SAU16 Joint School Board Meeting

001e set it up different you could afford that way can't we were on the stage and we actually did have our back sure thank you the city really has like no SYM okay everyone welcome welcome we're going to get we're going to get the meeting started here and we are going to start with the first item on the agenda which is the Pledge of Allegiance so if you can please stand and join me pledge of Ali toag of the United States of America the stands one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right so we're gonna follow along on the agenda here and the next item on the agenda is just a welcome so welcome and to introduce each of the board members so I'll start in just if we can start with

002just the board members to introduce themselves I'm Patrick oday I'm on the exor school board and I'm the chair of the joint board Melissa Lions East Kingston chair Tiffany drio East Kingston sure Bill gothier exor school exor corporative school board Scott Dan Scott Den Brentwood Cooperative School Board K Cooper Josh G Kensington Elementary uh Jennifer Leonard Kensington Elementary Alison Roy Kensington Elementary Jackie Tasser Newfield School Board chair J Newfield Heather ikem exitor School Board Susan Drinker exitor School Board Patty srat exitor School Board Don willins exitor School Board chair Ken utto stratum Memorial Kate Davis stratum Eric Herring stratum Memorial Erin Garcia de predes stratum Jennifer scrafford stratum okay if I can also ask the folks that are in the seu administration to introduce themselves starting with the superintend endent thank you David Ryan superintendent

003Esther asbell associate superintendent good evening Chris andruski assistant superintendent Molly o'keef Director of Finance good evening Rene Bennett director of student services ell assistant director director all right so the next item on the agenda is is public input and there is a new law that was passed over the summer it's referenced in the agenda RSA 18974 and it has some different components but one of them which I actually think we've pretty much always done anyhow as a joint board uh but is to provide at least 30 minutes for public input so we're going to provide 30 minutes um if if there's no one to speak we'll sort of move on to other agenda items but if someone else comes and wants to speak speak we can certainly C Circle back to that if it turns

004out that we need more than 30 minutes for some reason we start to exceed that time we'll go back to this group and take a vote on whether or not you want to extend the time or you want to move on with the agenda later on in the meeting we actually have a policy we're going to look at to uh decide whether or not to adopt or to discuss and adopt in the future but uh but for tonight we have um that opportunity for 30 minutes for any public input and we and I will ask that anyone that wants to speak to limit their time to 3 minutes or less uh if there's if there's additional time within those 30 minutes and someone wants to come forward and speak a second time uh we can

005provide that opportunity tonight okay so would anyone like to give public input okay come on forward to the microphone and introduce yourself and um feel fre to hi I'm June Fab from exor it's my understanding that the school board has dealt with a recent situation with racial undertones now is the time to take a good look at this event you have an opportunity to honestly review your actions to see if the school response could have been better a way to review this incident is to ask yourself the following questions is there accountability for school staff who do not advocate for their children is your staff training translating into actions and tangible change it's also my understanding that there is a there is no hate speech SL SL rist act policy separate from the bullying policy

006this results in a lack of response to incidents with racial undertones it would be beneficial to add such a policy separate from the bullying policy you owe it to everyone in the exitor Comm Community to review and update your racial policies and actions thanks thank you anyone else like to make public comment come on up just introduce yourself and say what town you live in thank you great thank you take out my mask um hi I'm Jennifer bracket pescovitz from exitor I have an sau6 student and I just want to start by saying thank you all for keeping our community as safe as possible during Co my family is imuno compromis and I really appreciate it we from the bottom of our hearts thank you all um so um I just wanted to come and

007um just talk about some of the important work that's being done in the district in support of diversity Equity inclusion and Justice thanks to the commitment of our Dei deij director Dr Ryan our superintendent our school boards staff students Community groups and other members of the public together we're changing the lens on how we value View and implement this work in our schools and the positive impact that's already had out in the exiter area and Beyond as we enter a new Academic Year and continue to support deij in our schools I'd like to raise an issue on behalf of myself and many members in our community who are concerned that the voices of black black and brown families are not being valued in conversations within this District conversations that have a direct impact on the

008safety and emotional health health of our sau's most rationally racially marginalized children what can this board do to ensure that all Administration and staff in our district are actively centering the voices of black and brown parents and caregivers what accountability can there be and what does that look like how will will it be enforced can progress in that area be measured I would greatly appreciate if members of this board will be willing to publicly discuss either tonight or at a future date steps this district will take to eliminate the emotional harm that happens when voices of our black and brown families are not valued in conversations that take place throughout the district prioritizing this action will not only strengthen our SAU it will also have a positive impact on the broader community as other aspects

009of our de deij work have had thank you kindly for your time thank you so again if you can just introduce yourself and say what town you're from um my name is Denise short and I am uh in exor and I have a daughter in uh the high school and um I was motivated to come here and uh in support of what you just heard from June and Jen about um in particular about if there's a way we can have a policy um a particular policy addressing hate speech and racism not just have it be a part of the bullying policy so I just want to support that but the main reason I wanted to come and speak was actually um about alist training and active shooter training which is um has now my daughter's

010a senior and it's now been sort of a regular part of her school experience um for many years and she told me about the most recent training that um was done and I was listening her describe how she was hi you know practicing hiding and being quiet and like physically actually Act experiencing what it would be like if there was an active shooter in the school and she's kind of used to it because that's what she's grown up with or what her experience has been but it just it makes me nuts because what else do we teach kids in school where we actually physically traumatize them because gee you're going to like remember what happens if it actually happens to you you don't do that with like the Dare program you know going to give

011kids drinks and say okay here's how your body responds to that and I know you know I'm I'm not asking I don't have a solution to that except I was kind of thinking open house at the high school is this Thursday and I was like you know what I think we ought to have the parents hide under a desk and be quiet and because what I my particular concern is trauma and this is you are literally traumatizing kids and teachers actually anyone who has to participate in that and isn't there a better way to do that can't we educate discuss you know have resources the way we do every other aspect of our education and that's all I have to say I just I wish there was a way to change that and I understand

012it's you know it's an institution it's an program and it's something that you've the school district has purchased and you know does it at all different levels and my daughter's in high school and I can talk to her about this and you know I think she's okay but for God's sake you have like kids at elementary school and middle school and and you're traumatizing them and there's there's no need to do that so thank you thank you anyone else like to provide a public input all right well it's 6:15 right now we started public input at about 7 after so if if anyone uh either changes their mind that's a member of the public or comes in between now and 6:37 you know please get our attention come up to the microphone and and interject

013and we will take a pause so that we can continue public input okay but otherwise we're going to move forward with the agenda and then as I said Circle back to that if if need all right so next we have approval of minutes there are minutes we last met on July 20th and there's both public and non-public minutes that were part of the packet and ultimately i' would be looking for a motion to approve each of those minutes or to make an amendment to one or either of them yeah I'd like to amend the um July my 20th minutes to say that I was at that meeting okay for the public and so you're both public and private did they excuse me non-public rather did they have you not listed and you're there okay all

014right so we can make that change yes I'm also not listed as being there and I was there for both we will change that too I see that on here okay yes that is not correct then do we know who seconded the motion to come out of nonpublic at the nonpublic meeting I don't recall I don't have my notes here to double check them I know we did have a second because we made sure we had a a motion to come out nonpublic and a second then we took a roll call vote before we did that so recall seconding a motion okay I think it was Kim Casey okay she's not here all right so there'd be amendment to have Kim Casey as a second okay Josh sorry Patrick I also wanted to mention that

015I was present at that meeting as well for the for the 20th Yep it marks him as absent at the non-public portion but he was there for that too okay yep so that should be changed for the non-public any other amendments to the minutes okay someone like to make a motion to approve the both sets of minutes as amended okay Melissa yeah I'll make that motion okay and second Tiffany okay all right so we have a motion a second any other discussion about the minute before we take a vote okay all those in favor of the motion say I and raise your hand I I okay any opposed no but abion and yeah I'm going to ask that next and and abstentions so looks like four extensions is that right okay you got it okay

016great all right thank you for that all right so all right so next on the agenda we have presentations but before we do that I had there's a request to move one of the items up on the agenda which is an update on the superintendent search process um Alison Higgins uh couldn't be here tonight but Kate Davis offered to stand in in herstead and to give an update thank you so um yes the update is we had a survey that went out last Monday um that went to seu staff and families um and other people who signed up for communications from the SAU um we were looking for feedback um from our school communities so some of the questions that we uh included on the survey were things that we're looking for the or certain

017areas were the most important areas for the seu to focus on When selecting a superintendent candidate um the most important characteristics for a person to have to be successful in the position important areas to strengthen in the SAU and important questions to ask superintendent candidates um it also went out on SE coast online on Thursday um so people could read it online there and then click a link to go to the uh survey and also the discussion group sign up um and then people members who were on the steering Community um could post it to other certain areas in their communities or Facebook or social media sites um as of 3:30 today we've received 300 60 responses the survey closes tomorrow afternoon um and then we will put a summary together and post uh post

018the summary on the se6 website under the superintendent search um so the discussion groups that we're we're forming um they're going to happen on October 25th and there there will be a series of small Discussion Group sessions with teachers pair professionals support staff Administration students and parent and community members each small group will be a repes repes representative of each of our communities in sau6 so um we we're encouraging um community members to sign up for this uh you just register um it's on the website it went out in a flyer it went out on the survey Link in a flyer um the deadline to register for the the discussion groups is October 7th um and let's see the discussion groups when we have them on the 25th the um we our goal is to

019learn more about the candidates from the individual candidates and to share what they believe the candidates should focus on if they are chosen to be superintendent um what will happen then is the participants in the discussion group will submit feedback uh from what they what they learned on the candidates and that will help the steering committee create interview questions um we'll also take the survey results into that account and kind of synthesize everything to see uh where the trends are uh after that the initial interviews will be on November 1st the steering committee will select which candidates who will move forward to the final interview with a joint board which will be public on November 10th so that's kind of the the timeline of what we have going so far at this point don't know

020if there's questions from board members but any have any uh people on the board have any questions or something they want to add to that for people that were on the steering committee I think it' be helpful to share so one thing to emphasize it is added to the agenda but that November 10th date is uh would be an additional meeting um and that wasn't something that was on the agenda in the past but it's and and there is some at least one conflict with that that date that I'm aware of um but the steering committee thought that would be the best date trying to sort out all the possibilities um and that would be the night that we'd have uh interview of finalists that the steering committee brings forward and it be with the

021whole joint board and if the board felt that they can make a decision that night they'd make a decision to either H well they would make a decision that night either to hire someone or to uh not hire so that would be the night that there' be both public input as well as uh the whole joint board would be here to make a decision about the final mention syn surve that's a that's a Heather question I know there is from the survey results will it also be public from the discussion group yes is okay I stand yeah although ideally if if um I want to remind everyone if you can use a microphone that's helpful particularly because we're streaming this and people at home can't really hear it if they don't hear it through the

022microphone so definitely thank you so much so once we summarize the survey information we'll be posting it on our website wherever we've um solicited the the feedback we've made sure that people will know where that will be um so that they can view that information from that and certainly happy to send an email out to uh joint board members so that you have that survey information in case you get questions you'll be able to forward that to the interested Community member y I have a question hea hi sorry has the job been posted internally yet it will be this week this week okay thank you we're just finalizing the profile okay thank you is the conflict the budget advisory committee that November 10th it is yeah and are they at the same time six o'clock

023okay I think it is that's right yeah so just just to be clear for folks that are might be watching at home in terms of what's going on here with um Heather Murray is is our HR person and she's sort of the liaison advisor support person to this joint board committee so it's a joint board process um and a steering committee that's you run by the board it's going to have members of the public involved um and Heather is sort of the advisor because she's the expert in terms of how to run Human Resources work but it is our committee and ultimately it's the joint board that makes the decision not the SAU it's a joint board decision other thoughts or comments okay um so next thing is on the agenda is the presentations but

024one more time I'm going to take one more quick pause because I think we are ending getting close to the end of the public input session time does anyone have any that they wanted to add or or share um we had a couple people that came forward give public input it's input we don't have to respond to it right now they're not looking for direct answers but if anyone wanted to comment on anything that was said I want to give an opportunity for folks to do that you don't have to comment tonight it's something certainly we can take up at a future meeting if folks want to do that go ahead well I do have a question because I I mean there's some serious allegations here with policies and and racism and I mean is

025it something we're looking at at a just District level to change policy and and add stricture policies that don't necessarily discuss I mean we're talking hate language and R racist act policies and and I think I think it should be addressed so I guess that's a question probably for the policy committee to start I don't know if I know Heather's our adviser for the policy committee too do you want to say anything about has the policy committee looked at that or is there plans for the policy committee to look at that and David also said the superintendent address it as well I'll tackle yeah I can do that I'll do that for us sub take the long walk back going to get your steps in tonight yep um thanks great question and I'm glad that

026we had some speakers uh speak to that uh the anti-discrimination task force was created three years ago uh when HB 238 came out excuse me SB 238 came out required school districts to have a process to review any type of discriminatory practices that were taking place in school whether it be actions of students staff the system community members that impacted students or staff members inside the school so when we established that one of the things that we were building towards was a reporting protocol for racis or discrimination aside from the bully policy um as you know we hired Andreas Mahia uh as our director of equity inclusion and Justice diversity he has joined forces with an assistant professor at University of New Hampshire they wrote for a grant uh they will know in March if

027that Grant is uh approved but we are currently working with anti-discrimination task force as well as this uh system Professor to look not only for a protocol for reporting but to write out a policy for uh hate language and bring that to the SAU policy committee um I'll also add that I had another meeting today if you haven't received the flyer I did ask principes to send it home uh for a forum on hate speech and uh hate and violence that's taking place in the Sea Coast region of New Hampshire in Maine that's going to happen at the kid KY community center on October 3rd where there's going to be something some of this ongoing discussion as well uh we'll be participating in that uh more as support and just learning from the presenters I

028believe the do PD KY PD and Portsmouth PD are three of the presenters uh as is on Hampshire listens from The carity Institute New Hampshire uh and um granded State progress so we have Partners in this area so the work is on going it's just probably not going as fast as it should so there's no SAU police involved in that at all it's you said do KY what was the other one Portsmith Portsmouth that's correct Heather first I just want to thank the members of the community who came tonight to share their thoughts and to raise this issue up and I also just want to thank the the sa6 and Andreas for your work um I think we're gonna um I think the fact that we're able to address this openly tonight is a sign

029of progress that um it's being lifted up and highlighted in a way that we can have conversation and and learn from it and and hopefully support um our families um better throughout and our students better in the community I think one of the questions I have is um I think that I'm I'm glad that we'll we're getting consulted on how to develop a policy that will will you know hopefully um support all of our schools I I'm also curious just how we're supporting administrators um across schools so when incidents happen that might be between students from different SAU schools um on a bus or you know on a school property like how are we supporting that internal collaboration communication um when different teachers different administrators are involved um I don't know if that's a policy

030I don't know if that's just more training I don't I'm not sure what the solution is there but we have such the SAU 16 is huge and our students you know go to individual schools but also interact and so I'm curious um in this particular incident where you know there have been um some issues that have involved students from different schools how how can we better support administrators and the internal communication between schools to support students and families sure thank you for the question um so not Andreas is only one person and so our goal as a team is to help build capacity in all of our schools uh to kind of understand a lot more about our deij efforts so in order for that that to happen we first had to establish the eij

031Committees which is now in all of our schools we have student groups as well that are participating in as a deij student committee we have student ambassadors we have adult ambassadors um there is I I can't imagine how exhausted Andreas is at the end of the day and he's here thankfully um so he can certainly supplement uh what I'm offering but the uh the amount of training that goes into first of all understanding um you know systems oppression and and issues of race but also lgbtq plus and uh ableism and um gender identity these are all really important issues that all of our students and our staff members really need to understand whether they agree with them or not is up to their the individual but to understand the impact and the disrespect that can

032can take place as a result of that discrimination is really what we're after is what we're trying to teach um that we're trying to respect all different is in this one space and make it a really safe space so that's the kind of work that we've been doing it's becoming more formal uh in that um more and more leaders in our schools are growing in their capacity to do this work as well lead this work so it's been um very rewarding to watch from last year to this year uh the the effort that people have been putting into um you know these types of of activities and I want to commend the boards who recently passed the policy on observant states where we added an additional holiday um I don't believe there was ever there

033was much discussion or um opposition to wanting to expand that list so that we can demonstrate our respect for for those uh for religious face in the community that we believe need to be uh recognized and respected in the way that we did so Andreas did you want to supplement anything that I said as I butchered through that work that you're doing because you do have a way with the words my friend H everyone so um just to go off what uh Dr Ryan was saying um we do have PD for the Educators and we've been implementing that in all the schools and especially this year with uh the elementary schools being able to use me as a support uh and resource now um this past week all the school elementary schools did have PDS

034that were focused around Di and they Tred to figure out what was needed in their schools and they worked with myself and others to create these professional development for their Educators um when Educators need support you know we show up oneon-one I show up one-onone and I and I talk to them I I I go through scenarios with them um how to deal with whatever situations they're deal with in the classroom between students between staff colleagues and and so on um and then also the uh the DI committees you know they were doing great work before I got here and uh they're they're even stronger um today and um I'm working with the di chairs of each of those committees specifically this year on a community of practice so we'll be getting together quarterly to

035to learn about this work to to to deepen our understanding so when stuff do happen in the school they don't have to come to me you know there's people in the schools that other Ed Educators and students and staff can go to um so that's one big thing we're doing this year to make it more sustainable um in the schools um so yeah that's there's a lot of great work happening Affinity groups um with in high school middle school um and uh the student di group at the high school started this year they're doing great work um if y'all seen the mural in in in the high school in the papers um so yeah that that's what we're doing around di stuff and there's a lot more um like they David said there's only one

036of me um so it's there um to go back since I'm up here I just want to make a comment really quick to the uh to the um the board on on the superintendent you know looking for uh my my only question and and I kind of is you know what what are we doing to make sure there's repres representation at these meetings or focus groups um so I just want y'all to keep that in your minds like what are we doing to make sure we have uh people who have children from the ESS community there people from um that might be working two jobs and come from a lower income class that they're that they have representation there um people who uh have students from the LGBT plus community that they're represented at these

037meetings and so on um and to realize you know it sometimes it takes an extra effort you know uh and and those people are usually not at the table or invited to the table so that's just my broad question to everyone and I know Heather has been working very hard you know on our end to make sure that happens but I just wanted to put it out there so that it's on all of our minds all right thank you excuse me okay hello okay sorry um so I I wanted to thank June and Jen for bringing that up um and and I'm really happy we're having this conversation and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes from this and Andre thank you for for standing up and explaining I've been I've been wondering and

038I keep think thinking I should probably just sit down with you and ask you what's happening in elementary schools but I'm I'm glad it is had um that you've been able to say it in public I also wanted to bring up um I wanted to thank Denise for your comments on Alice training this is a I've had the same questions a lot um about that I'm I'm it it's such a sticky subject because training needs to happen because this is the world we live in but um the my kids are young enough to where they haven't gone through anything like this yet but the stories I'm hearing are incredibly alarming about what it's like from from high school students I know but also from teachers I know who've who've truly truly been traumatized by these

039trainings um I I would love to see all lawmakers have to attend three Alice trainings per year but given that they're the ones who make the laws uh I don't know if that's going to happen but um I I would really like for this to be a conversation that we have at some point um um I I don't know what that's going to look like I don't know what level the conversation happens but I I just wanted to throw my support behind that idea and thank you for bringing it up other comments people want to make okay then we're going to um move forward with the agenda and now we're ready for the presentation thank you for being patient um so would don't you go ahead and come up introduce yourself and give us a

040sense of what's what you're going to present on tonight please hello everyone thank you so much for having us this evening uh my name is Zach shien I'm the Project Director of the New Hampshire school funding fairness project um so what we're going to be doing tonight um I'm here with um Doug Hall from our board I'll let him introduce himself uh in a second what we're going to do here tonight is basically um walk through our education funding and property taxes presentation that we have been giving um since we've been a formal organization and even before when it was um Doug and others um as some of the founding board members giving this presentation around the state and we're going to go through this pretty quickly um so this is our full kind of

041presentation that we'll be doing at exor high school on October 13th so that'll be the ask following this is to have all of you help promote this in your communities have get community members there we wanted to show you the full presentation so if you do have questions about different pieces of it want to dig into different sections of it you know what we'll be presenting but given that um you we want to kind of condense it down into about a half hour and leave time for questions from you all so we might be moving through some of the sections a little quicker uh just as a heads up that we know we're going quickly um but we're really happy to be here and we're going to break it up into two sections Doug will

042do the first half I'll do the second and then we'll take questions from you all um so thank you so much for having us here uh yes I'm I'm Doug Hall and I first got involved with this question of school funding in the state of New Hampshire when I was in the Hampshire House of Representatives 35 years ago uh this was before the Claremont case which we'll be talking about a little bit and um I was uh chairman of the committee that decided how much money would go to the school districts around the state and realized it was a major problem the problem still exists I got to turn it around and point it the right way um in the back some of the charts and tables that we're going to present may not be

043clear to you if you want to move up please do so there are a couple chairs here or bring your chair up um just to start this uh photo was uh taken in Berlin a couple years years ago after we did a presentation there the school district in Berlin um has been and is in a huge crisis and this um photo was taken the year that they closed their last Elementary School all the elementary kids now go to classes in the high school with the middle school kids as well and at the time the graphics Arts uh students in the high school decided they wanted to talk about about the problems there and they created this logo and marched through uh Berlin trying to tell the uh the populace there about the problems in their

044schools but the problem isn't just about schools it's also about taxpayers and the struggle that many communities have uh between those who want to support their schools and those who are really affected by increasing property taxes so these are two sides of the same coin and here's the quickest overview taxpayers and students are not treated equitably and fairly in New Hampshire there's some differences within your districts but the differences across the state are even greater this problem has been getting worse over recent decades and the current system is unconstituted stitutional this is what we'll be presenting we'll come back to this slide there's uh five parts of the presentation um and so the first part I'll present to you uh fairly quickly is the Constitutional responsibilities the New Hampshire Supreme Court's decisions in the Claremont

045case and that was 1998 um the state of New Hampshire has a duty to pay for the cost of a constitutionally adequate education for every K to 12 child that's the state's responsibility in addition the taxes that the state of New Hampshire uses to pay for this education for all of its students must have a uniform rate across the state and an adequate education is more this is also from The Claremont decision is more than uh Reading Writing and arithmetic it's a pretty broad um set of responsibilities in the 21st century and um the state needs to Define specifically what that adequate education uh includes so the connection here this is from another case the London Dairy School District case against the state in 2006 so only 16 years ago whatever the state identifies is

046comprising constitutional adequate adequacy it must pay for none of that financial obligation can be shifted to local school districts regardless of their relative wealth or need and in the Claremont case something similar to the extent that the property tax is used in the future to fund the provision of an adequate education the tax must be administered in a manner that is equal in valuation and and uniform in rate there are two School two school funding lawsuits uh currently before the courts the conval school uh the conval school district suit was filed in 2019 and it argues that the state's definition of adequacy isn't isn't sufficient and recently the ran suit filed this year by taxpayers not by school districts is saying well wait a minute if the property tax rates are supposed to be equal

047throughout the state they aren't therefore we're suing the state so let's talk about the role of property taxes in funding and the resulting inequities this is a pie chart of the funding of public schools in New Hampshire 2020 21 and what you see the big big blue piece is the local property tax 61% of the $3.5 billion I mean this is a big number 61% come from the local property tax another 10% came from the Statewide education property tax which we'll talk about a little bit more so in total 71% came from property taxes the lottery provided 4% uh and that was part of the state's Cash adequacy Aid that 4% plus the other 14% so the state was kicking in for adequacy 18% other state aid like special education and U vocational tuition and

048transportation was 3% Federal 7% basically our school system is funded by property taxes in this state and that Reliance has been on property taxes has been and getting worse These Bars show over the 10-year period from 2012 to 2021 as school district budgets in aggregate increased where did the money to pay for the increase come from on the leftand side local property taxes picked up 576 million additional dollars to fund the schools whereas state adequacy aid only increased by 71 million federal funds by 64 and if you look over here on the far right other state aid actually went down so not only are property taxes paying for the bulk of uh the school systems in the state they are increasingly so and this is just to give you a sense of how big property

049taxes in New Hampshire not just for schools but also County and municipal government how how big that is in comparison to other taxes in this state and what you'll see is property taxes in total about $4 billion and the next little bar is the two business taxes the business Enterprise tax and the business profits tax together are raising around $700 million and those are the ones that the state legislature keeps debating about you don't find much debate in the legislature about what to do about the property taxes so this is a look uh there's one bar for each state in the country 50 and what you'll see that these are measuring is the is the property tax revenue as a share of all revenue raised by the state and local governments and schools and the

050US averaged 31% of taxes raised among the states is from property taxes in New Hampshire it's 63.9% far above the next highest state and this is something of the same sort of thing New Hampshire's on the far left here and what this is is the percent of school revenue from State sources for each state and as we showed you on the pie chart um New Hampshire is the is the lowest it's the second lowest if you consider the Statewide property tax to be a state tax which it isn't it's raised and spent locally just like the local tax and our neighboring state Vermont is all the way on the other end where 90% of the revenue for Vermont schools come from state taxes not local property taxes so the key concept for comparing School tax

051rates is equalized value per pupil how much property is available in a town to be taxed to support the education of one student okay it's a way of measuring this that includes big cities like Manchester and small towns so here's it's simple math it's pretty simple if there's a million dollars of property value in one town and a tax rate of $10 per thousand then that million dollars of property can raise $110,000 but if that town has only $400,000 of property value for a pupil then a $10 tax rate will only raise $4,000 so what happens in the second town to to raise the same $10,000 they have to have a $25 tax rate this is the kind of difference if all the students were distributed across the state in the same way that property

052values were distributed across the state there wouldn't be a problem it turns out that the average in New Hampshire is $1.3 million of property value behind each student to be taxed and this see if I can U Point here it's not too clear there are 166,000 pupils in New Hampshire with a 1.3 million equalized value per pupil so on average in the Hampshire an equalized tax rate of $121 would raise $155,000 per pupil that's on average so look at Port bsouth it has $3.3 million of equalized value for each pupil so with a $6 tax rate it can raise $20,000 per pupil whereas if we go down to let's go down to Newport um Newport here has only $649,000 per pupil about half of the state average and with a $15.42 it's raising $10,000 half

053of what Portsmouth can raise with a tax rate that is two and a half times Portsmouth tax rate and these kinds of differences exist throughout the state unfortunately too many of us live in one community and see what the tax rates are understand how they change over time in our community but there are communities in this state if you can believe believe it cuz it's not in the presentation there are communities there's communities in this state where the tax rate for schools is one cent per thousand valuation think about that in comparison to what it is in your your towns um so these inequities uh exists throughout the state and we were asked at one presentation some years ago well if there's $1.3 million dollar of property value behind each student on average how many

054students are in communities where it's less than that below average it turns out that 78% of the students in the State live in the communities that have below average tax base per pupil I got three minutes uh so here here's an example uh We've collected any number of these two different houses um one very expensive and one not so expensive and the uh market price on the on the one in Freedom was $910,000 when it was sold and the school property tax for that year was 5,192 for that and in Brentwood this house with the property value of 335,000 paid about the same tax but its value was almost just a little more than a third of the other one so the gap between state aid and actual cost I'm going to turn over to

055Zack all right we're trying to we're trying to stick to our half hour presentation time so we can leave time for questions so I'll take over the second half here and so a big piece of what Doug's been alluding to at the beginning as well is this lack of State funding so thinking about the rly Des sparing tax rates they have to raise the money to actually support our schools looking to the other side of the equation which is how little money the state actually sends and so what we have here is we pull out pulled out a few communities um for you all brenwood on the left xer on the right right State average in the middle and the small chart is the cost of adequacy that's the adequacy formula that the state runs

056and sends per pupil um for adequacy money and what you can see is that there's a huge gap between the amount of money actually spent and the amount of money sent for the adequacy aid and the thing is that this chart looks exactly the same basically no matter what communities we plug into this some communities get a little more on average some communities spend a little more on average average but there's always a huge disparity between how much money the state actually sends and how much money the communities actually spend and part of this is something that is really engaging with community members and so this kind of comes back to our presentation um that we're going to be doing on October 13th and the work we've been doing doing these presentations around the state

057is when people understand the dramatic disparities between how high their taxes might be in relation to try to spend money to support their schools and the driving Factor behind that being the lack of State funding people really connect the dots and are frankly frustrated and want there to be a lot more activity and engagement and serious conversations at the state legislature around how to stop downshifting such a bulk of that so we ran a survey um last November basically laying out a few of these simple facts um and people across the board wanted to switch to a state a more of a Statewide funding source as to a local property tax system once they stood the dramatic disparities around how little money the state actually sent and one something we did a few years ago

058and I'm going to go through this relatively quickly but um anyone here well all of you here um who have worked on budgets um in detail what we did is we asked uh the Pittsfield school district um Doug and some colleagues a few years ago where did the superintendent and the budget administ to say what if you only got the state's adequacy to write your budget so take the budget you actually wrote and then cut it down as if you only got the $4,600 per student that year so they took the budget they'd written which was averaging $17,700 per student and went through and cut item by item through the budget to try to get down to the state's adequacy number to show truly how absurd it is to try to run a school and

059what the state is saying is an adequate amount for an adequate education and so in these hypothetical cuts the text is really small I'm sure not everyone can read it but getting rid of a third of the teachers at the elementary school limiting um all Transportation Grounds Maintenance and repairs this is just the first page we have getting rid of the 34 and a half pair of professional positions all esol programs all substitute teachers and there's a third page of cuts all maintenance of athletic fields all photocopiers and supplies all substance abuse counselors all guidance personnel and he after doing all of these Cuts many of which violate state law federal law colletive buying agreements the district only got down to a budget of $5.2 million and class size is at that point were 30

060students per teacher so in order to get to the state's adequacy amount and we'd ask them to kind of preserve the core classroom the teach teachers teaching um content in this in the classroom they had to cut half of the remaining teachers to get to that aacy amount so now it's 60 students per teacher with all those cuts you just saw and this is an exercise in the Absurd right but the point was to show how little you could actually do with the amount of money the state is saying is an is the adequacy formula when they're supposed to be providing funding for an adequate education for all of our students so now we're going to go through a few kind of other um consequences of this system uh one of them being uh teacher

061salaries uh this is this dat data is a little outdated um there's going to be some new data coming out this fall and there's actually a legislative committee looking at teacher shortages and salaries uh right now that's meeting actively but what this shows is another way that there are pretty dramatic disparities District to District town to town and so we have um starting salaries of teacher of new graduates with the bachelor to the top and a master at the bottom and you can just see that the salary range there's a huge range for the similar position first year teachers and what this does is it I mean I'm sure all of you deal with this um but it really makes it hard to retain teachers in some communities and just further widens the gaps Community

062to community town to town and especially with New Hampshire being such a small state and you can go to a different District relatively easily it just really compounds the effects of the system on specific districts another thing that this does and it's nice talking to um a Cooperative school district is that it it highlights differences among towns that are feeding into a a a a middle school or Regional High School or cative high school because we have tax rates for example pulled out some schools from that that send their kids to the PMI breaker cooptive School District here you have students coming from towns that are paying dramatically different tax rates and there's been instances of this there's current instances of this where some towns want to pull out of regional Cooperative districts because of

063the differences in tax rates and it creates intense tensions and yet Cooperative school districts can provide a lot more as you all do to the students coming here than individual towns might be able to on their own and so this really discourages that type of regional cooperation that is really helpful but because of the way that we fund it relying so heavily on tax rates it can be really discouraging to continue that model another thing we like to um point out is the impact on economic development and what I mean by this is think through you know some of the driving factors why businesses would or wouldn't go to a community often times it's Public School Systems it's taxes it's economic vitality and just the ability to succeed there and if you're going to look

064to open a new branch of a business and some of your options are a community like Berlin or Port Smith and you're going to pay four five six times the property tax rate in one of those communities that has a school that's having a harder time that has a school that is paying not able to pay their teachers as much right it really disincentivizes that type of economic growth and remember this is a state policy the adequacy numbers are state law that are upheld and changed or not every year but specifically every two years during the budget process and this is state law that is actively discouraging economic growth in specific parts of our state and really putting frankly School boards select boards City councils in very specific and tight situations with the lack of

065State funding and the heavy Reliance on property tax taxes that has dramatic Ripple effects to the ability to attract and retain businesses as well all right just checking the clock so a few Uh current and future steps but first I want to remind everyone kind of where the bulk of the problem lies so this is something that Doug went over at the beginning here but it's really the 71% of our school Revenue that is raised by local property taxes That Vary wildly across the state and so one thing that we've been trying to think through is kind of how to quantify this problem and one way to look at it if you believe that the Supreme Court rulings um should be followed um that the state should pay for an adequate education that should mean

066that we would not have this heavy Alliance on local property taxes and the figure of that in ter terms of dollars is to the tune of about $2.3 billion do per year is being ra currently raised and spent by local property taxes that should be the responsibility of the state there's an active downshifting of that financial responsibility to pay for the education of our students to the tune of $2.3 billion per year one way of looking at that is that should be the state's responsibility and just to clarify we're not advocating to raise taxes by $2.3 billion we are just saying that who pays for that and how should be at the state level and not rely so heavily on local property taxes as it currently does one piece in terms of current and future

067solutions that is important to hit is that there was a commission to study school funding there was a legislative commission I'm sure many of you heard of it it took place a few years ago um ran throughout the year in 2020 um and this commission um at the legislature um was given about I think $500,000 and they hired a National Data firm that has expertise in looking at these issues um in other states and their report um they did had hundreds of hours of testimony and met a lot throughout 2020 and basically the report this is the kind of quote that sums it up that really says that it's very inequitable and just reiterated that this problem has not gone away and continues to be deeply compounding in specific parts of our state and one

068of the um primary um solutions that air put forward as a potential way to fix this um would be to have a a single Statewide property tax and so that would be a single rate say what education property tax the single rate that everyone pays that largely replaces the local property tax and um that is down here which um would now be at the time of the writing it was a little higher of the AR report now would be about $10 per thousand that's one solution they are Pros to that there are cons to that communities that have lower tax rates right now probably would not be in favor of that communities have higher tax rates probably be more in favor of that but we have this up here to kind of show that there

069are a lot of different ways to tackle this and there's no way to it is unlikely that in one year we would make any policy at the state level that would shift around $2.3 billion it's a lot of money but the point is to look at we have a lot of different tax tax options that we can um use as as resources we have taxes that we have cut recently specifically business taxes interest in dividends taxes phasing out there are other types of wealth taxation other states use income and sales taxes both of which are very politically uh challenging in New Hampshire but as we thinking through that there are a lot of other ways in pieces with different approaches that could help replace the heavy Reliance on local property taxes specifically to relieve the

070burden on the communities that feel it the hardest and so to kind of summarize what we've been through and then I'm happy to answer any questions that Doug or I can um at a high level of taxpayers and students are not treated equitably and fairly and it's really important that's why we try to link these so closely throughout this presentation is that this is not a if you're involved in schools this affects you and if not it doesn't um which is why you know communities it's important to keep track of community members that might be on fixed incomes community members that might have different ability to pay than others they are impacted by this heavy Reliance on local property taxes just as much as parents who have students in the education system system that have

071different access to Opportunities and the state is downshifting to the tune of about $2.3 billion of per year that is currently being raised and spent by these wildly varying local property taxes problem continues to get worse it's unconstitutional and this last point is really the kicker and really the kind of where we as an organization fit in is that this problem is created at and could be needs to be potentially solved at the state level this is not a go to your local school board and direct your energy and activism there this is a go to the state level and have state level lawmakers look at how adequacy money is funded or not because that's really where this problem is coming from and this is uh where in our presentations we have some specific actions

072people can take if they want to get involved um we've been doing a lot of work this summer educating candidates running for office um we're a 501c3 so we don't endorse any candidates um but we are making sure to reach out to anyone running for state level office to go through various versions of this presentation act as a resource make sure they understand this issue talk to constituents and again give them the ability to connect with their candidates um and make sure that people understand where they fit in in this issue and specifically who State reps state senators the governor specifically where that process happens and where this these decisions keep getting made each year and kind of how we can move towards some solutions and that is the end of that and we did

073try to go through that relatively quickly um we'll be doing a very similar version on the 13th moving at a much slower Pace um and and digging into some more of those uh slides in a little more detail um I will also send a copy of this out um to Chris after so make sure all of you get a copy of this specific presentation too that lives on our website as well um but with that thank you very much and we're happy to answer any questions thank you um how have the New Hampshire educational Freedom accounts how has that program affected this problem do you have data on that yet there is data on that there was actually the new numbers were released a few weeks ago um the way that we as an organization

074kind of interact with that um with the educational um education Freedom accounts is to kind of point to how while this you know we're talking about a problem that is $2.3 billion and to date the that program is in the $15 million range I believe one of the concerning pieces is that it's pulling funding out of what we hope we just showed is an already cash strapped system and a system under which the state is not sending enough money um so I guess the short answer is those new numbers did just come out um there was some uh good reporting on that kind of how much money was being sent to students who are not in public schools and how much money was sent to students who left um but yes so that's kind of

075the so am I right am I right in understanding this that um the the inadequate amount that the state what you're saying is the inadequate amount that the state is giving to the public schools is has been reduced further because of the educational Freedom accounts because now they're pulling from that resource to fund those accounts is that right yes and there are other proposals um there was one last year there's actually l are filed a few weeks ago that would do this that would increase the amount that those um uh those the amount that you can get by using that program to not include just the state adequacy amount but to include the amount spent at the local District level um so that's another proposal that will be up at the legislation next year um

076the 2.3 billion doll is a lot bigger than that it's also a lot bigger than another other thing that happened which is when the state pulled out its contribution to the retirement system some of you are familiar with that those are important and and they are a tax on the public school system but restoring that amount of money doesn't solve the $2.3 billion problem if that can get restored that would be great but we wouldn't want people to walk away saying oh good now we took care of all the problem the problem has existed long before either of those actions occurred I had two questions um the Statewide property tax I think you said that was the one that happened after the original decision um has that amount increased in the 20 years since then

077could could you repeat the question I can't hear in this Ear hearing aid in um the Statewide property tax so like yes has that amount increased over the last 20 years is it just oh no when it was first in instituted it was $660 per thousand okay it's now around last year it was around a195 a185 per thousand and they just decided for the current year that it's going down by another hundred million so the rate will go down further it'll probably be around um what would that make it probably around a120 per thousand so remember it was $660 cents and it's been coming down as that comes down it forces the local property tax to pick up the difference which means that property wealthy communities only have to add 10 cents to pick up

078what they lost whereas property poor communities have to add a150 okay and then my other question was you had that uh around $10 number for if there was one number throughout the whole state you said some would be higher than that and some would be lower than that where does that line fall would most people pay less than that or would most people like compared to where they are now does that make sense I don't if if there were a Statewide property tax at the $10.60 level okay that's for schools that's not municipal government that's not County government just the school amount so any any town where the tax rate was higher than that today would have a reduction to that level and any town where it was below that would have an increase to

079that level do you know like on that graph where you say 80% of the people are kind of on the lower end what where does that $10 line fall in that sort of sense um I'm I'm going to make a a generalization here that I have to go back and check the actual data but about 75% of the people in New Hampshire would see lower property taxes and about 25% would see higher property taxes okay thank you that's okay it you you said that you I think you've started out the conversation that the problem is predicated on the fact that New Hampshire's working outside of a constitutional um judgment by the Supreme Court correct correct how has that been happening for over 20 years it's been challenged I'm sure a number of times how have

080those laws been adjudicated or how's that been adjudicated by has it gone back to the Supreme Court I can't imagine it's just two recent cases that so I'll give the high level and then you want to fill in but the the kind of how has that one question I think I hear you're asking is so the Supreme Court in the in the 90s the CL out decisions was pretty clear and we pulled out kind of the key pieces of that so then how how how has that not been fixed is one piece and how has that not been fixed is that the courts in their ruling they then say legislature you need to fix this as the branch that controls the state budget process controls how money Flows In the state this is inadequate you

081need to fix this and then swept was one of the one of the the original Solutions the Statewide education property tax but at the end of the day it's the legislature did not go far enough and then elections happen and different policies and different priorities come and then things backtrack and so there's kind of this back and forth of the legislative the judicial piece is one piece but the courts aren't going to solve this and even with the new lawsuits one of the reasons those are have been filed is because despite Supreme Court rulings that were we think very clear on the fact that this is unconstitu and the legisl needs to fix it they have not and so these new lawsuits are an effort to highlight the fact that those have not been fixed

082and pull out some of the specific examples and kind of where we as an organization fall is that's one piece of the puzzle and then engaging in advocacy and with your legislators is the other piece of the puzzle because at the end of the day they're the ones that have the the power and that they will to change how money flows of the state um Zach is exactly right about that in the end it will take action by the state legislature to make change but I'll be a little more blunt both political parties want to ignore this issue and as long as they agree to ignore it nothing is going to change it's a political issue it's a budget issue for the state and I've been a member of both political parties and I've seen

083it in each party where they don't want to talk about it and so that's one of what we're trying to do is get the public to understand the issue a little better and there may be soon in the next year two years from the two new cases more Court decisions that will put pressure again on the legislature but it will take legislative action to have something happen I just want to follow up one more thing I'm a strong advocate of local control of Education what would you say as a criticism that this would take away local control of Education yeah so I mean the one way of thinking about this is that this system right now is the opposite of local control so by giving so little funding you are putting local districts in a

084very specific box and you're not allowing them to make those decisions so but for example so say the um $10 uh $10 per thousand Statewide education property tax was put into effect right so everyone has to do this local communities could still through their budget processes through who they elect on the school board through their deliberative sessions still choose to spend more um so that's one piece of that but the other thing is that this process as it should play out should involve conversations about that specifically what would more funding look like where would it come from how would it be distributed what pieces of adequacy are looking at how do we measure the outcomes of the funding that that gets distributed or not um and so I guess the from our perspective that absolutely

085is a very critical piece but the way we look at it right now is that by providing so little funding that's really locking school districts in and frankly taking away your ability to make decisions because you have to you know balance the needs of the taxpayers versus are the needs of your budget so strictly um the local control issue is an important one and there was an attempt in Believe It or Not 1919 so 103 years ago to solve this very problem and there was a state committee set up and what they did was first of all they said the only power to be taken from the local community is the power to have poor schools and what they did is they set up the State Board of Education that's when it was created it

086was also when the superintendents were created they were state employees meant to go out and make sure that each district was complying with state regulations so local control is there for some things if the state provided instead of $4,000 per pupil provided $9,000 per pupil local control would still be there on how to spend the money the difference would be where it's coming from um there's one other thing I would point out here and that is that the the current system is not the way the system was designed in 1786 at that time the New Hampshire State Legislature every two years told each Town how much money it had to raise for its schools there were no local school boards there were no votes locally they were just told by state legislation exor this is

087how much you have to raise it wasn't and if you had the history in the area here it wasn't until 1900 to 1910 the towns began to add additional amounts to what the state had required and it's only then since the early 1900s that the current system we have of these great differences among communities has existed assist just keep it I'm good I'm good I I I do think I I appreciate you folks coming and I think it's great to hear this side of it I think a vigorous debate on both sides would be interesting I don't know what some of those other opinions are um but I think it's it's worth it while it is a political decision probably more than likely and that's where you have to win over voters hearts and Minds

088to your cause so I think providing opportunities for a more vigorous debate on this would be something I would certainly welcome just to respond to that I could not agree more and to Doug's Point earlier the this problem exists because of a lack of debate right I we neither of us we do not have all of the answers of how this problem would be solved and so a large part of of why we do these and what's kind of both scary and fun to do these is the people come with with from a whole range of ideological perspectives and come with very specific things that they are for or against and we get questions at these huge range um and you know people don't always agree but the point is is that without having these

089like without talking about is the state providing enough money we don't think so we think they should provide more how do they do that how do they measure that are there um strings attached are there local control issues all that should be debated and should be talked about but it's just not and so that's kind of what we're trying to is really Elevate this as something that candidates candidates and then elected officials at the state level feel like they need to talk about hear from both sides hear from you know there's way more than two sides hear from all of those but the underlying Force being that you know they are not providing enough money so how to do that who gets it who pays what the curriculum standards are Etc ET Etc that's complicated

090stuff but not having that discussion that discourse and to Doug's Point again both both parties is part of the reason why it still exists so I guess I couldn't agree more just to build on that and I'm sure you have this in like other I guess I'm curious you mentioned the opposite scenario in Vermont right be really helpful to see some case stories of other states that obviously every state is set up differently right we have you know things that are part of our system that are different than other states but it's it would be helpful just to piggyback on the comment that was just made to also see like what could it look like and what has been the impact on you know towns on students um if there is a state that that

091could be you know seen as a comparison yeah that's a very good point and I I don't know if you have anything to add to that but something that we also a to compare to other states and there's no state that does it perfectly and there's plenty of states that are in the exact same situation as us getting sued by because there's inequitable funding and it's some on different along different lines but very similar stories Pennsylvania actually had their kind of equivalent of the conal case closed up early this spring we're waiting a ruling on that um but so yes there are other states that do pieces of it well there but like there are also communities in New Hampshire that do things really well I mean our schools are by and large very good

092and we on average have very high levels of achievement we spend a lot of money per people provide a lot of things our public education system is very good it's just that the average kind of hides the disparities throughout the state and so something that um frankly we want to continue doing a better job of Is Lifting Up those communities the programs The Cooperative districts throughout the state that are doing a really good job because I think there's a lot to learn from our own State about what good models could look like have a um question or comment I guess have you done any comparisons with other states that don't have income or sales tax I'm not sure I mean I know on that model we we're sort of far to one side of the

093Continuum so I you know that place isn't going to change but I'd be interested to see a comparison to those states that don't have that type of funding like we don't have the um two states that have neither the sales nor the income tax as I understand it right now is Wyoming and Alaska so how do they fund their schools they fund their schools by mineral extract taxes the oil in Alaska not only pays for the schools it puts money into everybody body's pocket and in Wyoming it's much the same thing um and those the the only minerals we got the export are gravel uh and it doesn't raise a lot of money but there are things done in other states that we should learn from there's no question about that um and some of

094those have to do with how to how to enact a true Statewide property tax where everybody no matter whether you're in Coos County or in Rockingham County is paying the same tax rate some states have some real Statewide property taxes the the other thing I wanted just to comment on to speak to Eric's point I remember this debate one of the terms that was thrown around a lot was the concept of donor towns can you say something about that because I think it might be helpful to add that to the conversation yeah absolutely and so um just for folks that don't know donor towns formerly when there was a state when the Statewide property tax was in fact collected at the state level there were some communities that were giving more than they were getting

095than getting back so they came up with this term donor towns to Advocate successfully to stop that um the Statewide property tax from being collected at the state level and so this comes up a lot and one of the things that I find most interesting is one of the main points around that is just because someone happens to live in a community with on average high property value Portsmith for example does not mean that they are wealthy not everyone in Portsmith is wealthy not everyone in wolfboro is wealthy not everyone there can afford you know an increase in taxes especially you know with that current air proposal if it were to jump two or three times which is very valid and so I think that um you know we were just in CIP two weeks

096ago which is would be was a for a former donor town but they very much you invited us in to have a conversation we had had people from we stayed for two hours answering questions and um had people from kind of every background um wanting to dig into the topic but the I think the point is is that any of these potential Solutions need to include conversations around property tax relief targeted relief for people that have um lower incomes we have a property tax and low and middle low and moderate property tax relief program currently but it's dramatically underfunded there's current proposals to increase the funding for that so I think that including those um communities in this conversation is really important and also one way you get away from that is you stop thinking

097that you only fund schools by property taxes that's what created the so-called donor towns and so if we supplement that with other business taxes or the interest in dividends or other forms of taxes then it's no longer viewed as Community versus Community um so yeah I'm glad you brought that up um the the donor Town name is one of those things where if you can get the right term you're you you've got a good PR beginning um essentially what they are property wealthy communities that's the term that I would use if you have more than that $1.3 million dollar of property behind each student you're relatively property wealthy but we have towns with $9 million per student 30 million per student and they're called donor towns yes they're property wealthy towns the other comment I

098would have about the donor issue is this nobody asks why is NASA a donor town in the business Enterprise tax why is Portsmouth a donor town in the rooms and meal Stacks there are no donor towns everybody pays the same rate everywhere and it goes into State coffers and is used for State functions it even happens in regard in regard to the property tax in Rockingham County there's the county jail and the County nursing home does anybody in a particular Town say wait a minute we don't have anybody in a nursing home our County tax were a donor town you know it's the only place where that term is used is in the funding of schools Jennifer we're not we're not actually taking questions for public input right now but thank you though any other

099questions from the board or or comments that folks want to make again I like that comment the the full presentation um at a more reasonable rate for everyone to grab is going to be October 13th at 6 o'clock which is a it's a Thurs th night I believe uh in the auditorium at ex high school and that's for the the entire public is invited to that and they can also make comments and interact with members that are that are here so right and we'll be sending this deck around um as a followup and have my contact information in there so definitely please feel free to reach out yeah thank you so much for having us thank you for coming okay thank you thank you very much thank you all right so next we're going to

100move along here um still under this presentation section and we have the first draft of the SAU budget so see Molly coming forward it's gonna looks like she's going to take the lead on this okay so tonight we're going to talk about the draft budget for fiscal year 24 which is your 2324 school year Molly and I know the folks in the room know who you are but just since we're also broadcasting this just introduce yourself again just so it's clear for people out in TV Land sure I'm Molly o'keef I'm the Director of Finance here at sa6 and I will get into how it impacts our tax right later on in the presentation so stay tuned so we did review this presentation with our SAU budget Advisory Group and so that is one member

101from each of your boards and so we have Incorporated the feedback that we got from those members and tonight we're looking for f further feedback because after tonight in October this will go to the public Hearing in vote so there's a lot on this slide um but we wanted to start off with a year in review so our schools continue to work on ready math post-secondary career Pathways seal and deij and student driven assessments we transitioned from Power School to Alma we welcomed three new employees now these are not new positions we had turn over for two employees and then the position of the deij coordinator moved from the The Cooperative budget to the SAU budget we worked on portrait of an educator portrait of a leader and balance scorecard we held a silent auction

102raising $1,000 for a student scholarship what was trash to others was treasure to some people we had some team some members of our team present at national conferences we had two SLT members obtain their doctorates and our HR Director obtained an additional certification and three members of our SLT are on the nhsaa executive board or committees so the SAU budget is is a little bit different than your District budgets the seu does not have an individual tax rate you will see this in your local budgets on the line called Office of the superintendent and how it is divied up between all of your different budgets is half on ADM your average daily membership and half on property valuation the equalized valuation now all those statistics come directly from the doe website and in the bottom

103corner I put the distri distribution for the current year so the proposed fy2 24 budget is a 4.85% assessment increase to each of the districts now you're going to see in the line by line that is an overall budget increase of 15.13% however the assessments are to the town are what drives the tax impact and we're able to bring it down to the 4.85 by the use of the fund balance so the SAU fund balance is not given back in the tax rate every year and one of the questions that came about in our SAU budget advisory committee is how did we arrive at the current fund balance that we have so we've known for some time that we needed a new accounting software so we've been saving so what I did on this slide

104here is July 1st 2019 my first day here um I put the fund balance and what it was and that year we were actually giving back some of the fund balance so we had a hire a fund balance to support retirement payouts to some individuals who unfortunately passed away rather than retired and so we brought down that fund balance and so over time you add your Revenue minus your expenses and the fund balance has grown to 308,000 this is slightly different than we reported in the SAU budget advisor committee two weeks ago because we had a few um last minute adjusting entries we had to make so before we dive into the budget I wanted to show you this slide because the SAU budget is mainly people there's only 5% for the accounting software upgrade

105and 5% operational expense everything else is people so there is no Staffing changes proposed there are 19 people in the SAU budget and these are the 19 positions so employee compensation is more than just base salary there for all SLT members the senior leadership team on this slide I put what people are paid the value for the superintendent was based on feedback from your steering committee please note that health and dental and F and retirement are not included and I've also included a link to the um doe website where you can find the comparison of other districts so in the budget advisory committee one of our takeaways was to to give you more details on the accounting software so we currently use ads profund which is owned by Tyler Technologies we did a request for

106proposal a full RFP and we only received one response which was from Tyler an upgrade of the current system that we have and it's the system we want so I've also put some additional details on how many districts in New Hampshire use this as well as Tyler has migrated 17 districts from profund to Visions which we will be doing hopefully only nine districts remain on profund and it's sunsetting and won't be supported in a few years these are some of our neighboring dist districts that use infinite Visions or Erp Pro and we've had offers from them where we can go and sit with their teams and show us all the ins and outs of the system I did put two links on this presentation so you can go and explore the software and it has

107some nice tutorials and videos that you can view at your leisure so if you flipped all the way to the back of the line by line and if you do need a copy of the line by line Michelle Larson has some in the back um you'll see that it does have the 15% increase however the effect tax increase would be 4.85 and what we're using the fund balance on is really three items the provision for retirement we have some folks in the SAU that who I hope will never retire but they are eligible to the accounting software and a further fund balance reduction to help offset the increase in health in the health insurance increase now I want to remind everyone you do have to appropriate for Grant so that number in the bottom corner

108where it says $7 million seems a little bit scary however that does include your grants and grants are only spent if we have the grants but we typically and last year we spent about 3.3 million in Grants we put four to be safe because we do have an additional number of Grants so when we do do the vote I just want to remind you it has to be on the full total appropriation now these are the major changes from the Year we're in to next year so the current FY 23 budget is $2.7 million we talked a lot about the accounting software upgrade so we've added that in for health and dental insurance right now I've have assumed a 5% gmr which is your guaranteed maximum rate the rate it goes up every year but

109we also had several members of the team choose different health plans so essentially we went down to two singles and up five families which is a large expense the gmr will officially be released on October 3rd or 4th so that might change between now and the next time we meet the increase to the superintendent salary based off of the feedback from your steering committee in all other salaries for everybody else within the SAU budget and then the provision for retirement we have to appropriate it in the that we were to spend it if we were to expend it so that is an increase over a current year as well so other than these items everything else adds up to almost a negative $4,000 so these are your major changes everything else is actually net decrease

110of $4,000 so like the gentleman before me talked a lot about tax rates this is how it would impact your for individual districts so like I said before it's 50% ADM and 50% equalized valuation and it is embedded in each of your districts on the office of the superintendent line so what this slide does is it compares the current year breakout to the new breakout and the column all the way over here would be the change so if ADF is going up in one district and going down and another that's why you'll see the different percentages or equalized valuation and I also put the links where on the doe website you can find these statistics so in your pack is a line by line This is the very detailed summary of what I've just gone

111over but at this point did anyone have any questions or feedback lety um could you just review where the salary number for the superintendent position came from and how that change is not for the current superintendent it's for a future superintendent that does not yet exist correct so um so my understanding I believe it was August 30th there was a meeting with the committee that's looking for the superintendent and our director of HR had come out of that with the direction from the committee of the salary that I put up on the screen so it actually came from you Jackie uh to clarify that because I'm on that committee that's the maximum that we would offer a superintendent we just have to budget for the maximum that we would be willing to the place it's

112the placeholder Scott um just in regards to the accounting software I know once upon a time we did try to move from I think it was ads to another system this sunu guard y sunu guard okay so this is not suard where it is not suard um and it is an upgrade Michelle's shaking her head in the back um wasn't here not I was not here for that uh transition that was before my time um but this is an upgrade to the current system that we have um we've been looking at it for a long time and we already own a lot of the modules so it's really the most cost effective as well we did um Tyler also owns some Unice which is used by more cities and Hampton uses it because they split

113it with the town but even that it was going to be hundreds of thousands of dollars more okay thank you Jackie um on the accounting software because I know you know uh listed all the districts that are currently using it have you outreached them to see what they thought of it like oh yeah they enjoy it if there's anything that they think it's lacking yes um everyone that I've talked to really enjoys it um we've had our friends in Hampton have offered that we could come over and spend the day with them um we're we've definitely reached out to our surrounding districts Eric I think I just wanted to mention too I think you made a conservative estimate relative to the uh health insurance terms of the gmr and you also get a conservative estimate

114relative to a new incoming superintendent and whether they would be a family plan Etc so I just yes now I did think the 5% was conservative until Friday um where I heard that the rumors are whereas the co costs are kind of catching up to us now I really have no idea so since I've been here it's been anywhere between zero and six so that's why I thought before Friday I was conservative but I heard on Friday when I was up in conquered that it could be more but we'll know on October 3rd or 4th anyone else have questions I have uh two things one just to quickly explain I mean I'll explain it this because some folks it may be their first round with budgeting just what the concept of gmr means it's it's

115the maximum rate uh for health insurance so it won't go above that 5% typically when the actual rate comes in it's usually lower it could match that but it's usually lower one point in time and Dom may remember this I know Beck and xra we we were dealing with double digit gmrs for a long time and so it's it's been sort of normalized a bit more it's gotten down into that lower single digit but at one point in time it was averaging I think 11 12% for quite a long time um so that number is what that means the second thing is that um Kim meire is here on this laptop you can't see her though and um she did want to make a comment and she asked if I would read it um because

116it's a little difficult to do from that it's related to the budget so I'm going to go ahead and read the comment she submitted about this she said um her comment relative to the SAU budget while the raw increase is close to 15% the number is misleading large percentage of this increase is the cost of software which will be covered by surplus funds the seu has saved for such project another driver of health care costs notably the change from employee single plans to family plans this a fixed cost we must absorb and cannot control I'm disappointed that despite hearing taxpayers routine frustrations with Communications from the SAU we have not budgeted for any communication specialist role or resource in the budget neglecting to add such a position from the district that is over $100 million

117with thousands of employees students and taxpayers is unacceptable budgets Express values and we need to Value communication amongst our stakeholders of the district by funding such resources while I understand that adding such a position will cause an increase of roughly $100,000 to the seu budget the time is now to promote better Communications with stakeholders the seu budget is small relative to the overall seu District budgets thus such an increase appears as a shockingly high percentage increase of the seu budget however the cost for improved Communications will barely be sent on the dollar if such a $100,000 increase is distributed across six towns with the increase in misinformation our district has a duty to invest in better Communications with our staff children parents and taxpayers I do not think we can wait any longer to improve

118communication resources within the district other school districts like Manchester invested in Communications professional and the national school public relations Association exist to help manage such resources I ask that we include money for the communications audit provided by the NSP cost pending you didn't know what the cost is of that and fund a Communications position respectfully submitted by Kim Meyer um just a question on that do you know I just don't I'm not sure which line item is but the amount that we spend on a marketing firm a marketing firm yeah like if we were to talk about adding a salary into the budget like it wouldn't we're already spending money now to pay a consultant to do do Mark so like I think are you referencing cooks and Communications mhm there is nothing in this

119budget for that okay Jenny um I'm not I'm not disagreeing with what Kim is saying but I wanted to clarify would it would a new salary really be roughly a 100,000 or with the benefits probably closer to 150 no so we actually priced this out before and it was I believe 102 th000 all in all to inclusive okay great thank you I just really want to support what Kim is is suggesting and I think it's something we've talked about in previous meetings I think particularly at this moment of transition um with Dr Ryan leaving and US welcoming a new superintendent in the new school year and um knowing that we're in a junction where we really need to be building trust and two-way communication with our and and then just the reality of of the

120sa6 and what a complex system it is um I think we would do a disservice to all of the taxpayers and the community to not invest in a a director of communications at the at the central office um I just want to say I support that as well I mean this is something that we're constantly sort of battling up against and I think we would you know do us well to get have sort of an expert in place if you will to help us when we're trying to reach our families and our community members um you know we're often criticized for not doing it very well even though everyone's trying their absolute hardest to do so so I think that it would be money well spent if the cooks and communication is not in this

121budget where is it we don't have it idea it was not budgeted for this fiscal year or the next so which means we it's done I see so that because I was just thinking back to the mailers that we sent out that was them but we're not going to do that anymore do you or we don't have it anywhere in the budget it's not budgeted we don't work with them anymore correct okay yeah we received strong feedback on not budgeting for them so we didn't okay so we're not replacing them so there's no decrease in this year of that being taken out either correct it was not it it's not in the SAU budget this year or in the proposed budget this year fiscal year 23 correct thank you Bob yeah I agree with Kim

122one of our greatest needs is Communications Beyond I mean we know what's going on because we're in the room right now but how about all those people that tax pay out there we need to be public with them and let them know what's going on we need somebody Jenny so how do we move forward with that is that something I mean is that something we vote on is that something what what is the protocol for that makes a motion maybe someone could make a motion to I'll make a motion to include a a director of Communications in the sau6 budget for 2324 okay so we have a motion do we have a second a second okay all right so we have a motion and second and there we've had some discussion Is there further discussion

123though I think that communication can definitely do better in the sa I want to remind everyone last year when we changed the D from the co-op to this board we were told we were getting way too big in our leadership team from our communities though I think in the future it might be necessary I don't think today is the day that we decide that because honestly our SAU just keeps growing every year um and that's a lot of money coming out of our taxpayers I um I just I also want to Communications is really big word and I think one of the things that the communications firm that we hired in previous year did well was a lot of uh Communication in One Direction and so I think um I think the potential of this

124role is less top down and someone that can really engage the community in conversation as well as people across the sau6 um so I think of a communications director as not PR or marketing for the sau6 which I think has been some of the criticism of the communications firm but someone who can really help us coordinate Communications across the sau6 and help to help develop strategies I think everyone in the central office is is maxed out and I think someone who shows up every day at work and is thinking about how are we listening to the community how are we taking in that feedback how are we synthesizing what's happening in these meetings and um sharing it in a transparent and a digestible way that's easily accessible um I think we've made a lot of

125gains but I think that we would benefit tremendously for someone who's in a full-time role that position I also want to say that echoing what you had said I think now is exactly when we need uh communications director because we're we're we've got a very tumultuous year ahead of us and it's really really really hard to uh when you've got 31 people and then one person who's coming in you know that's very overwhelming it it would be it would be great to have one person who's in charge of the message like you said both ways and I think this is this is exactly the right time for that I I would like to Echo that you know I think there's a lot of sentim sentiment in the community that we have a very big Administration

126already and you know I I agree a Communications person would be great I just I'm not sure that that now is the time for it number one and second how do we determine what we're paying for this you know who what level are we getting are we getting a high school student who can do you know this as a side gig are we paying someone who has their Master's level in in you know public relations I mean there's a there's a huge variation in what we can do and what we can get from this and um but I just I would I do worry about kind of increasing the size of the administration um right now can you before I before I leave back can you say anything about where that number comes from in

127terms of what was contemplated about either job responsibilities or experience yeah and uh David if you want to chime in because I know you did a lot of the research and the base salary I believe is 75,000 so uh I am I I did pay this year to be a member of the New England um region for the national school public relations Association for this reason so we could do this work and get the information for you if for this position it's a range of 65,000 to 880,000 with Benefits reports to the superintendent of schools to bachelor's degree and journalism Communications marketing a related field three years of experience in PR Communications marketing field at varied levels and with increasing responsibility or three years experience in Broadcast Digital or print journalism uh employment experience in

128school or School District settings is preferred so a lot of this was developed through or with the assistance of the national school PR Association um it sounds like you're describing uh a community relations role as well so um that would change I think the role as we have it designed for when we wanted to have this conversation I we were asked to do this this wasn't our recommendation U and it wasn't our recommendation because of the big ask and the um the growth of the the spending budget for this upcoming fiscal year we didn't feel there'd be an appetite for it and so the some board members have asked us to bring this information forward and that's where it is now I would just also like to ask the administrators not to be flippant I

129fully agree with you guys like I'm hearing it too from the from the community but I don't think you're bored I think that like you guys are all pretty strapped just like every educator in every every town in every school in America um our Administration is growing because we need that support in order to be the best we can possibly be um so I I fully hear the the community when they're saying okay another position another position um but but we need to do that in order to manage what we have uh because this has been an area that that we have been struggling it's not this isn't coming out of nowhere um so this is this is about solving a problem that exists not just ignoring it I saw some hands over here are

130there other people want to make a comment that hadn't have a chance to speak yet go ahead yeah just to that end I was wondering the people that are proponents of this can you just talk about some of the things that you think you would see them doing like um for example would they be doing the website would they be attending and and forwarding minutes from our meetings um I'm just wondering what you see them doing well I just want to piggyback on that question because I think it sounds like when I'm hearing this there might be two different roles one that Dr Ryan you did some research on and one that maybe we thought was that role but we're asking for something different so I don't know if overall we all need to do

131some more research around what is the community relations versus communications director and what does the seu need from either of or both of those roles that's is before is there anyone else that wants to speak that hasn't spoken yet okay check to that end I don't see how we can vote to add in a position if a we don't know what they're going to do and B what our expectations are going to be for that position because if we do we're just giving money in there for a position which who knows if decide we need to pay them more you know pay them less like we're going into this blind it's not like we know today and we're sitting here with um the motion to pass this budget with that in it I think if

132you were to talk to the community right now most of them are going to tell you not another position the seu not right now I just want to voice my support for Jackie I I'm I'm in agreement with Jackie on that I think we need to understand what the outcomes are that would be for this particular role before we consider it so I had to sit and think about it for a second um because I I I hear both sides I I think that we strongly need better community relations better communication I mean Bob said you know we're in the no were here but I I still don't feel in the know even being at this table um there's things happening in our district parents voicing concerns that I felt blindsided by tonight so um

133I do think it's a problem I don't necessarily think it's a problem we can solve right this second um I think we need to come up with a plan and come up with what do we actually need before we add it to the budget and um and I do agree that the the community doesn't want us just haphazardly adding positions so um I'm still torn but I I don't think it's the appropriate time but I don't want to table it I think it's something we need to continue to talk about over the next year and figure out exactly what we want and then added to the next budget just I appreciate that holding both sides of the equation um it would be helpful to know how are communic ation we're not working with the firm

134now how are Communications being handled this year so who updates the website who is handling you know the synthesizing of the survey results from the superintendent you know input survey and getting those out to the community I mean I think there's Communications level at multiple levels right um and and how is that being handled now the website continues to be developed uh um at each school with the website administrator um the superintendent search process you have to ask Heather as I'm not playing a role in that for obvious reasons um the communications with the media still works through the superintendent's office um and as far as putting out any type of publicity um that is work that we'll we'll do as um you know events or or things that are happening occur that we want

135to share and so we'll actually develop the press release that then goes out to the media or will contact the media directly to have them come to an event um so there's definitely been a downshift in the traffic um based on the availability of time and resources thank you just to answer your question on this um the superintendent survey the steering committee is is going to work with Heather to go through all of the survey results and sort them for Trends and then create the document that will be posted to the website thanks and additionally how to reach the community at large with this processing commun is working without a degree in journalism or any of these things we talked about so I think that is where I see the problem is that many people

136are being asked to do things that they really know the best way to do it I guess what I would just observe from that is that it's fit in on top of other things or not coordinated right so there's not a coordinated strategy around listening and responding but also you know sort of putting things you know being on the Forefront of sort of what also what we're communicating if it's so widely distributed even to board members and various staff so I agree with I think it's important important to get clear certainly before we put out a job posting if whether we vote tonight to to add this or not but I do worry about waiting a whole other year with nobody really coordinating a strategy for any kind of communications within such a large I

137mean you wouldn't do that if you were running a corporation or business you wouldn't have a business of this size without someone thinking about communication can I just ask a process question so if we vote to add this tonight it will go to community feedback in October right like we're this isn't so tonight is the first review of the budget and then we will have a public hearing and vote in October so if it wasn't added tonight you could also make the motion in October to add it and if there was also an overwhelming response from the community that they didn't want it we could also take it out in October added correct this is very much in draft form so it won't be till October that there's a vote on what the budget actually

138is okay thank Bob um my concern is um the U issues that were raised tonight regarding um language maybe racism I mean that's not going to be answered that's we're allowing greater time for public dialogue at every meeting and there's no formal way except if someone chooses to respond to it to answer those concerns so how how are we going to educate our public if we're not doing anything in response to Communications on that note because I 100% agree with you um what what's the process if we were to vote in a position like this and it gets passed and it goes through all what is the process of coming up with the job description and what we actually need does that happen here does that happen with the administration what what's the process there

139uh we would work with the Director of Human Resources um and um any other resources in the community or in the industry to put that together and bring it back to this board the board would ultimately decide what it wants and that would be the job description that goes forward Jack on that note I'd like to remind everyone that our director of Human Resources is right now actively looking for our next superintendent so adding this to her plate in the next month when we're supposed to be starting interviews is a lot Josh how how about an internal review of the existing process is that something that we have the ability to maybe go through the effort and conduct I'm asking that because I'm I'm hearing a lot of things right now I'm I'm hearing that

140we really don't know collectively what uh a person sitting in this role should do and I think we can all collectively agree that there's probably something that could use Improvement right now so instead of saying that we need to hire a new person to go ahead and fill this role I don't know that it's fair to say that without having conducting an internal review on the actual process itself there could be big glaring gaps or items that exist within that process that could be fixed now I just feel that it's a little bit unfair to kind of go ahead and say we want to add a new line item that would increase the budget without really doing our homework internally firsta thanks Josh I think I that was a great Point um I'm also not

141comfortable with us raising our numbers in in the administrative office and I'm also I'm not seeing that there's necessarily a problem that we've identified I mean people can kind of say communication's bad we've spent a lot of time in East Kingston on communication it's always been a goal each year we started a community engagement committee um we've had very little kind of community concerns about it um you know our our principal sends out all kinds of um of information and you know he's shared with us that very few parents open it so there's there's a problem certainly with communication but I'm not sure that sitting somebody in the SAU office will solve that problem either for us at our smaller elementary schools or for um you know CMS where I also haven't seen any communication

142issues so far in you know my few weeks at with a child at CMS um so I would want to see that this is actually a defined problem that we're trying to to do something for um and whether we you know have some Community meetings and try to figure out what could be improved um before we just you know throw dollars at something um could we The Joint board direct the SAU office to uh next spring when they're looking at their unassigned fund balance if there's an amount of money there they could use to hire somebody to evaluate Communications in the sa to see if we need a position what that position would look like what sort of qualifications they would have is that something that we could do so one of the things I

143would just I'm sorry to interrupt you Molly that's to go back to one of the things that just to since I read the comment from Kimberly Meyer she had suggested two things one of them was proposed which was to add a position the second was to do a Communications audit by this group and so I think that speaks to the piece that Joshua was discussing it's not part of the current motion right now but that was part of kimly Myer's proposal to the group I guess I just want to be clear what I was specifically saying is not adding any money to this at all seeing if there is unassigned fund balance at the end of the year like there typically is every year and see if we can use that so we can make

144a separate proposal about that too if that's something that folks want to do I would just caution you about year in fund balance and using that to prepay an employee you she I think there was she was saying for a more defined test to essentially do an audit to have someone on staff do an audit if we could if we had some money left at the end of the year is that right L okay Stephanie so um thinking of my perspective District I agree with Melissa and Josh uh if I was going to be spending any extra money it would be on paray and substitute pay this is not something I'd be looking to spay uh use taxpayer money on thank you thoughts go ahead can I move to a question move question okay well

145um yeah y that's fine I I wanted to say something I'm sorry I was I was holding off a bit just before I move the question if that's okay um just I want to say just briefly I um have heard a lot of feedback about Communications being an issue in RSU maybe it's more of an issue in our district and so I might have a little bit of a district focused um look at this but it's certainly something I've seen a lot over the particularly around the pandemic that there's been a lot of concerns about how effectively we get communication out when folks aren't coming into our schools on a daily basis and it reminded me that there's a there's a segment of our community that don't always walk into the door to get their

146get their information so I think we could benefit from a position like this but I also hear the concerns about it not being well- defined at this point um and it has been something that's been brought up particularly over the past couple years from time to time and it doesn't seem like a lot of traction really happened with this um so whether it's you know voted on tonight or not I don't think it's something that we should lose track of because there's certainly some interest among this group as a whole to at least having further discussions about it as a minimum maybe even taking action tonight um and then there's this other piece too about the audit that I'm hopeful that we can get back to after we finish this motion so let's um so

147there's a um move the question is there a second to move the question yes okay all right so we're going to close discussion on this and move the question all those in favor of the motion um say I and raise your hand okay all those opposed and any extensions okay so the motion didn't pass uh do you have any other motions yeah I'd like to make a motion to develop um somewhere along the lines but Le is saying a a study of the communications process currently and what can be done to better it I don't know so the audit is the audit yeah so a motion to have a Communications AUD AUD okay is there a second for that motion okay there a second okay any discussion about that motion go ahead budy does that

148audit cost money yeah yes it does yes it does okay so do I have to do we know how much well the one from the professional group does and I don't think kimly M wrote specifically in her note that she didn't know the cost so I don't I don't know the cost she she said cost pending was what she wrote in her note okay so Dr Ryan says it's something get for the next meeting but I don't you don't have a sense of what that is do you it all depends on the scope and the depth they can be anywhere from 5,000 to 30,000 I I've been in districts where it's been done so can I make an amendment to or you have to make your own amendment I would just like to add that

149I would like to do that if there is money remaining at the end of yeah from the remaining fund balance of I don't want to change the number that we sorry so right now I okay well that's right so first we can make a motion so we had a motion just to do a Communications audit are you she I think Eddie 's offering a friendly amendment to that is that something you want to amend your motion yes so it's do Communications so the motion now is to do Communications audit if there's money left with the fund balance is what the motion is is that right yes no impact on the on next year budget correct okay so that's a motion and second any any comments about that yes so I'll say thank you Josh because

150that point was so good you changed my mind on the whole thing um so I I I I it seems that we we still have two things that we need to figure out one is the audit and figure out basically where we stand right and how we go forward but also I'm still not clear on how we decide what it is exactly we need I I I'm I'm I know that we need better communication and that you know the person who's running who you know the the person in the superintendent role is doing an awful lot of stuff it's it's a lot to ask them to also be in charge of all of the communication and do it effectively just the way that everybody wants it you know that's that's that's a big thing so

151I do feel that we need somebody in that role but you know a great point was brought up I guess there's a difference between community relations versus uh uh Communications person I I don't really know what the difference is and so I'm I we need to figure that out too I understand that's not part of this motion but I I'm just I'm a little unclear that seems like we know a lot of things that we need to do and I'm not really sure how we get them done the audit it seems since since a lot of us are expressing and I still believe that this would be a good thing to have this kind of help uh for the next several months I'm a little unsure about leaving it until the end of the year

152to be to know whether or not you know to figure out how to fund it so um I I don't know H how can we how can we move forward with with taking these steps kind of more sooner than you know in 10 months um just a suggestion is kind of a you know free space for us over the you know until we get to the end of the year if there were you know fund balances remaining and we could do an audit um what if this board had a a committee on Communications and Community engagement and we had some board members and some community members and we kind of started that conversation now so that we could kind of develop like what are the problems specific to each School District um what is the

153community looking for and kind of what changes need to be made so that we have a we would have a tighter understanding of what that audit should look like and what the you know the professional should be looking for as kind of recommendations for us did I ever send my motion no we you can withraw your motion you can withdraw your motion I apologize you can withdraw your motion yes is that what you're saying as long as the I guess person seconded also has to agree to that to withdraw the motion no because I think what she was saying was int okay so then the motion is still there so we're going to continue the discussion on the motion then um yes no with um I would agree with Melissa on that and I will

154volunteer um I no I do I think I want to keep the ballb rolling I don't want to wait until we have funds to do it I want to within our group if we can do some things and find out where our major holes are right away I think I think it's worth um doing that um I know I already have notes of what I can take back to Newfield specifically but I mean it's bigger than just Newfield so um I I agree with Melissa Dr Ryan had some information this year too about the the profession audit thank you um three years ago to the day um I had a phone call with the nspr on a Communications audit uh it's a four to six week preparation process they provide guidance materials it lasts for

155two days uh they do a site visit to the SAU identify stakeholders we would help them with that break them out by function or role in the community each focus group is an hour long there are 8 to 12 people per group so that speaks I think to what Melissa was driving at um perhaps at least the board's input um there is uh cost of if it's one auditor and 10 focus groups $14,500 plus expenses if it's two Auditors and 20 focus groups it's 19,000 plus expenses and those are the member rates so the uh the organization would have to become a member of the nspr um so this these are three-year-old notes I can't believe I still had them they're actually handwritten on yellow memo pad that I scanned and saved um so we

156do have information I suspect it's probably a little more expensive now um but I'd be happy to look into it if that was something that the the board wanted us to do that gives us a ballpark at least comments yeah I just had a quick question um when we first started the conversation you said this was not something that your office had asked for it was something that the board requested you to get some information on um would this be a nice to have for your office you I respect that you're trying to protect the budget and and the community at large but if down the road if we go in this direction is this something you'd be happy to implement at the in the leadership office like you would like I think it's an

157absolute must we're $110 million Enterprise without somebody strategizing our Communications right okay I just wasn't sure if I was reading the room right all right thanks H uh just a quick question I just to build off on Melissa's point which is is a good one is we're doing I mean maybe it's already set up but we are we just did a community survey and we are about to do some focus groups this fall and I don't know there's a way to add I mean we're Gathering people this year to talk with them about the superintendent search don't know if there's a way to to add a question maybe that's not the best way to do it but I guess building on this idea of having a committee for this board um and we're already in

158the process of gathering stakeholders and and Andrea's point of thinking about diversity stakeholders for those focused groups is there an opportunity for us to build in a question around community relations I mean it came up in our our board meeting I think in June around sort of a value that we wanted for superintendent is building trust and collaboration with the community um is there a way that we could use that opportunity to get some feedback from different stakeholders um as in addition to some kind of committee um within this board to to keep the process moving forward until we are able to fund it fund an audit or or a role so can I clarify you're just saying since we're already getting all these focus groups together just tack these questions on I mean they

159they're related to to the whole thing I mean I mean it all makes sense that makes sense to me it's I mean I think I have a feeling that was going to be part of the conversation anyway yeah and then the qu and then so let me just I'm sorry let me just interrupt the conversation a little bit because I'm less comfortable having an open conversation about this let's finish the motion then we can go back to an open conversation if people want but the motion is about using unexpended funds at the end of the year to to pay for a professional audit that's what the motion is on if it if it's a Counterpoint to that that's fine but otherwise let's stay with the motion is there any other comments on the motion I

160just want to ask for a pointed clarification of Scott's motion uh which fiscal year are you talking about that's what I wanted to end because I think I think I I I like your but I think we need to come up with a committee first to discuss and get information from community and other stakeholders before we delve into the the money part of it I just I didn't want to I didn't want to spend this year's money because I just think yeah that's that's what I okay were clear okay so the motion is about unexpended funds from this year's budget no next year's budget next year's budget so it be the end of so be I don't think we can do that so yeah we can so the idea is that yeah the idea would

161be to take a vote on whether or not if we have money in June 2024 to uh that's not the current board that we would try to expend that in different different way even this year's I mean part part of the problem with with this that's why I wonder yeah so let me just back up for a minute part of the problem with the motion in general is that when we' be taking a vote on um unexpended funds it's going to be a different board at that point we would have had elections it's going to be a different board that would be taking that up at that point some people of course will still be on the board but it will have changed by then and we don't even know if there's any money going

162to even be available thatch or April yeah I I we can still take a vote on the motion I I I guess but I'm I'm not sure how we'd implement it I think that was part of Molly's concern as well as she was sitting up there wondering what we're doing that's why I wanted to I wanted to I wanted to rewind and say let's talk let's have a committee to discuss all right so there's still a request to to withdraw the motion you're you're okay with withdrawing the motion all right so the motion has been withdrawn withdrawn all right so we have no motion on the table there's been some discussion about I'm done so just to summarize from what I've heard there's been a discussion about maybe setting up some sort of SEI committee

163that might look at communications there's been some discussion about trying to integrate part of this with the superintendent process and focus groups that have happened there's there's been a come by Dr Ryan that he can get some additional information about the cost of a professional audit and bring that back to the board at the next meeting on October um there other comments or thoughts that people want to share in a discussion we we don't necessarily need another motion at the moment but just anything else people want to want to add to that yeah I just have a question do we need any kind of motions or anything to create a committee or can we just say right now we want a committee let's create it like do we need a formal vote on it I

164think it's something that we should take a vote on because it does commit each of the the boards around theu to have at least a representative on it so we make sure people are on board so to speak to make a sa wide Communications committee to look at what's going on currently with the okay so we had so we have a motion for Anu wide Communications committee do we have a second I'll second can we call it the communications and Community engagement yes yeah okay so uh see we have a motion to create an SE wide CCE committee um any discussion on that motion any discussion all right so let's just let's take a vote on that motion then all those in favor Sor wait I do have a question I'm sorry this what does

165this committee look like is it is it one member from each board plus community members what what are we talking about out here so typically well we can go ahead if people that made the motion want to try to say more that's fine I'm open to both because I do think community members do need to be involved in the process um I don't know if it's the type of thing where the committee gets together from representation from the board and they kind of decide like do they do small focus groups like how they want to address it because I think as an SAU we have a huge range of stakeholders I don't think necessarily you have to have all stakeholders at the one table maybe you have small groups that you kind of meet with

166and talk about communication what I was going to suggest is I'm sorry Scott go ahead no I was gonna say if we set it up the similarly to how we're doing the superintendent search and follow the same model um you know with focus groups and survey and all that kind of stuff it's another subset yes it's another group but I think we all can um agree that this is an area that we all feel that it needs to be worked on in the SAU so I think it's it's almost it's as as important I think as the superintendent search communication is is like on everyone's mind it's all you hear about is I don't feel that I'm I'm hearing the information I public members coming to a to a meeting and voicing a concern and

167I'm writing down information that I have no clue what's what's going on so I I I think you know if we set it up that similarly that that would work so my my I I agree we need this information and this is a high priority I'm a little concerned about survey and focus group fatigue in the community I mean we're already not getting that many responses I I I wouldn't want to put people off from participating in anything because there's too many things coming at them that's not to say I don't think we need to do this exactly the way we're talking about so I I'm just not I I think we need to be mindful of how we are putting this out into the community it needs to be something that is very open

168that I think people can can uh we make sure they know about it and that they're invited to participate in whatever way we decide but I'm just I'm I'm a little nervous about like so many new I mean those new initiatives are great because we need them you know and and we're they're coming from the commun but um and also I mean how can we work is is there a way that we can share resources with the superintendent search committee I mean that's that's I think something to be discussed too so what the comment is going to make before is one way to do this would be to if the it's the will of the board to set this up is that we just set it up with a representative from each board and then

169that group comes together and determines what the scope is what the extent of surveys focus groups professional organizations coming in writing up job descriptions there's all sorts of things they would have that discussion about what what the scope should be okay it wouldn't be something that I don't that we're deciding tonight to write it out at that level I don't think we could it' be a much longer discussion that would be the first meeting that they'd have that's fine so my qu so so I guess my original question was tonight what we're deciding on is a committee comprising one member from each uh of our boards and then that committee will get together right and they'll decide from there how to engage the the 16 right as a whole okay yeah I was just going

170to say what you said that that's not for us to decide tonight like that's why we're forming a committee to well that that was exactly my question are we I mean are we making that decision tonight but we're not if we made a committee we don't have to decide tonight we could if we had a clear Direction but I didn't hear that as part of the motion so think we can do that yeah do the threers boards feel like they have enough people to man another uh committee that is something that I'm thinking about as we're talking said that as a concern yeah right on safety and it's like once every yeah yeah it doesn't have to be monthly either it's not something that every committee doesn't have to meet at the same level of

171frequency I'm not even thinking about the moment that people are at a meeting once every 3 months I'm thinking about the amount of work that they're going to be charged with going back to their principles going back to their entire group that they work with about the communications this this feels like we're biting off a much bigger piece of work than I think the board has the bandwidth for but I also don't want to spend $20,000 on uh an audit I don't know what the answer is but neither of these in front of us feel like the right way to go um you know I'm hopeful that this the committee could get together and find some experts in the community I mean we must have you know plenty of communication folks in the communities um

172if people can talk around and talk I think that we can pull some we I think we can pull enough resources that this isn't going to be a heavy strain on a particular board member I mean I think we need to involve the community in this this is really more um and that's what we did in East Kingston when we you know with our committee it really is there's one board member and our principal is there but it's a lot of community members and it's a lot of people that are outside of the school that have no you know no children in the school um and I think you know I think you'll get a lot of people that are interested in helping and it it gives them an Avenue to feel like they're participating

173in that in that process um I would agree and I was thinking already as a board we should should be engaging them anyway so I I feel like even if we didn't have a committee that work is going to need to be done by each of the individual boards if we're going to solve this problem so I'm happy to give more time now so that we can get past this other comments all right let's take a vote on the motion the motion if I understood it correctly is to established an SAU wide Communications and Community engagement committee C I [Laughter] guess um yes all right so uh we're going to take a vote all those in favor raise your hand and say I I I have a number okay all those opposed okay so the

174motion so the motion passed um lines got really clear any other comments that people want to make on this topic sounds like there'll be a lot for the committee to discuss at their first meeting okay thanks and so we're still we're still here about the budget forgot okay before again I want to beat this into the ground but any other comments any other comments that people want to make to Molly or something related to the budget yeah just quickly Molly this was really excellent thank you your growth over the past several years is very impressive I mean from what you brought from the first budget to this I mean this is something that we can walk back with to our boards in the community and I I don't see questions I don't see that we're

175going to get a lot of you know what about this and how does it impact this you've thought of all of those questions we've received and and put them in this report so thank you yeah and I tend to post this with the watermark draft um on the website before the public hearing we just want to incorporate any changes we had tonight if there are any all right I think we're done with that section thank you thank you Molly you Molly so we got a um have a couple other things that don't necessarily need to take a long time I'm going to take them out of order because there's the BCA school board member ethics and I think we put that on the agenda because there's a question at the May meeting about that policy

176my understanding is that that's been sort of clarified there's not still a question but we didn't want to not put it on the agenda in case someone wanted to say more about it so did anyone want to speak to that policy the ethics policy or has that been cleared up whatever the not whatever the issue that was raised before has that been cleared up I'm going to take that as a yes or one about the photography no no this is isn't the policy that I brought forward PCA that's no wasn't it we have BCA BCA is is this is BCA this is not what it looked like the one that I brought forward before it was like a half page it was half this amount of doing some live research here BCB don't apologize interest

177so it's the conflict of interest policy okay so it should have said BCB instead of BCA and shed that is there still a issue related to that though or that were okay so it's going to come I don't think the policy committee has met yet so okay all right so it sounds like that's going to go to the policy committee and be discussed in October so that's the update on that we don't have anything to present tonight on that so the other policy that's here is this um I guess public input at board meetings and I believe that each of the boards separately have considered this policy and have either taken a vote to adopt it or have it under discussion to um consider some changes and are going to look at it again in

178October but part of this was motivated I guess by the change in the law that required some new requirements particularly the piece about providing 30 20 minutes uh of dedicated time that can be used for public input uh but here is a draft of an SAU wide policy and I know that different boards have implemented this in different ways a lot just implemented the suggested policy but some have made some changes and I understand at least one board is doing something completely different but what would folks like to do with this proposed policy we don't have to vote tonight we could vote tonight if people want to think about it and uh reflect and come back we can do that if if folks have a strong opinion about this looks good or or want to

179propose an amendment we could have that discussion right now also under Section seven where it says speakers shall identify themselves clearly for the record shouldn't it be their name and town I think it needs to be clear what we're asking them to identify themselves okay so you're asking a question or you're saying to propos sort of amendment clarified like when it says Identify identify themselves clearly I should say like with name and town um just that way we know that they're part of the SAU and where they're coming from particularly for an Sai policy right okay go ahead um we don't currently have a a bedh for The Joint School Board is that correct I couldn't hear I'm sorry do we currently have a policy for The Joint School Board so we don't this is

180one of the things generally it's it's interesting you bring that up because I um Dr R I spoke about this back in April I think it was at the end of April we've talked about the need to really have sort of a slim policy manual for the joint board we have policies so for example there's a quorum requirement for uh The Joint board that isn't a separate joint board policy there's it's it's sort of out there but um there are a few policies that would implicate The Joint board that we want the policy committee to consider and bring that forward as a small packet this is one though that can't wait for that because it's it you know by Statute it has to be implemented in each of the Schoolboard related forms where there's um

181public input is taken so we need to have a policy in place um for that so it would be a new policy um so we certainly and that's also why again we could have have this as a first reading tonight um and think about what potential changes we might want to make for it as was already pointed out there may be some things that are particular to an SAU that don't apply to the town so for example identifying what town you're from wouldn't be something that maybe would need to be as specific about in your own town uh Schoolboard meetings but there may be other implications as well um oh oh so oh well I would just I would want to see under the in the first sentence under b um uh the board will

182provide the opportunity for members of the public to comment Etc I would want to change that to uh residents of one of the six towns I just would like to specify and then I mean if the board decides to entertain comments from somebody who doesn't live here for any reason we can still choose to do that but um I know in Brentwood we modified that to say a parent guardian of a child or a um staff faculty like all that language well also even even a member of the public who doesn't have a I mean I would want a resident a resident parent but add the other if there's a parent who doesn't live in the a parent who doesn't live in the district and also staff members that's right thank you yeah we did

183that too other thoughts Heather um and maybe you can help me out Patrick but I at our board meeting um we were discussing number nine of the policy on public input um it reads defamatory statements comments threatening bodily harm or other unprotected speech will not be tolerated um and then we talked about that in relationship to section c um where in other types of meeting disruptions um the chair will give at least two warnings um and then an individual be will be asked um to leave or action will be taken and so we had a conversation around if someone is threatening bodily harm or other um is threatening bodily harm or what does not will not be tolerated what is the to get clarity around um the action there and I'm I'm forgetting exactly how

184we amended that statement but um I'm wondering if you remember because it was a good discussion and gave some clarity for um for us around just being really clear if someone is actually threatening someone with bodily harm within a meeting we can probably we can look up the language to see exactly how we amended it but what I recall is that it was essentially that you wouldn't get two warnings it's sort of one you get sort of one time that someone threatens bodily harm that you're out instead of getting uh getting a second bite at the Apple to be warned again about that but I don't remember the exact language yeah but there's there was something along those lines I just want to ask a clarifying question for Brentwood so are you guys saying you're

185only allowing parents and Guardians to speak not community members no we specifically said residents of the town but then we also wanted to include parents who might not live Inwood got uh or other Guardians teachers staff members is that it think that's it okay because our original uh policy just had residents and we wanted to make sure that we could rope in any other people who we felt like were stakeholders in our school right particularly they changed the law several years ago any divorced parents can have wherever one of the two parents lives can have your child go to either School District so would it be possible for us to get kind of each of these you know minor tweaks that each just District put in place I think it would be helpful if we

186had a consistent approach for this so that if somebody comes to our board meeting and East Kingston or comes here that it's kind of the same process um so I know we've adopted this we in East Kingston as is but I think some of these little tweaks would be would be good to hear I think we should discuss it at the policy I'm I'm adding to Heather's agenda but I think it would be helpful to discuss it at the October policy committee meeting um because that's at that point we'd have a representative from each of the boards and number of people are in the room right now would hopefully remember some of this discussion be able to flush it out a little bit more are there other just general comments though right now that folks

187want to make go ahead um yeah this is a very long document um and I was just curious how much of this is tied directly to the new law versus trying to encapsulate what was already happening for the like for different boards um current bedh like our our current bedh is like three quarters of a page and so this is a pretty big jump and so I didn't know if other people already had something looked like this and it's just us or so I my understanding is most of this is not tied to the new law there are some changes in the new law where this is where some of this language is required but a lot of this is from the New Hampshire school boards Association in terms of feedback they've gotten from communities

188across the state with you know sort of new concerns that have Arisen around public input so that's they've developed a more thorough policy and that's why they're recommending the policy but it's not most of this isn't driven by a new requirement in state law there are some parts of it that are but most of the language isn't is that fair to say I would agree with that so I'm going to suggest I didn't there's not a motion right now to to move forward on this and I'm going to suggest that what we do is is based on just the comments I've heard in the room there's enough potential changes to this then it would benefit from a discussion at the policy committee and that we bring this back forward we can treat this as a

189first reading of the policy to get we've gotten some feedback and we can bring it back at the next meeting in the meantime we'll do what we did tonight which is to make sure that we respect the change in the law which is that we that we keep that that 30 minutes aside we'll we'll do that at all meetings until we have a policy that's passed conc of meeting will we a lot of problems Jo disrespectful may not best IDE okay do you want do you want to make a motion to that regard okay so I have a motion to adopt the policy as presented with um and then also refer to the policy committee to look at it for further changes I have a second to the motion okay any discussion about the motion

190can I amend the motion to just make that one change about residents parents and staff members so that we can just put that in there right now without bringing it to the policy committee first okay oh okay okay yep yep I was I was thinking that that was a um universal one that's fine can we at least add that they need to give name in town because right now it does not say that they have to give their name in town they just have to identify themselves again we can but again it's all of these pieces we can spend more time this evening discussing all the caveat of what we want other comments not I'm not going to put you in a position Tom you have to respond to every question people if people want

191to make comments so generally about the motion yes well I was just going to say I think I think it's a good suggestion by Don that puts us in compliance even though we are complying it shows that we've you know we're paying attention to the RSA change I think all of the other tweaks you know for example the identity of a town you were able to facilitate that this evening um I don't anticipate that those are going to be large challenges we have between now and our next meeting and you know policy can take this up at their next meeting I one thing I will I make a comment just to add to this is that if we do have a discussion at the policy committee before the next meeting we could even in Theory

192come forward with the revised policy before we even have public input at the next meeting it's possible to do that if we had a a updated version of a policy so I would be in favor of the motion other comments all right let's take a vote all those in favor of the motion say I and ra your hand all those opposed okay any extensions okay all right so that passed um I don't think we have anything else on the agenda I think we're the end of our meeting no no non-public session so just we to have a motion to adjourn from Brian in second all those in favor