001[Music] I aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Um, just a couple of quick things. Judy got her hands on this um via a person that works at the Department of Education, right? And it highlighted kids in one of our schools. So, it was shared across the state for school breakfast week and some nice pictures. So, we're going to pass it around so everybody gets a chance to see. Uh and then I just want to welcome new board members and Carl's going to do fullblown introductions. um from the town of Hornish, Susan Ray and Andrea Sturgeon. Um their first meeting after freshly elected last Friday for the town. Uh and want to thank
002outgoing board members, um board member Brad Perkins for all of his years on the board and also Nancy for filling in the um unexpected vacancy of Magnoxy. So hearing of delegations, you just here to listen. Okay. Attendance. You good? Consideration to approve the proposed agenda for March 19th, 2025 board of directors meeting. So Don second. All in favor? Wes. Good. Thank you. Superintendent report. All right. So, uh, thank you everyone for being here. Again, I think we do have a few new faces, so I think we'll do introductions around the room. I'll even include, uh, Miss McKenna and Mr. Stevenson in our introductions as they are here tonight, but my name is Carl Lenry. I'm the superintendent of schools as you see on your agenda. Uh, I will go over article by article the 11
003articles that make up our school budget. I did what probably a teacher shouldn't do, and thanks, Miss Day, we made copies in front of them, and everybody's just scrolling to the end, so it kind of stole my own thunder. Uh, but I will take you through the 11 articles that give us there. I'm Suzanne Day, the curriculum coordinator. Peggy McKenzie, accounting office manager. Brent Wolf, I'm principal at high school. Jen Hank, I'm school board member from Porter. Susan Ray, school board member from Cornish. Olan Thomas, school board member from Baltimore. Uh, Andrea Sturgeon, new school board member from Cornish. Don South Cooper, school board member for Hyum. Jill Weatherbe, school board member for Cornish. Amelia Capone Muchio, school board member for Parsonsfield and I'm vice chair. Jordan, school board member for Porter and chair. Judy
004Ingram, school board member from Parsonsfield. Danielle Parker, school board member for Hyram. Allison, school board member from Hyram. Amanda Mudget, school board member from Parsonsfield. Penny Wentworth, school board member from Porter. Wes Sunderland from Baldwin. Ashley Don Conway, dean of students at the elementary school. Jana Murphy, director of special education. Chris Hughes, uh, principal at the elementary school. Simon Logan, assistant principal and athletic director at the middle school. Nine, principal at South Valley Middle School. Mr. Stevenson is important to our school board team. Certainly, we have a couple new uh, school board members. So, Mr. Stevenson, if you'd like to introduce yourself. Uh, Mr. Stevenson, uh, Latin teacher up at the high school, soccer coach, JCL, and TV2 coordinator. There you go. All right. And we have a guest here this evening, Joan McKenna. I
005teach at the high school and teachers association president. Okay. So, there you are. So, uh, we have a lovely slide here on uh, SVME MS kids in tech and the Adams family that will be upcoming. But for tonight, so there are 11 articles that make up the school budget. You don't have all 11. I think what you have in your packet is the summary total of all 11 by numbers. And then you have the revenues that build it and the impact to the towns. And if we just had to do one slide tonight, be the impact to the towns. That's I think the final end result of a lot of work that went in. Before I start, as always, I'd like to thank our administrative team who put a lot of time and effort into
006the presentation you see before you. uh every budget that we do here is certainly challenging and uh looking at our needs and what's best for our students. So, they've put a lot of time into this. I want to thank our school board for your continued support. It's been great working with you for 12 years putting these budgets together. I'd like to thank especially our office team, Sue Day, Peggy Mackenzie, Becky Connors, who did a ton of work making all the numbers that you see before you. So, I'll see if I can do it justice and explain the 11 articles and at the end you can ask me any questions you want about anything you want. So, uh, welcome and thank you for being here. Article one, regular instruction. Our largest article, uh, I won't read
007every number to you, but it was about $5.7 million last year, 5.9 this year. The increase is $250,000. The very first line of that, salary and benefit increases. I know it's been a priority of our school board, our teachers association, our edtech association. We have got to pay competitively with our neighboring districts. I think those teams did a great job negotiating the contracts. I think we gave the teachers fairly substantial raises over a three-year cycle and our educational technicians as well. Still working to be competitive. Not saying what the board gave made us completely competitive, but certainly a step in the right direction. But the end result of giving raises is you'll see on every line there are salary and benefit increases. I won't mention it every time, but we uh tried to be thoughtful
008and again work to be competitive. The benefit increase isn't really uh on anybody. So I mentioned to this board probably a couple times when I first started here. We had experience uh for Anthem that was around 70% which means uh if we gave them a million they only paid out $700,000. This past year, our initial number looks like our experience is 155%. Which means they're paying out $155 on every dollar we send them. My work with insurance companies would say that means our rates are going to go up. It's like when you get in a car accident, your rates go up. So, our Anthem bill is approximately $2 million is slightly higher than that. So, uh figuring in a 10% increase to our Anthem coverage, about a $200,000 increase for health benefits. So, those are
009major drivers of the numbers that you see in front of you. And when we produce the budget book, um you'll see as well that it's salary and benefit increases that drive a lot of what we have going. So the next line is also on every slide, PFML, tie my shoe. So paid family medical leave. You might have read about that in the news. So that is a 1% payroll tax and that started January 1, 2025. We pay half a percent and the employee pays half a percent. So, it might not sound like a lot, but when you look at a payroll of about $10 million, about $50,000. So, the district's responsible for $50,000. Employees are kicking in 50,000 to cover the PFML tax. Additional teachers. So, here's some some moves uh through the great great
010work of this team and and everything that we do is trade-offs, right? He's giving up something. He's trying to add something. So, addition of grade 8 teacher, we have 61 students leaving the eighth grade and 76 students coming up. That necessitates an additional teacher at our eighth grade level. However, we've now had a couple of classes go to our high school that are fairly small in nature in the 50s, low 60s. So, we have decided to reduce a high school math teacher. Uh, it's always hard to make reductions, but just looking at our numbers and trying to justify with the increases we have, uh, that was the reduction. So we didn't do one to pay for the other, but from a cost standpoint, we're cost neutral with the addition and reduction. So we're teacher neutral.
011We've just sort of shifted a position. That's not exactly how it works, but from a money uh black and white standpoint, that's how it works for that shift. The next one is exactly the same thing. We have a third grade class that we've had five teachers for for I think the past couple years. They're moving to fourth grade, moving to a new building, a little older, a little more mature, while 23 is getting to the high end of the number that we like for uh classes. We did reduce from five to four fourth grade teachers. Uh and we are again that one doesn't pay for the other, but we are adding an intervention teacher at Saki Valley Elementary School. We found great success with our intervention teachers at the middle school and the high school.
012And I think certainly the elementary school made a great case. a lot of students in our elementary school could benefit and catch them early and try and put them in the right direction. Another uh for folks watching costneutral move one reduction one addition but that's how it played out. The last one is uh straight edition extended learning opportunity teacher. Our board uh other boards across the state I think a big push is career readiness vocational skills. Our ELO program has done a great job of that. Kids writing their resume, kids landing internships, kids going to see corporations. It's been a great program from our kids. I know it is an addition about 70% of salary there, but we felt like worthwhile overall to keep the L program. we'll evaluate on a year-over-year basis, but it's
013been a great thing for our students and I think we all value it. So, there is article one. We'll do the same thing. This is this and article 2 special ed are the lengthiest articles to go over. Uh, but that's our article one review. Article two, special education. So, you see this is the one that's up the most, I think, percentage- wise, 3.4 million. It's up 327,000. A nearly 10% increase, but not quite. Uh, there are some major reasons for that. We just did state of the school. So folks that that watch every week, uh I want to say historically, and I might not get the numbers exactly right, it's dangerous on TV in front of all you, but I want to say that we probably had about 17% of our student body was special
014education. Uh you saw last week when Jana presented at our elementary school, we're nearly 31% special education and at our middle school, 27% special education. There's been an enormous rise in the number of special education students. Not only that, there's been an enormous rise in the needs of those special education students. So based on that, we'll uh need four additional educational technician positions. And this is one of those things that the board, the community, the administrators, we don't need that. We have to cover certain students IEPs. I mean that we can say to cut that, but I think what we'll be saying is we won't meet IEP needs, which is IDA, federal law, of things that we have to do. So J Murphy, our special ed education director, has done a wonderful job. Kid by
015kid, program by program. When we say that we need the four more, that it's not frivolous. We need those positions to cover our students. The next one is the one that I talk about every year. So the fancy term for it, special purpose private school, SPS, out of district tuition. So when a student gets to the point that we cannot uh meet their educational needs here at Sockby Valley, we send them to special purpose private schools, i.e. sweeter, i.e. i.e. Maplestone etc. There is a significant dollar cost to out of district tuitions. Uh we have some students on the cusp of it and sometimes it's not even on Saki Valley for example. Sometimes students move into the district with out of district tuition already in their programming. So Saki didn't make that decision. However be
016responsible for up to $100,000 worth of tuition uh for a child and it's just what it is. It's just the nature of it. Uh we worry about it every year and we do have some on the precipice. There's a fairly significant increase in our out of district tuition costs this year. $100,000 increase. Uh so this is sort of a reduction but just always transparent try to with money I think it's important. We've uh I do this speech every year and it's silly. I think one of my first or second years doing this I can't remember su remember. Uh state agency client sach stands for state agency client. So if a student is a state agency client, we're receiving money back from the state to meet their needs. So we get fully funded. So one year
017we might have got six or seven or eight state agency client students. So we're getting money from the state, but we hadn't booked enough expense. So it looked like we're really overspending in special education. Ever since that time, we used to uh budget for special uh state agency client edex. It's never happened again. And the reason we budget for them is in case the students come, we have expense built in and then the state will reimburse us the revenue. It's never happened. So we just went from four to three. So you'll see on the revenue and expense side, it's a one one state agency main money. It's not our money. But instead of booking for four and needlessly driving up the cost here, we went down to three just because it's and this is the
018year we do this. We'll need 15. But I think uh after 10 times of doing four and not having it happen, we went down to three this year. That's what that means. The next one, additional middle school special education teacher. Uh, again, another uh shift of staff. We're reducing a high school special education teacher where there are currently 48 students uh receiving services and moving that teacher to our middle school where there are 95 students requiring special education services. Again, to the folks watching, budget neutral, but a shift of positions. So, that is the big deal. So, like I said, so significant cost here and here. And I think if you take the out of district tuition increase that sometimes isn't on us in the first place, and we're not always responsible for those decisions,
019this would be more in line with all of our other articles in terms of increase. Article two. Article three is our favorite uh career and technical education. That's Lake Region Boat Program. We don't pay, so there's nothing to really talk about here. Article four, the extracurricular activities and athletics. Again, I don't have a whole lot to say. pay up about $7,000 mainly from contract increases uh for our stipen agreements. Article five, student and staff support. Uh so the one thing to note here outside of salary and benefit increases uh I think our tech team along with Sudday has done a wonderful job with our MLTI program. So we get fully reimbursed for MLTI purchases this year. They'll use the MLTI money to get iPads for grade 2. So you'll see on the revenue slide, we'll
020have a revenue from MLTI that's included in this line. That's the only thing of note here outside of the salary benefit increases. Article six system administration. So again, the biggest change here, 13,000 doesn't seem like much, but on a $35,000 increase, 13,000 is more a third more than a third of the 35,000. So that is our audit accounting software and school board dues. We pay dues to MSMA uh as part of our school board where we get our policies and uh those kinds of things. So 13,000 the increases from those three increases. Article 7, school administration. I don't have a lot to add. There's nothing new. There's nothing going on. It's straight salary benefit PFML. Article 8, transportation. So this number should be about 3540ish,000. Well, I can tell you $40ish,000. The negotiated bus contract
021increase about 3% a year, 3% on 1.2 million, 36,000, slightly more than that. Um, but we reduced this line potential van purchase. So, we purchased a couple vans uh in the past couple years, a maroon one and a white one. They are not 50,000 that we have budgeted. So, we cut it back to 45,000. We pay for those van purchase out fund balance because they're onetime purchases, but there's a $5,000 reduction because uh I think Sue, Jan, and Peggy have done a wonderful job chasing down those vans and reducing the costs uh to under 45,000. So there's a 5,000 reduction there. And we have private source transportation. Again, we pay that out of fund balance. We've been budgeting about $30,000 for that. We haven't used more than a couple thousand bucks. We reduce that to
02210. Again, that's a fund balance item. It's not a real savings, but we're artificially, not artificially, but by those budgeting 25 lower than we should be, or it would be the normal bus increase that you've seen every year, $30, $40,000. Article 9, facilities. Uh, the biggest thing here, you might have seen the, uh, fires in California, the hurricanes in Florida. I think this is a universal thing. You probably see it at your homes. auto insurance, homeowners insurance, liability insurance up about $19,000. If you take that out of the pile, this is more in line with all of our other increases. And revolving renovation, which replaced all the curtain walls at our high school, uh to remind folks watching, sure you hang with me for 10 years in a row, we received a million dollar revolving
023renovation. $473,000 was completely given to us. Uh and $527,000 we had to pay back interest free over 10 years. If you can believe it, the 10 years are coming due this August. That'll be fully paid off, done. So, that's super cool. Uh, in fact, Suma Lansen on our school board and the construction committee led this work. So, again, our school board does a heck of a job looking out for our kids and programming, and that group really led the charge there. Article 10, debt service. This is the one I always feel terrible and and sleazy about. So it looks like we're down 28,000 on that first line. We're not down anything on that first line. So that's our middle school bond payment. The state fully funds the middle school bond. So we'll get 28,000 less
024in subsidy from Maine to pay for our middle school. But if you can believe it, there were probably board members on around that when we did the middle school uh in ' 07. That is almost paid off. And in 2027, I won't have to say this line anymore that it looks slippery and it's not really me. And but anyway, so the next line is true. Uh this is the high school elevator project, the 88 project. We had two bonds. One we paid off in 23. This one we paid off in 24. So that is a true savings. We've paid off our high school elevator in its entirety. We have a better functioning high school now. The elevator's working. Brett, thanks for your emails. We are getting folks to the gym and whatever. Uh down 43
02544,000. 73 overall. Last one. Another good one now. So Sam Wedgewood and her team uh since we received a free refused lunch from the state really doing a great job looking at their orders, their products, their payroll. They are fully uh in the black as a food service program which is unbelievable. I would say when I first started we used to transfer maybe $50,000 plus pay for some salary out of this. They have gone fully on their own as their own little private business and they make themselves whole every year. So that team uh deserves a lot of credit for reducing this line dramatically. budget warners. So, this is in your packet. This is for the numbers, people. So, this is the proposed 25 26. Uh I don't need to read them for you. Uh
026but last year was like 168. This is 175 700,000 or so increase in the budget, budget to budget. And the revenue side we should spend a minute on. So, a lot of work goes into this side. State subsidy. You see, we received a reduction of 77,855. And for those of you checking me quick on the $279, you say, "You fool, we can't do math. You really lost $119,000." No, because a portion of that is the middle school bond that they're paying us less. So, it's that fake. We didn't really lose the middle school bond. They're just paying us less for the bond money to money that we get in use. We lost about $78,000 from DOE this year, but we still received about 7 million stage client and main care. Ann Colby, Jana Murphy, Peggy
027McKenzie do a great job chasing funds. So that's if we have stage declined students, students that are main care build for they take time and effort and turn in all the billing we get reimbursement for those students to the tune of 110,000 that's a revenue for us. MLTI I mentioned. So that's the grade two iPads. The third line down. I'm not tall enough embarrassingly to reach that third one. I point to it. But the $40,000 is for a grade two iPads that'll be fully reimbured are revenue to us. The next one, other revenue. So we negotiated with Androskogen Bank to get interest on our checking account. Uh always worry that those interest rates could go down. they already have some, but based on the balance we have and the interest rate we've negotiated, which could
028change, we feel like we could get uh about $90,000. It might be more, but we wanted to be conservative uh off our checking. Great work to our business team negotiating that agreement. So, that's a revenue for us. Those are the last of I think revenues besides fund balance and local. So, fund balance, revolving renovation grant, I mentioned 527, that's our last 527 to pay for the curtain walls at our high school. So, we'll use fund balance to pay for that and it'll be over. Our school resource officers, we do now have two. I think this board/ our administrative team slash probably our community is psyched to have two. So, uh since theoretically those are outside folks, we fund balance the SRO payment $102,000 budget offset. So, last year we used a lesser amount. I think
029our goal is to put forward the best education our students can deserve while deserve while being fiscally responsible to the taxpayers. So, we will use $550,000 of our fund balance to offset some of the increase to put forward a reasonable increase to our local taxpayers. Out of district placements, I mentioned uh this is our year. So, it's 250,000 budget for the district placements. We'll pay the entirety out of our fund balance. That could change any time. Uh to be frank with this board, the community and Jana might get mad at me. We can't even place some of these kids because the schools are full. They won't take. So, will we spend the whole 250? I don't know. But we definitely need to budget for it. Um and that's a challenging process. And thank Jan and
030her team for all they go through. Capital projects. So, the great work we do every year, you see new things go on every year and upkeep our billings. I know that's really important to our community. So, $1285,000 we pay for it, it's done. good use of fund balance. There's the sack ed techch expense. So we went from four to three. So in case the industry client kits come, we'll have 139 of expense built in. So we won't overspend our line, but it'll be fully reimbured by main. So that's like a in case. We've never used it since I think my first year. So we'll see. Contingencies we've never used in my whole time. We have $200,000 in article 2 special ed, $100,000 in article one regular ed, and $50,000 in maintenance as contingency funds in
031case we put up fund balance in case it happens. It never happens, it goes back to fund balance. The next year, we put fund balance. We've done this 12 times and never used that contingency. Vantage private transportation. This is the one I told you that we reduced. This used to be 80. It's all out of fund balance. We had 50 for the van, 30 for private source. That's down to 45 and 10 because we believe we can buy a van for 45 or less and we've never spent close to 10 on the private source. So, we just reduced those numbers. Here's what our taxpayers gave us last year. Uh, a lot of people in this room are taxpayers, almost everybody. Thank you so much for your 8.357 million that you gave to education here. We
032are really trying to do a good job with that and provide for our students at a high level. I think last week's state of the schools did show that. And this year, the tax increase based on all these numbers, because that's the number we have to give before we pick the budget, is $258,000, which amounts to 3.09% to our local taxpayers, which you'll see there it is. All right. Used to be Don Isaac's slide and everybody probably stopped doing this slide. Um, but in terms of getting a mill, if we were all one community, if it wasn't five towns, if we were just Saki Valley, we take the dollars we need, divide by the total valuation. The mill impact of our budget was 23. So on a $100,000 home, this budget would impact $100,000 worth
033of property valuation, $23. And obviously $200, uh, $200,000 would be $46 double and so on. and 400,000. You can do the math from here, but for every $100,000 of valuation, it's 23 bucks, this school budget. Why is it different for every town? This was the best slide. I think this was uh Sue's idea. So, this is the one slide. I'd like to spend about an hour on it because it's the one you can't yell me. You can't yell at our board. We have zero to do with this slide. I have no idea, but the main revenue service sets the town valuation. You can see this is from the year before. We don't have those numbers. Up 57 million, up 85 million, up 125 million almost our town's valuation. And what sets the 3.09 different for
034every town is the amount your town's valuation went up. So if I were a math teacher, I'd say, "Okay, class, which town's going to take it the worst?" I'm not, and we're not teaching math, but you can see Parsonsfield went up the most. They are going to take the biggest brunt of the 3.09. Cornish will be next. Uh, Porter will be next, followed by Baldwin and Hyum. Just because I live there, I didn't set this. Okay, it's not because I'm a resident. I didn't call anyone before anyone spreads that. Nothing to do with me. But the 3.09 will not be proportionate 3.09 because of these valuations. Not because of 55 or your board or your administrators. So, I think there's another slide that'll show there it is. So, like we just said, Parson's feeling up
035the most, so they take the brunt of the 3.09. They're up 557, corn 488, uh, Porter 212, Bald 1.6, and higher on 79. And you can see what it is, the mill impact on 100,000 of property. So, even our highest town on 100,000 of property is up $41. So that is the mill impact, the tax impact of this proposed school budget pending your approval, pending the town's approval, pending the budget referendum vote May 20. Oh, federal funding. I get asked this a lot and the answer is before I even read that. So I have no idea. I don't know what's happened with federal funding. What I do know is I received an email from MSMA that it seems like federal funding is intact. So please don't panic about federal funding. But yes, if we lost
036federal funding, it would be devastating. Uh our title one, title two, title four, title five, uh which uh education support programs that Sue does a good job with that grant and our idea local entitlement grant that Jan does a good job with are about $950,000 worth of funding. They are almost entirely people. If we didn't get that money, we would hemorrhage people and not provide the services uh that our school board, our staff, and our kids and parents are accustomed to. So it would be bad. There's no talk that I've heard that it's going away, but wanted to address the elephant in the room with this slide. So US Department of Education ESA team has not been eliminated. ESCA is a congressionally funded budget item. So there'd be a process to remove it and we
037should anticipate a reduction 5% which I think is not great, but I think we can still do the things that we need to do at a 5% reduction. Haven't heard any more than that. Uh and don't have any other information other than that. and the possible notification date would be April 2025. So that is title one, title two, title 4 and IDA is special education. The last one is nutrition services. We have already lost a local food grant to the tune of $14,000 uh which allowed for purchase of local food. I mean appropriate name for the grant. Uh and community eligibility program the state of Maine I think is pushing that we uh join that provision. Sorry, not program provision. Uh, and I don't know what that would do to our food service money. So,
038all the great work I said about Sam and her team is still true, but I don't know what that would mean for us. Done. And then, so we have the I I'll try every question, but I won't No, no. You're great, Judy. I will try to do every question, but if I can't, I certainly won't be embarrassed to pass it off. Go ahead, Judy. Okay. Uh Sue, if you could put up article rhyme again, facilities maintenance. Is that the elevator? The end of the elevator that we're finished. This is the end of the curtain walls. You know, remember how the walls used to be those pebbles and you could push them and there was no insulation. That's that. Okay, that was my first question. The second question is underneath state subsidy um uh reduction of
03977,000 the you had said the money we didn't use for this for the middle school bond could you elaborate on that what money didn't we use it's not so right here they gave us 812,000 in 2425 to pay for our middle school in 2526 they're going to give us $784,000. That's a reduction in $28,000 of subsidy, but that's not real because we don't see it. We don't pay that bill. So, they give us the bond portion, that amount, and then they give us an education amount on the education education amount that we really use. The reduction is 78,000. So, that's a different slide then because it's uh this is the proposed 25 26 revenues under state subsidy. Go to it. I thought there was 77,000. Yes, it is. in the gez there's my height again
040but you see the you see the top one 7.037 037. So included in that is an education part of 6.3 or whatever and the middle school bond part. The middle school bond part was 28,000 less but we don't use that money in the bottom half. The stuff we do use for school. We lost 78,000 because we didn't use it though. No just because of funding the funding formula. You know that form the ED279 form that they tell you how much they're going to give schools. They someone else decided by a formula what we get. By that formula they gave us $78,000 less. Okay. [Applause] Okay. So, I have a lot of questions just because I'm new than anything else. But, um, so on your regular instruction, you said you were um getting rid of a
041fourth grade teacher. You're not actually getting rid of that position. It's just third grade is not bringing up their fifth teacher. Correct. Third grade had five. Fourth grade is now going to have four. We're going to use the money for that position to get the uh interventions. Okay, great. Um and then on the special ed um just had a question. Um you talked about um adding a special ed teacher for the middle school. Correct. Um because you had an increase of students at the middle school, special education students at the middle school. No, because the ratio proportion, Miss Ray, even even after we move it, our ratio of student to teacher is still higher at the middle school even by moving one. Oh, okay. Based on numbers only, not because of an increase, just because
042of what the numbers are. Gotcha. Okay. And is elementary good with their special ed numbers? Like their ratio is Yeah. You mentioned middle school and high school, but not elementary school. I'm just wondering about the elementary Jana Murphy has gone through it uh diligently. I don't know what they would say. They might not say no. So, um one of the four additional well three of the four additional ed techs are slated to go to the middle school for that additional increase in needs. Our special ed teachers I feel like can still manage the numbers but they are going to need the additional support staff to meet the needs of the kids. I think you meant the elementary. Oh, is that what I You said middle school. Sorry. Elementary. Okay. So, three of the four edte
043are going to the elementary school. Okay, perfect. Thank you, Miss Murphy. And then, sorry. Doing great, Miss R. Maybe not. I thought I did. Oh, okay. So, school administration. Just wondering how is that seven? Is that administrative um administrators or is that administrators plus administrative staff? B administrators, administrative assistant, and staff. Yes. Okay, that's all. Andrea, I sort of have a question just before I need to, but I am not quite understanding the fund balance like you had said that you know the van and the private private transportation and the um out of displacements that you may not use and the van that you may not use. Where does the rest of that go? Like does it just stay with us or does it so if we don't use the fun balance? So does it
044does it get put against us because we still have it left? Great question. Hey super you don't get this much money because super question Andrea. So at home let's say at home you have 10,000 in a savings account in case it breaks. All we're doing in case the furnace breaks I didn't use the right word. So I put five no I we are putting 5,000 in case the furnace breaks. If the furnace doesn't break at the end of the year, it goes back in the fund balance next year. Say, "Oh, the furnace is getting close. Let's put 5,000." It's it's like that trick rabbit thing. It's the same money that just keeps going. We're just allocating it in case. It hurts nothing. We're saying part of our savings account will pay for this in case.
045Okay? If we don't pay for it, it goes back to the savings account. And you'll hear me say this exact same thing next year. We have said the exact same thing. We, I guess, is me on this line for 12 years in a row. Yeah. That 350's gone. this way in case we ever using it, it goes back and then the next year I come back in case. So, it's the same money just keep going back and forth. I don't know about the same exact dollar bill, but same money. Yes. Sorry. Question. Um the transportation um what is the length of the bus contract? Is that 5 years? It ends in 2027. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Great. Maybe uh another thing to mention to Andrea and Sue is that the fund balance also helps reduce
046the taxes from the community. Yeah, huge. This year we used 550 to offset taxes to the community to make the increase around 3%. Yeah, huge. I guess I'll just do a statement. I I guess I'm just going to make a statement cuz I'm Parson's field which is the highest increase. Don't hold it against hire. We I'm telling you it's not Thank you, Alison. All right. Oh, I got one Har. I thought I was going to be Cornish, but that's okay. So, you know, being a resident from Parsonsfield, this is a large increase, but I just like to say that I think the district does a good job balancing using resources to share your resources and move things around to make sure a budget isn't increase isn't too large. and this is a palatable increase to
047support our schools. Thank you so much for saying so. I mean, I know this the team here works so hard to try and give the kids everything they need and be mindful that we do have a community that's paying for this budget. So, we are all in this together for the betterment of our kids. Thanks for saying that. Yeah, and people should note state of schools. I know we've talked about decrease in numbers over years and of course you get to high school it's low but the demographics for the SVES enrollment is at 368 you know and it'll probably keep going up the way things have been going great I am not from the highest town on this form this year I don't it wouldn't bother me if I was uh I have shared openly
048before I have no problem paying my extra for 16 only $16 per 100,000. Uh because I feel very confident in how much our district does with 16 measly dollars. Like I blow $16 on much worse things on a daily basis. This is a good cause for my tax increase. Thank you so much, Missy. Kind. Anybody else have anything else at all? Okay. So, uh, procedure from here, just for everybody, and some of our administrators might not be a part of it, but from here on, I think it's April 2nd, and someone can check me, the first Wednesday of the month, we will sign warrants to post in the town based on these numbers for a budget hearing. And I'll send these exact dates, but that should be May 5th, I believe, at 7 PM in
049the middle school cafeteria where it'll be this presentation again, and our public will get to weigh in on every article. Now, I'm going to check the date since I Monday. Monday, May 5th, I got it right. So, it is April 2nd at our board meeting. You'll sign all the warrants to post. May 5th in the middle school cafeteria at 7:00 Monday night. This presentation will happen again and it probably will happen again April 2nd in some form before you sign. And on May 20th at the polling stations in all your towns from 3 pm to 8:00 p.m. we will vote on the budget that is passed at the budget meeting on May 5th. And it's a typically a one question. Do you approve the amount that was approved at the budget meeting on May 5th?
050Yes or no? Those are our final steps. And if all that happens and we stay the course, this will be the budget we build for next year to provide hopefully a wonderful education for all of our students. Again, thank you to the board for your support. Thank you to our administrative team for all the work that they do. Uh appreciate all of you. That's it. That's all I have. Oh, Judy Ingram, just a thank you to all of our administrators, too. It's a great group. I said last time, unbelievable. Thrilled to have them as colleagues. Very proud of them sitting there. They're s You mean listening to me for half? Is that what you mean? I know what you mean by that. What does that mean, J? I'm proud of them, too, but I'm not
051sure it's for the same reason. All right. All right. Good. Ajourned, Mr. Jordan. Thank you all so much.