001and meeting is being live streamed taped got it okay and uh terry you have uh let's see myself john yourself uh michelle luisa and kate are on board all right mr spang i will turn the meeting over to you sir please enlighten us um if i would like to wait uh for the superintendent but maybe in the meantime i could give an audit update just take a few minutes while we hey fair enough okay uh so uh last time we met i promised to get back to you with the results from our meeting with the auditors if you remember we had a very large uh document that we weren't sure how to proceed with we met with them uh there in a zoom meeting their preference was uh to take the data even in small
002tranches and so the next day we uh created um created that information in smaller parts ran it up through our advisor and loaded it into their portal for them to work with we did that for both the general fund the grants and in the meantime they withdrew their request if you remember they were looking for some sampling of paychecks they told us they didn't need to do that anymore they had tested that another way so the the 21 items we think are finished and then on may 18th they sent a list of six more new things that they wanted us to do so very routine matter of fact things i'm glad to share them with you later but on the 23rd i guess that was yesterday we completed all of those uh again ran them
003up through our advisor and they were dragged into the auditor's portal so right now we don't have anything we think we should be working on uh but we're not ready to be convinced there might not be something else so that's uh that's where things stand today all right but john at this point all data requested has been submitted yes and it's in their portal for them to look at correct thank you sir yep i i also sent a copy of the the last six things uh and our answers over to the city finance director david saint-hilaire just so he knew too that we think we've uh finished the list so far so that's that's the audit report okay do we have any questions for john members of the committee question for john okay hey teresa
004is this common uh for auditors to keep asking for more and more information um not really i you know they've changed field auditors um the person we had in the fall the one who actually came here um that's when all this would have been asked but they they've done a i'll call it a reset and um they're you know they use a checklist and they say did you get this did you xerox that and the new auditor is going through that to make sure everything's complete so normally we'd get these kind of questions but they'd be in september say october so you will expect this again in september then for this following year yes okay thank you okay we can't ask for more than that sir thank you for your diligence they say that everything
005it asks for has been submitted and we'll just wait till for the next move yep okay that eddie do i seen it yeah okay so what we thought we might do al to start it off is there are two um things we'd like to display on the screen i i'd like to see if i could just kind of set everyone on the same page before we talk in a little more specific so if it's sorry to you i'm going to ask eddie to display a page from the mayor's budget book this year um i don't know the page number but this um so this is what um you see it and i don't know if you can make that any bigger but you know as you recall the mayor's uh recommended budget goes to the
006ad hoc committee and then on what they do what they need to do and then uh their budget goes to the city council so you can see uh right here in the two most uh right-handed columns uh you see proposed by department there was our 152.4 million uh requests that's the one we adopted and then um right next to that you see the 141 million uh proposed by the mayor so i just thought it was good to to show that so you can see where the number is coming from the ad hoc committee um as they did a year ago voted to move the mayor's recommendation along to the full city council and uh in turn uh the city council um agreed to uh abide by the commit the recommendations of its committee and that's
007what was voted for uh earlier uh this month so that that's where it comes from um but um and so you can see the difference as i i mentioned in my memo it's uh 11.4 million dollars and uh what i'd like to say first is that um what kind of makes it what what exacerbates it for us is that the there were three there are three coronavirus relief grants the first one you'll all recall we called the cares act these days some people call it sr1 but it was over 2 million dollars and it's it's not being reauthorized uh and that grant initially was really to help us uh reopen schools uh safely uh with some of the un anticipated expenses from social distancing and uh you know uh plexiglas and cleaning and uh some
008of the staff though too that was needed just to to bring kids back but that that grant ends um next month so and i wonder if you just could put the other document up and i i wanted i thought it was important um just to bring this one back that uh those of you been on if you want to i think you went up to hyad but uh just show the title if you could ferment that's um what you had in front of you a year ago you can see june 8th of uh 2021 and um it was pretty good it was a good piece of work and what it did was it showed the grants and they were expiring and if you scroll up a little more you might recognize this chart here but
009it showed if you go down the column on the left side uh you can see there was the the city amount the what uh car reserves uh and then the grants coming in as well as the alliance and it added them all up and what the chart uh attempted to do and i think it did a good job of it although our situation has changed it said um you know without a significant increase from the city when these grants start to expire there's going to be a big uh deficit you see it um they called it a accumulated variance which really is the difference between what we would spend with the grants and what the city uh would give us and what we needed so you could see that the um the story was out
010there and we took we talked about it a lot a year ago that um we needed to do um we needed to get ready and i i from my my view what's happened is um when these discussions were going on not just here but everywhere i think most people thought uh last may or june that the pandemic was was ending uh that we would be going back to face to face we wouldn't have uh it lingering the way it has and um well we all know uh what's happened uh then but um and if you just scroll down a little more you can see that i go down to the next page what what happened when we voted uh that's the good page when we voted um a year ago uh what what this chart
011showed in and some of you remember it uh we tried to identify um what kinds of expenses would come out of what grants and you could see you you'll remember it um there were certain things that clearly um were easy to connect with one of the uh pandemic grants like our our move to um brookfield and st joe's to keep the kindergarten kids socially distanced that's in one of the columns as you go down uh but what we also did was um and i think it's at the very bottom um you know we needed a good we needed six percent uh we needed a six percent increase uh to keep things going and at the very end we just said well let's carry forward into the uh grants into sr3 uh the rest of the
012money to bring us up to uh the six percent and um that that's what was uh approved so what um i'd like to talk about today is uh a couple things one is that um you know not as the pandemic uh continued beyond what we thought that meant some on some expenses we didn't think we'd have last june a couple examples it became very difficult when school opened to get not only to fill our regular positions just many people left didn't want to come back um it was hard you you've you've heard all of this but it became very difficult uh to get substitute teachers so we had to uh we went with a service uh kelly services to help with that we also had to add um didn't have to we decided to provide
013more building subs those are sub teachers that come to the school every day not sure what they're going to be teaching but we know we'll need them so we we added some of those that we didn't have before and at the high school where we all know our enrollment has just been going up um we with classes we couldn't fill we either got teachers who had open periods to teach those we called those overloads if they had normally six periods to teach they'd teach a seventh or um we did what's called period coverage if a teacher just had a open period and we had a person out just for that day we'd have them cover it but all in all um it was a lot more expensive than we thought back in june uh just
014to keep our schools open so i i wanted to make that point because that meant uh we had to dip into the sr3 grant where there was money for these purposes but back in june uh we didn't think we'd be using it for that so um thanks eddie if you guys um or you folks want to look um at the memo i prepared if you you have that handy one of the things that um and others will speak better on this and i but um what we found is that the uh for almost all of our students pre-k through uh by being home for such a long time uh a third of the school year in 1920 being uh remote for the beginning of uh that the learning laws that everyone talks about has occurred
015and we're we're addressing um we think it's it's deep and it's going to take longer to uh bring everyone back to where they should have been we we think that's so important that we don't want to what we want to do is continue the programs and services we're offering and then i would say change our our three-year pro grant drawdown that you just saw into a two-year uh drawdown uh that we had and that's that's really the message that's in my memorandum uh i put a chart uh in there that it compares uh the figures you just saw i call that the june 9th uh plan and it shows it over three years uh compared to what uh we might do uh next which is a a two-year uh drawdown and and what that allows
016us to do is uh distribute uh the city council cut if those are the words and still rely on the coronavirus relief funds to address the learning loss and and some of the other things that are going on now um they're also uh it wouldn't be completely uh looking to our grants for another source of finance there's some things we think we can do that would not impact teaching and learning for example normally we have a number of people who retire or resign and when we replace them on the teachers salary scale of course we don't bring people in on the top step we'll bring them in at a lower step sometimes you just call that salary savings or the term breakage is out there but it happens every year we already have a number
017of people who've indicated they're going to leave or retire and we've been able to calculate what we think we'll save if we bring them at a typical replacement schedule and that figure is um it's close to a million dollars it's um we think we'll get 940 000 uh about uh just from replacing the typical number of staff that we replace every year and and after looking at who we uh we know will be leaving we also have a much better idea of our kindergarten enrollments you know registration's been underway and uh we know where those kids live and [Music] and we believe that we can reduce um some of not a total of nine elementary school sections not just kindergarten but other sections as well and save uh 550 000 not having those and staying
018within our class site guidelines so those two things uh having fewer sections and stand within the guidelines and also having the salary savings uh there's a million and a half dollars that we would suggest we use towards um distributing the reduction and then there's some other things we've talked about um it should be no surprise um this is a this is a difficult number and we're still looking at different ways it would have the least amount of um uh impact uh and it's it's it's really not easy to do so it's taking a little longer uh to do that um and then the other thing i i uh two things i'd mention one is uh we believe that if you remember when we put some new positions in the budget i think there were 31
019not mistaken but six of those were specifically identified for the high school largely to meet the graduation requirement the change is there but also because of the increasing enrollment we'd like to leave those in the budget as proposed and then finally i've written to the city finance director and asked him for ways that we can have reserves released there are 2.8 million dollars in what they're calling reserves they the city would like us to use those only in the event of an emergency uh something we haven't expected uh i'm asking if we can relax those requirements and apply that money now if if the answer is favorable uh we have a smaller number to deal with um so those are the um those are the key points uh kevin i don't know if you'd like
020to uh add in a little bit there or maybe where we are that kind of thing so john thank you for opening up and providing an overview for everyone good afternoon everyone and thanks for joining um us noon time for a committee meeting um terry someway somehow mr russo got out of the seven o'clock meeting today and i guess given his role on the committee we were able to do noon so i i appreciate it um so i i just want to share quickly and just kind of paraphrase everything that i heard john just say um one one i think i i heard context on our three-year budget and given three year budget last year and beginning to share the term um that i think we all became very familiar with and that's this idea
021of a cliff um and so the cliff meaning the federal relief monies that was coming into the district helped us to address the enrollment growth um over these last couple of years um what what perhaps has not been clear but we want to clarify is that we are using at this point um extra monies for either critical support services which is what the essa funds were allowed allowed for and then using now all of our alliance monies which technically was also provided for critical support services we have maximized alliance um all of our grants and i don't think the board is as aware um as perhaps as they have been this year but we can clarify if we need to um we have exhausted every grant available to the district uh we have staff um
022exhaust in every salaries and benefits line possible in a district this is the work that i've gone through with the people on this screen that you see and we feel confident not only have we maximized every budget line and salaries and wages uh we've also realized um potential savings for the board as well and maximize those as well so john spoke to the fact that we added positions for social distancing during the pandemic those are the teachers at the elementary school also at the high school level on the teachers that were hired at the high school level um unfortunately we were not able to release because we continue to get more students at the school and without additional revenue to cover those costs on those positions remain being funded by the additional monies from so
023ii and so3 in the elementary school we hired 10 or 11 visit we were budgeted for 14. we ended up hiring i believe it was 11 teach classroom teachers and so the statement john made we were able to reduce nine k elementary sections this year um again and so we're working really hard to try to find as many savings as possible for the board that was for a total of over close to 550 000 savings by reducing those sections at the kindergarten levels by strategy by a narrative we were allowed to keep them for the next two years we thought it was in the district's best interest to move on those positions now so we collapsed them through attrition we hired 11 to 14. i don't know the exact number classroom teachers specifically for the
024high school we were not able to collapse any of those positions um and this is because of the increased enrollment growth at the high school so we're still holding on those positions and the funding source right now is essa 2 and sn3 so just want to try to clarify those points the last um point i just want to reiterate that john had made and that's this is the potential um savings for the board and this is um typically about a million dollars um potentially in breakage and we will be working really hard to maximize these opportunities and that is when we have more seasoned teachers either retiring or resigning as a strategy we try to bring in early career teachers and we experience a breakage breakage of salary that is um so we have teachers
025leaving us on the higher end of the salary scale and we hire teachers on the lower end of the salary scale and that difference between every teacher that's hired um is the savings for the district and so we anticipate another nine hundred thousand dollars potentially from those savings and so we're we're budgeting um close to 1.15 million from those from those two strategies um and and feel good and confident about those two numbers um but but the reality is with the 4.1 million dollar increase from the city um you know we typically have a couple of budget drivers and guidelines annually in our budget um the guidelines and i you know talked about these um a number of times in my public conversations but i'll just repeat them now and the guidelines are really contractual
026obligations are always going to be number one um we have you know we have negotiated contract terms that we have to honor um enrollment growth is you know our district unlike some other districts we continue to grow um we enjoy an amazing um diversity here in the community but the diversity comes at a cost in terms of services and so our services that that are mandated that we have to provide certainly english language support for our students who qualify for those services and then our students who require special ed support and so the board is required to provide contract satisfied contractual obligations address enrollment growth and mandated services and these are the very basic kind of expectations and then in any budget i think we're also um it's going to be important for us for
027health and safety to make sure those guidelines are also in place and so because of that you know we have at the minimum i'm an advocate in every school i'm an advocate in every program and a nurse at every school and a nurse at every program and then of course there are other items like facilities food services and those contracted obligations as well given all of those kind of budgeting guidelines and i'm just trying to give you that backdrop we are anticipating uh next year in the year after when john was talking about essentially the three-year budgeting idea we could be looking at a similar ask next year plus a couple of extra million um and so the 8.7 this year uh was for the growth that we talked about um our hope was that
028we can start the the process of moving away from the federal funding now and continue to use those monies for the purpose in which it was intended which was to provide critical support critical student support to students the federal monies were not intended for enrollment growth and that's this is why our ask of 8.7 uh was was moved forward uh we are now in a position as i mentioned earlier for social distance purposes we hired the positions at the high school we hired the positions at the k5 level we hired a couple of positions at the middle school the only ones we were able to reduce this year um are the k5 positions um and so i'm i'm just really sharing with the board we we feel like number one i feel like i have
029an obligation to continue to provide as many services to students as possible through the um relief the relief grant um at the same time we're also in a position where um the enrollment growth that we have experienced these last couple years and project to continue to experience we are not through attrition able to reduce those sections at the high school in the middle school and because of that we will continue to move forward with the strategy that we had for essa 2 and essa3 and that is to keep those teachers in the 612 level um but it does just push us closer to the cliff which is what we opened what opened up with during the 21 20 20 20 21 school year um and so we will continue to partner and work with um
030the city in this regard uh and and try to educate them on our our respective needs um but but the needs continue to grow um in the 4.1 million although i am excited over the fact i mean i've been here for four years and it's the most money we've received from the city and i'm truly grateful for that um but to be clear our contractual obligations the four million covers the contractual obligations and that does not help us with the growth of students who come into district in which we need more teachers for in more staff form and so long story short i am recommending that we use the federal monies to essentially cover our cost for another year and come back and reevaluate again the team and i budget season you know starts in
031the fall we will start even earlier next year to make sure we have an opportunity to educate on the board and the community on our needs um and we'll try to strengthen our partnership with the city um to so that they further understand our needs as well kevin if i may yes sir just so if i have the numbers right we asked for 8.7 million the city gave us instead of 8.7 the city gave us an increase of 4.1 which left us with uh 4.6 in the hole and we have about a million five to recoup from uh breakage and collapsing a few sections which leaves us to about 3.1 mil is that correct sir yeah so so yeah i have an ass to get someone to take some of that out of the reserves
032am i also correct yes uh so there there are a couple of things there are a couple of things there so our technically our budget increase was 12.8 for this year in which we were asking the city for 8.7 right and then and so the reserves we had already included as a strategy to get toward the 12 million um and so in our budget request and i'm just looking um looking it up now let's see if i can share this so this is the way we presented to the community and the board so our ask was really 12.8 and i understand this is what we asked of the city our subtotal was 12.8 million that's what we said we needed for this year and part of that ask was the health insurance claims we saw
033as a significant budget driver as we had learned from our um as we had learned from our consultant and so our our strategy was to use the reserves which is what this asset is for because we anticipated um requests up to 3.2 new million dollars and again this is contributing to the 12.8 um some other new um dollars that we anticipated because of our enrollment growth um an increase in transportation of 1.5 but again we had planned to use our grants to spend down on our grants for that money because we're looking at the whole thing um special education increase six hundred thousand dollars again we were looking to tap our reserves for this strategy um this k5 literacy program alignment uh 1.3 over the next three years but again as a strategy we were
034looking to go to grants and so the the 87 is the number we were asking for from the city 12.8 million was our total ass all together and so that that's kind of you're seeing a big budget drivers here um so i just want to clarify it so the the gap really is the 12 million because what's happening is when people say well we can close the 8.7 gap by going to your health insurance oh and by the way you got an increase from alliance well we've included the increase from appliance from grants we've included the increase from the we've included you know our reserves as a strategy with health insurance claims so i just want to clarify some of those things our total ask is 12.8 with all the revenue that we have coming
035into this district and kevin if i if i could add an al i think the re the reason we put the reserves into this request and and netted it the way we did was because uh the previous june and what you saw the board adopted uh june 8th they adopted a spending plan that included the reserves from a year earlier so and that's what we were operating on the budget each month had those reserves in it so we said well we'll continue to do it again we knew they were close to 3 million and that was brought to you on february 2nd it was two weeks later that the city finance director pointed out i said well you can't be counting those reserves you you shouldn't have included them in your budget last june there
036for insurances you need to write a letter tell us something uh unpre unexpected happened and then we'll release it for that so um i remember we talked about the finance committee we did write a letter and we had the 2.4 uh released for for this year but they've been very clear um even more so than a year ago that that's not money that you should be using to plan your budget now that's what i've asked them to reconsider uh because they're they're sort of um i'd call them house rules uh they can change those if they'd like and that's what i'm hoping they'll do but that's why we thought when we did those budget drivers it was going to be the same as we thought in june right well the difference between 12.8 and the
0378.7 uh it's my feeling i mean correct if i'm wrong some of that the difference between those two numbers were from some necessary or wanted or needed improvements that we wanted to make to uh kevin had wanted to put into action for our district yeah there there were other budget drivers in there that um we called them different things uh initiatives improvements uh i think we had a couple pages called graduation requirements and meeting those there were some facilities yes they were close to four million dollars as i recall okay thank you committee any questions please teresa wait michelle good night good night i think you have kate with a hand raised okay um so a couple things john i just want to follow what what you're talking about about that 2.8 million that we
038carried over from the previous year and added to like our baseline starting point for this last budget cycle so that that 12 plus million ask did not include the 2.8 from the previous year right it was on top of um so john i just want to make sure i understand are we talking about the carry forward no i think the budget driver page so what we when we had 12 something million the way we brought that down to eight was uh what we thought would have been three million in um unexpended funds from the previous june i have it on the screen yeah so the difference between twelve eight and eight seven is two items one is what we thought was about three million dollars of unspent money from the 2021 year the reserves they
039it turned out they were 2.8 million but we uh thought about three at the time and then uh the other one million was we knew the alliance grant was going up from 17 million to 19 million we needed thought we'd need half of that just to pay for the contractual increases in the 17 million but we said you know there's another uh million that we haven't accounted for so we'll use that for some of these things so i eat a k5 literacy program alignment exactly that's here yep so you built the 2.8 that had previously been part of the established budget i i'm i'm just getting confused because i'm looking at your the summary here and maybe i misunderstood the situation to begin with so so bear with me here um the total new dollars
040that we were adding on top of the existing budget i thought was put on top of a budget number that included that 2.8 million from the previous year that came out of reserves yeah now they um kate i i just want to make sure i understand the question i'm going to take a shot at answering so when when considering our budget for next year we sat down with looking at these budget drivers that you see on your screen it added up to uh a subtotal of 12.8 million we knew what the other revenue that we have coming in and when i say revenue i'm talking about essa 2 s3 alliance title 1 all of those other grants that we have coming in plus plus the reserves right so even with we will still have those
041reserves next year and given given those reserves are in place specifically for this purpose as john had talked about that you know quoting dave and so if we experience an increase in health insurance claims as record as as as projected from our insurance consultant we would tap the reserves to help address those claims projected claims right so john said we didn't have 3.2 we have 2.8 in reserves and so our expectation is we would draw down on those reserves to pay this cost you know and so you see the two the two um asterisks for reserves and so that was our strategy we would pay the health insurance claims um particularly this increase that we projected to to experience with our reserves money also increase in special education of six hundred thousand dollars address that
042with if we have an increase in out-of-district placement we would address that with our monies that we had allocated previously but didn't it didn't expend them down because of the pandemic so once again we would go to our reserves for those for those monies so that's why you see those blue asterisks there the three point two and six hundred thousand dollars we have monies quote-unquote in the bank because we didn't spin them down during the pandemic so that's what the blue asterisks are for and then the 1.5 for transportation this is from enrollment growth the 1.3 uh for the reading program that you guys heard kara speak to speak about our intention was to pay for that with alliance money as john said we're anticipating two million dollar increase one million dollars will be eaten
043up because just for contract obligations folks will get step movement um yes we will get more money and we need it um and that's just to address the contractual obligations that we have uh because we we have a lot of teachers in in in that grant the other million dollars that we would experience an increase um the k5 literacy program would certainly be eligible uh to pay for that so that's why we have the other aspect of 1.3 so we saw these big these four big budget drivers to be handled by uh to be handled by the reserves and our grants however the remaining um we needed help from the city to help satisfy and that's that 8.7 number so that's what you see here um and that's the number that we're trying to work
044from now so maybe i'm asking this question incorrectly kevin um i just want to make sure that i understand when we looked at the budget summaries that came through to us the fiscal year 2021 sorry 2122 budget was listed at 139 million 139.5 million right and that included 2.8 or 2.4 i can't remember exactly of reserve funds the previous year um and then the budget asked that we asked for which was the the it was 12 million minus that those dollars so it was really 8.7 right um to bring us up to you know the ask we made of of the city the the the 2022 sorry the 22 23 budget ass that we made was 152 million which was that 12.8 million i see on the subtotal line right right so that to me
045if i'm looking at those numbers and you're telling me that we were going to pull you know dollars out of our our reserve funds and and from the alliance and and esser grants there um reduces that ass down to the 8.7 million so did we still ask the city for 12.8 even though on the sheet i think i understand what you're asking and i'm just gonna i'm just trying to determine because if we're started if we started from a number that was already higher than what the the city was operating from right and so the gap is even bigger than i'm thinking right so dave made this point dave st hillary made this point i'm sorry kate i didn't mean to take you on that bird walk i understand what you're asking now um and
046so dave st hiller actually made this point um because he said the district is not starting at 139 they're actually starting at 137 um and so he was correct in that regard um and you know with the new administration coming in here we didn't have that clarification and so it's really 8.7 plus the 2.2 million that's what you're saying and that's why john was saying we have an 11 million dollar gap right yeah okay and so everyone can see that okay thank you that's helpful and then the other the other question i have is like in terms of helping you know the city understand this and and perhaps other people who are watching these meetings or or um you know sort of following what's going on for us financially is it possible for us to
047come up with like a a list of specific services or or positions that are being funded currently through um grant specific situations i mean i understand like there are some limitations as far as how we're supposed to use those and perhaps we may not want to you know get into too many details but i also think there's some value in people understanding specifically what's going to happen when those dollars aren't there because i think part of the obstacle is we perform very well with the resources that we have which i think is you know to our credit um and to the credit of the administration and the the staff and our our district but um i'm i feel like there's maybe a gap in understanding because folks don't understand exactly what services or positions we're
048talking about losing yeah and so i i mean and some other folks make well everyone's processing your ask um i am happy because certainly we've had these discussions internally um but at the same time i don't want to scare my staff and have a mad exodus out of this district because people think they're losing their job um and so i i think we have i understand you know we may need to provide a shock for the system to say hey this is what we can be in danger of losing um but but while implementing that type of strategy i don't want to scare the very staff that i need in front of kids um you know in the hope that we will get to react the the the reaction that we need and i um
049and so i'd like some more discussion on that before we put names and positions um and and post them publicly anywhere okay thank you very much yeah and kate i understand the question because i've been access a couple of times now um but i i also want to be sensitive to the people who are here and taking care of their families and i don't want to implement a strategy again that we may not even implement or have to um and this backfires and we start losing people if folks start running out of you but i but but again i i do understand because i've been active i've been asked this question several different ways now yeah i certainly appreciate what you're saying though i think that's a good point to you know be sensitive to
050everybody who's involved in this thank you thank you teresa um so the 141 thousand dollar budget approved by the city council does not include the reserves correct correct okay because that's where i think we were stuck for last year's budget thinking we were going to use that those reserves and so now we're right now john is going to work on uh with the city finance people see if we can utilize that is that all we have in the reserves so no no there's close to and john this number might be different now but last time i looked it was like close to 10 million dollars and by the way teresa i'm happy that you asked that question because the the issue was not us being allowed to use the reserves the issue was the reserves
051actually counting toward our base because um and i don't want to speak for the city but if if our number if our base is 139 which it was not this year was actually then when they give us an increase the increase is coming from 137 at 139 um because they're just basically saying hey we're giving you back your own money from the previous year because of the pandemic and that they were just very careful that we didn't did not include that as our base which we did this year and then we had to um correct that so we they did as john was mentioning uh we did have to officially notify uh the city that we wanted to use those monies um and that is in motion so that we can draw down on them
052for this current school year but as a strategy we would like to do that again next year but again it will not be applied to our base so the 141 will still that base will remain but if we are allowed to use our reserves it will not impact the base it would basically just be hey we're gonna give you your money back from you know 1920 school year that you didn't draw down because of the pandemic here it is but this does not increase your 141 base and kevin i think it was uh the finance committee's i want to say october meeting might have been november we had a description from the city of the reserves they were i think seven or eight different categories um some of the big ones were specialized out of
053district placement right one of the other ones was technology food services with food services yeah so they really were in in two parts there was 2.4 million that was we had baked into our budget those were unspent funds from the 2019-20 school year and what the city did was they put those into three or four categories i believe on their own the ones kevin described so when we realized in february that we had to ask for that money we asked for it in those categories and we've drawn it down at the end of the 1920 year 2.8 million went up to replace that and from what i understand it's all in one general category but below that if you looked at their page there were three or four other designations one of them which had
054to do with health which has to do with health insurance involves what's called a corridor when you self-insure for health insurance you have to provide a reserve for this corridor that's an amount that's in between what you insure and when your stop loss kicks in if certain things go a wrong way you have that money to pay the bills there's some other very specific reserves i think one has to do with workers compensation maybe unemployment insurance when i looked at those other than the corridor i think those probably could be also released um but maybe what i could do out this afternoon is i could send that sheet around that we talked about at our meeting and you could see for yourself what they were setting aside that helps thank you john eddie mr wilson
055any additional items on our agenda for today i think michelle has a question just a quick one you were saying that with the retirements that we were gonna possibly save somewhere around a million dollars how many how many uh teachers or pensions whatever does that signify like how many teachers would that represent right right now we're about we're anticipating 40 to 45 staff members retiring or resigning that's and historically that's kind of been our sweet spot um john i'm sorry i cut you off i was just thinking kim is here too and she may have her list right so as of 10 o'clock this morning we're at 49 and that you're saying is typical um yeah it is i mean it's really hard michelle to tell what's typical because of covid so last year two
056years ago we had a lot of retiring teachers because they just were not wanting to come back this year we're seeing more of kind of flight because the job market is so liquid for teachers right now there's lots of jobs out there so it's really i don't really have a beat on it right now 49 is right where we always are but we still got another you know four weeks left sure and so are we looking because i know that we typically say that we're looking to hire at least about 100 new teachers does that include this 40 or would it be like 104 okay and then my other classes my other question is regarding the enrollment because i know we had been talking about that since i got on the board um i guess
057we were talking about somewhere around 300 what is our our current unexpected enrollment as of the beginning of the school year no i'll need it i'll need a minute to look that up um but if we keep talking i can look up see if we can find the latest numbers great hi michelle any numbers would need to include um after october 1st um until really september for next year right now we're at about 12 300 and change so that growth because i think we had spoken it was is that like five or six hundred students i'm looking for the actual number that we didn't anticipate and so for the following years we're talking about students coming in and out after they register after the school year begins what kind of numbers are we looking at
058this current year and anticipating for the following for the next year as part of all these calculations right i i could look up an updated projection for you um as you know we've blown all our projections to date so we're we're kind of shooting from the hip on a lot of these guesstimations at this point so we'll look at you know what's coming in what the new kindergarten enrollments are and kind of take our best best estimate but we do have the numbers for this year we should have a solid number for that right yeah that's that 12 300 something number that i was uh that i just said um and it you know it fluctuates day to day where do we start i guess i'm looking for a start and a finish number for
059the year yeah i don't have the start number for you i'm sorry i could look it up though great that'd be great thank you so much eddie the state demographers which are always below the curve on us where do they put us um i think they had us not hitting 12 300 for about a year and a half two years out so um we're we're well ahead of schedule all right yeah and without the state demographers where else will we get our number or projections from that's it i mean we will you know we'll make our own estimates based on you know what we see coming in but you know the demographers that's the rule then we just have to see what the registration numbers look like and and make the accommodations accordingly i'm looking
060for my crystal ball thank you if you find it let me uh let me know i could borrow it i'm willing to share thank you ladies and gentlemen any additional questions so mr russo i i do have a number for you um i i don't have that stuff readily available on my watch here but i have 2021 our state reported october 1st collection was eleven thousand eight hundred and thirty four in twenty one twenty two the october first um collection was eleven thousand eight hundred and forty three right and so that was our number submitted for this year in october 11 843. after october 1st we were already up to 12 06 on january 28 2022 we are over 12 300 today how much over today today we're um mike said we're we're over 12
061300. so twelve thousand three hundred and counting so what at one twenty eight we were twelve six on one twenty eight but that's not the state reported number nor had we budgeted for that we budgeted for eleven 11 843 those that was our october first state submission so if you look publicly at our data that's the number you will see since that number was submitted on october 1st at the beginning of this school year we have grown by over 500 kids thank you sir thank you so may i ask another question what are we budgeting at for for this year as far as the number what is the new number that we're going to be looking to get funding on obviously this year you said it was 11.84 so is it going to be this
06212003 or we anticipating or are we even allowed to do that anticipate an additional 400 enrollment or is it just based on the number we have right so at the end of the school year our budget always include it's not just projections with contractual obligations but also projections that we typically experience on throughout the year um so we're you know we find ourselves always playing catch up anyway um i right now i'll be happy to just get budgeted for the numbers we have currently um but if michelle i feel pretty confident if we got the numbers from the city for the projections for the high school and middle school growth that would position us well for 22-23 um i'm talking about the project the budget in terms of what we budgeted for our budget accounted
063for where we were now and leaving space for that typical growth that we always experienced nice teresa so you're uh basically basing it on the 12 300 uh school population then yes right because during the budget season we were already over 12 000 you know it was january we were at 12 000 in january um and we will always i shouldn't say always you know hopefully one day we will not continue to grow um at this at the same rate uh but when we budget it's addressing our needs now with a little bit of space that we just always experience in the spring in the summer thank you did you say increase or decrease for the spring and summer we always get increases in the spring this summer increase and the fall in the winter
064it's like a couple of different cycles we get to we experience every year anyone else john anything additional sir no thank you eddie oh thank you all right one more if you don't mind sorry um somebody had mentioned that there was an additional expense for second language learning do we have an idea per student what that amount is is an additional expense for english language learners so wow i'm not sure the question michelle when you say per student what do you ask them yeah so there was a uh i believe john had mentioned something about additional funds that were needed for the second language learners is that only in staff or is that per student that it's calculated how does that number how do you get that number if i may um in our budget
065book uh one of the three or four improvements was to add staff for english language learners i forget the number we were requesting but it was uh just the staff um nothing else other than that okay thank you and and michelle not not exactly the same way as students who have an iep uh but but students do have the quali the students do have to take an assessment and if they meet certain requirements um they then become eligible for services if the families accept those services we have to provide english language learner support for those families um the enrollment increases that we are experiencing are a lot of students who require these services and so i believe we had six or seven positions esl teachers or by and all bilingual teachers because a lot of
066our students that came in this year were middle school middle school and high school students this year and so that's why in a budget driver worksheet i'm sorry in the budget worksheet it was positioned at that level to support that growth okay great thank you appreciate that welcome anyone else mr walston because there's no audition do you have a summary swirl thank you mr russo thank you so much so i'll i will just end on um i i think the best summer i could provide is is that um the team and i you know we've struggled over this for um a number of hours um and feel like it's best to use and continue to use the relief monies to provide these critical student support services that we have in place post pandemic we understand
067fully that these positions these monies uh will not be here long um and as a district we will have to make some tough decisions uh moving forward um at the same time we are continuing to experience enrollment growth during the pandemic we hired additional staff for the purpose of social distancing some of those positions were able to save the board monies and i i think we had quoted um quote um a little over a half million dollars but a lot of the other positions that we hired office for the purpose of social distancing and seo support because of enrollment growth we are not able to uh through attrition uh remove those positions at this time and so um the cliff that we talked about going into the 21 22 school year uh we are approaching
068that cliff i i think we all have a responsibility while we're in possession of these federal monies to continue to provide services for kids but unlike other districts in the state of connecticut we continue to experience enrollment and we're going to need monies to close that gap i i apologize to interrupt um i just got a text from louisa whose connection is not so great but she was asking how is how is this budget going to affect uh the development of the career academy um it will just exacerbate our um our challenges and so i i mean obviously we are far apart right now with city in terms of the monies that we need from local monies that we need and there will be greater needs once we open up the academy certainly some positions
069some teachers will be able to slide over to the academy but we will need school leaders there we will need secretaries we will need custodians we need food services we need all of the contractual services that you need to open up for school and then we will need positions at that school as well not to mention and i think we all forget we have a middle school that's also opening there there are no positions to pull from rogers park or broadview we will actually have to staff a school of 350 those will all be brand new positions um in the meantime we will continue to experience enrollment growth uh we will continue to have to pay our salaries and wages and meet those contractual obligations um and so that's my long way of saying it's
070just going to exacerbate the challenges that we've been talking about okay thank you so much mr wilson absolutely one final comment mr wilson if i may yes question the city is aware of our needs for the cred the academy correct um they are learning they are learning yes in our in our um breakout meetings you know we've started those discussions and and when i say discussions it's more of a dialogue like this versus presentation and you know then the meeting ends um so there's more opportunity for a dialogue and i believe we are meeting again in june um i think we're suspending the meetings over the summer but we will be picking back up again um in the fall thank you very much sir thank you so because i can't see you i can't recognize
071you do you have anything further michelle no teresa i'm good thank you i'm wondering um you know the term you know built that they will come if we get a new school will we be inundated more with students i mean if if we do the good job we are anticipating um i would move here [Laughter] right right and and our assistant superintendent just said and home values will go up even more [Music] anyone else louis psych if you're here please comment if you wish anyone else all right i i'd like to hear a motion to close the meeting motion to adjourn thank you a second maiden second thank you all thank you all for your participation