BOE/LC Budget Workshop #2

001um so let me know when we are live on youtube and i will call the meeting to order is queuing up right now [Music] hmm it's almost there i have to prove i'm not a robot problem i have my suspicions about you kelly perfect good afternoon everyone and welcome to to today's scarborough board of education meeting today is march 10th 2021. may i have the attendance please sure mrs giftis yes dr gill yes ms casalonas here miss leighton here mrs lindstrom here is either here and mrs turner here excellent if everyone could please join me in saying the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance 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 and with that

002i will turn the meeting over to sandy thank you thank you april so we're in session two budget presentations and we will start things off with our wonderful special services department and allison i'll turn it over to you i'm jumping right in huh good afternoon everybody just uh to quickly touch on some things we heard the other day i wanted to reinforce the support of the k2 behavior positions and maintaining those in the budget and i can give you lots of reasons why also strongly support the curriculum instruction for phonics tier 2 interventions learning recovery instructional coaches all of these things help address students needs at the lowest restrictive level and that's always our goal special services just a quick overview our primary programs include special education uh section 504 gifted and talented esl um

003and uh within all of our programming we um impact 33 of our students uh 33 of our students are accessing one or more of those services so what resources are needed to maintain our current programming and services we will need to reallocate personnel and some facility resources to adjust to our incoming student needs as well as our changing populations from phase to phase we're really focused on being as efficient with our adult support models but also creating a safe and positive learning environment for our students the second resource we need is one i didn't expect to be asking for in january of this year the doe extended idea or special education eligibility for students until their 22nd birthday currently students can access services through the school year of their 20th year if they haven't received

004a diploma so this requirement went into effect immediately as you can imagine it has significant ripple effects throughout the state and in many departments the doe has put together a task force to look at such things as funding the special education regulations facilities staffing and certification care payments adult education dhhs adult service eligibility vocational programming the list goes on and on i've just um attached if you're interested just some um information about it uh questions and answers that the doe uh put out to um so that is very unexpected it does have a a small impact on us for next year we have under five students that will be accessing services past their 20th year and um several of them require adult supports as as the years go on and in further budgets this will

005impact us in many many other ways uh next slide what resources do we need to continue to ensure a safe and healthy school environment sue ketch our high school principal already spoke to this about increasing a high school social work position from part-time to full-time with shared costs between special education and the high school we have seen a significant increase in the number of students hospitalized for mental health reasons this year we've seen a significant increase in high school students that were currently accessing a 504 plan but accommodations in this kind of environment with the pandemic and remote instruction it was not enough to meet their needs and now have been referred into special education and our school avoiders whether remote or in person has become more complex as well secondly in addressing enrollment projections

006and learning recovery we would like again to maintain the instructional supplies and staff to provide coveted recovery services this would be for students in person or remote it could be during the school day after school or in the summer we have found for a lot of students this year they just are spent at the end of the day they have no fuel left in their tank to do additional tutoring or instruction so we're looking at more creative ways of doing it which will include different opportunities this summer so the impact on the budget for the services we need would be only in maintaining what's already in the budget that coveted recovery position and i think i have one last slide um are there any resources that have been deferred or removed that potentially will have

007significant impact on students i have been bringing this up for the last several years about doe potentially having the school districts responsible for students beginning at age three in special education the age three to five-year-olds right now there is a proposal before the legislature to have this be a year roll in starting now and fully implemented by school year 24. this will have significant budget impact on facilities on staffing on creating preschool gen ed classrooms for inclusion on transportation on evaluations uh so we um that is coming i don't again uh uh stay tuned uh the first year for scarborough because we do not have any uh current preschool programs will be a year to plan and and um bring the community together and look at what resources we need do need in order to

008be at full implementation uh for three years so more to come on that and that's it for right now happy to of course answer any questions but i know kate has us on a good um a good agenda it has us on a short leash um i'll just jump in right now before i go to the next slide and say that uh we'll use the same protocol that we used yesterday we'll have a couple of presenters and then we'll have time for questions so you'll want to be jotting down questions that you have we do have the parking lot document that's attached it's linked into the agenda and we've got a few things on there from yesterday so if you have big ideas or wonders or even small ones that we can address quickly you

009can park them in there and now i think we'll see how monique is feeling about talking with us always interested in talking i'll focus this on the budget conversation though um in terms of resources needed included within this budget our online applications that support our students learning um we have about a dozen um instructional applications that are managed through curriculum as well as a number of different applications across all the schools as well we're also looking to fully funding we've always fully funded the psat for sophomores and juniors and in light of the state's shift most recently to having the nwea become the new mea state test starting this spring our high school juniors will be asked to take the nwea but given um our experience this year we know that the community um really

010wants our students to continue to take the sat so i've reallocated resources in order to make accommodations for that uh you've heard from the buildings around 8th grade and high school math new resources this past year was a bit of a bridge year because the 8th grade the middle school students who used the high school resources because we have that vertically aligned curriculum we had to purchase used textbooks because they only leveraged the online application and as a result of flash that was no longer available so they've been making do this year as well as the high school with no online resources coordinated to their text materials so um working with the high school and with the middle school teachers um we put a placeholder in the budget to cover the cost of materials and

011professional development there and we're going to go through a process of screening and developing criteria and then reviewing resources uh for a purchase pending a successful budget but we've allocated resources towards that end professional development specifically in the area of social emotional learning that would take on the form of professional development funds whether that be bring an expert in or whether that be having teachers participate in professional workshops i've also included funding for summer person professional development in these areas and you heard on the k2 talk of a responsive classroom 35 is still working on what their um guaranteed and viable solution will be we're also working with the k-12 sel committee we have a meeting next week i believe on march 18th to continue to coordinate our efforts to make sure that that uh

012those strategies are in place for our students ever more important this year we also have our diversity equity and inclusion work which is connected to our social emotional learning work as well and that will take um additional funds um i typically allocate our federal grants towards this endeavor that's what we've been doing um for both sel and the um dei work um there is some funding in professional development for some of that work certainly not all of it uh and then uh we've allocated we brought um had start having conversations about what kinder camp might look like this summer about what uh some sort of summer reading and math summer camp might look like for students so i've allocated funding for that to fund staff but also to provide resources and so taking a look

013at some of the deferred pieces as folks who've been on the board for some time know that we have made incremental steps forward um but for example we had a three-year literacy implementation initiative we're on year six finalizing year six of that so we've slowed down our implementations this has um moved everything back um so where we thought year four we would be doing science tackling science and social studies that's had to be put on hold the challenge with that is our stuff is getting older microscopes are breaking down kits are coming apart there also is a need to bring teachers together k-12 and particularly at k-5 across both content areas so time is the real challenge this year we have not been able to bring any teachers together k-12 the wednesday afternoon time has

014been consumed with prep time and grade level meeting time in order to best prepare for students in terms of lessons and instruction so the professional development we have had to provide has come in more or less one and done as well as the opportunities that our coaches have had in working with teachers so time is a significant challenge for collaborative curriculum work particularly in bringing teachers together across phase levels so and that has an impact that has as much of an impact on addressing science and social studies as well as sel diversity equity inclusion as materials professional development um is also an area while we have i've reallocated budgets to um put more professional development back into the budget we are going to continue to put a pause we're going to defer participation in national

015conferences certainly if there are virtual opportunities that are within the budget we'll certainly um attend to those but there are some national conferences being advertised now work where teachers can travel to those conferences but that's just outside our scope we have much to do within the time we have available the calendar time for professional development is my biggest worry quite frankly um our teachers do and continue to strive to want to do a really great job for their students um many of them are involved in professional development on their own time and they maximize the time that we have and i know that this was a conversation in and around the calendar piece but we have two strategic target areas one is effective teaching and learning and we have plt time but we also have

016to allocate time next year for teachers to come together and to time to learn and plan for students who are um are have unfinished learning and have challenges we also need time to review and adjust the curriculum for vertical articulation i was not able to get any groups together so we need to continue to keep those improvements moving but then we also have safe and inclusive schools as another target area and that's where the social emotional learning piece is and we will need to allocate targeted time towards equity diversity and inclusion and time for teachers to come together to collaborate even the notion of doing a curriculum audit or equity audit ought to involve all staff i'm not sure where that time is going to come to have the quality of the conversations that need

017to have in order for us to move forward um so for within education what we've found is that effective professional development is defined as a professional development that has a positive impact on students it has to be content focused those evidence-based practices it has to incorporate adult learning theory it needs to support collaboration in a job embedded context teachers can't learn a new practice without practicing it it also involves modeling of the effective practice it provides coaching and expert support that's bringing in the consultants that we've brought in over the past and it's also opportunities for feedback and reflection in a sustained duration so that is my biggest worry in terms of this organization moving forward and continuing to be a learning organization our community has high expectations as well it should um but that

018is a significant resource um that falls short i'm not sure how much we'll be able to accomplish without the timepiece in terms of the libraries there was much conversation yesterday around libraries to provide you with a little bit of context while the uh circulation rate from wentworth was very impressive please know that precoven just to give you some context precovered it was about 12 to 15 000 um per year uh the middle school this year ran into some challenges [Music] with staff either being reallocated to cover classrooms or out on medical leave so their programming fell short of what we used to provide in the past um also when kelly muller martin talked about the k um the k5 librarian they have had a shared librarian she's absolutely right they've had a shared librarian for

019quite some time but only in the past three years um we did add a librarian at the middle school so really it's been three years that there's been a full-time position at middle school prior to that we had a k-8 librarian and so we've made incremental steps forward in that area and in these areas where there are resources or deficiencies our leadership council has worked hard to say okay what are the competing priorities this year how do we set up our students for success next year do we ask for an additional librarian or do we wait and we put our resources towards reducing teacher class size and so in working with schools principals yes the librarian position is on the um the list but not for this year and so the principals and i continue

020to have conversations how to maximize our staffing resources within our libraries thank you thank you monique i think uh instructional technology is up next you can bring don on board good evening thank you for having me for instructional technology this year it's been a been a busy year um obviously uh resources that we would need are outlined in the budget there's no new resources other than the potential for two high school stem labs which is the bottom section we've been very fortunate through the funding that was provided through the federal covid related funds going forward we need to be able to maintain the commitment to our current programs and services so funding is required in the areas that will support the significant growth in it systems devices and services to put that in context we've

021had a growth of almost 200 percent in the number of devices that are used by teachers and students every day which is unprecedented growth for any organization if you think about it at work that would be the equivalent of giving everyone three pieces of technology overnight so while we were fortunate to do that a couple of the bullets there software subscriptions uh needed to be adjusted and uh in increased as far as not only volume but access we also experienced some uptick in cost for maintenance and support contracts for online services obviously software companies picked up pretty quick on the fact that their services were now at a premium we did have to make some coved related and cyber security related improvements for software and hardware related services um we were in our line item

022detail we have tracked all of those so that would be available if you would like to see that um and we've outlined a a new section in the budget to be able to repair maintain and support all of this technology going forward which is a higher cost obviously than it has been in the past where we were supporting essentially just the one-to-one computer devices middle school in high school and the rest of the devices were in carts that were maintained at the school site now we have devices going home every day the second group of resources is that we've been providing home-based verizon hotspots for both students and staff to support remote teaching and learning uh i would say that while this relatively speaking while this program has been small it's been highly successful in

023this from the standpoint of we do have families and staff uh who without this program would be unable to have sustainable high-speed internet available to each member of the family during the day i don't know if any of you have experienced this yourself but when you get more than one family member on the internet at the same time and then someone decides to go stream netflix at the at that very same time your internet poops out on you so um this program has proven successful it was initiated by the maine department of education um after we had already uh gone into this ourselves so we had some number of hot spots that we had purchased up front and contracted for services through verizon then the state came along and did the same thing so we've

024almost doubled the number of hot spots as of the end of june the state will stop paying for their part of their number of hot spots we continue them on a monthly basis to review who has hot spots and we um we continue to also slowly trickle hot spots out as families realize um that they're having difficulties with multiple family members so it's it's kind of a moving target how many we have out from week to week the other part is that we continue to focus on a technology refresh for k-12 staff desktops which is the one area of our technology that we have not refreshed in the last five plus years and that's for school staff that are in the front offices the desktop computers uh that you see when you walk in the

025front office primarily um those devices uh are actually getting beyond their life cycle they're becoming more and more difficult to get parts for as well as to keep running effectively so our proposal was to replace those devices this summer before they get beyond um our ability to maintain them efficiently and start to become a drag on our ability to to keep up with the problems that we may have and then again uh the last bullet uh addressing enrollment projections sel needs and learning recovery um our one focus there is uh whether or not we move forward with um supporting the build out of a two high school stem labs i have to be very thankful to both the school leadership central office leadership and the board as well as our community um for the fact

026that in the area of instructional technology we've been very very fortunate and continue to be able to have the technology that our students need and our teachers need in the hands of everyone so that we have very effective teaching and learning utilizing modern resources so at this point we don't have any resources that are deferred or removed from our budget that would have an impact if they weren't funded i will say finally though that we were extremely fortunate that the covid related funds came along it was a significant amount of funding that was going to need to be requested in fiscal year 22 to refresh just what we had already in-house we were not only able to do that a year early to be able to get more technology in the hands of kids but

027also we were able to add some enhancements that we would have never been able to consider if the funding didn't exist from another level thank you don i would just make a couple of points for those who might be watching and might not be fully oriented to our materials but in the budget book in the executive summary there's a a pretty significant section of three pages that talks about the crf funding which is the coronavirus relief funds a couple of grants that came down from the federal government in this past year and how those were spent across the district and as don says a significant portion of that funding was available to us for technology and it's really been a game changer for us in terms of how we provide teaching to our students and

028so many of the things that we've been i guess you'd say forced to do in the pandemic environment in the remote learning environment are also things that have open doors for us and will be things we'll take into the to the future of teaching for our students the one other thing i would say at this point is that we do have a capital budget slide coming up later on and that includes technology and facilities and transportation so we might have a question for don down the line on that but at this point i think we get to open this up for questions about what we've just been listening to i i have a question for monique um muni can you please speak to the difference between plt and pd and what the different budget allocations

029would be or what the impact of the to the budget plt has um emt's um acronym stands for professional learning teams that is how we use some of well pre-covert how we used the early release days that we had the once a month days we had a pd a group of teachers come together over the summer to redesign that structure the idea around that structure was that teachers would identify goals aligned with their evaluation goals and they would work collaboratively with teachers who have similar goals doing research gathering information trying new methods uh and practicing that in their classroom and then coming back together again to continue working on improving and listening we had many groups working on writing we had groups working on mindfulness we had groups working on alternative furniture and classrooms all

030sorts of innovative ideas so that does not have a budget implication in terms of materials it's minimal i had some lines in my budget um some teachers wrote grants for things we have that in some of our covered in some of our supply budgets that pd is called to refer to professional development um we really should be calling it professional learning and it takes on several forms that have budget impact one is it's a conference registration another is uh it's a consultant we bring in to work with teachers another is it's a group who wants to do a book study so it may be some supplies but teachers still need the time embedded in their work in their contract year and work day to do that professional learning if it's to be effective and has

031a positive impact on students and their learning there years ago i did a presentation where the then board felt that teachers were certified so they learned what they needed to know and they were done so why do we even need professional learning and as this pandemic illustrated we always need to keep growing in this profession learning more about students learning more about new practices more effective practices learning about our implicit biases and what we might be doing in our classrooms unintentionally doing curriculum audits all of those sorts of things which are on our list of improvements is that helpful that is helpful thank you for making that distinction for us we use too many acronyms it's a lot and you know i i i mean i'm not i don't mean to say you know to

032imply that i was playing you know of the part there i know what the acronyms are i wasn't sure if we had talked about what plt specifically was and so i wanted to make sure that that was was clear for everybody who might be listening to i appreciate the opportunity to provide that clarification i see sarah's hand is up i believe yep can you hear me my connection seems to be going in now yeah yeah okay um my question is for allison allison you mentioned the um [Music] the phasing in of the three to five year old and you alluded to the fact that it's going to be a significant impact on the budget which is not not surprising i'm just wondering if you have any estimation kind of two questions if you have any

033estimation on how significant that impact will be um and similar to the question or that i posed yesterday to mike um legage in terms of the turf field like are there things that we can be doing early uh and kind of phased so that we're being a little bit plan planning for it rather than just hit getting you know having it hit our budget all at once in one year uh sure uh a few years back we had a group that came together to look at uh developing preschool programs at our three k through two schools and that um the the it was cost prohibitive and space prohibited for us to move forward with that but for me that would be a significant step forward for us to be looking at how and where we

034can develop some preschool classrooms because that would start benefiting all students at this point not just special education students also so we need places for once these students are identified that they are with their peers so if we don't develop contracts with local daycare providers preschool programs then we will have to create them for ourselves so we know that's a facilities issue that's a teacher issue just starting with that would be significant for us before the special education staffing mandate came in we are looking uh scarborough collaborates with several other districts on on other initiatives in special education you know we've talked to we have a central testing site um for evaluations things like that so we're because of the lack of information or decisions made at the state level it so much is up

035in the air but i will say sarah preschool programming would be um a more realistic initial first step for us to do sooner than later gotcha thank you and i i think also it's it's timely to remind ourselves that this initiative is out there when we're talking about forward planning for k2 and you know what we might potentially be doing in terms of space there we have to bear in mind that it might not just be our existing school population but it might be an ad of younger children as well or it might make sense to consider that i see leanne's hand is up it is and i'm not sure if this question is for don todd or sue but can you explain more about the two stem labs we had heard yesterday about a

036lab i'm wondering what the difference is between the two setups um i as far as the configuration and um the need rationale uh i'd defer to sue on that i know that the um we've both todd and i did an evaluation last year as part of the budget process to ascertain the cost required to convert to uh rooms to stem and or robotics classrooms and determine what that cost would be regardless of the uh function of the rooms um the costs were very comparable so it really comes down to what the educational function of the room and how uh what the rationale for expanding the number of classrooms within the high school would be which which is sue's uh expertise okay i'll say that the conversations that i've been having on the topic with sue

037and todd have been about trying to figure out what's the right scope of work to move forward and you know what would be um the most cost-effective thing that we could do that would make those spaces actually viable for stem teaching i believe that the original plan right now was to have a one room specifically built for stem and the other to be more of a classroom space which could be used for you know engineering projects but not like big um space consuming projects but more of a classroom space that could be used for math and um i guess classroom teaching i think todd is probably out here in our audience someplace and he might be able to weigh in on it we have asked um and i think sue mentioned this yesterday we have

038asked harriman to work with us on a plan that will do enough to get us to a useful classroom space for the stem teacher without it being as much of a cost perhaps as outfitting it 100 percent but dawn's right that his piece of it would be the infrastructure piece to allow for um you know wi-fi protectors the kinds of of um equipment that are included in every classroom i see todd yeah and the cost for us uh is roughly eight thousand dollars a room to put the wiring in put the projector put the wireless support for laptops regardless of how many students and what the function is and i'm pretty sure don we put that in the operating budget because it was a small piece yes and um so that's included in the equipment

039line in in it operating that's correct i did promote todd to speak so he is available but he's mysteriously invisible i am working on a new can you hear me okay yes i'm working on a different laptop and i cannot figure out how to make the camera come on but anyway i'm here um so uh to answer the question about the stem labs it's really just one lab space and kate is right it's a secondary classroom that could be used for anything it would just be a basic classroom might be used for overflow from stem but might be also used for math or another science again deferring to sue but if you look at the space we are considering for this which is actually a facilities storage garage it's sort of naturally divided almost in

040half um and so with harriman's work last year we basically decided that to use the natural division in the space and make it two spaces using the larger portion for the stem space and the smaller one for the regular classroom both of them would be over 800 square feet and would have access to a hall but the stem section would have the existing overhead door so if they had larger projects they needed to move in and out they wouldn't have to try and squeeze it through the hallway and so that's why they kind of selected that space um and i hope so i hope that answers the questions really just one stem lab the other one is just a basic classroom thank you do i see any other hands raised any other questions for our

041current speakers if you find that you have a question as we move forward and we're moving past your thought process i would just jot it right in that parking lot document and we'll make sure that we circle back to it so our next section is going to be transportation facilities and maintenance and capital projects and equipment and i think diane is going to help me talk about transportation maybe whoops it would help if i didn't screw up the slides so um in these uh support departments that aren't fully instructional we've kind of compressed the two slide questions in in some cases there's not quite as much to say about the details of what's going on for transportation the budget proposal that the leadership council has created includes maintaining funding for a full staff of bus

042drivers and what that means is 23 bus drivers last year's budget or the budget season we talked a lot about taking out and then adding back bus drivers as a response to the pandemic environment and as a response to the need to distance students on a bus so that we can't have as many riders as we normally would to be frank the only way that we're pulling off school in person at all this year is because parents have agreed to drive their children to and from school and we are so grateful for that it's really the way that we've managed to transport the students that do need a bus ride without excluding anyone so um hiring bus drivers is a story that you've heard us tell um it's it's a sad sad saga there really

043haven't been a lot of bus drivers looking for work um in recent years pre-covered and um now with the pandemic environment it's even more difficult to find new hires and to invite folks to come to work with us so at the moment i believe we do not we have oh i can't do math i think we have 18 bus drivers right now um five open positions and um so we toyed with the idea of well if we're getting along with what we have should we put should we continue to fund because this is what we would call level services it's what's in the budget um with fy21 or should we continue to fund at that level and you know the the answer is sure because if all the kids need to ride again and we

044go back to school in person then that's what we will really need and you know leaving aside the potential challenge of hiring we want to have the resources available to hire those drivers if we can um so that's one of the thing that's things that's been retained in our fy 22 proposal and then in terms of what um was deferred or has been added back we have the uh bus replacement cycle last year in fy21 our original capital proposal was for three replacement buses which is our usual cycle generally speaking we we have uh 30 buses they have a 10-year lifespan so three buses a year is our reasonable replacement cycle last year we took one of those buses out and we only replaced two this year in cip you'll see that we're asking to

045go back to the three buses per year the good news in cip for transportation is that we were able to purchase vans we did have in fy 21 we took out the request to replace a minivan and just deferred that and as it so happened when the crf funds came along the coronavirus relief funds came along one of the things that we could spend that on was vehicles and so we have purchased five new to us slightly used minivans and our fleet is now in really great shape we were able to um decommissioned the one that was dying that we wanted to replace in fy21 and the others are on the road and helping us immensely with the flexibility of our ability to transport kids and that was really necessary this year because of the

046limitations that we had so you know we might have in previous years had two or three students on a van with a driver and an aide and we're not able to do that with the current restrictions so um the ability to pick those were just in time absolutely and and so i mean when folks are looking at the description of the crf funds i know there everybody out there is just running to read this compelling document um but the the things that the the federal government thought were important for us were things that would help us open school and keep it open in this environment and and you know lots of different schools across the country grabbed onto that transportation piece and expanded some of those funds in that area because it is such a

047significant impact if you can't get the children to school or get them to their programming you're really you're really failing them diane did you want to throw anything else in there diane got kicked out by her computer so yeah i'm sorry i disappeared there for a couple of minutes um i just figured i'd just keep talking until i'm like the piano player of all timing like that was not a good time for that to happen no so you know again i i can't say enough about uh the work that our transportation department has done this year um and also uh the commitment that our parents have made because as all of you know um you know i think when we started this year we were upwards of i think 65 of our parents who were

048um providing transportation for their own children and you know i i i think that has um you know remained pretty true uh for the year because as you know we're still under the restrictions of no more than one student per seat so at the largest bus we have i believe that's right around 28 students at one percent so um you know that's been no small challenge and uh with the number of adults that have gone in and out of quarantine at different points um in the year the fact that we've been able to keep this fleet going and not cancel school because of transportation as some of our district partners have had to do is really a testament to sarah our transportation director who continuously is looking at bus runs rewriting bus runs moving kids

049around as needed making accommodations as as parents situations have changed and they've needed some support um our transportation folks have uh transported cohort d students at all times a day any day of the week they have delivered meals delivered work when they've needed to um it's just been endless so we're you know we're we're so appreciative of everyone in this organization because i think we wouldn't be doing what we're doing right now if we really didn't have all hands on deck but we do want those five drivers next year because you know we are anticipating um that we will be able to um extend transportation to our students and obviously if we could find those five bus drivers that's five more buses that we could be putting on the road right now so if you

050know anyone who would like if anyone's listening we we have a cdl training program that's quite excellent if you'd like to learn how to be a bus driver can't think of a more fun way to spend your day right you don't need to come ready trained with a cdl license um we will invest our time energy and expertise into training folks who have that interest so commercial break this this program is brought to you by the scarborough school department transportation department and uh we also need a commercial for facilities and maintenance because as todd will tell you he's down a few really important positions but uh his team is just remarkable and is is taking really good care of us todd you out there hang on let me bring him back didn't he get booted

051out with you he was just back in the audience for a minute so now he's with us there we go here i am i found the camera and the volume uh new laptop so excuse my uh elementary uh usage here um never giving you a new laptop again yeah my old one was only seven or eight years old i think i you know i did okay with it um so thank you kate for that uh fine and i think overly done uh introduction but i am uh pretty proud of our pretty lean staff and covet has not done us any favors but we've also uh been able to accomplish a lot because of kovid at the same time um i would probably say that uh you know safety has been at the forefront of our

052our uh efforts this year more than ever before um and again we're we're looking to try and maintain our funding for a full-time staff if like the bus department we could uh find suitable applicants without robbing one department to complete another so we are currently a full-time maintenance worker down and several custodians probably two or three part-timers and at least one full-time custodian down the hybrid model has helped us because the schools aren't as fully occupied and therefore fully dirtied shall we say and the school lunch plan even though it's been spread out has been much neater because a lot of the food is sort of pre-packaged and prepared in a different way so that helps cleaning up afterwards but again we try to keep everything safe and disinfected as much as we can we've

053taken on the role of amazon warehouse for receiving products and goods for the district everything from furnishings um you know clear plastic dividers and other things all the way down to desks and and [Music] i'm hearing voices so in with respect are there any resources deferred or removed from our budget which again will have a significant impact on our students really i think the most important process in any facilities operation is to keep your eye on prevention of catastrophic losses so we spend a lot of money on contracted services to keep our electrical and hvac and plumbing systems running uh they're heavily used systems that keep everybody comfortable and and uh we have hundreds and hundreds of toilets and sinks and so forth so there's a lot to keep everything moving and operational um this

054year we've even conducted district-wide indoor air quality tests which really show that our systems have been maintained and are providing the appropriate air quality for all occupants teachers staff students and we're pretty pleased with that we we're also blessed with the crf funds in that typically in a capital budget i will ask for equipment and so forth and buy bits and pieces of things that we need always feeling like we're just kind of you know maintaining what we have and and replacing the ancient stuff this year because of um crf funds we were able to uh leverage some of that to improve our overall cleaning fleet of equipment and our maintenance equipment um we had asked last year i don't know if it's time to talk about cip yet or not kate but we had

055asked last year for example for a new uh dump truck which is just a small one-ton truck but it has a very important piece of equipment in the back in the winter and it's a salter sander the truck typically we like to replace things at 10 years old the truck is now 15 years old has low mileage but it's unfortunately rusting out and the um public works department has been great in maintaining that truck they welded a new floor in it so the driver wouldn't fall through it and our sander died in the middle of the winter this year so we were able to reallocate some cip dollars that i had earmarked for cleaning equipment to buy a new sander for the old dump truck which we'll just put in the new dump truck should

056we be so fortunate to get a new one next year but it's a it's a infrequently used piece of equipment but it's vitally important when you have an icy day and teachers and students are walking in the building so that's just an example of one of the blessings of covet but again um it's probably been more negative than positive in terms of overall impacts for us um next is there another slide from ek or is that it no that's pretty much it we'll go into capital next and i did want to tell folks that um we have a more detailed chart of all of our capital budget projects linked into the agenda it's at the top um i'm gonna see what it's called here probably something clever like school capital budget detail worksheet and uh

057that has a little bit more narrative to what it is that we're doing and why and i think the important thing to remember and the reason that it's on this slide is that we did really cut back heavily on our facilities maintenance capital budget in fy 21. we pretty much removed everything that we could reasonably defer and so one of the goals of the town council and and therefore also one of our goals has been to try to bring those things back and take another look at them and make sure that we're not losing ground so this slide is really talking about the preventive maintenance cycle is really talking about those capital capital projects drop this down and kate if i could just add one quick thing um the point about preventive maintenance that i

058mentioned we're trying to head off catastrophic failures because those typically will result in loss of school time so if we have boilers fail for example and there's no heat you simply can't have school in the building which is why we spend what we spend on our preventative maintenance program because stuff only breaks when you need it it doesn't break when you don't need it it seems right and and if you do the preventive maintenance and you keep things safe and and well maintained then you can get longer life out of your let's say hvac system at the middle school which should technically have died about five years ago it's still chugging along um it's it's having its issues but you know the preventive maintenance lets us get ahead of those kinds of problems and extend

059the life of our systems so capital projects i just wanted to mention the capital budget i've mentioned that we have a separate document for that this is a separate section at the back of the budget book with some narrative pieces that are pretty captivating because todd's a good writer um about how uh the projects are are planned and you know what the useful life of things is and what these investments are about the capital budget is a separate fund from the operating budget um it does not include it is not included in the uh budget referendum that goes to a vote for the community of scarborough it's a separate section that's combined with the town's capital budget and is passed by the town council so it's a little bit separate process it's also not a

060budget in which we know what tax dollars we're asking for because each individual project is reviewed by the town finance department and they decide whether a project can be bonded or it should be paid for with reserve funds we've used that quite a bit in the past couple years whether it's lease or whether it's appropriated which means that it will be tax dollars requested and and that that will impact the bottom line on what we ask the taxpayers for so that's something that we don't really have uh a say in but it's something that will be talked about as we go forward and continue to discuss our budget proposal with the town so in uh dawn's technology capital budget i believe the only item that we have in there right now is a replacement of

061projectors at k2 and don if you want to just say a word or two about that uh projectors in k2 are eight years old or older um they're beginning to fail at a pretty systemic rate of several a week and some of them we've been able to repair and others not and so it's life cycle on a projector is usually seven to ten years and we've seen extremely heavy use from day one on those so we're proposing to replace them uh cost is about 165 000 for those and that's for a total of 90. so this is a much smaller ask for technology obviously as don was saying earlier we've invested an enormous amount and we've kind of been able to move forward on some of what we would normally put into a tech refresh

062by using the crf funds this year so that's a pretty small number and you'll see if you go all the way to the bottom of that detail worksheet for capital budgets there's a list of what are capital budgets approved have been in the past i believe i've got six or seven years worth of budgets in there and this is a very low year for technology for obvious reasons and then in facilities it bumps up quite a bit because we're trying to restore some of the things that we did not do last year and todd i don't know if you have that in front of you but you could talk about what's in there sure i have um a version of it up and so some of some of the things that were deferred um from

063last year i mentioned the dump truck we did get a significant portion of funding for hvac upgrades primarily for heating ventilation air conditioning for the middle school because we've had an ongoing cycle of replacements for all the heat pumps there are 123 heat pumps at the middle school serving all the various different individual spaces some of them are as large as um half of your car and some of them are about the size of a large microwave oven so they're all over the place above ceilings and in mechanical rooms and things like that um so we we got going on some of those and then covet hit um and then we didn't want anyone in the buildings so we we kind of held off and i did work on the outside of the buildings um

064for example roofing projects and we did some heat pumps for the middle school portables so that all 12 of them could be actually climate controlled in all seasons so we did some of the work but we didn't get to all of it so now that we're a little bit more comfortable with getting people in the buildings most of this hvac stuff has to happen after hours or on weekends so now that we're a little more comfortable with that we can probably i'm actually starting to develop the schedule for starting to get some of those replaced [Music] the roofing projects cape lists in the cip budget we did two large sections at the high school last year um and we held off on some that are listed here in this year's but they're much smaller uh

065segments on uh the elementary schools and one on the middle school as well um we always try to plug away at painting interior finishes kate calls it um it costs a lot of time and money to paint and we don't have a big crew so we typically contract that out because they can knock out a giant section in a short period of time and they do a really professional job so we worked away over and that can only happen on vacation time so we try to tackle that over school vacations if we can or summer security and access management that has been well funded as a result of uh unfortunate incidents at school where we just feel like we need more cameras and and access control so we we always have well we have dozens

066and dozens of cameras and access points that are electronic and fail again typically when you need them the most we also have flooring and there's a reference to audi auditorium the auditorium on our normal years is very heavily used and um this year it wasn't as much because of group gatherings being um not allowed but we do have uh various types of flooring tile rubber flooring uh carpeting that needs replacement as it ages it gets worn out and uh it's not good for indoor air quality especially if it's carpeting so we try to replace it as it needs it uh building envelope this is the most important one of the whole list because it includes next to roofing it includes the walls windows and doors and we have uh listed here sections of these lovely

067brick buildings that everybody thinks are permanent believe it or not they start to fall apart if you don't take care of them the wind and the rain and the sun cook them and bake them and wash them out so i every year i do a segment of masonry repairs on the brick portions of buildings same same with driveways and parking parking lots and playgrounds our playgrounds are in good shape around wentworth but are in tired shape at the k2 schools and some attention really needs to be paid especially to the ada accessibility um and uh we're working on that we got some things uh in to help with access for wheelchair-bound students to get access to swings and so forth um we can put that in the spring um there's a big ticket item for

068the quentin drive roadway for those of you who've ever traveled from route 114 to the middle school you will see that that road is deteriorating pretty badly and that needs to be repaved i've worked with public works to come up with an estimate and that's the number they've helped with and so that would go out to bid if it's approved we would keep some sort of speed control in there right now there's a dip in there that most people hate but if we didn't have it people be traveling way too fast and i'd worry about safety of uh pedestrians and then the science lab we've talked about uh and facilities support equipment is the things i reference like floor equipment dump trucks i just material moving things like a forklift and things like that um

069our furnishings there's a never-ending pile of furniture in our schools and they uh have lasted a long time uh but are in need particularly at middle school and in some of the k2 schools they're over 20 years old you like to get 15 or 20 years out of them and now we're over and so we're replacing tables and desks and chairs as we get funding to do that [Music] the rest i guess is mike's there's some athletic equipment there he's referenced and i'm not as well versed on that as he might be we did talk about that briefly yesterday that's the fencing piece that uh that might be mandated by mpa and i think of course um there's the the elephant and maybe a few or three elephants in the room which is the turf

070field and track replacement i think this team has heard a lot about that and will probably have a lot more conversations about that but there is a place holder right now in the cip budget for that as well as long-range planning and again this team has had a lot of conversations about what's the right number um where should that live and you know that'll be ongoing but that's in the capital budget proposal at the moment i i think i probably sound like a very repetitive broken record when i say this but when i look at that number knowing that that's where it was last year i only believe that that will be a higher number because of what construction costs have done over the past year they've increased we're seeing sue and i are seeing

071that with harriman as we talk about stem lab we had a decent price last year it's gone up so we're scaling it back and simplifying it as much as we can to try and stay within that budget number i would assume the same would be held true for the turf and track renovation and in in general construction overall has gone up the price of materials has gone up the labor rates have gone up everything has increased in price and it's it's um one of the things that i talk about is if you you know get while the getting is good because next year it's only going to be more money so the longer you wait the more it costs thank you todd transportation we already talked about so i think we'll go to wonderings and

072questions and sarah's already got her hand up because she wants to be first this time i don't need to be first i'll take it on youtube i was just ready she is ready uh so in the conversations i've had with the chair of the town council um finance chair so john clutier he's talked about the process for them reviewing the budget and how the cip is the last thing that they review um and so this has come up in conversations when we've talked about the the long-range planning funding and he's the message that i'm getting is you know if you want something to guarantee something's fun and obviously putting in your operating budget because i i don't we don't know how much taxpayer money we're gonna have left to play with once once it gets

073down to the cip so all this to say todd um it would be useful maybe not now but at some point to get some sort of prioritization of these items so that we can be sure that we're communicating to town council where our priorities are because if it comes down to cuts um in what we're proposing we want to make sure that you know you have your say and what's more important which i know is a difficult ask um and conversation to have but i think it's unfortunately probably going to be the reality i can definitely do that i will say that on that detailed document there is a priority column on the far right um unfortunately most of them say hi so that's probably not as helpful as it might be there's a few

074of them that are are not high but um yeah it's definitely a project that that todd and i sort of um first we triaged to see what goes on there in the first place but we could certainly triage to see what um what would get kicked off first if need be and i i think a lot of the reason that list has become what it is is that we've we've deferred things since i arrived in 2010 one year we deferred everything we didn't we didn't do anything because we had other huge uh amounts to undertake for one-to-one learning and so forth so uh but we can still uh you know we can still prioritize and make things lower lower uh demand yeah sorry to ask that and i know that um you know one of

075the other things that we've advocated for is that you know that our our line should start sort of after the turf field like that shouldn't be kind of included um in really our budget you know so we don't want to lose things because that's included in our budget but i think when they look at it they do look at it in total and not as town and school separate so yeah you're right sir i mean if you take that place holder for the turf field out then you've got a budget in cip that looks very similar to or less than what we've had in prior years right so thank you don't kill the messenger just for safety reasons again i hope the turf field doesn't count against us overall in the capital projects but it

076absolutely needs to be done it's a safety issue um and you know the longer we it's just again like i said before it's not going to get cheaper if we keep waiting and putting it off so i think it's going to involve a large output of support from the community to get it done and those whose student athletes play on that field and run on that track [Music] they're the people that we need to be reaching out to and and talking about how important it is for their students to stay safe while they're participating in activities they love yeah i mean to me the last thing we want to do is number one have anybody get hurt and number two have to shutter that facility because it's unsafe so i think we all have agreed

077on on that for sure um i don't see anybody else's hand raised here everybody is just so captivated and knows exactly what we're talking about and maybe we need a break i think the next thing is uh it says a five-minute break let's see where are we for time here um oh look we're right on time that's insane gosh we're good so um everybody want to do five minutes is that sufficient okay we'll see you back here at 5 56 computer time give everybody a sec to get back april i'm very strict i think everybody kind of grabbed a quick bite to eat and so some people may have their cameras off just while they they finish up a few bites i'm definitely chewing a little trail mix here so it would be very uh

078unfortunate if we all killed over um just really mostly looking for diane to see if she wants to help me talk about health services i i can't say enough about these guys they're incredible and as far as their budget is concerned it's interesting because although we have retained the two school nurse positions that were added as coveted money in last year's budget in the fy 21 budget their budget overall is actually decreasing by a smidge because we had budgeted more than what we actually needed for those new hires and we were also able with uh health services to do some of the same things that todd talked about in terms of purchasing equipment and fitting out the clinics and setting things up so that there's not going to be that initial big investment next year

079we can just carry on with what we currently have yeah and and one really neat investment that we were able to make uh you know in addition to the really phenomenal work that we did in each of the buildings to create a well clinic and a sip clinic to make sure that our nurses had all the ppe they needed and they were fit testing tested for and 95 masks but another really cool piece of equipment that we were able to purchase for each of the clinics were vision screening machines um that are wi-fi capable and so most of you remember when you had to do your vision screening which by law we have to do in certain grade levels um you know you just you know held your hand over your eye and you saw

080that um chart somewhere and in some cases the nurse would have to really come close to students um to be able to do that and so in a covet environment obviously spacing is something that people have become acutely aware of and so our nurses were able to locate a machine that that does this work basically for them at this point in time and and it allows for safety because the nurse doesn't have to maintain close contact with the student um and so those were a great example of well-used crf funding because those are not items that we would have been able to put into a typical budget had we budgeted for a vision screener machine i would imagine in a typical year we would be trucking that one machine from school to school and arranging

081a schedule by which they could share those um and again the crf funds made it available for us to make sure that each school had what they needed to do that yeah that was definitely a bonus um as far as health supplies and ppe are concerned we're using a regular operating budget for that we have had a as todd says we've had an amazon warehouse full this year um some things have been pre-purchased with crf funds um for the coming year and uh the state is also providing um several different forms of ppe for us for free um they've got an arrangement with federal government where they're receiving i believe through fema some equipment that they're just sharing right out with schools at no cost so that's been pretty cool and i i will encourage

082folks to read the ever-popular budget book which describes a little bit about what folks have been doing in this environment and that's true of these support departments as well and again i think one other comment that i would make about the health services before we move on to adult education would be um just to remind everyone about the very large number of hours that our nurses have been putting in during all of these covid cases that we've had throughout the year especially within the past couple of weeks the health services team and myself and our building administrators who have been affected have been logging in lots of time outside of the school day on weekends in the evening and again we have been able to utilize some of our crf funding to make sure that

083the nurses were being compensated for that time outside of their contract you know and and certainly that is a small gesture that we can make to acknowledge that people are working well beyond the scope of a typical workday so you know i i was pleased that we were able to provide that at least for the nurses absolutely um so we'll we'll go to adult ed and i don't think we have marianne with us diane and i were going to try and do this quickly for her so rather than have her come and have her two seconds to talk um really the the big takeaways from adult ed are that yes we're still here we've been keeping things going through the pandemic environment a particular focus on trying to keep the workforce programs going and the

084ell programs programs for english language learners because again i mean these are critical adult supports that are needed in this environment more so than ever because those folks need to work and those folks need to be able to take care of their families not to mention the fact that i think the world could use a few more cnas right now so any of those health related programs are just adding value all over the place we did shrink funding for enrichment programs and enrichment when we use that expression to mean the the fun programs that aren't necessarily leading to a degree or to a high school diploma or to a job they're fun things to learn like uh how to do chinese cooking or how to um paint a beautiful picture or make jewelry or organize

085your cupboards so enrichment programming we cut back on our funding in fy21 because we figured well we probably weren't going to have people coming in and doing a painting studio at the high school which we're not um and we we really weren't sure what we would have access to for the community in terms of online and remote learning so what's developed is it there's actually a fairly small but robust catalog of enrichment programs that we're delivering online and it's uh proven to be quite a nice escape for some of our folks particularly seniors in the community who have been cooped up in their homes and haven't been able to get out and do some of the fun things they would normally do so marianne doyle who's our adult ed director plans to actually continue to

086have that remote option on a number of our offerings but we do want to build back up to assuming that restrictions are lifted and we can get people back together we do want to build back up on some of those enrichment programs i think that's all we wanted to say about adult ed so we'll go to school nutrition and peter is listening in if anybody has specific questions for him we thought we'd just do a little shout out again to the amazing job that this team has done they've completely reinvented school lunch and breakfast and a little bit the backpack program in much the same way that that our teachers and and education professionals have reinvented learning so as soon as we shut down in march the backpack program went into full gear and started

087working to make sure that our community was fed and that no one was going to go without a meal because they weren't in school diane mentioned earlier the bus drivers were delivering meals the school lunch workers were coming in and cooking for us they they started making sort of the regular backpack style take home for the weekend meals they graduated into making these vast pans of lasagna and sending home a week's worth of beautiful family style meals um just just remarkable and then the usda at some point decided that it would be um allowing us to work under what they call the summer meal program or summer lunch program um and a couple things happen there one is that all kids in scarborough can now eat for free regardless of their economic status and it

088also allows us to claim um or to receive reimbursement at a higher level for those meals so the things that are in the fy 22 budget that are a little bit different um are maintaining funding for remote ordering software one of the things that peter put in peter esposito our school nutrition director put in right at the start of school was touchless ordering so no one has to pass cash back and forth because there's no cost no one has to touch a terminal or get in the face of an order something from a school professional they can do all the ordering online parents can do the ordering and they've been delivering the meals out as todd mentioned to all different corners of all of our schools to make sure that kids can be well-fed and

089comfortable but in sort of a to-go model so that remote ordering software is going to stay in place and it's a little bit more pricey than what we normally had or what we had pre-covered but we're going to keep that in place for this coming year to make sure that we're ensuring the safety of our kids as we transition back to whatever normal will look like and the maintaining the funding for equipment maintenance is what i would consider to be level services every year we have a little bit in that budget to make sure that as equipment ages we have three large production kitchens lots of interesting pieces of equipment there and as that equipment ages we want to be able to replace and repair it i'm just peeking at my notes to make sure

090i'm not missing anything um oh i guess i probably should say i know we've said this at quite a few school board meetings but the community just jumped in with both feet to help with the backpack program and with donations school donations it was actually amazing when i first came into the to the wentworth kitchen after we shut down in march i became sort of a courier and kept popping in and out of there to see what they were up to and and uh paid their bills for them which was kind of a good thing and uh i i found them building these beautiful boxes with meals and and and fun things and maybe there's a you know a cool little puzzle book in there that somebody might be interested in and on the top

091there's this little crowning glory which was a roll of toilet paper and in a time when everybody was treating rolls of toilet paper like gold it was just like oh that is just the sweetest thing so all right that's that's my little dramatic pitch about school nutrition and peter is on the call so if anyone has specific questions for him he can also um provide information yeah he said he'd be willing to jump in we have one more slide for central office and then we'll go to questions and the central office slide tells us you know again we're using these framing questions so i'm sort of jumping around but what's in our budget in central office is funding for the superintendent transition which just means salaries and benefits of an unknown level as well as

092contracted services to support that process unemployment costs have been um a little i don't know what the word is peculiar over the past 18 months we started with enormous unemployment costs when a lot of people were being laid off and as a direct reimbursement employer we were receiving the bill for anybody who was collecting unemployment um then an enormous amount of fraud started and so we were getting double charged and booked for people that weren't really supposed to be on there and we started getting credits when they figured that out and at department of labor they started to give us some of our money back so it's been a roller coaster year but we're thinking that with the pandemic economy there's a chance that there will be some turnover and so we want to be

093prepared for that a little bit more than we were in fy 21. and the um resources deferred or removed section in this budget proposal that the leadership council has put before you we have a receptionist position we did have a central office receptionist position that was cut from the budget in the spring of 2020 um that actually that person was downsized and then the position was removed in the fy 21 budget so for the past year we've been sort of having a lot of pinch hitters in our central office staff we have an amazing group of people up here who are willing to do whatever it takes to keep us open and running and whether that's you know whether sorting the mail is their job or not they're sorting the mail and whatever it takes

094answering the phone we've been lucky not to have a lot of foot traffic in central office because there just isn't foot traffic in general but we have no one sitting out front right now and um we have no one manning the switchboard right now it's just automated and it's it's being forwarded to people's desks and this has really proven to be quite a deficit for us so that's included in our proposal and now i will stop talking and i i know i saw leanne's hand go up so i'll reach out to her first i do have a question for peter based on um the covid19 um bill that just passed today and the extension of the usda food for all children program do we need to readjust in order to support that for july and

095august or is it already part of the budget basically i i found out this afternoon that that had passed so um our summer programming as far as daycare and um community services will be covered but is as far as that goes it goes until september 30th so um i'm i'm assuming that it's going to be further on than that but um at this point i can't i can't tell for sure okay thank you and then peter can you speak at all about um or or maybe kate you might be able to help with this um about the deficit that this actually creates for us by having um this federal lunch program offering the reimbursement yeah it is something that we talked about in finance um the fact that the feds have um instructed us that

096we're allowed to provide free meals for all students it means that we are not selling food and therefore we don't have the opportunity to make money over and above the cost of the meals and that was really the only way that we're able to support our labor costs because um our school workers are you know they're entitled to wages and benefits under collective bargaining and so um it is going to be a bit of a problem for us i think uh what it what i'm looking forward to finding out and i know this is the um should i say four million dollar question um is when we are able to get new stimulus money which sounds like it's almost out the door what does that look like and is is it put would it be

097potentially possible to use some of those funds to restore lost revenue in school nutrition because the first rounds of crf funds you could not use them to restore lost revenue and so that's something that i'm thinking about um as we learn more in the next week but leanne has a good point if we're if we're not going to have revenue that we're expecting and budgeting for then then what is that going to look like you're on mute kate um just looking for hands raised um anybody with questions um for this segment or anybody who forgot their question for the last segment we'll see if people are hanging around oh i see april and sarah both um so i have two questions one's related to transportation which is more just a confirmation cape in terms of

098um keeping the buses on the same um renewal schedule i i sense that there might be a narrative that since the buses were not utilized you know do they really need to be do they really need to stay on that same schedule and having had this conversation in the past correct me if i'm wrong please um that it has the replacement schedule has to do with being able to insure the buses and the age of the bus itself that's true yeah um for one one thing that a bus once hits 10 years of age especially with the level of mileage that we have on those vehicles even if the mileage was somewhat reduced this year um it's they're still very high mileage vehicles so your your cost of replace of repairs begins to go up

099but you're absolutely right um any bus that's more than 10 years old is very difficult to ensure and in most cases you cannot insure it for replacement value which means that if you wreck a 10 year old bus you're going to get the kelly blue book value of the bus and you're not going to have a hundred thousand dollars to go buy a new bus so absolutely good point thank you for confirming that and then my other question is about nutrition um do we have number any idea of the numbers in terms of how many students are currently accessing um either picking up or or eating in school every day i should be able to answer that immediately because i just did the state report last night but i was kind of half asleep when

100i did the numbers so you know you peter you'll have a better guess but we can we can provide that too and put it in the parking lot if we need to i actually had just sent that information to diane oh there you go she has it in a text i shared a communications committee so i know there are people here who have it after my last yeah yeah if you would have that i don't have it off the top of my head i can get it so we are serving an average of 12 500 lunches per month and 7 600 breakfasts each month and then we get you know um the reimbursement that we get for each of those breakfasts and lunches are more than it costs to make the lunch or breakfast right

101so like i don't have that number right so it's four four dollars and fifteen cents per meal plus administrative costs and any other um ex i guess they've added some extra costs that they've given us so it's it ends up being about 30 uh four dollars and 37 cents per meal that we're getting as opposed to um the 2.63 meal that we would get normally and we are providing meals also to a couple of the daycares i believe in town um not just to our school students so that's kind of cool thing too yeah we've added about a over a hundred uh meals a month per for day cares which actually gives us the extra subsidy to you know help fund our program yes excellent thank you all right now i've really messed up my

102screen but oh well um our next piece here is talking points in critical messages or takeaways or whatever label you want to put on the compilation of great ideas to share with our community and i know that our finance committee and our communications committee for the board are both seriously intertwined and have already been having some great conversations about what the outreach piece is um i believe there's a document linked into the agenda at the end that where people can put some notes and we're at 6 22 right now so i don't know if you want to april have a little discussion around that or if that's something we want people to do on their own because really the only other agenda item is just to review the upcoming steps the next the next steps

103on the calendar um yeah if we have four or five minutes um to hear from either finance or communication in terms of um big takeaways that they've already um discussed or if or if there's foundation for those conversations that's already been had and that way you know we can also maybe get some input from people who don't serve on those two committees so either sarah or leanne i'm deferring to sarah first well you were off mute first so why don't you go first um i know that kristin has put together um are starting to put together some memes looking at the nursing the things that we've been able to do with the crf um really want to push what we were able to accomplish with that money and how this is helping to keep us

104on task for maintaining what we have with this budget um and kristen and shannon jump in where i'm going off a track um i know yesterday the one that got me was the books and those numbers were incredible and i think that that's important to highlight the readers that we're building um so that's some stuff that i'd like to push through yeah i'm sure we could find some some data points i did take pains to make sure that the crf material was called out in the executive summary of the budget book and finance committee gave me some great suggestions about how to tweak that a little bit to make sure that the community was seeing what they would expect to see or learning what they expect to learn from us um but i think you

105know pulling those into sound bites is kind of a cool idea you know did you know kind of stuff like we had in our budget book last year and okay i'll just ask you to confirm an assumption that i have and it'll lead me to um just a call to action for the rest of the board but i'm as i compare what was presented here with the budget book the assumption that i'm making is is everything that was uh represented as you know a critical need is is in the current proposal is that accurate uh yes the only things thing or things that are not presented as a done deal in all of the charts is those five positions and and we kind of went into that question um in terms of class size but

106there are no needs that have been absolutely um called out by the leadership team that are not in the budget i don't know if i'm saying that right um well i think you are it makes sense to me does it make sense others i'm seeing and i think if you look at the at the very end of the executive summary there's some bullet points there that are like this budget includes this budget restores budget does not include so under the crf funds that were in our operating budget there's a something that says you know we're not we don't need extra money for a couple of things because we're all set okay so i just realized that we i thought we had a finance committee meeting between now and first reading which is next thursday but

107we don't so we need to get something on the calendar because we need to make a decision on those additional staffing positions and so i guess my call to action for anyone who's not on the finance committee if you have opinions on it or questions then i would you know invite you to share those with us um between now and whenever our next finance committee meeting is or obviously please feel free to join us at that meeting and i'll i'll reach out to you guys offline to get that schedule uh i have no idea how the 18th is next week already i don't know but we also have and i think you know this is something for consideration april depending on how the agenda for the 18th is panning out we have the option of

108doing a special meeting on the 25th for just the budget if we need to because we don't have we have a little bit of time before town council's first reading that's true yeah when we were building the calendar we don't have to have our budget in the hands of the council or the the town manager technically until the 31st right so we have that additional week if we wanted to push it out so if next thursday is looking like a midnight ending just for consideration and yesterday we had already talked about maybe having a workshop on the 18th to talk about the enrollment so we're kind of piling on a little bit cool great thank you for bringing my attention i will definitely make that part of the conversation when um sandy and i built

109the agenda nick you have your hand raised too yeah i just wanted to ask really quickly about the um [Music] i'm just wondering for the two rn positions which i know i know from my work on the school board but also from my family life that for a long time there were traveling nurses in the primary schools and nurses circulated around and it always kind of amazed me that we left schools without an rn on site and now that we had the opportunity to kind of change that moving forward past cobit i'm wondering if there's any way for folks in our community that may not understand the need to keep this after cove is there any kind of i don't know about a testimonial statement or something that could come from the nurses about how

110important this is what advantages this could be there could be for keeping these positions in would that be helpful i'm just i just i would love to see that stay and i'm trying to think of any strategies i can think of to get that in people's minds that's a really good point nick i think what's really powerful for me is um i sound like a sales rep for the budget book but it is free so you can't accuse me of that but that the budget book from last year in the health services section there's just this amazing litany of the incredible work that these folks do and you know i think you're right a lot of people in the community are like well a school nurse that's the one who gave me the band-aid when

111i was in second grade um these folks are health care professionals top to bottom even without covid so you're right that that needs to be sort of called out and shared with the community as as best we can in some ways it kind of reminds me of where we started tonight which was talking about special education because i remember touring the primary schools in my first few weeks as a school board member and it amazed me just the amount of equipment and everything especially i don't think that the public has any idea that that's what goes on at our schools and i think nurses are right there i think the general public doesn't understand that the um management of medication and of students that have special medical needs i mean there are some pretty extreme

112things that go way beyond band-aids because that's my recommendation my recollection of my school nurses when i was young too but um there's just so much more that goes into it now that needs that on site full-time support i wonder if that might be something that that uh communications could um throw out of a factoid or two you know did you know that x percent of our kids visit the clinic every day because they have a medical need to do so or you know something like that i can tell you that last year's analytics on the various memes that we put out um the nurses meme by far outperformed our other memes so i do think that there is a sense that in this community just how critical and important those positions are can you

113believe how many times you're saying the word mean kate i'll turn it back to you to go over the budget calendar if there are no other questions or comments all right so i've got one of these fancy transitions that i didn't know was built in here it's very posh this is just a quick overview of the next steps we have our first reading listed here as march 18th there's a budget calendar now a full budget calendar posted up on the town school budget portal which is on the town's website we have calendars linked in all over the place in our documents as well but if we stay true to our schedule we'll be doing the first reading here on march 18th we might push that out to the 25th depending on how things go and

114we just want to keep these dates in the site of the public so we'll continue to push them in places where hope folks can see them on the school calendar and wherever else we can think of um anything you wanted to call out from that april of particular interest or do you and don't need to read through it okay um so that's really where we're leaving it tonight and we have a lot to do um next step sarah's already said that she's going to be calling a finance committee meeting we're going to rely on the finance committee to help us figure out what the proposal is that goes to the board for first reading and then at that point it becomes the board's budget and we all surge off into the into the future and

115develop a lot of of support and community understanding for our budget there will be changes between first reading and second reading we've talked about that a little bit and we talk about it every year that we'll know more before we get to second reading so folks need to bear in mind that even our first reading is just just that it's the beginnings of the process the public process um any questions wonders excitement that we're ending more or less on time i'm really impressed with you guys you move well well with that kate i'm not seeing any hands um on behalf of the school board uh thank you so much to our central office leadership team for giving us the last two days of your time to make sure that the school board had this opportunity

116to go department by department to see what is in this year's budget to get our questions asked we all know that if something pops into our head an hour from now or three days from now that not only is sarah and the finance committee available to us but that you know kate and our other central office leaders are available to us to answer our questions so thank you all so much for your time and you know from me personally thank you to the board for your time and attention to this i know not everyone's forte is finance um but you all bring the same level of attention um and i appreciate you know the early morning yesterday and the late evening this you know afternoon evening today so thank you all so much for for

117doing this thank you all very much appreciate it okay i hope you have a motion to i have to have a motion to adjust oh please it's all moved second discussion and with that diane please miss giftus yes dr gill yes miss casalonas yes miss leighton yes mrs lindstrom yes mrs either yes and mrs turner yes thank you thank you all