Finance Committee 11-9-20

001can you all call a call the roll please you're on mute i think mr grippon here ms ham you're on mute face here and miss helen i'm here mr chairman you have a quorum thank you uh i'll rise for the pledge let me bring up your flag where are we going oh you have a flag i have a flag fantastic great that's great oh look at beautiful oh that's nice i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all i'm rusty i haven't run a meeting in a while yeah where was our last meeting it's been a while definitely but we'll have plenty of opportunity won't we tis the season yeah oh yeah so

002i believe the only thing on the agenda is uh then your financial reporting and a little uh report from uh madeleine as well so ben go ahead uh thank you mr gripper and good evening everyone i do um there is an audience section on tonight's agenda which is the next agenda topic and i know ms jaczynski is on with us so um i don't know mr grippo if you want to just call for the audience first if there's anything from our coven 19 email uh sure uh is i don't have access to that email so mr zinsky if you have any email uh to report um not seeing anything there is none okay thank you all right okay mr maciana i guess we'll move on okay so i'm going to be presenting my screen here

003to um you know give the finance committee members an update on where we are through october 30th with our budget bear with me one second here okay can you see on the screen the finance report as of october 31 yes i can okay so wait i don't have it oh which one it it's on the screen no i got a blank but that's it's um let me just guess it's titled uh or not yes it's cheshire public schools financial report the one that says narrative on it faith yeah this guy hold on let me see where you are yes yeah thank you okay we're starting at the top just very briefly the budget that's appropriated for this fiscal year is the 74.593 million dollars through october 31st we've expended or encumbered the 57.689 million so

004we've incumbent expended or encumbered and mostly encumbered 77.3 percent of the budget the important point to note here is that we have now encumbered for all payroll expenses and all transportation expenses so that that's included in the 57.7 million dollars um and you see here i'm projecting that we will hit our budget of 74.593 million dollars this year and as as we talk through i'll i'll show you where we expect some variances based on you know mostly the pandemic you know as well as some offsets that we have so i am at this point certainly forecasting will end the year in balance um i won't go through all the verbiage here other than to say that i've made some changes to the report this month that i'll continue to update as we go forward but

005i've identified in this section the potential operating budget variances and i refer to a report which i'll get to in a second the one significant um i i'll call it a new budget variance that's developed is that because of the change in participation in our student breakfast and lunch programs we do expect a you know pretty significant shortfall in revenue coming from the food service department which the board of ed budget has to make up and we'll talk through that in a minute that's why i've had ms dyker who's the director of our food service operation to join the call with us in this next section i provide an overview of the variance offset which i'm going to come back to if it's okay with the with the committee members because i think it'll make

006more sense if i walk through this this high level summary which um you should see on the screen now and miss ham that's it's basically on page three of the report it's up now thank you okay thanks okay so what i'm showing here is really a view at what i believe uh based on our current run rate and using our projections will be our major [Music] cost overages due to covert 19. and i'm going to run you down this fairly quickly because you've seen some of these and i'll talk through the rest so we know that we have to do intraday cleaning in all our school buildings and you know that primarily involves disinfecting all the bathrooms during the school day as well as disinfecting our high touch surfaces we're using our contractor performance environmental

007to do that so if we run this out over the full 10 months of the school year that cost will be three hundred thousand dollars and the key assumption that i'm making and all the numbers that i'm presenting now are that we remain in session for the full calendar year as we are today so cheshire high school is running in hybrid so students are in you know all students are in two days a week all students are remote on wednesday and all our elementary schools and dodd they're in every day so that's the assumption that we're using here obviously it's early in the school year we're hoping that that continues and we don't go into more of a remote mode which would affect all these numbers so i just want to be clear that that's

008our assumption for these numbers the second item which um i just mentioned we'll come back to is that we're anticipating total revenue loss after we basically put through some mitigation efforts that we will have total revenue loss of about three hundred thousand dollars in the food service program a food service program ordinarily you know runs on its own um the revenues it collects from charging for meals or collecting from the usda for meals that are provided to students is more than offset by the cost of labor and purchasing the food but because of low participation which madeleine will get into we will not meet the our revenues will not exceed our expenses this year unfortunately so that will put the food service program into a hole that the board of ed budget does have to

009fill um this next line the is 191 000 that is to install the audio visual equipment to the 59 broadcast classrooms which we did demonstrate at a board of ed meeting last week we are renting tents at all our elementary schools and dodd we've extended that through november 20th that will total 159 000. we are providing isolation room monitors in in all schools but the high school and that's costing uh a little bit more than 20 000 per month now but we are going to be able to reduce that cost a bit so i'm assuming that that'll continue to cost about fifteen thousand dollars per month we have to provide these monitors in accordance with state guidance so i'm estimating that will cost a hundred thirty five thousand dollars to get us through the end

010of the year the cost of ppe sanitizing and disinfecting supplies that we purchased will be a hundred twenty thousand um we put quite a bit of of storage and equipment uh quite a bit of furniture and equipment into storage that will cost us 98 410 this year and bus monitors which we supplied essentially from when school started in the beginning of september through the end of september cost us forty thousand dollars and i'm not anticipating we we will have any more bus monitor needs at this point that program has gone fairly well so if you just take the total of those items that's 1.344 million as you see in this line here on the screen so we have offsets the offsets are coming from the corona coronavirus relief fund that's been allocated 706 for cheshire

011um i'm going to go back and show you the detail on that after we get through this section but that will help us pay for quite a bit of that 1.3 million dollars and i'll show you the breakdown in a few minutes we're also getting eighty five thousand two hundred sixty four dollars from cara cares act funding um specifically it's called the elementary and secondary emergency school relief fund that 85 000 is is going to offset this 191 thousand dollars for the broadcast classrooms the board members um i'm sure remember that we carried two hundred thousand dollars of the 2019 budget um in an account that was approved by the town council so we have 200 000 available to help offset this 1.3 million dollars and the last thing that i'm estimating at this point

012is that we will have ex transportation savings because we are not running very many field trips we are not running any of the very few sports charters because our teams have not been playing um competitive sports to the extent at which it was budgeted that fifty thousand dollars if sports and field trips stay limited through the next few months or through you know the spring then that 50 000 number will increase but you know but those are you know real savings that we've projected that we won't incur just from the fall sports so we've got about a million 41 000 to offset this 1.3 million dollars so the net cost overage that we're anticipating um less what we're receiving in these offsets we've got about a 300 3 000 budget deficit to make up and

013we can make that up a few different ways we can certainly make it up by not spending our entire budget in our other categories and board members know that typically when we have budget overages you know we do you know work to offset them within the budget usually it's categories like maintenance some of the curriculum support supplies textbooks so i'm going to pause and stop sharing my screen for a second to you know certainly address any questions or um initial thoughts from the finance committee members uh catherine you had your hand up first go ahead thanks thanks adam um so on the audio visual installation that's the existing um systems that we had bought before the school year started i mean the reason i ask is that gesture education foundation is going to provide additional

014um systems so is there an additional cost that will be incurred to install those or is that included in here no it's not included because um the cost is we're going to install 10 more broadcast classrooms that the cheshire education foundation is paying for in fact i don't know if you could see this how nice that's the check that we received today courtesy of the cheshire education foundation so it's not reflected here i could add it and then subtract it but the education foundation did come through to pay for the full cost of the additional 10. now if we go beyond those 10 then okay that would be we'd have to make up okay thank you you're welcome i was just confused faith go ahead you're up so ben um i noticed that we're spending

015you know three hundred thousand dollars for contracted intraday cleaning and sanitizing disinfecting and then we're spending um another what is that a hundred and twenty four or is that yeah i'm reading the right line sanitize and disinfecting so these supplies are over and above um the supplies provided by our contracted cleaner are we are we buying the supplies and they're how is this working and then if that's if if they're providing the materials to clean and sanitize what if you could just explain to me what the sanitizing disaffecting and all of that for eight additional months okay who's using that uh okay primarily the 120 000 are the items that are supplied to our staff and students so it will include things like face masks both adult and children sizes but most of what we're

016purchasing really is along the lines of hand sanitizer that applies in all the classrooms disinfecting products that we're providing to all the classrooms so that includes great product as well as wipes yeah so it's really that 120 000 is staff use the 300 000 that's on that top line that's to pay for the contractors you know cost including their staffing costs they're supplying one or two people in each of our school buildings during the school day to do this disinfecting um of both bathrooms and high touch surfaces so the commitment that we've made to our staff through our contractor is that in addition to the nightly disinfecting of all the bathrooms all bathrooms will be disinfected at least once during the school day plus doing the high touch surfaces which includes things like you know

017the doorknobs the handrails any tables that are used in common areas that's clean throughout the day by the staff of performance environmental so you know this is in in line with the guidance that we receive from the state to do the high-touch surfaces and bathroom disinfecting during the day and then the products that we're supplying inside the classrooms and our libraries and other spaces are really there because you know our students for example at the high school are switching classes you know during the day so as one group of students moves out and another group of student moves into the classroom you know all the student desks that are that are basically being shared they're getting you know wiped down either with a sanitizing spray a disinfecting wipe um and those those products because we're

018really as i've explained we've worked really really hard to find products that you can use during the day that don't require ppe that are safe to use so they're pretty expensive but certainly worth the investment at this point in time to try and keep everybody healthy okay thank you can i ask a couple more so okay adam okay um all right and then so going down removable 10-month storage and return to classroom all right so are 98 000 in furniture moving um that will include the reinstallation or should we expect something more there no that's all in so you know we paid about 20 uh thousand dollars to have the stuff taken it taken from our classrooms put into storage by the vendor and then six months uh 10 months of storage and then restoring

019it for that 98 000. okay and then last the final question how reliable are these um relief funds given i mean are well do we have the money in hand because i think that's about the only way i would trust it no and that's why i mean i i and we'll go through the details of that next but i would say it's reliable you know the state has made an allocation to each school district then they asked the school districts and they made that allocation based on a survey we completed in august then they issued a grant application and then you know since they did the original application the original allocation issued a grant that had to match the original allocation the state has since allowed us to change the grant application so i'm confident

020at this point in time that we will be able to take advantage of all seven hundred six thousand seventy five dollars that's available in the grant now you know most of that um as you see in a few minutes when i present it is going to be for the cleaning and sanitizing and disinfecting products that we're purchasing you know the original allocation allocated more money for personnel which i didn't think we would incur so you know i i feel confident that the state will provide the reimbursement it is a reimbursement grant most of that seven hundred six thousand dollars we've already either spent or committed to spending with these items that are on this list okay so i i do we have a plan b just in case yeah the plan b if the state

021for whatever reason you know does not come through with that 706 000. you know what we have in place right now is we still have that 40 percent expenditure cap on non-payroll expenses um and we're not going to release that until we get a little bit further into this into the year here and then we would put the brakes on every possible other thing that that we could before we go um you know you know before i tell the board that we can't balance our budget and you know the board would authorize us to talk to the town council so i it's clear that the state's aware that you know they need to provide you know funding to help school districts get through this so i'm not concerned about the overall allocation or the reimbursement

022against the grant i'm just not sure when it's going to happen you know we haven't gotten that information yet we haven't gotten formal approval of the grant request yet but then again we only submitted the latest revision to the grant application on october 30th okay i mean i guess the short answer to your question is if the state did not provide that 706 000 we'd have a problem because that would be a significant underspending of our total approved budget yeah okay thank you okay um i'll i'll reserve my questions until you finish the uh the second uh portion so um are there any other questions if not then you can continue no okay i'm gonna again go back i'm gonna present um just an update on the coronavirus relief fund grant and again now now

023we're back on page two of the document so what i'm showing at the top is this is the 85264 for the broadcast classrooms that is part of the cares act grant this is the update on the coronavirus relief fund grant and i know this gets this is kind of busy here but just so you you i can explain what's happening this is when this is the information that we provided in the original survey issued in august august 11th is when we responded so if you just think about it this is before we knew what was happening as as the school year was beginning this is what the state allocated for personnel costs this is the grant application that we originally submitted on october 1st and really this last column is what i'm going to focus

024on is this is the dollars based on the updated grant application we submitted on october 30th so in the category of personnel what we have here is forty one thousand twelve dollars um and i really should highlight this one so the forty one thousand twelve dollars that's that's going to be used to pay for the isolation room monitors the important thing about this grant is that um it's for funds through december 31st is when you have to incur the expenses so um you know i know we will incur that 41 by december 31st there's 34 000 for personnel transportation that is the cost of the bus monitors and it's incurred costs so you know those are very solid numbers so the total personnel cost approved under this grant is the seventy five thousand twelve dollars

025and i say approved although it was allocated not officially approved by the state yet um in the non-personnel cost category this 500 1000 is for you can see the categories very broad contracted services for cleaning health safety so this this 500 1000 will include the cost of the funds that we have for performance environmental for the tent rentals for the moving and storage um and and those are that's pretty much will get us to that 501 thousand dollars 96 000 for um contracted excuse me for purchasing sanitizing disinfecting um supplies thirty thousand dollars is ppe again ppe being masks face shields you know any items that um you know such as the disposable gowns that we've provided to some of the special ed and nursing staff this was an interesting category it's just cleaning health

026and ppe specifically for our school buses so you know that's two thousand dollars so if you take the total of the 75 000 for personnel 630 1 000 for non-personnel that's how we get to that 706 0.75 and as i said you know most of that is already incurred or committed to so that's why i feel that we're on solid ground to be able to get this reimbursement once the grant is approved by the state so again i'm going to stop there if there are any questions on on this component and then once we're done with this i would like to have madeline address the food service a bit uh then i guess i'll kick it off um so i'm guessing you had i guess you've been working with opm on this is that or

027do you have to work directly with the governor's office no actually the grant application for this like most of our grants is just done online so um it's you know the grant application is submitted and questions go to um the department of education at the state um and so have you spoken with anyone at the state level about your categorizations of the uh of the line items that that you've identified have are they are they okay with how you've included them and everything like you know i've not spoken to anybody but based on the guidance that they provided in the documents we are in line with all the guidance so i you know there's certainly no issue in terms of the the categories that we've resubmitted under meet the guidelines and the guidance okay right

028because i remember in the in the a few months ago you had different guidance where it disqualified a lot of the expenses so they reissued guidance yes be more specific and allow you more flexibility and how to categorize things much more flexibility so that's why i say we're in good shape now compared to where they originally you know had had a you know done the allocation and then issued the reimbursement grant guidelines they've modified that so that we could modify our application and and we did that on october 30th that's all right so you've officially submitted the application and it's in for review okay yeah um and so are you is has the town or or have you um applied for any fema money is is that available as well or has anyone looked at

029that yeah the there's yes is the answer there really isn't much fema reimbursement that uh we'll be getting and fema the way the order of funding you had to spend your fema first that cares act funding second before you can apply for any of well not before you can apply but before you would be approved for the state grant funding so when we applied for the state grant funding you know we attested that the money that we're requesting in the state grant funding is not going to overlap fema or the esser funds and and they they don't okay that's why i forgot about the other the secondary front that was at the 80 85 000. yeah we cheshire got a grant of about 99 000 but we had to share that with the non-public schools

030saint bridget and cheshire academy so 85 000 is our portion okay and let's see oh and the uh the in in the personnel services the 41 for cleaning is that what is that overtime paid to our own custodial services i think i missed that part no no the 41 000 is the isolation room monitors that are there if we have any student in any of our school buildings that has symptoms um you know that are suspected to be covered which means it could be just about any symptom sore throat you know fever um you know those types of of of symptoms are very generic so if we have a suspected a child that has symptoms they go into an isolation room you have to provide supervision in that isolation room so we are using a

031third-party contractor to provide that right now because we you know we we didn't have our own staff that could do it okay thank you you're welcome are there any uh faith go ahead so um going back to these you talked about the costs all have to or the costs have to be incurred by 1231 right so january 1st onward is there what it how these costs aren't going to stop um what's what do we have available uh is there are there going to be more grants are we hoping for federal bailout i mean there are federal money that will then continue this uh or so the way i did the analysis is i assume the full year costs and the way i did the revenue is based on what i expected to receive with the

032from the 700 6000 and the 85 000. so and then the transportation savings so i've estimated based on what we know now full year's worth of expenses and then when you do the math that's where we wind up with this 300 shortfall okay okay so but you raise a very good point which is if there are additional funds made available let's say under the corona coronavirus relief fund 2. then we would certainly want to apply for that because you know that the current 706 000 doesn't cover the full boat of cost that we've that we will incur the full year i i've not been made aware of any additional funding that would be made available i'm certainly hoping that that would be the case then i'm sorry did did you just say that the 706

033000 is for costs incurred through 1231 correct so that's so we still we have enough money in our budget to cover the remaining months if we were not to receive an additional uh coronavirus ii uh infusion of money we're still okay if we didn't assuming we get this bucket we wouldn't need a second bucket right now would just be more of a windfall no or it would be able to help us for uh to to reestablish uh our maintenance that perhaps we've been cutting now because of our additional expenses well maybe i'll explain it this way as of right now based on what we know we're projecting to spend less what we're getting including the seven hundred six thousand we are sure three hundred thousand dollars to our budget which we'll have to make up

034and i i believe we can make it up because we do have those expenditure caps in place and um you know that's assuming we don't have any expenses beyond what i'm projecting and it's also not assuming that we'll have additional savings as i said earlier if we continue to have very limited extracurricular activities we'll have additional savings in transportation you know the other place interestingly where we're seeing transportation savings is new haven school district you know some of us some students attend sound school which we have to provide that transportation for well the sound school's been meeting remotely so we don't have that transportation expense the votech schools that went remote again we are not transporting to the vote-tech schools because the students are remote so that's all funding that's allocated in our budget that

035we're not expending right now so if that continues to happen you know even if it's on and off for example at the vote tech schools you know or sound school through the year you know that fifty thousand dollars that i'm projecting in savings will grow so as of right now you know we're looking at a 300 000 net deficit all in including what we know we're getting you know from the coronavirus relief funds make sense yes and uh so that that uh jogged my brain for uh one last question for this section uh i know that uh ciac had just put out guidance for winter sports which i'm guessing would also affect our revenue for non for what do i call it extracurricular sports um that you know revenue that we may have we may

036have received through other organizations using our facilities you know such as tom white basketball or competitive cheer and that sort of thing um that spaces they normally would have rented i'm guessing now they won't be able to rent or or have we worked anything out on that front or are is that something you didn't account for in the first place so therefore it's either a gain or a loss so um we as of right now we have not permitted any building used to outside organizations so any after school activities so to speak are only for student sports or extracurricular activities like girls volleyball is in session right now they are using the gym no spectators though um except for parents of seniors um so building use you know it's we really don't have revenue um

037that does anything other than offset cost so when we rent out our building you know if there's revenue it's to pay for the custodial cost and there's no markup so if we're not renting the building or we're renting the building it's there's no net cost to the budget so that's not a factor right now um and you know just while we're on the topic so we've said um that we would not permit any building use through november 30th at this point you know winter as and i know everybody knows that basketball whether it's some of the youth leagues through park and rec or cheshire travel basketball they're not currently using our buildings now what we're waiting to find out and get a final determination on is what winter sports will be allowed and and under

038what conditions will they be allowed by the ciac and you know with dr sullivan we'll make a determination after consulting with mr phone and we're talking to john garlic over at park and rec you know what should we do for allowing outside building use come december it depends on on what's happening what the infection rates are what ciac's determination is what the governor will allow us so not allow us to do but that's not gonna be much of a factor mr grippo in in the budget okay i was yeah i was more concerned if if we were to open it up is it does it end up being that zero because do we have to incur extra sanitization costs or or anything because exactly uh hey i was reading your mind there catherine yeah so

039it's not just the usual custodial uh you know services uh that we would provide and seek reimbursement for i said it's that extra step um that you know could be cost an additional 25 or 50 percent uh from the looks of it um to keep things running so i was just you know concerned about that you know i would certainly make a recommendation as to what we should charge there would have to be some type of a surcharge um you know for any extraordinary cleaning expense that we would incur and again i mean as i sit here today even if we were to allow extra outside use of our buildings i think it would be pretty limited to just the uh participants and and coaches and a ref but not much in the way of

040spectators i mean you just couldn't you wouldn't want to do it based on current logic but we may not be permitted to do it anyway but yeah okay and and uh we'll know we'll know that one by uh by the end of this month probably yeah we we talk actually every week we have a group uh including dr solon sean kimball john gallick some of uh some of our internal staff including steve trafone we talk weekly about you know building use field use i think is really done [Music] within the next week maybe two and assuming that it's even allowed to continue and that's outdoor field use inside use you know tbd and there was uh no there's been no prepayment or anything because i know um some organizations are very proactive in let's say

041booking for space and and as far as we're aware no one had pre-paid for anything any potential charges where we may have to refund anything that's a joke question right nobody's prepaid okay i'm just making sure that we are not holding anything for anyone and that there's no surprises there yeah no risk there adam we're good fantastic thank you any other questions for this section all right okay so now what i'd like to do madeleine um is turn it over to madeleine dyker again she's our food service director to to talk a little bit about kind of the problem we're facing today and why and then some of the mitigation strategies that you know have already started being taken to help us get through so madeleine i know that if you want to present your

042screen you should be able to do that whenever you're ready sure i can do that right now okay um basically uh i'll present first what i feel is the um the causes of the shortfall this has been a certainly a tough year unexpected and you know obviously due to everything that's happening but basically uh in our budget and in our program our participation of the students are down so that's one of the uh main uh things that's causing this uh budget shortfall for us uh last year uh we were uh serving 11 000 breakfasts this year we're serving 9 000. that's actually not too bad down 19 and the reason why that's not down as far as it is is that we are serving uh breakfasts on wednesday um pick up wednesday evening pickup for

043remote learners our year today uh lunch meals 35 000 which is down 45 percent from last year's 64 000. so that's quite uh significant our revenue is down um by 85 percent uh in our a la carte sales so uh year to date till the end of october uh last year we'd be at 62 000 this year we're at 9 000. uh the reason being is we're just serving um meals we're serving very little a la carte uh and uh you know except for some waters you know a couple of chips you know obviously it's significantly down also there's a loss of upper tier lunch revenue at the high school we had a two-tier lunch price system so there was a 360 lunch and a 460 lunch since we are all on free meals and

044we're just based on the uh usda reimbursement meal we um are not getting the income from the upper tier lunch uh the uh parent funding of the student accounts uh is expected to be down 95 by the end of the year uh that's what really gives us our cash flow uh as the money comes in from the parents expecting that their students are going to be buying breakfast and lunch basically what happens is we use the that money to pay the bills and so we definitely have a uh cash flow issue here because now we're waiting for government money uh our government revenues to come in and there's usually a two-month delay uh arcadia ring is expected to be down about 62 percent and this is based on what i'm seeing so far uh year-to-date

045uh through about october uh what's also happening is not only is revenue down and participation of meals down but we have an increased cost of food per meal when we provide school lunch to the students we provide five components milk meat grains fruit and vegetable the student only has to select three of the five they can deny two components and it's the same thing at breakfast you provide four items and they the student can deny one it's called offer versus serve and the reason why the usda does that is to reduce waste why provide five components to every child in the school district if they don't want the milk or they don't want the vegetable they can still choose three that becomes still a reimbursable meal and then we get a small amount of usda

046money for that uh due to the pandemic we were packaging our packaging uh all five lunch components and all fresh for breakfast components and we did this for several reasons uh one a bagged meal reduces the chance of dropping the meal on the floor as their students are now traveling not only to the cafeteria but to tents and to gyms and outside uh one meal bag reduces the time spent on students making choices so we wanted them to move along very quickly and if we put everything in a bag you have to put all five components uh the grab and go remote learning at the high school a monday and wednesday pickup must have all the components since they can't have a choice you know right there on the sidewalk as mom and dad are

047picking up so you have to have all five components in addition there's extra cost in packaging the lunch menu you know we're now putting the hot items in foil bags or foil trays to keep things hot and the extra cost of vinyl gloves uh case of vinyl gloves last year as you probably all know went up uh last year was eighteen dollars a case this year it's ninety dollars a case uh at least this week you know last week it was eighty dollars a case just went up the the other uh increased in cost is our labor cost a small amount of additional labor time uh needed to extend lunch waves and additional passing time we needed additional labor needed for training before we open the kitchens you know exactly how we're going to do

048this the additional labor needed for bagging up the food you know instead of just cooking the food and serving it on the tray now we're bagging and portioning up and you know things just take you know much more time uh lack of participation uh by the students uh there could be several reasons for this you know you know we haven't put out hard copy menus and so uh you know the students may not you know be having that menu up on the refrigerator uh lack of choices we reduced our choices significantly uh because we knew there would be there's the more choices you have the more cost you have and so um also the more choices you have the longer it takes to make choices so we wanted to streamline the process to get the

049kids through the line as quickly as possible because now they're you know five to six feet apart and you've got to get them through the line uh in the same amount of time students are taking a longer time to get into the routine of eating lunch usually that occurs by october so they're not into you know okay yes let's buy lunch now um probably uh i could have done a better job in marketing and communicating to the parents and the guardians about the free breakfast and lunch i think there's still a lot of them for a lot of people out there that don't realize our meals are free um we feel that uh the lack of participation could be that maybe um the family fears um the sanitation or the kids waiting in line and

050you know so that could have been an issue i think in the beginning of the year everyone was discouraging students from eating school meals because we didn't know what was going to happen and concerned about cohorts and how are they going to be sitting uh and staying in their cohorts so there's you know several reasons why uh perhaps there's been a lack of participation from the students and then um you know as far as our weekly remote meals that we are serving on wednesdays and monday nights at the high school compared to the dad spring grab and go meals you know significantly down these uh right now we're serving about 2 000 meals a week as opposed to in the spring out of diet in one location we were serving 12 000 meals per week

051so um what is what can we do about this and what we're hoping would work so it's a plan to mitigate the loss i have objectives and uh key results the objective is to increase meal participation as quickly as possible some of the key results we're going to be looking and measuring for are increased meal participation by 20 measured at six week intervals we'll begin to offer free all grabbing free-for-all grab-and-go breakfasts or you can call it a snack at school dismissal for all schools by december 15th now we've already uh reached that key result or partially cheshire high school today did serve 179 grab and go breakfasts and dodd did serve today 79 grab and go uh breakfasts at dismissal today so we have begun the grab and go breakfast situation at dodd we

052are no longer serving breakfast in the morning but this way the kids can grab a breakfast and eat it either for snack or for breakfast the next day at home we will be instituting this at all the schools one by one and hope to accomplish this by the end of december one thought was to do a grab-and-go meals at dodd middle school between 12 30 and 1 30 during the day for remote learners we could offer grab-and-go meals for seven days a week at the high school in dawn and actually we are going to begin this this wednesday november 11th at the high school we start now to offer seven day um per week pick up so it's not only monday through friday but will include meals breakfast and lunch for saturday and sunday um

053the next plan is to set up a marketing and communication plan uh more communication to the parents uh communicating about our sanitation practices to if they have any fears to put them aside increase our tweeting and social media increased lucky tray days and so and then providing samples new samples of new foods this is happening on november 19th at the elementary schools we're going to be providing ramen noodles for the first time and so the kids are excited about that uh chapman school had a student had asked for it and set up a petition we did it and it it went over great so we're gonna try it at other elementary schools and just talking up school lunch with the kids the other objective is to reduce expected food cost we want to reduce our

054food cost by five percent to be measured every six weeks uh to double check that we're not uh over producing food uh by uh putting down exactly what we're making and how much it was over produced on our edit check sheet um also providing choices to the students i think this is a big one by returning the choices to the students i think the students will be happier when they can make choices again and return to serving food on trays instead of bags return to offer versus serve where the students don't have to take the whole bag again providing choices this will result in a slower line so we are working with the principals so that the students can wear id badges and once they wear id badges we have a scanner that scans that

055id badge and they quickly go through the line we will review and adjust our larger portion sizes at the high school to fit in align with the usda reimbursement that we're getting um our next objective is to reduce labor or effectively use the labor to increase participation we want to reduce our labor cost further by 5 right now we have about six employees that have retired resigned or uh are on unpaid medical leave resulting in a savings of about twelve thousand five hundred to about fourteen thousand five hundred per month will review and determine again we do this quite often on a regular basis but even so here um how many hours do we need per kitchen if we have extra staff hours you know and i don't mean extra but within the hours that

056the employees are supposed to be working we'll be cutting up fruit or baking bread or trying to make other things from scratch uh trying to utilize those hours effectively we'll continue with our cross training you know one of the concerns that we do have is that our staff get sick and both employees you know are quarantined so we are cross training staff so that we can move staff from kitchen to kitchen and we have been avoiding using our substitutes and in general just discussion with staff and managers just watching the hours very carefully okay all right there may be some questions madeline um but mr gripper if i can i just wanted to add a couple of things um first of all what we're experiencing here in cheshire is not unusual you know many school

057districts are dealing with some of these same exact issues where participation is down food service revenue is down you know and and costs are really up not so much because of um anything other than we have to package meals where we didn't package before and some of the commodity items like latex gloves you know are up in cost right now so there is an adaptation that that we have to make you know i will say madeline you know and her managers are running a very tight operation they always have so you know the mitigation strategies that madeline laid out will work they'll they'll certainly help mitigate the loss of revenue it's not going to be down to zero and so you know if things continue to go the way they are i do anticipate we'll

058probably be short around 300 000 per year or this year um but this mitigation strategy will help us and then the last point is you know food service if you haven't picked up on it and i know the you know you've heard me say it before the you know food service is very technical in nature what we do you know to get a meal out to a student goes way beyond just preparing the food and packaging the food you have to meet all the standards for it to be a qualifying meal so as madeline said you need to have you know between three and five components of lunch and four for breakfast and we have to meet those standards in order to get reimbursed we're getting reimbursed on all the meals we're serving right now

059but we have to make sure that we're compliant so there's the devil is in the detail you know with what madeleine is doing but i think this is a solid plan that will help us get through and and hopefully we can you know really build capacity up as long as we stay in school and we can continue to build capacity get students to start eating um on a more regular basis taking advantage of the grab and go breakfast meals that we hand out every day you know we'll we'll get ourselves in a better spot than we are currently and i see mr solon or dr sullin has joined so welcome doctor i didn't need the formal doctor event but uh anyway the yeah i'm sorry i was at the school modernization committee meeting but obviously

060i'm uh pretty well uh aware of where things stand fiscally right now in the district and you know we've been working with madeline and our principals particularly around obviously the food service stuff to generate higher rates of participation um you know it's critically important that we maintain the solvency of our food services program uh but it's also really beneficial for our kids to participate from a general nutrition perspective so uh we are really you know trying to be creative and i think you saw maybe some of that in madeleine's plan but really try and push that participation and find new ways to engage our students around this thank you um are there any questions i i just just because i don't understand why there would there was such a high level of participation last spring

061and it kind of dropped off and i'm just i maybe you explained what your thinking is behind that but i'm just that's so weird that it would have been there should be such a big difference i think um yeah go ahead i'm sorry man that's okay i i think not only am i surprised i'm as surprised as you uh but there are districts across the street uh food service directors in districts across the state that are just as surprised um all of us thought that once the meals became free that we have a bigger participation so i think there's other factors at work you know whether it's communication whether it's a concern about covet and standing online not quite sure you know we're thinking about doing a survey to the parents but um we are

062surprised that participation is not up thanks that wasn't helpful on my part but you know yeah i mean it looks like you guys know how to address the problems at least or start tackling it so thank you as always madeline thank you faith looks like you have your hand up yep a couple of things first of all i i don't know maybe i'm just the cockeyed optimist but what i see are families um making their own meals which to me um is a positive sign but um and i'm a little distressed that we are this dependent on a program that is mostly funded through government government um subsidies at a time when the government is is uh let's just say stretched thin and i would also i guess i'm a little distressed i you know

063you are the dietitian but when i hear ramen noodles which it probably i was told when i was feeding my children ramen noodles one of the the most nutritious things that you can give children i am concerned i'm really concerned that we're in this hole um and i i can't sit back and just say you know marketing is gonna fix it um i uh can i ask how much that that's just my comment and i'm sorry it is sort of uh from the gut as opposed to from the head um how much of our food service program depends like what percentage of our revenue specifically comes from the us department of agriculture versus catering where we could actually make some some make up some of this shortfall the catering amount is very small you know

064so when i do say catering is down well we're talking about a very small amount my budget is generally about 1.8 million in revenues that would would have been last year and while i don't have something in front of me i would say that half of those revenues you know generally came from the parents you know we are we only would get a revenue from the usda uh to get reimbursed by uh for free and reduced meals and then each meal we would get a very small portion of about uh 21 cents you know per paid meal so uh as far as our revenue uh from the government you know was not uh morse above and beyond what the parents would pay for it and could you i'm sorry could you repeat that um what

065i'm trying to say is the the parents i would say about if i had to guess uh about 75 of the revenue would come from the parents paying for the meals and then about um you know 25 to 4 35 or so percent from the uh federal government 25 to 30. yeah the book that's because madeline just to you know help explain you know our free and reduced lunch part not participation but the percentage of students that are eligible for free or reduced meals that are paid for by the usda is around 15 percent correct okay and then beyond that we also even if there's a full paid meal not a la carte but a full paid meal we get 21 cents additional reimbursement even if it's not a free and reduced lunch student correct

066from usda from yes so in ordinary times as madeleine said let's use 25 as a round percentage 25 of the revenues came from usda for either free or reduced lunch students or the 21 cent reimbursement when we were serving a full balanced meal you know i and i i think it was uh president trump who extended free meals for all through the end of this school year yes until june correct so yeah i mean it you know i think there are some things that you know we look at and say well gee you know is there would there be a way if we could allow for choice instead of having to serve all five components in a lunch meal only serve the three four or five the students want you know that we would certainly

067do that if we could and i think that's part of the mitigation when we go to a full tray and selection but you can't do it right now so you know there is some some waste that's potentially happening but that's the way it's always been with the food service program it's just worse now because of the fact that we have to pre-package these meals but again we have to meet the technical requirements of the program to get reimbursed you know the other thing is that this is a much different scenario than what in the spring too because in the spring everybody was home and we had a ton of people accessing these meals frankly out of convenience or telling me that it was a trip out of the house that i look forward to every

068day you know this is a different scenario now when the vast majority of people are back at work um and they're not in a position where they have to do that uh we still though need food service well into the future after this is over with and so we're trying to figure out how do we increase student engagement in the program with a significantly particularly the high school reduced number of students so you know on a daily rate we'd have about 1500 kids now you can lock 10 percent off of that who are full-time remote and then half it every other day right so you know that's the numbers are significantly down and we've made adjustments as a result of that but the revenue is obviously significantly down as a result so we want to

069make sure kids are eating and eating right first and foremost and then we need to make sure that our food service program is there to meet those nutritional needs beyond covid um and so that's what we're looking at just one other question if we reduce labor by five percent what does that translate into for dollars um 15 000 a month right because i would just 12 well we've already cut that well that's already been cut that's already been saved um due to retirement uh and resignation um at this point i would say that that would approximately be about 80 000 total or per month no total okay um so this isn't adding up for me i'm i think i'm i must be missing something so we're short 300 000 in food services but we're supposed

070to be getting reimbursed for our food so does that mean that we are not being reimbursed at 100 percent and that we're incurring a cost that we can't recoup because we're not collecting money from parents through the uh the the the meal payment meal payment system i i think you're correct in the fact that yes you know we get a reimbursement from the usda to cover meal cost but it doesn't always cover all the costs and i think because this is unusual times and the fact that we're doing business differently we are giving all five components of all the food where normally there would be many students that would only take three out of five so that extra food that we're serving out is the additional you know that contributes to the additional cost the

071additional uh labor to to deal with you know all the uh different things that we're doing compared to what we would do last year that's contributing to the additional cost and then plus the fact is what if your participation goes down you still need a certain number of people in the kitchen for example if i'm doing 300 meals in a kitchen or i'm doing 200 meals in a kitchen i might need the 200 meals in the kitchen i still need three people to serve whether i'm serving 150 or i'm serving 250 because i need two people serving in a cashier so sometimes just the the basic needs of needing some um a minimum number of people you know obviously the more meals you serve the more efficient you become yeah you still have one manager

072one cook to pay you know so if you're serving one meal or a thousand meals you know that's part of your overhead so it really comes down to participation rate more than anything you know there's not enough participation even though we're getting paid by the government you know for these meals there's just not enough participation to cover the overhead and even by reducing you know the overhead with some of the labor cost reductions uh and the mitigation strategies that madeleine talked about we're still going to wind up short unless we could you know magically get the participation up really really high for the remaining you know seven or six and a half months of the school year so i'm not understanding how a lower participation rate uh translates into a deficit well because i think

073it would be the opposite that you have low you're putting out lower less food less food cost unless the the usda plan requires you to have a certain amount of output that we're somehow not making up and what am i missing i basically what i um i said i is as far as labor goes you need a minimum amount overhead yeah okay i have a minimum overhead that you know we weren't operating on a profit before you know we were operating on a break even so to sustain the same amount of overhead but sell many less meals where that's where we're falling short over the course of a full year so if it cost us a hundred grand to do business and we were selling 100 grand in meals that's you know that's well that's

074where we wanted to be now we're doing it cost us 100 grand to do business but we're selling 80 grand worth of meals because we just don't have the customers coming through the door this is the same restaurant problem that other people have just under our roof because we're not selling as many meals anymore but it costs us the same amount we still have to have a cook we still have to have all these so the overhead is the same the meal sales is down and so that's why you know faith to your point we're not gonna we're not gonna blow this up with increasing participation we're not gonna get back to 100 but what we are going to do is by increasing participation we're going to start to hedge that instead of hemorrhaging the

075way we are now so when you so madeline when you say uh bringing back uh choice to a meal are you saying that you that would uh incur a cost to the student by that i mean before covid a student would have a meal account and then they would be charged x amount of dollars because they chose a certain meal or whatever it was does is that what you're is that what you're saying that parents could then uh refill the uh their their their child's meal accounts and then we would be able to conduct business in a more normal manner or because i'm not quite understanding how the how the deficit is made up by increasing participation um is it i i don't understand the mathematics behind this it's basically right now uh we're making

076very little on a meal based on usda reimbursement so the usda reimbursement is three dollars and 41 cents we used to get three dollars and sixty cents a meal at the high school and four dollars and sixty cents for a higher tier meal we're only getting three dollars and forty cents uh per free meal and for breakfast we used to charge two dollars and twenty five cents a meal or two dollars at the elementary we're only getting a dollar eighty nine for that meal so what we'd like to do is one you know if if we can make a little bit of money the more meals we serve then the more we'll make going back to the choices what we mean by choices is right now the kids don't uh in the beginning of the

077year we were putting all five components of the food in a bag take the bag there you go one two three it's done we want the kids to have choices when they have choices they're happier about buying their lunch because they're choosing the fruit they want they're choosing the vegetable they want and once we go back to more choices we're hoping that'll help um you know uh help the participation to go up so why are we doing this then if we're we're essentially operating at a loss are we mandated to do this well we have a couple of things again we need to first our first goal here is to make sure our kids get adequate food nutrition we do have a significant percentage that receive free and reduced lunch so yeah we are required

078to provide that to them um and additionally we do have a fair number of kids that are accessing the lunch program now and this is a short-term problem um i you know i'm hopeful about the the news today about a vaccine that this isn't a problem that's going to last us three years this is a problem that i'm hopeful will last us three to six more months um and it at worst if we get through the end of the school year we should be back in normal next next next year so yeah we we do have to continue to provide food services you know from a um another perspective and we could what if we just dumped our food program and hired an outside group well now is not a great time to even pitch

079that idea no there's no money in it for anybody so it's like trying to sell trying to get somebody to be our bus contractor last spring you're not running any routes you know there's no money there to be had now we had a a burgeoning food uh services program one of the best in connecticut prior to krovid but like madeline said you know you have that hundred thousand dollar overhead and back in the old days you could sell an upgraded meal kids were buying a lot of them that helped us meet the overhead actually made us allowed us to do some enhancements you've seen i don't know if you remember the old cafeteria but it's beautifully painted at chs it looks like a restaurant you know we we've done some of that because we've been

080we were successful in our food service program like the rest of the world we hit the covid wall we have a hundred thousand dollar overhead again these are just uh hypothetical numbers hundred thousand dollar overhead and we just can't meet sales because we're just not getting enough kids through the door to buy it um and we can't sell on top of it those high priced higher priced meals that the kids want like my 15 year old boy you know he wants a bigger meal he's going to pay the extra money for the meal the the reimbursement program is not working that way now so um you know that's probably another reason why we're not we don't have the same sales so there's a number of factors in play here you know strong recommendation is stay

081the course but we absolutely have to find ways to close that gap the same way if we were losing money anyplace else we'd be you know going out of our mind trying to find a way to close the gap um it's cutting the food service program is not really an option and i'm not suggesting that that's what you were saying by the way i just that's not what i was saying i know it's that's why i wanted to be clear about that because i know you're not saying well let's not serve lunches anymore but it's like you recognize the way we do and i understand like vin madeleine myself we've had a couple of weeks to really process this and start to problem solve where you guys have had not even a couple of hours

082so this is just um where we are right now uh with this and we're trying to close that gap uh aggressively i think what i'm just trying to understand is it seemed like we shifted from the the need model which was i'm i and i forgive me if i'm not understanding if if a child or a family was in need did they have to apply to be in in the program so that when their child went to the cafeteria you knew who they were right that you oh okay all right so it was just it was just built into the cost of the program that 15 or whatever it was that's what you were reporting or however it's done right and so and so you would get your reimbursement or whatever the number was you

083you were giving um and so now we've gone to basically a program but it sounds like usda is reimbursing at around or maybe slightly higher than what they were last year but we are not allowed to do our regular program because why not why shouldn't we just go back to our regular program and hope for the best because i know that i for me i'd be willing to put in my you know 30 40 a month and you know have my child you know spend that money at the school at the cafeteria so i i'm not sure why we can't go back to a model like that again or if there's something preventing us from doing that so can we opt out of the federal program is the question basically so yeah i don't know

084if that's what would be that's what would happen if we opt out we lose everything is that kind of what you're saying i don't know we would certainly lose the reimbursement we would lose certainly we were not getting getting government commodities which is another way of subsidy but i think the reason why we went to the state did give an option of staying the course or uh going to everything free and the reason for going to everything free is that everybody uh well the community uh was having financial difficulties so the fact is our free and reduced uh families uh the percentage was going up now people had stopped applying for free and reduced applications because now all the meals are free but we have about uh last year we had about um children that

085were eligible by applying for free and reduced meals and it is a very confidential system where uh you know no one knows you know it's in the system but they apply it gets processed in our system and then they come to the cash register and you know it's very confidential but the fact is the number of families needing help uh due to being layoffs um has increased you know and so if i go into free meals for everyone this sort of helps the community who is struggling you know during these coping yeah there's one more piece to just we kind of glossed over it but it i think it's an important one and that is the a la carte sale being down you know 86 percent is is what madeline explained in a presentation so

086you know we last year for the first three months we're at about 60 000 this year we're we're at about 9 000 in a la carte sales so i mean that's significant and the point that i'm trying to make adam is that that portion of the program is still there but it's just it's not being sold i think there's a fundamental difference in the way students are using you know a food service program i think a lot of that has to do with some of the things madeline touched on that people are afraid they just don't want to you know stand in line with other students i i can't put my finger on it but there's something at work there even in the a la carte sales which are not free those students would have

087to pay for that just can i just clarify for my own self some things did i turn myself okay so i just want to make sure we're losing meal money on every meal we give out essentially yes at this point yes yes okay and we have 15 percent of roughly 15 percent of our student population who receives free or reduced lunch is that in a normal year that is correct okay we're in an abnormal year but do we have a percentage on kids receiving for your doula reduced lunch this year okay everyone is on free meals so i i know but we but as far as their status the status of free and reduced uh i believe is around 650 students i'd have to double check i don't have that okay so 650 uh 4

088000. um i might my initial reaction is we should those need to be our concern those guys are our concern in in how do we um you say that i i know there are needy families out there but our demand is way down so how do we reconcile this notion that there are all of these needy families out there when our numbers are so reduced um it's not that to me doesn't judge um so um i don't know i mean you know this is this requires a lot of strategic thinking far more than mine and trust me i applaud you for what you do because you are trying to unravel a gordy and not that nobody seems to know where the beginning or end is um but i just think that if we could somehow

089concentrate or or identify without identifying but help those 600 people 600 families 600 students in need and um well just so that you're aware there's two things here um we have done uh outreach when we were doing the spring grab and go we were doing outreach to those families to make sure that they knew about it that we made sure we gave them access to make sure that we can get a bus to deliver it you know so there were very many things that we did do to to to get the uh people in the spring it worked you know these are different times than the spring i think the other thing is one of the things you have to realize is that if we focus only on the free and reduced children we will

090not have the program that we normally have because we want kids that are not on free and reduced to eat the lunch if the kids feel that they are free and reduced and they're the only ones going up to get lunch they're going to be overly identified so it's important to try to get as many children to be eating so that those who eat it will also eat when their friends are eating it okay uh okay um so uh just so just to pick up on that point madeline um so our system was running like clockwork last year where we had the two um i guess the the two types of of families i guess uh using your system right the free and reduced and and and the paying in the paying children as well

091the paying families correct um and so why why what is preventing us from going back to that is it because right now it's an all or nothing situation from the government yes oh so either we yes it's but i we still would be in a financial difficult time because even if we were charging our four dollars and sixty cents even if we were charging our three dollars and 60 cents i think there may be families that who in the past would have purchased lunches might have might be struggling and having more difficulty this year than last year just based on how many people have been laid off right so even if we went up to let's say 30 or 40 percent right i would think that we would still be in a better situation than

092incurring a three hundred thousand dollar loss wouldn't you think uh i'm not sure that question thirty or forty percent of what well if if our free and reduced program was at fifteen percent but we're in a you know unprecedented unprecedented times right now so let's say that went to 30 or 40 percent right correct um wouldn't if if we were to be able to to just uh subsidize those lunches right at a 40 level than a hundred percent level wouldn't wouldn't we still be in a better financial position um than if we were to to maintain this hundred percent level um or are we not allowed to i mean is that basically right now we're not allowed to do anything except accept free lunches or provide free lunches or not right is that essentially where

093we are right now at this point we are accepting three dollars and 41 cents per lunch meal that we serve and it's for everyone last year we charged um a certain price we were reimbursed a certain way for 15 percent of our children but this year everyone from september 8th uh has been getting um free meals there's no reduced meals everybody three at three dollars and forty one cents and so and so that three hundred thousand figure that's for the remainder of the year or is that through 12 31 that's the full year okay full year provided that i'm not i don't see a way out of this it would even with your reductions i don't see how there's a red there's no way out of this because we're going to continue to concur the

094loss and even if you essentially if you're if you're increasing participation you're just hoping to approach a one-to-one efficiency in your fixed costs which may or may not happen and okay either way it's it's we're gonna have to find some money the um you know the mitigation strategy what it's gonna do is it's gonna get us closer to our break even because i mean just really simply if we're getting 3.40 back from the government part of that is covering the cost of the food that we're purchasing and and providing and the other part is covering our labor so because we haven't been and we can't i mean we still have an operations run you can't reduce your labor enough to make up for the loss of participation so by increasing the participation it'll get us

095closer to where we need to be that's why the mitigation strategies that we're presenting um you know have been identified and who knows maybe we'll get to a better place all right so so that brings me okay so all right i'm trying to obviously i'm just trying to figure this out we're talking through it here so you're saying that if we were able to increase the participation rate so let's say that we're doing 400 meals a day at a given school instead of the current rate of 200 you're saying that we would be able to somehow in close the gap of our shortfall by having more people participate i said i think what i'm trying to say is um the only way i feel i can explain it is like walmart walmart makes a penny

096on this uh one prod you know item if i could but you got to sell 100 000 items to make what you know that profit it's the same thing here we just need to serve more a la carte and we need to serve more meals we're making less per meal in a very small amount but if we can get our participation up the hope is that we'll bring in more revenue because we're serving higher meals so so you're saying that if if everyone in town participated as if they did last spring yes where the meals were at a very high level you're saying that there is a break even point in the reimbursement scale where we would not incur a loss per meal i believe so but that also includes the fact that uh we

097need more a la carte now a la carte uh items are not reimbursable so if i'm making 15 cents on a bag of chips that's pure profit to towards the program right that's a lot of chips though if i just follow on with adam i just i don't see how if we're losing money on every meal increasing participation is going to somehow get us out of this hole it seems to me that we're going to get deeper in the hole but yeah i see miss steiker that yeah we have got to get that those a la carte sales up as as any restaurant would i mean that's why you sell dessert at the premium because you know it's easy to make and uh people want it and it's a great margin same thing with drinks

098but can't do that no i'm not suggesting but no but you know you know and i've worked some in the restaurant in business and then and as mr zolan point dr solon points out there's this is what we're dealing with it's essentially food service restaurant but um i guess um you know freeing free and ultimately we got to pay for it but i i just going forward when we do come out of this and i don't know necessarily how to work it um you know i think of hospitals and they have you know they're non-profits they have their indigent fund and i don't mean to call this an individual fund but do we somehow going forward begin to set up funds um you know prices are our meals accordingly so that there is something that

099can be put away for for contingencies like this because they're not they're going to happen again you know this is this is a particularly um extreme one but i'm not we're not in the profit making business but is there a way to establish a fund in the food service um unit to to be able to offset these these hiccups or whatever when they happen yes you know if breaking even isn't going to do it in a normal time i think maybe this is showing us that we've got to have a a paddock some kind of padding somewhere some kind of extra funds yeah we always have we always have until last year faith the food service and madeline can give you the more specific details but food service actually was running above break even and

100food service is allowed to carry a three-month reserve maximum in accordance with state guidelines man i want you to just explain it kind of how they calculate that um but we ran out of reserve that's really kind of the bottom line yeah yeah and in the past 17 18 years that i've been here we've always had a positive uh reserve uh a surplus so that if we did make something we are allowed to keep up to about i think it's like 450 000 you know in a reserve for emergencies for cash flow obviously when we start up in august and september we need cash flow to pay to pay payroll to pay our vendors before the you know we're even starting with uh meals so uh you know for 18 years we've always had a

101general positive cash flow any um surplus uh you know you know we've had years where it's been over 240 000 we've had years when it's been as low as 23 000 that we would make money and we would save it what would we use this money for equipment you know um investment into the program just like a business you know if we need to buy a refrigerator you know we're gonna wait till we have the money and then next year we use our surplus funds certainly we went through our surplus funds last year um you know so and ended up with a loss last year even though as good as we did with this dodd spring you know grab and go it's still what um you know was a loss yeah i mean that that's

102the right uh thought faith and i mean i'll add to that too some of the things that we've done with the reserve kind of went the other way like when we were redoing the doolittle kitchen which you know was a capital expenditure that was paid for through the town's funds when we went out to bid you know we did come up short or the bid was higher than we had capital funding for and so money was allocated from the food service reserve to help pay for the improvements that we made at doolittle so i mean it's been a two-way street the reserve has helped but the you know the last you know now we're going on you know nine months with with covid for food service it's taken its toll on the reserve so we're

103not there anymore oh boy so to me it sounds like we're voluntarily committing to a program that's costing us money and there's no way for us to recoup it really um and and of course that money that that 300 000 as we know that's a that's a big number that will have to come from somewhere most likely maintenance and repair that's usually kind of where it comes from a lot of times um so oh man well i just i guess that's just where we are right now i guess because we cannot go to a hybrid right madeline we can't we like you said it it's all or nothing right now that's the way the program is structured it's either you're all you're at 100 or or you don't get any reimbursement at all is is

104that no no no don't it right now we're 100 free so it's a 100 reimbursement for the reimbursable meal but the other way was like last year where you would get your reimbursement for uh just your 15 and then we would be back to uh everyone paying for their meals okay all right all right so i think i think i'm understanding now is that the federal funds covers the cost of the food but it does not cover the cost of the overhead is that sort of like where we are at the beginning is that that's kind of where we are right now right it doesn't cost it it doesn't cover the cost of the people putting it together the materials to pack it in any of that stuff it's i i think it's uh yes

105it's not covering our costs for sure right but it the reimbursement does exceed the food cost it covers some of our labor it just isn't covering 100 at the current level of sales right and normally we would make that up through the the meal accounts correct with higher practice i mean with higher participation even with the federal reimbursement you would get revenue above your cost of food right then yeah these small increments which don't sound like a big deal but a la carte sales and the higher price of uh of the more expensive meals at the high school did you know get us to a place where we had a surplus typically in food service and we can't offer those now for some reason no we are offering them we we offer and we're in

106the beginning we were very very cautious because uh we want to keep kids six feet apart now if kids are six feet apart how do we get them through the line as quickly as possible you limit their choices and part of that was the a la carte so our la carte sales went down we are offering more a la carte now that the kids know what the routine is what the system is how to get through the line we are offering more a la carte okay so the hope is that now that everyone kind of knows the rules you kind of loosen things up a little bit exactly up sales a little okay so what so we're at a 300 000 shortfall now how much do you project that we could shave off that three

107hundred thousand a hundred thousand uh we've shaved that to three hundred adam that our mitigation strategy works and look i i think the other thing to throw out there is because other food service programs are in dire straits you know and i know they have a pretty strong lobby the the connecticut has a school nutrition association you know is there a possibility that we would get further reimbursement or some state state aid or might it be part of the you know another round of coronavirus relief funds that remains to be seen you know we don't take chances though we're you know going to put in a mitigation strategy we we plan for it within our budget estimates at this point in time and continue to work the problem and you know we're doing it in

108the name of you know ensuring that you know we're feeding feeding the children nutritious meals well i i certainly appreciate all the questions you've taken i don't know if anyone has any other questions um it certainly is a a a difficult problem and i know you guys are working trying your best to to solve it and um you know i think it's just it's so wild that you just said we hope to get more money from the federal government to make up the shortfall we're getting from the federal government 2020 i guess the pandemic adam there are no rules all right um well thank you very much madeline for your time this evening one comment uh to mrs hamm regarding the um uh the ramen noodles okay i love them i do love them they

109are school made okay so it's a lot less sodium and it's not a full portion it's just a little taste of ramen noodles to get them excited and to try school lunch and increase the participation so you don't have like a giant flavor packet that you put in there oh that's bad that's all right then that's better perfect garlic and ginger when i walk out of the kitchen you want to stay clear i smile that sounds good i'm coming over thank you um all right uh do we have anything else on the uh agenda we we do we have one more item it's called other and if i can just take one moment um to address miss ham had asked about the grant list um and what that when we would have an estimate on

110the gran list so the i did reach out to mr jascott the finance director for the town he said we won't have an estimate until january however what he explained is that the average grand list growth is about 0.67 percent per year last year happened to be 1.52 so i did the math the the grand list last year was 2.84 billion dollars and if you take point six seven percent of that as an increase that would increase the grand list by about 19 19.4 million and then if you just run that out with the current mill rate of of 33 mil that would generate just the groundless growth at that 0.67 would generate about 640 000 of additional revenue um again those are just some numbers based on on you know that 0.67 if it

111holds true so january is when we'll get a better understanding faith of what the grand list is going to look like and you yeah i'm not i'm not trying to do and runs i just would love a more less contentious not contentious it just um just a a better strategy than just saying hey we're going to give you you know cost of living plus you know plus three percent or that's that was too arbitrary and just a more methodical approach to budgeting than just saying nah kind of thing you know if you know what i mean but that's cool so i did want to share that though um thank you you're welcome um uh then uh just so i guess on a quick question for the budget for next year are we going to be

112budgeting uh with the assumption that the uh the vaccine is working and everyone's vaccinated and we're sort of back to normal for next year or what what scenario are we uh looking to fund next year so when we put the request out to all the the department managers and the principals we asked them to budget as if there were no pandemic and then we'll budget separately for pandemic related costs you know which you know as we were looking at the finance report tonight you know we would add you know budget categories i'll call it kind of on the side because we'll probably know a lot more in january and then even more in april by the time the town council gets to weigh in on the budget then we will when we you know essentially

113present up a budget in january so we'll budget for cleaning sanitizing disinfecting you know ppe purchasing uh disinfecting supplies to supply for our staff you know we'll come up with a separate number broken down for that but um yeah so we're taking it kind of as non-pandemic plus we're going to set aside a separate set of numbers related to the pandemic things like student enrollment which drives the number of teachers in elementary those are going to be presented as normal we you know did get our initial nasdaq number so you know we're moving along pretty well with the budget process at this point in time you know all the department managers and principals have submitted their initial budget we have the new program request those have been reviewed with with dr solon and miss solano

114already so you know we're making progress we still have a ways to go to get you know our budget developed but that's the plan for how we will treat it we'll kind of bifurcate it okay thank you um are there any other questions from the committee no all right thank you last item on the agenda says adjournment i move my second all in favor okay thank you everyone appreciate it