001Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the special meeting of the Kansas City School Board of Education for Monday, January 26, 2026. If you're in the audience, would you please silence your devices at this time, and would you please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, which it stands, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. Mr. Gruber, would you call the roll, sir? Mr. Van Allman. Present. Ms. Watkins. Present. Mrs. Brown. Present. Mr. Russ. Present. I'll make the motion to approve the agenda as written. Second. Any changes or corrections? Hearing none, roll call vote. Mr. Van Allman. Ms. Aye. Ms. Watkins. Aye. Mrs. Brown. Aye. Mr. Russ. Aye. Moving right along, our presentation tonight for our school calendar, Ms. Kingsbury. Oh, thank you.
002Okay, so we're here tonight to talk about our 26-27 school calendars. So I'm going to start by going over an overview of the process that we use to develop the calendars, share some highlights of the draft calendars with you, talk a little bit about instructional hours versus days, and then I'm going to finish up with some information about kindergarten eligibility because there has been a change in the law. So starting with the calendar process, we start in the district by looking at Ohio revised code 3313.48, which talks about the minimum number of instructional hours that we need to have in our school calendar. So the ORC says that we have to have a minimum of 910 hours in grades K through six and a minimum of 1001 hours in grades seven through 12. You cannot
003count lunch in those hours. You can count two days each for parent-teacher conferences and professional development days for teachers. We also look at our negotiated agreement because there's some information in there that helps us create the calendar. So for example, the negotiated agreement speaks to the number of teacher days that we can have and the timing of some teacher workdays. So in our current agreement, we have agreed that we would have one teacher workday prior to the first day of school, one teacher workday at the end of the second nine weeks, and one at the end of the third nine weeks, and that we would try, if at all possible, to have one at the end of the first nine weeks. So from there, then we sit down with the calendar committee and we finalize
004the draft calendars that you have before you this evening. So that calendar committee is made up of a group of people in the organization that all look at it from kind of a different vantage point. So we have someone from the payroll department, somebody from the academic side of the house, someone from maintenance. We have our union leaders. We all sit down and look at those draft calendars and everyone has that unique perspective from their seat in the organization. And then we finalize the drafts that we're presenting to you this evening. The ORC speaks to having a public meeting on the school calendars. So that's what this is considered. And then we will ask you to approve the calendars at the next board meeting in February. So some of the highlights, you have two calendars
005in front of you. You have the district calendar and the Portage collaborative Montessori school calendar. So both calendars have 185 teacher days and 173 student days. And that is the same number of days for teachers and students that we have in this current school year calendar. We have six professional development days and six teacher work days. And again, that's the same number of each in this 25, 26 school year calendar we're currently in. Teachers would start August 12th. We would have staggered starts again for students. So on August 19th, students in grades four, seven and nine would begin on August 20th, students in grades one through 12 would start. We have pup camp days scheduled for our littlest learners, our pre-K and kindergarten students. And those are days where they come in. They make appointments
006and come in and participate in some orientation type activities, getting acclimated to the staff and the school and participate in a couple of screening activities. And then the first official day for preschool and kindergarten would be August 25th. The student last day is May 27th. The teacher last day is May 28th. On the Portage calendar, everything is exactly the same, except for one teacher work day that we needed to have on a different day. It used to be in the district that Portage would follow Plain Locals calendar. About three years ago, we decided to make our own Portage calendar. And when we make that calendar, we look at Plain Locals calendar and we try to align as much as possible that way, because the teachers at Portage Montessori are our Canton City teachers. So when
007we can align those professional development days, especially they get to participate in those days. But there was one teacher work day that we couldn't align. And really it was due to the lunches. It was a day that Plain Local has as a teacher work day that they wouldn't be able to have lunch at Portage if we didn't make that difference. So it's just one teacher work day difference. So there was a question about the school days versus school hours. And it's actually the timing of this is appropriate given the current weather that we're having. So I wanted to just remind everyone that starting in the 2014-2015 school year, the state changed the minimum number of days students had to be in school to a minimum number of hours. So it used to be prior to
00814-15 that the state said students had to be in school for a minimum number of days and then districts got five calamity days. So the state changed to hours and because of this change, there was no longer calamity days. Instead, districts can schedule hours above the minimum that's required. And then any hours missed above that minimum would not have to be made up. And then in the 24-25 school year, the state introduced online day plans and those are a way that districts can make up up to three equivalent school days by having students participate in online instruction. So when you look at our calendar, and actually this chart applies to this school year as well because we have the same number of student days and the same length of day from this year to next
009year. So when you look at this chart, the length of the student day in K-6 is six hours and 30 minutes. When we add up all those hours and take out lunch, that gives us a total of 1,032 minutes or hours, my apologies. And then remember we had the ORC says that we have to have, gosh now I forgot, sorry, 910. So when you subtract 910 from 1,032, we have an excess of 122 hours in our school calendar for students in K-6 and that equates to 20 days. So we would be okay until we get to having 20 days off of school for weather or some other type of emergency. In grades seven, eight, and nine, twelve, the length of the student day is six hours and 35 minutes. When we take out the lunchtime,
010we get a yearly total of 1,046 hours and that 1,001 is the minimum requirement. So when you subtract 1,046 from 1,001, that's 45 excess hours and that gives us seven excess days. So again, this chart also applies for this school year. So when we get to seven days of no school due to weather or some other emergency, then we would look at how to make those up with our online day plan. And then for kindergarten eligibility, so Ohio House Bill 114 was recently passed in Ohio and it revised the minimum age requirement for kindergarten. So previously at each district could choose either August 1st or September 30th as the date by which a student had to be five years old in order to enroll in kindergarten. What the the law says now is that all
011districts have to admit students to kindergarten if they are five years old by the first day of instruction for that school year. So for the 26-27 school year, our first day of instruction for kindergarten is August 25th, 2026. So a student must be five on or before August 25th in order to be eligible to enroll in kindergarten. And with that, I'll take any questions. Any questions from the board or anyone hearing that? Thank you, Ms. Cainbury. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Cainbury. Next up, Ed Services Report. Superintendent Talbert. Mr. President, I recommend that the Board of Education approve the following resolutions to purchase Infinite Campus. The resolution reads, whereas the Canton City School District wants to purchase a new student information system from Infinite Campus, Inc., and whereas Infinite Campus, Inc. is the sole source
012provider for the student information system, and whereas Infinite Campus, Inc. has provided a quote for the student information system with a service start date of July 1, 2026 of $205,386. Therefore, it be resolved that the Canton City School Board of Education does authorize the purchase of a new student information system for Infinite Campus for the quoted price. So moved. Any questions or comments? Hearing none, roll call vote. Mr. Van Almen. Aye. Ms. Watkins. Aye. Mrs. Brown. Aye. Mr. Russ. Aye. Once this, once we completely transition to this new student information system, a lot of our other software that we use that is separate from our current system to support our current system will go away because this is an all-inclusive system, and right now we believe when it's all completely implemented we will save over
013$100,000 a year, which is something we definitely need right now. Superintendent Report. Back to you, Superintendent Talbert. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Gruber and I will kind of combine and tag-team this. First, he'll give an update on the forecast and how we got here, then I'll go through the plan, then he will talk about where we sit after that, and then we'll put forth a recommendation for you to approve the plan. Mr. Gruber. Just to remind people, we projected a general fund deficit balance of $17 million in fiscal year 2028. This deficit triggered a notification letter from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce stipulating the district would need to form a written plan that would eliminate the fiscal year 2028 deficit. Tonight's responsive required document consists of an accompanying workbook, the workbook includes changes
014in assumptions and expenditure reductions, and I believe the superintendent will go through that now. Thank you, Mr. Gruber. So we've been talking about this plan since December, and we presented it at our first meeting on the 5th, then we had a community feedback meeting, and in between that meeting and this one, we've had two full weeks of building-level meetings where we were able to take some feedback. Also, during that time, we've continued to crunch numbers, and we've realized that we need to go deeper, and so what I can tell you is that, and Mr. Gruber will talk about it afterwards, that we we've met the requirement of reducing the budget deficit in 28-29, but there's still work to be done, and following the recommendation and following approval of this plan, we will begin that work
015as well. We will implement this plan, but we will also continue to look for ways to reduce our budget, and this is going to be something that will continue until either we get additional local revenue or the state does something different with school funding. So Mr. Gruber kind of talked to you about how we got here, but it's about at length at our last board meeting, which was money that was given to us as the new fair funding was being implemented to help districts that had high poverty rates until the formula was able to figure out how to account for that, and that was completely reduced, cut to zero, so that funding source completely went away. We were told that it would be inserted into the formula, but again, knowing what we all know is
016that the formula itself right now is only funded at 66%, and it is funded at 20-21 funding levels. So we lost that money, and along with 3.2 million dollars in federal funds, which goes over, it's 7 million total, almost 9, almost 8 million, and we need to figure out what we're going to do with that. Between now and 2028, we burned through our carryover, our savings, and if you looked at our last forecast, I believe we had 36 million dollars to start this year, if I'm correct, and so that's a good thing, and we did that by saving money, making reductions over the last two to three years, and we were going to continue to do that. So now, because we are going to fly through that and have a negative balance in 28 of
01717 million dollars, we had to do a couple of things, and those things are, one, implement our elementary grade level transition, the K-6 buildings. What I need for this community to understand is that this plan was put in place back in 2022 as a result of our strategic plan and going out to listen to our community and our staff. We were told overwhelmingly during that process that the community wanted to go back to neighborhood elementary. As a result of that, we put a bond issue on. The community approved that money, 64 million dollars, for us to build two new elementaries, which would give us the ability to get out of some of our smaller older buildings and then return to the neighborhood schools. The parts of that plan, Bellstone closing and combining with Timken, Worley
018becoming Timken Elementary, Yutz becoming a K-6, McGregor and Cedar combining and going to Lincoln, those changes were a part of the plan that we put together four years ago. The other changes, moving arts to Crenshaw and turning Summit into a neighborhood building, eliminating our our balanced calendar building and AIM and returning Bell into a neighborhood school, moving McGregor into Cedar this year, those changes are a part of us trying to reduce that 17 million dollar deficit in 28. This district, this board, has been very committed to living within our means and that was something we promised to the to the community when the last levy passed before I was hired and we've been able to do that. Again, this recent shift has gotten us to where we are. So as we looked into this plan,
019the most important thing for us was staying true to what we say we value and making sure that our core services are able to continue and that we're able to meet the needs of our students and our parents and our community. That being said, if something doesn't change, the next round of cuts, I can't guarantee that we won't have to eliminate programs or services. So the the way we attack this, we looked at buildings and programs and looking to consolidate. Being able to consolidate that saves us operational costs and will makes it easier for us to reduce staff. When you operate, we operate fewer locations, you need fewer people to manage those buildings and then purchases and spending. The the personnel which you will see here is the lion's share of what we spend our
020money on. We are a people industry and so 84% of what we spend is on people. So over the next two year period, the reductions will cut almost twelve and a half million dollars in staffing, almost three million dollars in capital outlay, a million dollars in materials and supplies, and 1.3 million dollars in purchase services. What you won't see in in that 17.7 million dollar number are our revenues, our savings that we expect, but they're not 100% solid. So by consolidating elementaries and returning to neighborhood schools, we will and with current numbers cut almost take there will be create 700 more walkers. So with the additional neighborhood schools, there are 700 more students who live within a mile of those schools. That can save us nearly at today's cost and again that's why we're not
021putting nearly a million dollars at today's cost. We don't know what's going to happen with fuel prices, we don't know if students are going to move, we don't know if students are going to move back. So I didn't give those numbers to Mr. Groover when we were working together because it is very important that this is the real number and that we make these cuts because we don't want this to be in year two and a negative number year two is a whole different process. So we believe and we will continue to look for ways to save money to go beyond this 17.7 and we believe we're that we're there now, but it is not a solid number it's a fluid number. So just with that 17.7 million again we will end 27 with 15
022and a half million. We will end 2028 with 1.3 million instead of minus 17.7 million. That solves the problem that the state wanted us to fix. It doesn't solve the problem for 2029. In 2029 we will be minus 10.5 million dollars if nothing changes which means we're going to have to go out and get new money and to erase that deficit it will be nine plus mils. So what I need people to understand is while we are making this decision to take care of 2028 we will continue to look for cuts. Nine plus mils is a lot so we're going to we're going to solve and chip away at that 10.5 million dollars from now until the end of the year and hopefully when Mr. Gruber does this forecast in September you will see a
023significant reduction in that number. So here's how we're going to get their personnel. As I said 84% of what we spend our money is on paying for people and so we we plan to cut nine administrative positions, 34 positions from our classified staff and 29 positions from our certified staff. Administration three million dollars it includes six district level admin including operations and educational service team members and three building level administration. I want to be clear that this number is fluid. We could have some more classified people resign and we decide not to replace them. We could have administrators retire that we don't know about but and it could be more than this. What the plan has in it is this and so at a minimum this is what we have to do and but we
024will continue to look for more and we'll keep you updated as we move forward. Certified positions again 29 positions. We hope to do the majority of this almost all of it through attrition. We have a lot of retirements and they keep coming in every day but this includes classroom teachers. It also includes counselors. It includes what we call support specialist teachers who are on special assignment outside of the classroom to support our instructional program. Classified 3.5 million again 34 positions is about 5% of that total staff and it includes almost it includes all of our departments transportation, custodial, clerical, and educational slash classroom support positions. So it's 34 positions. Some of the positions are open right now we're not going to fill them. Some of the positions have people sitting in them. Administrators and classified
025are the positions that have the least amount of turnovers so while I hate to riff people lay people off it's something we've tried to avoid and we've been very good at it. We've cut over a hundred positions the last two years through attrition. This number is just too big so we're we're going to have some tough conversations in the month of February as we talk to our team members and let them know that there's just we're just not able to keep them in their seats. Over the over the course of a year we do lose quite a few people so there that means that there could be opportunity for folks to be called back but because we are committed to making saving 12 over 12 million dollars the next two years we have to make
026the cut. So we will bring those suspension of contracts to this board in March. So how are we getting there? Again the lion's share of this plan is has to do with reducing duplication, reducing cost of operating buildings, reducing the number of sites we have so that we need fewer people. So starting in the 26-27 school year Cedar Elementary was currently a K to 3 building will become a K to 6. It will combine with McGregor Intermediate School and they will all be in the Cedar Building and in 27-28 the entire building will become a K to 6 building and they will all move together and they'll be joined by some students from Harter. Gibbs is currently a K to 3 building next year and from and forevermore it will become a K to 6
027building located in the same building. Harter is currently a K-3 building next year it will be a K-4 building. Harter will have only kindergarten students who will be going to Lincoln the following year and fourth grade students who only fourth grade students who will be going to Lincoln the following year and they will also have students in first second and third grade some of which will go to Lincoln some of which will go to Clare and then Harter will be closed and used for other district purposes in 27-28. Stone is a K to 3 building at the end of this year. Stone will close. The building will be sold as soon as we possibly can. Those students from Stone will either attend Timken, Gibbs or Yutz. Sorry about that. Clare in an intermediate school. Next
028year Clare will transition to a kid will have kindergarten it will have kindergarten students who live in the new Clare in attendance zone area and then it will have grades four five and six. The following year Clareden will be K to 6 at our meeting at Clareden we got to meet a few students a few kind of preschool students who will be kindergarten students so they will be the first kindergarten students at Clareden it was really nice to meet them and then the next year they will be the first first grade class so it'll be really nice to meet them it was nice to meet them in their family. Next year McGregor which is currently an intermediate building McGregor will close it will combine to with Cedar and it will remain closed and be it
029will be repurposed in 2728. Yutz is currently an intermediate school four through six next year Yutz will become a K through six building and it will have students from Stone and from Gibbs. Patrick is currently a K to 6 building it will remain a K to 6 but its attendance zone will change due to the opening the combining of McGregor with Cedar and the opening of Belden as a neighborhood school. Portis collaborative Montessori is currently a K to 6 and will remain a K to 6. Worley is currently a K to 6. Worley will close the building will be repurposed for district use as you will see and on a later slide so it will be repurposed for district use. Temkin it will move to Temkin Elementary which is a new building that will open
030next spring or at the end of this school year and it will be K to 6 again it will be students from Worley some students from the harder Clareton neighborhood and some students from Bellstone. AIM is our balanced calendar school AIM will will close as a balanced calendar school and a choice school and will open as a neighborhood school and will return to the name of Belden and it will be K to 6 starting next year. Arts Academy at Summit is a K to 6 choice school next year it will be it will have kindergarten and those kindergarten students will be students who live in the Summit neighborhood who will attend that building when it returns to a neighborhood school the following year in 27-28. The arts the current arts program will be one through
031possibly seven next year and the following year grades four through eight will move to Crenshaw and we will have some remodeling that will take place there and we will continue to work to expand our arts program there at Crenshaw and because of that shift with seventh grade early college at layman and this is new I talked with the principal this afternoon this was a shift that came as a result of conversations that happened last week seventh graders their early college middle school program will not take seventh graders next year the middle school program will be phased out and the reason for that is there's some duplication that happens with that and there's also some added transportation costs the our middle school students still participate in our middle school sports and after school we are required
032to transport them all back to the different middle school locations for sports also there follow a high school schedule right now and so the kids have to sit until the other middle schools are out so with arts becoming a fourth rate we decided that you know what this will be a perfect time to not have an early college middle now for our families who are looking for that option we will begin working as soon as this plan is approved by the board to develop early college prep program that will be housed at both of our other other middle schools so that families have choice but the seventh and eighth graders we believe that the programs that we have moving to the Arts Academy expanding that will take some of the kids and that some of
033our kids from steam will be able to do that as well but we will hopefully will have a plan to the board on how we're going to make that transition at our next meeting in February early learning at Shriver no change for 2627 2728 it will relocate to another district building we're pretty sure where that building is going to be but we don't want to make that call yet because things are fluid and when he and mr. Dixon probably wants to make sure we take the cheapest option and so I don't want to tie his hand even though I do a good job of that most day so we will figure that out and take some time over the next year to make that decision and begin that transition Fairmont Learning Center will the building
034Fairmount will be closed the programs next year will be transfer transition to Compton and they will remain at Compton and the building at Fairmont will be so the Shriver building once we are out of that building that building also will be so with this will be out of our oldest buildings in the district and we'll leave behind millions and millions of dollars of deferred maintenance and then also with that we look to get out of our business service center and combined central office combined central offices and hopefully we'll be able to sell that building and then our our Nadine McIlwain admin center also will be demolished to make additional parking for for this campus exactly where we'll be located is still up in the air and and I do want to say this that the
035the the board and the previous administration named our admin building after former board member former educator here an administrator Nadine McIlwain and we want to honor and continue to honor that wherever we move and follow the name or I would be recommending that a building be named after after her so stay tuned and we'll come back to to that but we do want to make sure we continue to honor that if we can updated attendance zones so we did make some shifts at from the last meeting as we began to look at what's the best way to make sure our buildings are at capacity but not overcrowded and so from our last meeting where we had feedback there have been some changes so the the Whirly or the Timken elementary zone stays complete stays the
036same there are no changes there the big update to this is that the Myers Lake neighborhood that is currently in the Clariden Harder area those students now will go to Timken and some of the Clariden students who live there up to to the south to the north of 13th Street some of those students will also attend and that decision was made because those students live far enough away from Clariden and Harder that they receive a bus so if we're picking them up on a bus we're just going to take them we'll just take them now to the Timken building the Yutz elementary the Yutz zone pretty much stays the same that we did make a small change down around Nemesilla Park that that area there right around the roundabout used to go to Gibbs for
037K-3 and then to Yutz for 4, 5, and 6 that will now be built and so that shift was made to make sure we had enough students at Belden and we weren't overcrowding Gibbs or Yutz. Gibbs the Gibbs zone has changed also because of Belden and also to solve some problems that we've always had so Gibbs is actually when we talked last time the Gibbs zone went from 17th Street as far north as 17th Street we moved it up to 19th Street so everything south of 19th Street and we're also taking it to the east down to Nemesilla Creek there or I like to use maple maple Avenue but we decided that we were also going to take 12th Street and cut it and you know we always have the old Washington neighborhood there and
038the folks who have to walk up that big hill and then cross 12th Street and and having students cross 12th Street is a big deal because those would be walkers and so we're going to pick those students up and we're going to take them to Belden that will help us kind of make sure Belden is balanced in enrollment and Gibbs isn't too overcrowded. Patrick, Patrick zone again is impacted by Belden a lot of students who live around Belden Elementary School are now bus to Patrick and so that is going to change but what we've done also is some of the students on the on the southwest end of town because we are combining McGregor and Cedar a year earlier are also going to have to go so we're shifting a lot of kids out of
039Patrick to Belden and then fill in those seats with some students from the southwest end of town and so when we look there it's the industry railroad tracks that run parallel to Navarre Road that we're adding there and adding that into Patrick and and so when when the board approves this plan every parent who got that they were going to Cedar and to Lincoln the last time we'll get another email that will say you're you're shifting to Patrick. Cedar Elementary the Cedar zone well Cedar will become future Lincoln so the kids who are at Cedar next year will all go to Lincoln except the few who will be going to summit there are a few who will have to leave and go to summit and we'll we'll talk about that but the majority of them
040will go will go to Lincoln they will be joined by a group of harder students then you can see there anything to the west of Rath Road and to to the north those are all students who would normally who currently attend harder and then go to Claret and 20 27 28 those students will go to Lincoln and so when I talked about harder there were kindergarten students that we were keeping those are the students that we will keep there are some fourth graders that we're keeping those are students that we would keep along with the students who currently live in the Baxter neighborhood and if you're familiar with that we take the Baxter neighborhood from the southwest end currently and bust them over to harder and so instead of them going to Cedar and McGregor
041they go over to the harder so and 27 28 will be just the opposite the kids in the Baxter neighborhood will get to go to the school in the southwest end and the students there to live to the north to the north of Tusk and to the west of Rath those students will be heading to the south southwest in the town and attending Lincoln and that allows us to that helps us balances out the enrollment in Clarendon because Clarendon is a smaller building and it also helps us make sure that we are at capacity in Lincoln Clarendon elementary zone changes when we put out the first zone for Clarendon we had some students that live just just to the west of the park kind of going up the hill there on 4th Street and on
042a long Arlington Road in order to fill summit when we open it up as an elementary school we had those students going to summit and you know when you drive that street those those kids could kind of look out their window and see Clarendon and so we felt that they needed to go to Clarendon and so we made some shifts to Cedar some kids who live in the Cedar neighborhood but live far enough away from Lincoln that they'll need a bus so they're kind of in the middle between Summit and in Lincoln so we're going to bust those kids on the southwest end of Summit and then you saw the shift at harder we're shifting those kids from harder that from from Clarendon over to Lincoln so that these students who live pretty close will
043become walkers and again that helps us with getting more kids who live within a mile to these schools so they're truly neighborhood walkable school harder I've talked about that and again it will be K and those K students are students who will be going to Lincoln and then the fourth grade students will be fourth grade students will be going to Lincoln the and then one first second and third will keep the kids who are there rising kindergarten rising first graders rising second graders and rising third graders will stay and they will split the next year some of them will go to Clarendon some of them will go some of them will go to Lincoln that can't happen now because there are kids at Clarendon who will go to Clarendon who will end up at Summit
044and so until Summit opens Clarendon needs to stay an intermediate building. Belden Elementary again AIM will cease to exist as a choice option and will return to a neighborhood school and that talked about that attended zone it is a very large attended zone just to get the building full but again the lion's share of that population lives around around Belden I believe that it will need one bus and may at the most to to get it to happen there versus five four or five this year and and so you can see that reduction that will happen and how we'll be able to save money again the changes that happened in this are the changes that takes it from Lawrence Road to the north north of Lawrence Road there all the way up to 12th Street
045and then take it in that little area around OJ's Parkway there and that the roundabout and Cook's Park in the lagoon that area there is not a lot kids who live there but we were separating neighborhoods and decided that we could just take that and then Summit Elementary a lot of kids live in this neighborhood and right now we bust these students to Gibbs and we bust them to Clarendon because it's the Arts Academy and so this will open as a school and so the changes you will see are in yellow here on this slide it includes the southwest end being added to it and that neighborhood in Clarendon being taken away it will fill that building when it opens up and currently because it's the Arts Academy I believe there are four buses that
046go to the Arts Academy and will go to one it is one of our most dense neighborhood walking neighborhoods our most dense neighborhoods are Clarendon and Arts Summit and and so when people have asked and I've been asked this question that you've got heart you got harder in Clarendon. Harder is the bigger building. Why did you decide to close Harder and keep Clarendon open and it's simply because the number of walkers who live close to Clarendon. If we decided to go with Harder we would still have or even more buses and kids would be majority kids would be bus K-6 so this allows us to do that and again we will use Harder there will be a program district use of Harder in 27-28. So that is all of our consolidations that will be happening
047we again consolidating buildings changing these attendance zones making our buildings more walkable helps us reduce duplication helps us cut our staffing because we have fewer places will help us make significant will help us gain significant savings from transportation as well and so again we believe these are solid cuts and will help us meet the expectation that we have to make to to be approved by the state and with that being said if there are any questions for me I'll turn it over to Mr. Gruber. Questions from the board. Ms. Watkins you got the floor. They will still go to Patrick. Mr. Van Alvin. I have a question Mr. Superintendent in regards to sixth graders that are currently at the Arts Academy next year they will return to summit as seventh graders and then that's for
048the 26-27 year for the 27-28 year they'll then move to Crenshaw as eighth graders and that's that's that's the plan we're going to bring to you in February but that's that's what kind of led to our our decision not to have seventh graders go to early college and and so we want to kind of work to put together a plan that will still let any family who wants their students to follow an early college pathway and begin to prepare for early college to have that option whether that option continues to be a part of our Arts Academy if they're there or if that option is an option to do that at STEAM as well and so we'll give more options or more choice to our families at our middle school choice and then at the
049end of the day help us with the duplication of services for middle school and so and that will give us savings but we will transition so since there there are sixth graders right now that will make this decision we're not going to move them and then make that decision later so we decided just say no seventh graders are going and then we'll put a plan in place and bring that plan to the board for your consideration in February. Thank you. Any other questions from the board? I just want to say thank you Superintendent Talbert. I know how long me and Mrs. Brown has been the only two on the board from when all this went down but I know how much work was involved in it how much different planning many hours so thank you
050for your due diligence on this matter. With that any other questions? Mr. President Mr. Gerber. Yeah let me finalize this for everyone. This plan is based on the best information available at this time it considers known staff demographics revenue estimates spending obligations and compliance requirements depending upon future election outcomes student needs new legislation budgetary requirements and unforeseen staffing changes reductions may vary from those listed in the plan in order to achieve the same or higher cost savings. The workbook itself is 30 plus pages long and some of the sections within the workbook actually duplicate some information so rather than go through 30 plus pages of the plan I have chosen to summarize the impact of the plan on a forecast that I have identified in the right corner is February 2026. We will not be
051actually acting on this forecast this evening we will be acting on it though at our February 9th meeting but just to summarize the changes that are documented in the pages of the written plan for fiscal year 2027 as a superintendent had said previously we are now anticipating a positive balance of 15.5 million dollars. In fiscal year 2028 back in October 2025 we are anticipating a negative deficit of over 17 million this plan will now get us to a positive balance of approximately 1.3 million dollars but the next time we are going to experience or anticipate negative cash balance in the general fund is indeed going to be in fiscal year 2029 and right now that estimate is a negative balance of 10.5 million dollars. So even though we have done all of this work and
052documented it here and we'll wait for the state's approval of the plan it doesn't completely get us to where we need to be in the upcoming years so as superintendent Talbert had said there is continued work to do in order to make sure that the general fund has a positive balance in upcoming years and with that being said if you have any questions we can do them now. Questions for Treasurer Gruber. Thank you very much. Mr. President I recommended the Board of Education approve the budget reduction plan worksheet and notebook for the 26-27 school year. So moved. Second. Mr. Gruber call the roll. Mr. Van Almen. Aye. Ms. Watkins. Aye. Mrs. Brown. Aye. Mr. Russ. Aye. That concludes my superintendent's report for this evening. Thank you. Real quick on a personal note I want to
053thank everyone for the prayers and the well wishes on my behalf. I want to thank the people sitting at this table for all your support and all everything you've done for me and my family. I truly appreciate all of you and with that I'll make the motion to adjourn. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Everyone be safe getting home tonight it's going to be a cold one.