001spanx for them to enlighten us and then if we have any questions you know we'll start there thank you thank you mr ginelli thank you board members uh for joining us this evening so so one i i just want to start out uh by one i'm introducing michelle sanford to the meeting this evening she's in charge of grants uh for the district um it has been an intriguing part particularly not only to transition but just helping us manage uh manage through the various grants that come monies that come through the district um and it has been very invaluable to us particularly during this transition so i want to thank her for her presence this evening and then of course we have um eddie miranda of course our new deputy of finance and of course our
002chief financial officer mr john spang let me just start off by one thank everyone for joining us again this evening um i wanted it was very important for me um to have a process in place in which we start to review the monthly financials prior to the board meeting and so mr j i just want to thank you number one for getting us together and kind of understanding my perspective and just kind of given the last couple of months and how the school year ended and with all the various commitments and concerns that we had about the school budget for the 21 22 school year um i thought it was important that we have kind of a a monthly discussion before we asked the board to approve um approve the financials for the month so
003john and ed are going to take us through walk us through an exercise i know he um opened with a memo and then of course associated with the memo is also the monthly financials um this will bring us up to date with our monthly financials from here in terms of a process and if there are no questions i'll ask john to step in and start to walk us through nope i just want to thank you for the you know organizing this so that it does become more of a discipline and we as board members know what to expect you know historically in the past we've had these meetings you know sort of held the skelter whenever it was convenient or stuff like that but i think and as i mentioned the last meeting a regimentation
004or schedule of these meetings are very important so people know to block that out on that calendar and so i thank you for doing that well i i hope you and kathy both enjoy it so much that you'll continue to come back after november yep we're ready for you mr spang i know that's tongue-in-cheek no no that is this is genuine we're we're in a we're on the second page not the third page of the ballot you know [Laughter] they call that we're the right ends yeah right yeah do they call that down ballot there's a name for that right something like that has been that's what they call it [Laughter] oh thank you um so uh let me just uh kind of explain how how i i look at it uh this time of
005year and and see if we wanna what we might want to adjust for next month but um generally the first month or two um certainly the first month uh what i what i try and this is the first month of the school year that we're talking about and what i try to do is uh point out uh what might have changed from uh the budget that you adopted but from a perspective of uh what type of programs and services did we expect to start up and put in place and um are they are they going or did it happen and that kind of thing um and then as as the months go on uh more of a comparison to where our original budget estimates uh high or low or where were they and then as
006we get you know probably into uh december january start to project uh what we think uh things will be come june 30th it's really um you know we've had maybe 20 or 25 days of school out of 180 there's there's not a whole lot you can say about what's going to happen by june so a couple of things i point out there in the beginning we start we opened in in late august with 11 800 students you heard that all about that at our regular board meeting uh a couple weeks ago um there's some additional students um in the registration pipeline i won't get into that uh but the total is expected to be over over uh 12 000 students which is you know an increase of course compared to what we've had and i
007also think it's good as we start these meetings to talk about our our budget how how big it is so to speak so i mentioned there in the second paragraph and i i think the uh the night you adopted the budget uh june 8th as is important and i i think it it needs to be pointed out uh that we um we expected our budget to go up about four percent uh after all the um the trimming and and reductions were made just our our current program uh from last year to this year um and we assign we had 2.4 million of additional fund funds come from the city and that became part of our general fund budget so the general fund budget that we'll be comparing to is 139 uh 0.5 million dollars you'll
008you'll see it there but there was also an additional 2.2 million that was assigned to the arp or the sr3 grant you'll see if you maybe next month i'll pull out the spreadsheet again and i think at the time we weren't quite sure what all the uses could be for the sr3 grant no one knew at the time um it looked to be as if there'd be quite a bit of flexibility there so i think we just have to keep our eye on that as as we go through the next couple months to remember that some of our operating increase was was put there about 1.6 of the increase was parked over there as we started the year of course everybody is all the students are back and the term you'll hear people use is
009face-to-face kind of a funny term to use but compared to a year ago that was not the case so it's going to be it's hard to compare the spending this year with last year because it was just apples and oranges i think as the year goes on at least the next few months you'll see me compare it to uh two years ago when september october and november were somewhat similar before ever covett gripped and and we went with the shutdown but um again comparing it to last year uh is going to be um we have to be careful what we do there uh but uh i so what what uh what i like to do early is if something changed uh compared to what you thought was going to happen i i like to point
010it out and um one of the big changes it's a favorable change is at the high school we have returned some of the tents uh that we had there originally we thought we'd be spending 720 000 over the year for tents and uh we're gonna uh right now they're just three tenths there and we think for the rest of the year project uh and and dan donovan wants to keep from there for different uh purposes but we think at the end of the year uh that expense will be closer to 400 000 so there's a 320 000 uh favorable uh savings there and then the other thing that's that's just it's different compared to other years of course is the uh danbury primary center in brookfield so i thought it'd be good just to mention
011that again we think the total cost for that could be in the vicinity of 1.7 million dollars there was a couple hundred thousand dollars almost uh that we needed just to get started there yes uh we would have had those kindergarten teachers elsewhere but there's additional busing that goes along with this i know you know that um extra administration and some of the support teachers that go along with with any school we had to put some smart boards in the classrooms and some some technology that really couldn't come from the ascending schools so i thought it's just good to point that out because uh that's different from what uh we had a year ago and then the other uh thing i think worth pointing out we were just uh talking about this when the meeting
012started um is uh school lunch and uh the cost of food uh we had uh sodexo in uh last week uh to talk about uh a number of things uh one of the things i said to them was if if there's any uh changes in the program whether it's lower participation higher participation food costs higher whatever it is i said we we need to hear that every month as as we go along so we can certainly report it to you and and to the board um if there's a story and i i don't know that there will be we don't want to know about it come springtime we want to know about now i i asked them also um to talk about the price of food what they're seeing they didn't seem uh as concerned
013as i was uh with their costs um they you know they as we were talking they have a lot of large bids and large purchasing that they do um so maybe that's um that's enough but um i still think it's it's good to ask them uh to what's going on so um maybe we'll hear some more about that one way or another we're we're gonna watch it very closely of course as it goes on but i think the message is tonight is that all the other programs and services that you planned on are underway in place we we don't see any uh significant budget variations uh right now so um other than what i mentioned um it's uh we're off and running so happy to answer any questions sure i'd like to start off nobody
014oh go ahead kate john i just had a quick question um can you remind me the approximate cost uh for the year for a bus you know i i don't know it exactly but i i think it's upwards of seventy thousand dollars from that vicinity okay and that includes like the the staffing the fueling and everything right it does okay it does all right thank you so much and i'd like to say yep al uh thank you rich john could could you provide me with a rough estimate of the number of students we serve with free lunch and the percentage of our students that are on that program right um i can i will get you that figure i can say this tonight it's it's a couple things and boy is that a program uh
015that has been uh evolving and changing uh once a pandemic hit but when students first came back here and elsewhere last year at first uh participation was very very was much lower i think parents uh were a little leery of um what we were serving was it safe was it a place you know what more students were bringing their lunches uh than had previously before the shutdown but boy has that changed what we know so far as participation uh in september is way up uh which is a good thing um and it's not just up here it's elsewhere part of that is because using state federal and state funds uh everybody this year uh eats for free whether they're eligible uh for free and reduced or not and the state reimburses us uh so much
016uh for lunch and so much uh for breakfast so when it's you know it's free uh there's more people that do it plus we have a good program so we can um we could probably get you the number of people that are um uh getting their lunch every day at school and not bringing their lunch but they no longer have to fill out the applications that they used to with their income when told them whether they were free or reduced uh we know that's going to go on for the rest of this year there's a lot of talk about how do we go back next year and what happens but it's um business is good over there kevin is there anything that you know about the um school lunch enrollment yeah so so john while
017you were talking um i actually looked up in our e-grant system and if i calculated this correctly it looks like a little over a little over half of our students are eligible based on the state's algorithm for k-12 low-income count and so in our public schools it looks like 60 a little over 6 300 students are eligible under this under this algorithm but i i don't want to say that that's that's definite i think i'd need this information from janet to come to confirm these numbers but but just kind of based on the information we have on the state um to help determine title one eligibility i have a little over 6 300 students who are eligible under the k12 low income count okay you know historically for some reason a number like 68 percent
018i remember looking at last year i don't know whether that was just the part of the ecs formula coming out for the the free and reduced lunch uh but uh it's interesting to know that it's open to everybody at this point so it makes no difference of what the percentage is you know we're calculated at i want to backtrack michelle i just want to welcome you i know you've got a very difficult job these grants which include the essa money so complicated um my biggest concern is that just to make sure we don't miss a window to utilize the funds before the time runs out yes we definitely don't want to do that and if you can and to everybody if there's a way that we can develop more reporting uh on grants i know
019our grant budget is is large um forgetting the esser but generally it's in the 35 maybe uh million million dollars we never really focused on any of the the the grants in detail we had conversations more in depth on on the uh uh the the alliance grant which is part of that but it would be good to start bringing forth some analysis is what these grants are what they mean um an interesting study would be in title one money it's been my impression that our increase since i've been on the board of title one funds has been nominal versus the number of schools that are now title one schools from when i first came onto the board so more information on that that we haven't previously had i i think is always good and enlightening
020so that it's an education not only to the administration but also to the you know to to the board and john to your point in making comparisons yeah to compare it to the last two covered years is irrelevant because they were really an anomaly and and so any kind of comparisons you know that should be done should be done to quote whatever we define now as a normal you know a normal year uh my concern is the big ticket items of what we refer to sometimes as needle movers you know basically um the health insurance you know last year we had conversations last week about the the contribution to the reserve was due to the the the health the health insurance the lack of expenditures on it due to covert are are we seeing or
021are you able to see an uptrend this year to a point where you know that decrease that we had in the prior two years would start to pick up and get to a more of a normal situation excuse me people go out and get their regular checkups etc but not to a point where it becomes greater than what we budgeted i mean i know it's only three months into the year but that that would be my concern as a you know it's a watch item yeah um it's an excellent idea if i i was um thinking about that uh just today you know we use a company gallagher uh they're kind of a combination consultant broker um most towns and schools do the same thing um when it gets to be close to budget time
022they do that for us they look at the claims per month and they project and recommend the premium uh but it to your point uh rich it's been such an unusual time i was thinking of asking them to do that now in addition they just there's no extra cost to us for having them do some analysis but go over uh go in look at the claims uh what does it tell them and of course what would that mean for us um i i don't think it hurts to ask and and i i think there's so much uncertainty um it would be good to do so yeah i think that's a good idea the you know the claims you don't know it's it's it's sort of like a crap shoot because it is just based on
023what comes in and what you get hit and the timing too you're getting hit with expenses that may have had for a a situation for an occurrence of a couple of weeks you know a couple of months ago sometimes depending how fast that particular provider processes their paperwork so again i think the the consultant would be good just to keep you on on track as to you know where it's heading so that we're pretty safe with the budget you know with the budget numbers yeah and it's an excellent point and um this is what they do you know so they they look at it um they they'll see things that probably we don't um let's use their expertise why not so john i i recall when we met with the city you speak into how
024important it was to invite the consultant in at this point just strategically this would be beneficial to the district but can you also remind the board about our strategy around putting money in the reserves for the questions and concerns mr j just also just raised yeah yeah um so what the uh what that that's that's about is if remember we looked at the reserves um uh two weeks ago or the last time we met and of the 10 million you probably could say one way or another uh at least half of that was for health insurance kind of reasons and what the city felt and i i agree with them uh that there was um during covid there were so many uh elective surgeries um that maybe that's an oxymoron two elective surgery but that
025were put off for a lot of reasons we all heard about that read about that they feel there might be a pent-up demand there that will might artificially increase our claim experience in the next eight to ten months and that rather than trying to dig into uh premiums or or some other reserves that you need uh for kind of things that this this money that they've set aside would be a good way to smooth that expense that's kind of a one-time expense when you think about it if the money came from lines where it was supposed to pay for surgery so it was a term like a knee surgery and it didn't but next year it will as a person goes in and has it then why not match that money with what it was
026for so the logic i think is there but we'll have to see what the claims look like okay and one other point is uh and kevin this is to you the the tense the use of the tense are they i think one of the board meetings or conversations that he had you were indicating that because of the the the large capacity and the safety issue of the tents you were thinking perhaps not to use those as an eating facility but then to do something some variations to spread out the the so-called cafeteria because of the complications of the winter and having all these kids in into the tent so are they still going to use the tents for part of the food serving issues or is that completely out and it's going to be used
027for something else so so the high school has asked to keep a couple of tents uh because their their thought is kids are gonna still continue to want to access outside seating no matter how cold it gets um and and and so as long as the tents are safe um and we don't have to worry about wind or snow um you know i'm happy to oblige and you know to allow students to go outside and have a space to to sit we've also ordered a couple of extra round table like benches so we don't have to use classroom furniture when the weather permits um in the spring hopefully you know this will not be an ongoing issue and and pour over into the next school year but they do use some of these savings to
028purchase some benches for outside seating so that again we don't have to use classroom furniture out there uh but that but that's that that's the idea um mr j and the idea is to just have a couple of tents left over for any outside activities and for students who want a nice day still want to go outside they'll at least have a covered space but then inside the building we will be using one of the gyms in addition to the cafeteria to spread kids out within inside of danbury high school okay and one other question would be on staffing particularly substitutes and then our regular staffing are are we experiencing a [Music] shortage i guess the best word i can say are we experiencing a shortage in these areas of staffing which are you know
029giving us a favorable you know variance going on but i mean operationally it'll also hinder the operation of teaching is that how i guess my question is going to be then how is your staffing issue regarding of teachers and and uh substitute teachers this year so far um unfortunately it has been a challenge for us and we are pricing a number of different agencies now uh to address not only our substitute teaching challenge but also the same foot powers paraprofessionals and tutors as well these are three areas that have been shortages that are um not allowing us to address uh services for students across the district and then of course when there's a substitute if we have a substitute teacher shortage you know that begins a domino impact within our respective buildings because we have
030a supervision issue and then we start pulling staff from different places to plug the substitute um hole if you will so one of the things um john and kim have been looking looking into on the district's behalf is pricing out the cost of temp agencies for this purpose my hope is is that we can solidify some of these shortage areas with the temp agency it could be a good way to plug personnel challenges because we're not required or committed you know beyond the one or two year contract and so we don't have to worry about the financial cliff with those spaces there is a markup of course for those positions where as an example the substitute teacher may cost us 100 110 um if we go through the agency it could be a markup of
03125 to 30 extra per substitute teacher so certainly it would come as an additional cost but given our challenges and kind of where we are here in almost november um i think it's i think it's worth seeking and seeing if this is a possible solution for us um and then of course unfortunately we have some other um challenges with staffing as well because of shortage areas um in esl and now bilingual staffing um and so you know and and then um there are new students who have come in the district um has been concentrated mostly in our middle school and high school dan in the high school has gotten over 200 students um since late since september and you know i know the magic number for our budget budgeting is october 1st but we kind
032of smiled at john today when talking about the october 1 numbers and you know we still have another 200 plus students in the queue in registration because you know they continue to slowly continue to just register in a school district so you know that's that's also a reality but we are finding this tight this year um particularly in these last couple of months the high school numbers are continuing to increase could you say whether the shortage in substitutes is is due to less people participating or wanting to to work or is it uh or maybe it's a combination of a competitive rate that we're paying with uh other districts i know in the past we've gotten creative and and not so much creative but we've gotten creative in terms of long-term subs giving them some
033benefits uh or incentives to to make a commitment to stay you know and on a regular substitutes i think we went from a lower rate to i want to say 90 to 95 dollars to maybe something a little higher i don't call the exact numbers but is there any one obstacle or is that a combination of those two plus more that's creating this problem right and i'm not sure all of the challenges um i can tell you um we don't have as many folks in the pool this year you know despite our recruitment efforts um despite the people the numbers in the pool that we've had years previously we do not have the same numbers um and folks even just available to subs as we've had in previous years okay and this is safe i'm
034sorry let me finish i'm sorry my last question would the agency is this a type of agency that specializes in in substitutes where they would do the background checks for you yes yes they would they would yes okay all right thank you okay go ahead sorry uh no problem um mr wilson i just wanted to kind of follow up on that uh you know in terms of hiring a staffing company what costs are there to us would we only see fees if we actually get hires um i i will ask john for a little help on that um we we actually just received a proposal from two different companies which has been 300 plus pages from both organizations um so i i went straight to the second to last page to look at the price
035which is the part that i quoted about the markup per sub but i'm not aware of the entire commitment um in terms of is this a one year or two year commitment um the things i'm most interested in kate is you know what is the cost per sub plus one and then two if they're with us for a year and then we want to fold them into our operations does that come at an additional cost um so those are some things i'm trying to get clarification on now but john may have some answers to those other questions it usually um it's really just uh price per day per sub for the um positions they fill um there's a half day uh option in there you can again for their half day or full day and
036as kevin pointed out there's a mark-up for the company expenses um generally there's not a penalty for hiring people later after the year but we'll make sure of that so and again they're they're they're companies that that specialize in this and are in you know other districts around us yeah and and that was kind of where i was going you know if there are not a lot of additional costs involved here if we're just looking at that additional you know that that markup um this might be a very viable solution for us because i know other districts are really having the same struggle so um they they gained uh popularity uh from the affordable care act when when employers found that um if people had worked for a certain period of time can continuously they
037might have to offer them health insurance coverage under the affordable care act so [Music] schools towns et cetera they just they'd rather move that liability onto a contractor than have to keep it themselves so they've last couple years they've grown also kate when you look at the differential you know what they're charging it also decreases our labor to you know our participation thinking of kim and her staff you know have to deal with this the amount of time they have to spend you know on this stuff on a daily basis to to to do all that work you know the small differential when you include our cost in it versus the the actual differential of what they're charging to me you know sometimes it's nominal and you pick up all the efficiencies in in the
038personnel department or the hr department that they can do on you know getting their job done instead of wasting a lot of their time on a specific crisis to put out the fire yeah i tend to agree with you rich and and you know but the other thought i have in the back of my head of course is if we're willing to mark this up to pay somebody else to find subs uh would we be better off perhaps making our sub price more competitive but i understand that could have repercussions for uh other contracts that were we're operating so you know there could be other offsetting savings too i i think doing this way through an outside agency they're not on your payroll and so it's it's something that john and eduardo and kevin will
039assess but you know i always look at things in terms of the loss of the manpower that we're doing taken away from truly what our objective is at the end of the day which is to educate and keep this district moving you know rather than spend a good part of our efforts in putting out these fires so this sort of cost and reward basis um are there any other questions you know generally you know before i i don't want to conclude too quickly but the the conversations building around the first three months of financials as john said it's i don't want to say meaningless it's good to have but i think when you get to a six-month point of view it gives you a better not so much a trend line but a better feel
040for where you're going and then you could have a better assessment is to make adjustments you know going going forward unless you see something really that's an anomaly in the first couple of three months that you know really becomes a watchdog item so to say but uh other than that if the more that you come out with and and clean up i say clean up in a positive sense i don't mean any derogatory thing that was done in the past but you know make easier the presentations so that the board and the public understands them you know my feeling is you'll have more participation uh in in your meetings uh that would be perhaps more productive because it gets down to the layman understand what you're talking about and and uh and again that the
041looking at those 100 line numbers on a financial report it is horrendous i mean that you know whoever designed that report has got to be nuts but you know as i said last time if you could focus in on on keeping it cleaner so that when you submit it you know it has some meaning and as i mentioned i think it was eduardo today at least on a heading if you could have another line put in there so it indicates what period of time we're talking about because lots of times i've had to go back and look at financials and they weren't labeled on the top as to the three-month ending or the six-month ending it was five-month ending so i had to go back and look at the board minutes that the attachments was
042there to determine what period i'm looking for so at the very least in a heading if you could indicate what period of time that that would certainly be you know be a helpful and then work with the provider if they can clean that thing up so that when you do show it to to board members you know you don't really lose them because they tend to think people get lost in all that array of of numbers uh even to try to recap it to your summary uh that you give and i like your summary and i like your your top level summary is to the high points i think that's good and you know those good starting points so we're off to a good you know i think you're off to a good start thank
043you hey i think kate had a question i i did have one more question um thank you thank you mr wilston um i just wanted to talk really quickly about the esser funds because i know that um you know per year for your cover letter here that you know 2.25 million is coming from the sr3 grant that came through so can i just get a sense of for the sr2 funds um are those spent at this point and that's done or is that because i know that that's also a multi-year grant so i just want to get a sense of sort of how that's fitting in as well kevin do you want me to answer that or would you yes i i think both of us can and i i will just start with um
044kate we we made some we we made a three-year commitment with the essa funds some of those some of that funding included a project manager for before the high school that was actually to be paid out of sr2 interventionist and paris support throughout our schools i think we budgeted for almost 18 paris across the district curriculum so and then we also budgeted curriculum development eel achieve expansion for el program and that that was not a big number it was like fifty thousand dollars um you know between the two um but then also el achieve which is you know new curriculum um that was 125 000 and then we also budgeted over three hundred thousand dollars for i'm sorry the 350 000 was for eel achieve um and so that that was a size sizable budget
045items under curriculum but then we also had the family liaison family liaisons a number of them um committed in s or two parents squared the paying apparent square and getting that up and running um at fifty one thousand dollars so um the answer to your question the answer is no uh the monies are not um done um but a lot of the commitments that we made were kind of um training or curriculum updates orton gillingham was 150 000 um psyop training uh for staff was 140 illustrative math training which is a new math curriculum that we're bringing into the district was 14 and 12 000 respectfully um and then we had some some um the classrooms and this is when i say the classrooms this is for part of the rental i believe this is
046for brookfield adding classrooms of facility rental we have over 700 000 commitments that we made and the buses um we i it looks like we paid for our buses that was over for the 10 additional buses that was over 700 000 commitment as well and so in terms of it being done uh i would say it's not done the commitment is but we have committed those dollars over the next few years um we've i i think in between all of those items there may be an opportunity for some savings in between some of those budget lines um but this group might recall some of the commitments we made in those presentations uh around essa ii um in the first year and then s3 in the second year so three in the second year was the
047one where we did the big community engagement sessions we were getting feedback from the community plus the staff on to inform that last plan but i i just thought i'd take that opportunity to just kind of refresh everyone's refresh everyone about some of the commitments that we made and uh john before you jump in i i heard mr jannelli uh speak to earlier you know maybe we can have some type of presentation or update on um some of the grants and and i think it would be important for us you know kind of separate from our operating budget to share maybe a bi-annual at the very least update on cares esser2 and so3 just to give the school community an idea of how these monies you know just remind everyone number one how we committed
048these monies um to um you know our progress or lack thereof just in terms of what has been spent down and not spent down i think there's going to be a need for us to repurpose some of these dollars very soon so for example the board might recall the commitment um you know the commitment will be made to the tents for the high school as an example um and and now you know you just heard from john officially that you know there's you know potentially an over 300 000 savings from the high schools there's an opportunity to repurpose those monies and invest back um into our schools so i think we're going to find that along the way that's going to happen throughout and i think a biannual at the very least update i think
049would be appropriate thank you kevin i think that's very important because it's a lot of money that we're starting to see and as i said before historically when we talked about france it was talked in just global total numbers and we were focusing more recently on the alliance part of the grant but there were so many there were so many different grants we have and people are not i say people board members no i'm not really aware of what the grant means or what it provides to us you know other than it's in the combination of a total of x number of dollars that the board of ed receives his grant so you know that's another area where you can pursue and and again bring that to light um is to more of an educational
050process for the for the board as well as interested participants are there any other questions that uh any of the committee members have okay mr russo just a thought i want to thank for uh saving us 300 000 tense great idea utilizing uh gymnasiums spread things out a little bit that still leaves 400 000. i was wondering are there any other strategies social emotional mitigation we could use to eliminate those tents and put additional part of that covered 400 thousand dollars to use elsewhere yes well well well hopefully um hopefully we won't need the tents at all and you know maybe by the spring um the covet people and all who are in charge of making these kind of recommendations will say it's okay and we don't have to worry about social distancing and that
051would be the easiest way to save the monies for sure um we're any as everyone on this call knows we're in a unique situation because our um we have so many kids at the school and we just don't have the capacity to have all these kids sitting sitting in the gym and sitting in the cafeteria the good thing mr russo is when the weather warms up again um our kids will be able to be outside for pe um our kids will be able to go outside and you know we may or may not need the tents right away in april um because the sun it's not as if the sun is beaming down on us um until april and may you know so that there may be an opportunity there may be a cost savings
052there um but more importantly you know we've we've budgeted for tents for three years um because we because we had to not know you know it's kind of unknown um so i think the good news for the board and for the for the school community is um this is this potentially could be a considerable savings for us if in a 22-23 school year and beyond we do not have to budget for tents at all i mean and quite frankly i'm certainly hoping we do not uh so we can reinvest those monies into supporting our kids which is you know and address some of these other issues um that we're continuing to face since we've returned to school okay thank you great idea using the gymnasium yeah thank you thank you sir that's the school i
053gotta give the school credit they found the space in the building good is there because of covid is there still a reluctance about visiting the two new schools the the brookfield location as well as the uh granville location uh do you think i i mean many of the board members haven't seen those and i was just wondering if in the near future you could put that on the agenda i think it might be interesting it's you know to see what those locations are yes and i and and frankly um i think both sites would be great to bring the board um obviously the one right here in town is is even easier and more accessible because it's right around the corner from ellsworth on granville avenue and and of course if there are no students
054there there's even less risk for our school community so if we were to schedule something right after school or you know on a day off like veterans day for example um you know we can go into the school during a professional development session and um absolutely mrs j it's a great idea i think it's time given that we've been meeting in person getting a walk through both of the facilities and getting the feel of you know all the hard work that our facilities department has been doing over the last two years i think would be good for the board to see particularly given the commitment we've made to both of those facilities thank you and i thought certainly board is interested i will certainly work on it yeah taking into account your safety precautions you
055know i can envision each of the board members holding a long rope six feet so that they stay six feet apart you know be like in the circus the elephants people following each other um all right um are there any other questions uh before we mr russo who are you paying attention tonight there mr rousseau good good to see you smiling richard just uh just a thought um are there any opportunities with our transportation scheme for savings number one and number two it's been a while since transportation has gone out for bid and would that be advantageous to us we just we just renewed a contract from that mistake and pardon me haven't last year i thought we renewed the contract with how long is that with the last year we've renewed the contract it
056was a board meeting that that said we we weren't going to go out to bid if i'm not mistaken and we renewed the contract with ssta we we we did renew and we renewed at a at a savings i i don't remember how many years it's for mr russo so we can find out um and report out you know perhaps at our next meeting um but but by renewing with them we we did find the savings by renewing with them and i can get those specifics for us uh for our next meeting um i i and i believe it has something to do with the 10 buses that we've just added on right um and and some of those buses were literally at no cost uh for the first year uh but i i will
057i will get some specifics on that plan um and if i heard the second part of your question um was was that about um how things are going with bus and i heard one about the cost of buses is there any opportunity for saving additional funds with uh under our our current contract okay okay and and i can what we can do um i can ask john and ed uh for some help on this and see if we can get maybe a comparison to what we're paying um and get an idea of and see how that compares to what other school districts are paying just just so we can have an idea and get kind of get a side by side comparison and just see how we're doing um given our contract level obligations right
058now at least we can see how we're paying and what that looks like versus you know some of our things like stanford and milwaukee some of our similar sizes and our current contract that was renewed and can we just check in how long that contract will be running absolutely yeah thank you yeah off the top of my head out i want to say that i forget the the contract i want to say three years but don't hold me to it the savings are somewhere between from memory anywhere between 500 to 700 000 and the savings were occurring the first couple of the years of the contract this is only from memory but when i pull up the files that'll you know they can show you that but there was a savings uh a significant savings
059to us and that was the reason that uh the determination was made to to pursue it with this company and and not go out with the bid since we had this uh since we had experience with them as as well as potential savings we didn't want to lose that window of opportunity to uh you know for any increased cost but again i'm only talking from memory uh so and you've got a great memory rich [Laughter] he's gonna miss you buddy yeah actually i'm gonna miss all this i really enjoy this and and i would you know the sad part is with all of the the the the updating i'm going to call that uh of the schedules and the financials which is stuff i love to do that wouldn't have an opportunity to to be
060part of it there but i i think that to me that's the fun of financing is as to how to make how to make the numbers talk and and talk to other people who are not as interested in all the details but yet from what you're providing them have an understanding of what you're putting across and then you can back it up with all of the laborious details but um there's certainly a lot of stuff on their plate that you know is going to be new and inventive and creative stuff that the board has never had before and i think that's that's also interesting um and you know certainly a time you know if time has passed that we you know we haven't had that stuff so um again i'll say it again this time
061as i said last time i'm going to miss this and i thank you all for your working with you i certainly enjoyed it uh kathy and i have worked together and been on a finance committee i think each of us have been on them since inception so she's always been the secretary and i always ask her please to take the minutes which i thank him for um you're welcome yeah it's been it's been a good run and i wish you all good luck thank you thank you sir all right all right guys with that um i'll take a motion to to adjourn [Music] lunch and maybe i need to understand this just a little bit better um my understanding that all our schools own free and reduced lunch and i can remember back at a
062meeting that all our schools were on title uh title nine that were on free and reduced lunch and we had um three schools um the high school west side of academy ais that those schools were on free and reduced lunch but there's still application that goes out to those parents that want to put their kids on free and reduced lunch so the applications are still out there because i was with a parent last week that her children had applications to apply for free and reduced lunch so we need to need to be clear as to what we're saying when we're saying parents don't have to fill out the application because they do okay all right thank you uh with that i'll take a motion to adjourn kate made the motion i'll second it thank you
063kathy so so moved and we'll see you all in on wednesday uh again thank you very much have a good day everybody good night see you then have a good night bye you