001um rich was really helpful to uh get me to uh focus on what i think is a meaningful i hope is a meaningful presentation um and then what i'm what i'm hoping to do is have this be a dialogue with the finance committee and um it's a broad overview you'll see and then relating rich asked me to relate back to the last finance presentation we did where you'll remember that we had we were describing like what i would call a braided funding scenario where we had another extra 10 million dollars and how we're going to spend that he's asked me to give you an update on that or how our budget right now relates to that last presentation and in addition how it relates to the board report that you'll get that you received on
002friday for what we're pointing out for expenditures in the general fund as of now in addition some reporting on the coronavirus relief funds and then i want to move into the more nuanced you know questions that you might have so that we can respond to those you know i can go through rich and we can get gather information together but without further ado i'm just going to share my screen and i know that it's hard to look at when you didn't have it in hard copy and i will distribute it i do apologize that you don't have it in front of you um but i was hoping to walk you through it first so that it wasn't um daunting that was my goal um so you're familiar with i'll just start with this is the
003report that goes into the board packet it doesn't have the header but this is our most recent one as of on november and it gives you sort of that summary on the big broad level about where we are in position to our salaries our substitutes you know this is our budget this is our projected spending our benefits um and all of the categories you're familiar with so our service and fees utility repairs and you're seeing some negatives here and i just wanted to explain that to you so at the bottom line of the report you notice that you're familiar with our budget of 136 million um this what we've done in rich has asked me to do is not just our expenditure to date because i don't know how meaningful that is to look at
004well we've only spent 37 million dollars um and we've encumbered another 99 million which means we have a promise to pay out there through a contract in 99 million but our real projected expenditure is about 137 million because when you annualize all those contracts that's really the way you should be looking at a budget and when we do that against where everything sits in the budget now we have a negative 1.4 million which is an over obligation we're at 101 but i don't want you to focus on that or worry i wanted to report it out accurately but i gave some footnotes here because there are three big sources of funds that we spoke about when we talked that way back when when we developed the budget together and those monies have now come in
005and so once i move what you do is you cut you move the expenses over so a contract was hitting general fund now it's going to hit cares act so that frees up that money and that's going to offset that gap and where we are if everything goes as planned which we know it may it may not we are dead even with our board of ed budget and there's a lot of assumptions behind that and i welcome um questions after we go through the presentation um i'm you're going to remember this document um i know or maybe you won't maybe you've forgotten this document which is fine but this was how we developed the budget it was a little bit interesting this year how we did it we basically i'll just give a brief reminder
006because i want to update where we are from then we basically said here was our old budget here's the enrollment edition and here's the funding edition that um we are getting through all of these sources so that gave us 146 million dollars but the city's proposal for us at that time and continued to be only a hundred we made this sort of looked at it from an overall perspective looking at all of the sources of funds um and then we and if you recall each of the different categories and how what we need to achieve would be achieved so alliance was paying for some funds here so we looked at this against what we asked for not hitting the right code but that's um and then basically the big picture takeaway here is we had
007a huge insurance adjustment so not only did we get an increase alliance funds and all of these that are projected expense on the insurance down and they've set us to take down the budget on insurance and afford some of the carry forward that we make based on an actuarial assessment hi dr sal hi guys um oh really can you can anybody else hear me if sometimes you're coming in in and out you know like you're breaking up yeah like a tunnel or something okay let me see if um if i'll get my husband to try to tether me to my phone which sometimes is this better right now okay somebody's coming through remember go ahead okay okay so um so that was how basically some it was affordable in the budget was the fact that
008the insurance adjusted down the actuarial assessment said even with covid even with our increased race risk of this year where people waited to go to the doctor you had some savings we had a unique year last year so we matched our budget with the city we worked with the city on this to the actual projection and we set up because we had a big big significant surplus last year a big reserve in our insurance funds to be able to account for any other odd fluctuations so i won't bore you with but the point is all of these additional resources i'm just going to now update you on where we are with those additional resources so this is a little bit easier to look at and what we're saying is here is you'll remember our budget
009of 136 million and you'll remember our projected expense of 137 which showed that we're short by 1.3 um rich has asked me to show you how we're not actually short because it's about shifting the funding and if you recall we talked about that 10 million incremental increase to the budget that 10 million dollar increase grew to 11.7 because the governor made this funding which is the corona virus relief funds available to us and we didn't anticipate it back when we developed the budget that's allowing us to shift some money and i'll show you that in a second but that that allows us to do one-time things like buy subs where we needed to do some extra work with students we can buy some curriculum development where we needed to do the work to get the
010technology to align with our curriculum needs we were able to buy a lot of desk shields and ppe with those funds so the reason it looks like this is because we have 2.5 to spend but we've already spent some of it out of the general fund budget so we come to balance once we right-size those expenditures it's just that when we started to buy those things this money wasn't available to us yet so we couldn't put it up that we knew it was coming so that's just a series of adjustments but i think it's telling because you can see that for example alliance this is just the incremental ad we also have a base budget so the total budget for alliance is 14 million dollars this is just the additional funds that were added the
011cares act this is the 2.2 million dollars all of it is spent on coronavirus i think people were asking like what of our base budget versus you know there were some questions that came up the cares money is and i can show you the detail in the next tab in a moment but all for coronavirus related activities one time in nature there's some staffing the staffing that's in the cares money is also alliance eligible so when we get our next bump next year if we wanted to as a board decided to we won't have to lay those people off they can slide right into the alliance funding it's not a huge risk if the city doesn't backfill that funding the coronavirus relief funds we initially thought we were only going to get 1.3 million but
012we asked for and got another one and change just got announced on friday so we're glad for that but that just means we have to right-size some of those expenditures and this buys the hepa filters that money has to be expended by a certain date right i think the board correct it's a little tough because it has to be spent by december 31st of this year so not just obligated but actually spent so that's like our desk shields um our disinfectant that we had to buy in some cases we had to buy additional desks you know to make the spacing work when the kids come back um it's it's also for the signage that we put up wash your hands maintain your distance you know we spent a good 75 000 on just that alone
013throughout all of our buildings um so this chronovirus relief money is really helping us in that you know the ppe the cleaning supplies all of that as well as some student supports so some of the student support specialists for six months of their salary as well as some substitute supports that we need for the accommodations the grant carryover money this is this is also related to coronavirus because because of the school closure last year the state made an exception where normally we're capped on how much of the grant money we can roll this year we requested and they allowed us to roll a much bigger amount so we dedicated a portion of that so we got 2.2 million in carryover funds of that about 465 000 we dedicated just a coronavirus type activity like um
014software purchases for example and then we're really um the city worked with us and we're really grateful we don't know yet what council will decide it could be a number higher than this but we had some surplus last year because of our closure and we gave it back to the city and the city is holding it for us in increasing our reserves knowing that this year is riskier so there's a thing called an insurance corridor which means you know there's a recommendation from your actuary that you meet your incur but not reimburse your prior liabilities which we're fully funded for in addition you can increase up to a 25 corridor in reserve which means 25 of your current year cost so that would get us to about 8 million in reserve for the insurances and
015we're doing that with the city so there it's very helpful it's not from our current budget it's only because of coronavirus that we had those uh a little bit of a surplus last year and they're partnering on us to allow us to continue to use that and they're going to present that to city council this week um so broadly speaking instead of the 10 million we have 11.7 so the mayor's going to do something at the city council exactly what so we all here sure sure so in a normal year when we closed the year meaning in the past in my predecessor working with you dr cell occasionally we would close because you don't always close perfect zero you don't want to close in the red but if if joe closed with maybe a 400
016000 you know surplus which is a small percent of our overall budget he would go back to the city and the city would allow us to hold that in reserve for technology or for health insurance and this year we requested and they agreed to go to city council to create two new additional reserves so a reserve for special education funding and again that's only one-time fluctuations and then for technology we increased the technology and there was another new one for it was like facility emergency related items which would include anything related to covet so that's about a million dollars that we asked to dedicate to that as well we're just um waiting to hear whether or not that gets accepted and at what level but 2 million is conservative um of which we dedicated about
017540 to coronavirus so i think the question was asked like how are you affording your baseline are you using money from these new sources to offset costs and not buy things in current affairs i can assure you no i can assure you that the staff really planned very very prudently for this so of the 12 million that was added about 5.8 million was dedicated to coronavirus the rest is you know our operations in a new world so and a lot of that funding if you look at this summary sheet you know everyone we were prudent like 3.7 of it was dedicated to online instruction and distance learning not because we knew we'd be in a remote world but we knew even in a hybrid world we needed to have these resources equal to our sister
018districts if we wanted our kids to continue to succeed at the levels they were and so kara really really carefully crafted this you know balance of a lot of different resources that are electronic in the early grades the middle grades and the upper grades and some staffing to support it some new staffing um and that's the total there and then we had some social emotional supports it was some software and training modules that we rolled out throughout the district that kelly rolled out throughout the district and then we we spent or are projected to spend a lot of money on sanitizer disinfectant additional custodial staff when we do go back um we've purchased a ton of protective shields now that we got the additional money we've made desk accommodations and safety to the tune of
019about a million and um ppe this is the face covering shields disposable gowns everything that's about 600 000 and these buckets are a little bit flexible so we can move amongst them because the state recognizes that your priorities could change if you're for example like us in remote longer than you thought you would be um and then instructional materials so these like these two categories the online and distance learning and the student supports in terms of instructional materials will continue to have benefit for our students beyond the virus but they happen to serve the purpose of meeting the needs of kids in a remote environment so our total estimated cost was that we've projected to spend or have spent is about 5.8 you know our sources here are about 5.8 and you'll recognize those sources
020from this sheet as well it's just a subset of the 11 million dollars so rich also asked me to kind of show you how that lined out and basically you'll recognize that a bulk of our budget is spent on salaries and benefits it's about 108 million dollars and the rest is just obligated services that we provide so you'll recall again that one negative one three eight one it's here that we show you on the board report and it's literally just this these little bits of cleanup that we do to right size where the individual items should be charged with net which net net leaves us pretty even we've got 17 000 left to spend if all things hold true in this budget assumption and then i just briefly explained each of these little pieces here
021so the salaries well why are the salaries over well we just have to shift some language art specialists and student supports where they really belong you know which is in the coronavirus release funds for services example fees curriculum development tutors and teacher and student supports have to be shifted to the right grant category and we're going to do that before your next board report and then utilities repairs and maintenance this is really facility safety so it's those desk shields we bought and this is really ppe and other things that we um purchase that just have to go to the right grant categories now that the grants are available one other item that dr sal and also rich asked me to bring up to you is that because we were operating in a remote world it's
022not part of the board of ed budget standard budget but it does have an impact our school lunch program has not been serving as many students as it would have normally if we were open so in an open world we have a captive audience and they want to eat our food but in a closed world even though we're open remotely and we're distributing food we're distributing less food and so dr sal called the meeting with myself and the vice president of the regional sodexo area which is our school lunch provider came up with some strategies to mitigate that risk given that we're going to be in a remote world for a little bit longer and even when we return there's possibilities we'll be in and out we have to plan for that and so we're
023doing a targeted strategy because we've got to increase our meal count which means we should be reaching another 500 families per day um because the school lunch program operates on a reimbursement basis so we have expenses we have salary we have food items that we buy and the federal government gives us money back for every lunch and breakfast we distribute on a per number basis um and when we're distributing less we're getting less revenue so we just need to up we need to increase our distribution and dr identify about five strategies that we're doing going to implement to do that which includes a massive social outreach campaign um and so we're going to be robocalling tomorrow a survey for families that want to sign up for a home distribution and we're going to do a
024breakfast and lunch at the same time and we're hoping to triple our bus drop off distribution right now we have a bus drop off distribution for about 250 families and we want to actually quadruple that through a big sign up campaign so we're hoping that that will be successful because we're right now we're still paying a big portion of our bus contract per the executive order 7r to keep retain the bus you know retain the partnership with the bus company and have them available for when we are back in school so why not use them dr sal said so we're going to use them to increase our mobile distribution and also have them at fixed sites around the community so that we're more of a presence and also just do a really targeted outreach social
025media campaign we plan to report out to the board at the next meeting on our progress because if we're not hitting those targets then it's a concern for the budget um because the state rule the state law about this is that if the school lunch program is short the board of vet has to make up that shortfall and i'm going to pause there because i know i just gave a lot of information i want to see if there are questions and have a dialogue so on this last comment you made which was a pause because you sort of got a call i would say that the board will have to make something up um do you think by the neck board meeting you'd have a pretty good handle on the effectiveness of your your program
026to increase the the distribution yeah um we're hoping to get a part of it started uh midweek next week um and so i would give it about three weeks of operating before i can have some results to report back but i think it's important for me to report back regularly to you all about it so that we're all on the same page and you understand and you can give feedback um about any concerns you have if we're not meeting our targets so i'd be ready to report just before christmas i guess um and i'm not sure when the next board meeting is but i'm happy to whatever the next one is report where we are in terms of rolling it out i would think that by how the committee members you know it's it's dr
027saw it's hard to understand at least maybe it's my my complaint to me i i would think that maybe by a february meeting it could give you enough time to see what the effect of your your initiatives are and then we can follow this up with uh dollars and cents so that we'd be in a position to understand uh how much money if if if necessary we'd be on the hook for all twenty-four alternatives uh we have to fund that that deficit if it occurs yeah yeah yeah any possibility of anybody backfilling us because with the executive order we're not laying anybody often yeah so anything coming through that way do you know yeah so you had me dr sal put that on the legislative agenda and so we did mention talk to the state
028about our concerns um through the legislative agenda and other um districts are experiencing the same problem to my knowledge we don't know of any major funding stream nor do any of the people at groups at sodexo yet that's that's been available the state wanted to use some of that emergency relief funding for this the coronavirus relief act but the feds didn't allow it um so we want to continue to lobby for that because i mean it allows to pay for very very limited things on the cares act so you know paper bags that you had to buy to do new distribution because of chronovirus but not the food or anything like that or the labor so um so we're going to continue to pursue that and we've also asked the state to you know if
029we do an estimate about the what the workers um insurance the workers comp i mean i'm not sorry the um unemployment insurance would have been were they to get um unemployment and the state we're asking the state to reimburse us that amount at least because it's what they would have paid otherwise um and in addition we're really really going to target ramping up the production we have to thank you you're welcome and to the other committee members that when i first noticed the the accounting that we normally get from courtney and i saw the 1.3 million deficit it sort of rang the bell and i got you know a little bit concerned saying see you know all we overspent etc until she went through and indicated that the and also the footnote on the bottom
030of the statement was that the accounting really wasn't completed at that point because of the revenues that he was waiting for so then we developed this and said well why don't we just give us a summary which we has presented here which tells what we were budgeted for and the projected expenses for the year against that we're able to see from here that there's almost 6 million dollars spent on the the uh voting situation and how much of that may be one-time spending or what's necessary for additional spending next year in the different categories so with the complication that we had last year they say complications because with the uniqueness that we had last year of the different revenue streams that made up what we need to operate on i thought that this kind of
031a presentation puts things in line what we were accustomed to seeing and approved and we could take it from there um so courtney you see operationally the the i guess one of the questions that it gets kicked around is would be a logical question that says are there any savings that we would occur this year as to the schools being closed um thinking in terms of could you follow that up with any any whether it would be a net savings or that would be offset by certain other things that would mitigate that yeah so last year a majority of our savings um against our budget was actually the health insurance um and it wasn't just because people weren't going to the doctor it was because we were seeing the natural decline in health insurance we
032were doing a good job with some of the strategies that we lined up for our self-insurance that joe and can put in place so we were seeing some of the benefits of that and it rang true it held true even held up against relative to our peers how they were doing in coronavirus winner assessor when our consultant did the assessment in addition to that we saw savings on bus fuel which we saw last year because we weren't driving our buses and we negotiated you know a reduced contract amount for the bus company last year um and we carried forward a credit for that into this year which was part of what also sort of offsets some of those one-time things um the other items that we saved money on last year were you know electricity
033and and all the costs associated with running the buildings because we were really fully closed down for the most part now um this year's a little bit different even though we're fully remote we're running our buildings our staff is in the buildings we're still running our electricity we're keeping the building safe and open as a community of you know being welcoming the buildings are open so we don't have those savings the bus company we have not paid since september it's a projected annualized amount right now because we're just not sure where the state's going to land we're still assuming that 7r is in effect and extended meaning we could have some savings on the transportation but potentially the governor could come out and say you've got to pay the full bill or a large portion
034of the bill which you know i mean we do need to have that partnership with our bus company we do need to have the drivers available and they've been actually incredible partners during the closure with the food distribution and with constant changes to routing so all their managers are active and they've even been available to us to do things that we've asked them to do that are a little bit outside their scope because we know they're they're there and they're they're they're not laid off um so to answer your question the budget doesn't contemplate any savings right now um we constantly review against every every two weeks every month we look at update our projections but a majority of our budget is benefits and salaries and we have not we've still continued to maintain our
035you know requirement to students for the class sizes that we commit to when we're whether we're in person or remote and all the support stuff that goes with it and they're all working in a unique and new way or the old ways but distanced but we all we still need all of our staff to fully support all the kids that were you know it's like 10 times the work actually because they're having to revamp everything that they knew so they're all still employed um in so we're not really seeing any savings we have some additional caught legal fees and costs because we're assessing some things that we need to assess that are unique that we haven't dealt with before um but other than that yeah everything that we're projecting in the budget is pretty much
036you know standard and spoken for again i'll update on the transportation as we become more clear because we're the only you know one of the only few districts that were full remote other districts are now expressing it so in numbers there's solidarity and we might have some more clarity on that but our buildings are fully running our staff is up nobody's laid off so we really have the same projected expenditures in our base budget right now all the bus drivers are we utilizing them in any other capacity other than driving the bus or the special thing so they're still driving the buses for the non-public schools and we were able to afford you know more spacing on the buses they're going to be driving the special ed students next week when they come back return
037and they're also doing food distribution so i have about anywhere between six to eight buses every day going out to distribute foods to families food to families in need we're going to expand that production as soon as um i apologize it's going to be a confidential conversation because it hasn't been spoken with the unions yet so i apologize i'm speaking a little too soon but as soon as we speak with the union meaning our lunch staff and our safety advocates about the potential modification to the schedule which is slight then we'll be expanding our production on the buses to get food distribution they have helped us with um when we were bagging up curriculum at some point they did help us with that and that was great um and i talk with their management staff
038pretty much on a daily basis because we're just being agile and ready to open each time so you know we're redoing the numbers every time something changes and believe it or not even when just you know 100 special ed kids it's a ton of work because a lot of these you know we want to get every everything right because they're almost needy population and um and we're in chronovirus time so it's a lot of work to get even that set up and we've been ready to go with each model that came down the pike and you know we'll be ready again if we come back when we come back in january so the management staff is working full-time has it been any conversation with the city relative to let's assume in our 136 million operating
039budget we do have a a favorable uh difference uh under than on the spending is there any any conversations that would allow us to have a carryover again or is it too premature at this point no i mean we have a really positive relationship on that front i mean we really do and i think um if it's warranted and justified i know the city will consider that if they're able to you know they have their needs too um and all all funds are funds that they could potentially need back but i mean they recognize that these are board of ed dollars and they gave us you know they're proposing to get our a good portion of our surplus back this year um and it was a lot of work um with the city and we
040partnered with them to come to that conclusion and really had to justify it and i don't see that changing if we have a justifiable reason you know if we get a big hit to our health insurance and we have a carryover you know reserve this year a surplus this year they will certainly allow us to prudently put it up in the reserve if we have a big it project coming up i'm sure that we can make that case for example are there any questions from any other committee members or i have a question rich um so courtney um i just i'm i'm trying to sort of wrap my head around all this information which has been very clear and valuable thank you it's just my brain is a little bit too slow to process it
041all so quickly no it's all good um what i'm what i'm trying to to figure out is it looks like if we were to maintain you know the system as it is right now that we we could successfully get to the end of the year and and you know meet our budget what i'm wondering is because i and i think everybody is anticipating that kids are going to be back in school at some point and i'm thinking about a lot of the uh area towns that i have seen go back and forth with their their situation where you have a you know an infection that shuts down a class or maybe it shuts down a grade or maybe it shuts down a school what i'm trying to understand and i don't know if you've had
042any conversations with other area districts about this is what kind of costs we might see come out of uh i don't want to say an episode that's not the right word but an incident like that yeah yeah i've only just started to because i think they've just started you know it's relatively recent that they're in that out and in mode a lot of i just got a report back from one of my colleagues that about of the 44 districts in connecticut that they surveyed about 16 were on full remote now through at least mid-december i think was the date um so that cycling in and out certainly has been a big focus of of kim in hr because our biggest challenge will be staffing and i think and i don't want to misspeak because she's
043not here but i would just categorize it broadly as saying that i'm actually here i'm here oh you want a hair oh oh good okay i thought you were off today i'm sorry i'll categorize it broadly and then i am off today but i'm here thank you kim jon okay it's okay what i'm getting back from everyone that i'm you know we on thursdays we've been the whole area superintendents um have a meeting and we're joined by uh our um ceo for the caps the the expense that they're experiencing is exactly what you cited the in and out and it is the ability to maintain subs and bringing them in in terms of sustainability that has been their major pushback you know now how one estimates in our budget we have approximately you know because
044we we move it around 1.2 million maybe uh in in the budget part of some of it's an alliance in operation as recent as today uh with dr clark up at um westcon um the state has provided us the ability to um use uh students some home student teachers students at the university that enrolled in head courses um to work with us we haven't been successful but we received permission today to give you field experience credit so we think that will increase so that will help us but there's where the challenges and and i don't know where that would go i mean if it cost me more money i'd have to have people right now we don't have people to pay to bring in so that's been that's been our dilemma the other thing and
045maybe kim can speak to that would be if people are contracted and we have to double pay pay for the person at home plus hiring a teacher to to backfill in a classroom there's where that would be very expensive as you can imagine because you're paying two salaries and most of many times um benefits as well i know kim may want to comment to that no i yeah i i would just echo everything you said i think that the one thing that we're really looking to do is it to see if we can bolster kind of our more transient workforce if you will um you know people that that will come in um if we can align with the westcom kids um that would be a great solution um it's just we're just seeing that
046the pool of applicants even for the postings we've got up now are really low um and we're not quite sure why that is um but we're really struggling with really getting um kind of pools of applicants even for the places that we've got posted so we're really looking at a bunch of alternatives and it's a little bit of thinking outside the box we also continue to get requests for accommodations um and and some of them you know we're at the point now where we probably can't absorb any more of those um because we've done so many so we're going to be challenged there's no question i just want to add dr we did put in a proposal with and got accepted for the cronovest relief fund increase for additional subs so if the pool is
047there we do have a little bit of funding to supplement that 1.2 million um for this year good but that's where you know that's the unpredictability piece because we're paying for the buses um my worry is the cafeteria the food that is a big worry for me um because we got to be able to serve so if when we do get back to the hybrid that should mitigate i hope that part of it which would be great but then the expense would be mostly on backfilling folks in inherited staffing okay thank you good question is that does that answer what you're asking kate like the cycling in and out you're looking at yeah i mean it sounds like the the expense is really just around staffing and what happens if we have teachers um or
048um you know support staff that are uh you know have to be quarantined yeah you know we still have to have those you know those classes being taught yeah um the biggest thing yeah because the buses you know we need to have continuity with the buses so the the goal is to continue to pay while they're to be able to have that available to us as we open or close and open um and everything else is sort of right like you said like the fixed costs of all running the buildings there's still be run yeah and you've already you know it sounds like you you guys have done a good job of um you know preparing to have those spaces be used you know with uh you know the the different supplies that you brought
049up the different protection equipment and all that kind of stuff it sounds like that we've got a substantial enough supply that we can certainly go back and forth a number of times without any kind of issue yeah yeah definitely you know that extra state money was really helpful for sure and um we just got the the bubblers today so those are getting installed this uh this week tomorrow and next week so that'll be good the individual water fountains and uh towels and another question made a little bit off the subject but to dr sal in one of our meetings i think the mayor alluded to the fact that he was working with the governor to accelerate the the differential to bring danbury whole with the ecs funding is there any progress on that that we
050could have hopeful uh you know expectations of that we would get an acceleration of something that's greater than what's been proposed over the next 10 years rich tonight when you look at the proposal we have it in our proposed legislative proposal to try to do that so i don't the mark has not indicated that there's been any success in that at this time no we asked for it again no rich you know like i said real that squeaks the lavish gets the oil so rather than squeak you know i'd rather start yelling attention again on a unrelated subject to this particular one when do you think we should start the budget process uh you know it's very complicated because of you know the epidemic that we're in now and and all the extraneous costs but
051you know before we know it june 30th is here and then the deadline i think is sometime in march if i'm not mistaken uh that we we need to come up with some sort of a budget uh and then incorporate again uh some of these coded expenses in there so if you could give some thought as to what you'd like to do with with uh some some dates to discuss uh the budgeting concepts uh it might be good just to have an initial meeting for brainstorming and then get into you know a later one for for details i'll leave it up to you but i think the sooner the better because i think it's going to get more complicated next year with a whole lot of what if uh scenarios that are in here yeah
052the uncertainties that that we have yeah i'm more than happy to and you're right i do need to get that going so i'll send you a couple dates rich and then we can solidify when you want to have the committee and and and set up a i think we should just set up a group of them for december and jan and i'll send you some proposed dates that's a great idea yeah you know rachel did some go back over to what kate was saying in a way in forecasting um we have you know the the the enrollment last year explosion it has kind of subsided down with um to about kind of around two percent i don't know it changed with changes that the coming if that was going to um create another challenge we
053know that our kindergarten number this year is low so we've got to anticipate like that so and i'm a little concerned about predictability in rolling out the budget um the carryover things that we're talking about um will be interesting in terms of what the governor might do with us because of some unanticipated you know we're expecting to be in full operation next year as of july 1st um so you know we'll probably budget on normal staffing levels at that level plus about a two percent increase uh in our uh our in our our uh our enrollment so you know i think that's the way we're gonna roll at this point uh until something unless something really different happens yeah well i think this year with the two percent is you know it's attributed to the
054the the ban on traveling and and and the virus situation but danbury is still danbury it's got a good reputation so when and hopefully soon things get back to if you use the word normal you know that'll be another you know time to look at at the issue it's funny at this particular point i'd rather have the problems of trying to fund an increased population than you do with dealing with this epidemic but you can't pick your problems that's true and we can model it out so however you want like if you wanted to show just the steady state carry forward with the two percent and then a two percent enrollment increase versus flat versus four you know yeah so that's the unknown well we'll see what happens as we hit springtime too yeah exactly
055well and you may you know one thing we didn't talk about is you may see this vaccine have an impact at least on how people are feeling about all this and and you know that's going to be a roll out that i've you know some some predictions are it could be widely available by may um you know it's going to start trickling out in december um and you know one of the things that we've done on our end is um we're working with the health department to get them they've asked for numbers of employees so how many teachers how many staff members as they go about finalizing the distribution plan so we may see an impact from that also right now i think it's going to come i think i said to one of you
056i can't remember um it's going to come in i think 100 dose vast batches and you know if you need two doses obviously it's going to come in small amounts it's going to trickle in but it may actually start to come more quickly and the city will will lead the charge on on how it gets distributed and what the plan looks like but we have um kind of taken those preliminary steps to make sure that we're helping them to at least have enough information to deal with our folks as well board first right yeah superintendent first hold people first yeah we'll see kim can i ask a quick question about that yeah um it's sort of unrelated but i'm just curious as to whether or not you've heard anything in the legal sphere as far
057as requiring the vaccination yeah i haven't heard anything um you know it i i think we will get guidance on it i mean you all know you have to have certain vaccinations to be a student in our district but there really are not i am hard-pressed to think of what required vaccinations there are to be an employee so i don't really know whether that's something but i would expect that there will be lots of legal guidance around it there's a lot of people kind of speculating out there but i haven't heard anything really definitive you know i think that the the thinking is with the numbers of folks that have already had it and then you layer on the vaccine that those two numbers together will push us toward that herd number that herd immunity
058number so we'll see thanks um are there any other questions from any other committee members mrs cooper do you have any questions no i don't okay um if that's the case then what we can do is to particularly adjourn i see no reason i mean to be nice to have a social conversation but i'm sure you have more things to do and then if they're ready for the conversations that that you need or any follow-ups we can pursue it during the uh the board meeting uh at seven o'clock is that agreeable to the committee members so all right so it sounds good rich thank you okay so then i'll make a motion that we adjourn i'll second that all in favor all right hi okay so i thank you your attendance courtney thank you for
059your your work thanks very much courtney thank you everyone yep thank you very much have a good evening oh you too thank you uh and thank you rich for all of yours no i apologize you just left i'll send him a note to everyone i'm publicly thanking rich so he's not here i apologize i'll see you shortly