we try and find a way to make space i mean that's what we're going to be doing there right now we have some classrooms where we have a couple of different special education teachers sharing a room um and those will more than likely have to be collapsed you know and those people put on carts um and move to other locations to accommodate this there's really no other options you we can't i'm certainly not going to recommend that we put portable units at our schools or anything like that that's a absolute last ditch uh intervention but

060we're gonna have to pull people out of rooms and share space you know obviously in a global pandemic you're not you want to try and do as little of that as possible but that's that's where we are one second there went over to google yeah i just had a little bit more um you know a little bit more meat on the bone one of the things that we did at doolittle a couple of years ago is we you know basically removed the computer lab which is a relatively large space that we're looking at dividing that and making that a resource area for special education so that we free up the classroom that's currently being used as a resource room for special education so it's yeah it is windowless uh we'll make it work that's you

061know that's the only solution so you know we go to each building and and we look at it and you know we try and figure out how to you know maximize the use of of the building by making some changes so that one is relatively easy as a first step if this continues to happen it gets a little bit more complex and the sensitivity of course is you don't want to put a lot more kids in classrooms because we're still you know expecting to have pandemic conditions next year hopefully they'll lessen and my second question is um so i think it was at our last business meeting or our last finance meeting we're talking about the dire situation of the uh the medical benefit trust fund and um in the report uh this evening you

062the wording was at least sounded like you were confident that that high burn rate was going to end and i was just wondering where you got that confidence from girls oh he's going to hand it back to me um i got that from vin matseon no uh actually what we did adam is take a look at the last six years of month over month and the adjustments that have occurred over the years when you roll over into january that's the start of a new plan year for a high deductible healthcare individual so what tends to happen is once that individual has met their deductible usually in the second half of the year the visits medical visits increase and the costs increase over the course of a full year it's still substantially cheaper than going with

063like a ppo model but our historical performance indicates when you roll over into a new hsa year the claims drop off and the deductible contributions you know kick in mitigating impact so you you really um like i said over our history this is what we've seen but i i feel like uh you know charles schwab add here that past performance does not guarantee future outcomes you know so but the history seems to be that this is what we can anticipate happening so the possibility of actual cost coming in at current burn rate is still there it could double it could frankly double the likelihood is really low that it would double right the the likelihood is and you know i it's hard to put even percentages on it but if i said you know i

064would say that i'm fairly confident that we're not going to continue with that current burn rate as you should call it it's not um it's very it's unlikely to occur it's not um impossible however which obviously gives all of us pause you know cause for pause here um but we are closely monitoring it there's not a lot that we can do to influence it if i tell people please don't get sick really i don't have a lot of authority there so you know we try and monitor it we try and provide our staff with healthy reminders and take care of their health but at the end of the day it is what it is thank you sure andrew thank you um so tonight we heard about the operational increase of the 5.2 percent and that

065we'll be getting then we'll be doing a presentation of the cova related operational expenses do you see i'm sure we'll learn this later i'm just wondering do you see this being two separate proposals going to the town council or will they both be rolled into one ask to the town council or meaning that as the world changes over the next several months you know budgeting wise will we be asking for one increase or will it be two separate ass to the town i think you know my recommendation will be two separate the town council designs a budget but they also have a rainy day fund we don't and so i think it makes sense for us to go at this operationally but also it's prudent to inform the council and the community that there is

066a potential for this and you know like everything else i i'm trying to be very optimistic in 2021 that vaccinations are here by the time we get to the end of a summer season uh that the demand won't be as high but again that's i i don't have crystal ball for that but i think we have to plan for it or at least educate people that there could be a cost for it i totally agree i totally agree with that thank you thank you man uh andrew faith and then we'll go back to tim um just uh back to the medical benefits if i could um how help me here um of those making the claims um how many of them are in the are holders holdovers from the ppo program and and we're moving

067we're seeing um we're moving most of our staff into the hsa is how is that going to help us and um it may not even be a factor but if you could explain that to me and then i have one follow-on question okay i mean the the simple answer is if an individual is in the ppo or the h or the high deductible health plan or our hmo it's still a claim right claims the difference though is what jeff was talking about come january anyone in the high deductible health plan starts paying their own deductible so those claims aren't coming to us they're paid through the deductible at this point the vast majority of our employees are in the high deductible health plan so i don't anticipate that it's going to change much as i

068said if you know we're hoping that come january february march we'll see lower claims than we've seen in october november december where most employees have met their deductible and those claims are all coming against us so there's my point is there's not a huge impact because there's not as many employees in the ppo and hmo as they were you know five and more years ago okay so we're not this this million dollars per month is not a factor of just a huge claim of those of those employees or those um staff in you know remnants of the ppo program so to speak and we're liable for that much more no no okay okay and then um okay um that answers that and then jeff you had mentioned you don't want to go to portables so

069i am i could you explain that to me and and it's probably obvious but if we're up against space constraints just explain to me pros and cons of that if you could i i've worked in a building before with portable units they're really expensive to break in and rent they have to be heated um often cooled because of the configuration of them um just the way they're designed uh so you add a substantial amount of cost they're often relatively unsightly if you to um you know highland and you've seen them out back or norton has them we had a tree fall through the roof they're not the most durable of places in the world either so are they an option absolutely could they um be implemented if necessary yes but if we can find viable

070solutions that don't have that cost aggravation and look to them that i think you know that's our initial recommendation okay thanks i wouldn't take it off the table okay thank you i'm actually going to go to ann and then 10 because i might finish the round robin of questions but ann and then 10. go ahead yeah so um last month i attended a cave webinar on the board's role in the budget process and something very interesting happened in the second half of that webinar there was a lot of talk about shared services between town and board of ed and it seems to me that i know that we do some of that um you've spoken to even about the um medical benefits and um uh not the medical not the the fun but sharing the

071um expenses of getting everybody town and um and school on the same medical packages and things like that but it seems to me that we do very little of that the when we're talking about not having a rainy day fund but the town having a rainy day fund it seems to me that those are the places that they're talking about having these shared services and having this um they call them rainy day funds special revenue accounts and um what they what i was hearing a lot about was for special ed because that is an account that you just have no control over right and so that shouldn't be maybe maybe that shouldn't be in the the board of ed's budget but that should be in a shared account where you have memorandums of operation or

072of agreements between the board and the town that clearly states you know what the responsibilities are on both sides but that way it's um it's more of a shared thing than putting the problem on just you know the school side and when you were talking about just now about having a separate budget for the covid related expenses to school that also seems to me to be something that should be have this be in this special account that's that's a shared account that's not just um a school responsibility so i'm wondering if we can start thinking more about um these shared services uh between the town and the board of ed um and really the large responsibility that would fall on sorry jeff you and um and sean the town manager and the superintendent but i

073really would like to see things start to move in that direction a little bit more and i'd be happy to talk more about it i just wanted to sort of throw it out there tonight but that's all i'll say about it tonight thanks ann shared services pete that i and you acknowledge i just did a couple of quick highlights there and i think we could probably give you some more examples in the workshops uh in terms of shared accounts uh for unique circumstances you know we had talked to sean about that already and um i think maybe one small example of that was at the end of this year this past year where we rolled 200 000 over this year uh for covid expenses um and i i think you know you're talking that that

074was the exception you're talking about creating more of a rule and you know we can certainly share more on that as we we go through this process thanks anna it's great you bring that up i i attended that seminar with cave i attended two more this week not related but i bring it up because even on our weekly um the cave uh facilitates a weekly quarterback call cheering meeting every thursday just especially during covet uh and i hear costs and shared services talk to that level and um i actually reached out to the chairs yesterday just to say hey you know chester's experiencing an exceptionally high number of high cost claims this year who else is experiencing this and i got a couple responses and i'm i'm i bring this up because i wouldn't surprise

075me there's a greater push uh from school districts to not to consolidate but get get great efficiencies and shared services so yeah i hope we could talk more about this in the budget process but thanks for bringing that up and that's a valid point um uh that being said i tim you were up next thanks thanks tony uh yeah with regard to the um with regard to the 80 new kids just going back to that for a second the potential for it you know increasing further mid-year first of all is is that like is that unprecedented for you i'm assuming most people historically have moved into town by the time school starts have you ever gotten a number like 80 new kids even in an entire year in an entire year probably in a you

076know a three four month window absolutely unprecedented okay okay and so just generally speaking about that uh the demographics of those 80 kids are they weighted anywhere either you know where they where they're living in town their age it um is it all kindergartners or is it spread across the years do they all live in one elementary school district um predominantly highland um and it's not necessarily due to um to like new construction but i mean that's the largest geographic footprint so it makes sense um but it's it's not anything where you could say oh my gosh you know 12 people moved into one apartment complex yeah yeah yeah yeah is it mostly you mentioned highland is it mostly younger kids yeah mostly elementary age okay okay all right thank you yeah as seeing as

077there are no other comments from the board thank you again i want thank you jeff you and your team and the school district he'll put us together it's uh it's always a very meaningful package and uh and for the board for tying tonight and for those that may be watching thank you for your patience uh i i want to also commend jeff that the the presentation was great it was uh efficient and concise uh it's not a not a jab but i'm i i was expecting a much longer presentation giving all the challenges that you and your team are facing this year but i think you cover the topics well we're definitely going to dig into those over the next few weeks that being said um we do have meetings and i'm going to read

078off the schedule so tonight was the presentation of the superintendent's budget proposal for for fiscal year 2122. on january 19th it's tuesday at 7 00 p.m we are gonna have a virtual budget workshop to review uh the first few sections of the budget uh it's going to be mainly diminishing review of accounts on january 21st uh next thursday there's a regular board of ed business meeting it will be virtual on january 26th is a second budget preview at 7 00 pm uh whether that's in person or virtual will be to be determined but the the details that will be out in time at a time in the meeting on january 28th also uh thursday we're gonna have a public informational meeting and board of mental responses to the superintendent's budget possible adopting an abortive budget

079uh maybe and on february 4th uh if necessary we'll have a special meeting of the board of ed to adopt an education budget we are uh constrained to adopt the budget um i believe it's february 14th in february but we'll confirm that so for those watching plenty opportunities to get in more detail as dr sullivan and team mentioned earlier the entire budget book that the board of ed uses and its deliberations as well as presentation will be made available after this meeting on the cheshire public schools website in fact there's a usual direct link on the board page right to this year's budget process on the material so those will be handy for you that being said there is no other items on the agenda this evening uh is there a motion to adjourn and

080makes a motion to adjourn is there a second uh andrew first catherine quick second all those in favor uh the motion passes this meeting is adjourned thank you everyone thank you team and we'll be chatting next week have a good evening thanks everybody good night everyone thank you