001community engagement and partnerships a financial summary of the garfield heights city schools including our five-year forecast and effectively uh implementing our cova 19 protocols and some coveted updates at the start of the 2021-2022 excuse me 2022 school year we began on august 25th for students first through 12th kindergarten began on monday august 30th we have approximately 3 200 students here in garfield heights city schools in pre-k through 12th grade our strategic plan last year we went through a comprehensive process that brought us a positive path forward despite the onset of covet we successfully completed a revised strategic planning effort more than 100 community members including parents students members of the board of education and staff participated we created a revised mission and vision vision statement and we created a portrait of what we'd like to
002see in a garfield heights graduate our process included a steering committee of parents staff and community members that developed a mission statement and portrait of a graduate providing ideas and direction to achieve the mission and portrait we had six focus groups which were conducted to gather further input on the priorities and actions and each of the established pillars which i'll go over and the principles in the cabinet which is the central office uh staff that reports to me further refined the plan and consolidated the vision that the plan would achieve the plan builds on academic rigor holistic support of students community engagement enduring partnerships and strong resource management the plan reflects the commitment of our board of education to driving based on the input of stakeholders including students families and community staff and administration it
003is intended to set a challenging but achievable agenda to further the mission of the district in an ever-changing world it is flexible the strategic plan is a work in progress we have the opportunity to revise and further enhance the strategic plan even within its parameters as a five-year plan this is our new mission as the heart of the community the garfield heights city schools fully prepares students to pursue their dreams and give back as engaged citizens and future leaders our new our new vision garfield heights city schools a premier educational institution will be recognized throughout ohio as fully preparing students to be leaders equipped with real-world skills to contribute to a global society we realize through this vision that we would like our students to find success through career pathways through collegiate pathways and through
004other pathways that can be established and nurtured by their teachers their counselors and the principals our beliefs our students will have a plan that prepares them to be employed enrolled in career training or college or to pursue an entrepreneurial career relationships are absolutely at the core of our success everyone is a leader and can make a difference in our community diversity of people experience and perspectives defines our schools here are the five pillars that are comprehensively addressed in our strategic plan teaching and learning the core of our business starts in the classroom and it is where our students will be able to get success as they move forward diversity and inclusion this is going to run this runs through the entire strategic plan and all the decision-making processes we have including the board of education
005uh coming up with an equity statement and working toward a policy on diversity equity and inclusion wellness the whole student being addressed through social emotional learning access to agencies that can help students with mental health and other other things that can help our families with emergency issues facilities and learning resources we understand here at the district that we have some facilities challenges especially at our middle school and with our athletic facility and we are working through the parameters of this plan to address those challenges community and family engagement our community and our families are the most important aspects of who we serve here in this district and engaging with our community through partnerships through being able to have various stakeholders have input in what we do and enhance our our school programming is very important
006to us is our portrait of a graduate this is what we would like to see of out of our students as they graduate from garfield heights city schools we want them to be socially and emotionally aware we want them to exhibit leadership as i stated earlier we believe that there is a leader in every one of us we want our students equipped with real world skills and we want them to be career prepared those things are central to what we would like our graduates to achieve to be able to achieve and to be able to exhibit as they move forward some special initiatives we have underway we have a stay in the game initiative uh this pat the first home football game we had in partnership with the cleveland browns a family fun night with
007uh stay in the game through the cleveland browns and this helps with student attendance the mission to stay in the game is to prioritize attendance by connecting its users to resources into tackling chronic absenteeism we're partnering with the browns throughout this year and we're offering incentives for attendance including fantastic prizes such as tickets to browns games to show that students how important it is to attend school and here we have chomps the browns mascot he was also on hand for us a couple of things we did in terms of the family fun night we had activities we had family togetherness we had raffle prizes we had food and more and everyone had a fantastic time was able to come to the family fun night and also enter the ball game afterward the father's walk was
008held september 23 2021. it was a this is a cuyahoga county initiative throughout the county where fathers and other male mentors are encouraged to be involved in their children's education on this date and throughout the school year and we'd like to thank all of our fathers and all of our mentors and all of our family members that walked their children to school that day and and remain in the lives of their students and make sure that they're help helping with their education we believe that the father is very important to that we have successful academic opportunities here at garfield heights city schools we have ap american history we have ap government we have ap art we have ap english we have 19 honors courses including anatomy physiology chemistry physical science we have the letters initiative
009which helps us with literacy at our elementary schools william foster this past year won the silver medal from the state of ohio for pbis and all the other schools won the bronze medal we have a comprehensive positive behavior intervention and supports program that helps our students understand the value of coming to school prepared being safe respectful and responsible and for our younger students exhibiting what we call paws and we believe that this initiative has really blossomed in our district and we and again we've been recognized over and over and this is the first year we've had or excuse me the second year we've had a silver award our highly talented co-curricular and performing arts activities i can't say enough about i'm going to read right down this list music express jazz band student council national
010honor society 18 varsity sports offered at the high school with 25 percent of the student body participating we have 15 sports offered at the middle school we have students of service we have our drill team we have our student ambassadors we have our spanish club we have our theater department and a couple that are on here our student newspaper our project mosaic group that helps with diversity equity and inclusion foster within our high school we have our programs through our kiwanis club our builders club our key club these are great programs that allow our students to be fully invested in their education to kind of go forward a little bit more into pbis we've placed a deliberate and intentional focus on this initiative we believe that behavior and academics do not live in silos we
011believe that they are interconnected and if students are to be successful they need to be successful in both of those areas and we are so proud of william foster for their silver award and there are several ways we go about implementing this initiative we're very fortunate to be partnered with the cleveland browns uh for our stay in the game initiative which is tied to pbis we tie a lot lots of individual awards for students for exhibiting positive behavior and we also make sure that this ru this initiative is from pre-k all the way to 12th grade we have valuable community partnerships the city of garfield heights including mayor burke has been a great partner with us our k kids and kiwanis uh through uh judge nicastro who is who founded the kiwanis here in garfield
012heights has helped us our our library which is now reopening fully from cove that helps us with programming for our students and and also helps us make sure they supplement the academic things that are happening in our buildings marymount hospital has included us on their advisory council and they always keep us abreast of the latest trends uh that are happening most significantly lately uh has had to do with covet uh unfortunately we are still dealing with that but marymount has been a great partner with us overdrive technologies has partnered with us to provide e-books to our students they are a local business jennings home we've had a partnership with them and my hope is is that if kova does start to wane we can get back into jennings and participate with programming with our senior
013citizens we we really miss that uh we haven't been able to do it over the last year and a half and again and the other the other piece is the senior group at the civic center that we were hopeful at some point we can come back in and offer programming to them and and we also have our music express and our choirs and our band come and perform for our senior citizens i do want to address covet 19. it is still going on and there are a number of precautionary measures we have taken and are taking to ensure that our students can we're able to safely return to school we currently do have a mass mandate in all of our school buildings i do not have it on right now because i am speaking to
014the public but generally you will see me in a mask if i'm in a school building we have that through october 29th our covet 19 task force we'll be reviewing that in the coming weeks to see if there is a need uh to extend that mass mandate i have been doing it in five week increments uh through the covet task force and we work as a task force uh with board members on it with uh uh central office personnel with our head of security to figure out what our best practices are we diligently follow mass protocols and we work with students and teachers to make sure that they're following mass protocols that are recommended by the centers for disease control as of yesterday we had approximately 53 infections which compared to other districts were doing
015quite well and it's due to the mass mandate and some of the other things we put in place we do contract tracing of close contacts that are unmasked for the cuyahoga county board of health we are in contact with them after every infection to ensure that we are doing the right thing we have routine cleaning and disinfecting of classrooms hallways and common spaces including misters that we use that is able to kill covet 19 and other viruses on contact reporting of positive cases is updated and it's on our website at the top of our website it says covet 19 resources you are able to click on that and get how many positive cases and what buildings we have we were using thermal imaging we are using it in more of a generalized uh way now
016to check temperatures for the cdc guidance we do not daily check temperatures but we do use it if we do have something someone that is it is possibly symptomatic air ionization which is shown to kill viruses including covet 19 has been implemented in our air handling systems in four out of the five of our buildings our middle school which has uh more of a an older system had to be retrofitted with an air circulation system that also helps circulate air and move uh clean air through the building and our kova 19 task force as i said meets regularly once every two weeks now and if we need to meet more we do we are hopeful that these measures will enable us to keep our schools safe and open during this year we believe that having
017in-person education is incredibly important however if there is an issue we do have remote learning plans and they are in the works and we are working on them if we have to pivot to remote learning and we keep we will keep the community well informed if we do have to do that one of the issues that is is causing us to look at remote learning plans are staffing issues as as is happening with a lot of businesses and organizations throughout the united states uh there aren't many substitute teachers and so if we have staff absences we're taking a close look at whether or not we may need to close a building for a staffing issue if that does have to happen i will make sure that the community is well informed as as with as
018much advanced warning as possible our plan with that is to close just for a day and and to pivot to remote learning we have not had to do that yet i will be having more information on that on my video on friday just just to make sure that parents in the community is aware i i do i cannot say this enough to everyone masks are working please make sure that you are wearing your mask if you're in our buildings you're wearing it over your nose and you're wearing it all day we will have masks for you if you do not have a mask also on our buses by federal rule uh you have to wear a mask on buses masks are the one equalizer we have against this virus if if i could say anything
019that's one thing that will help us keep the schools operating and open personally i would encourage anyone that's eligible to get a vaccine to please consider it at this point teachers are now eligible for booster vaccines if they have received the pfizer vaccine most of our staff did receive the pfizer vaccine and i sent out information for them to receive booster shots uh the other uh two uh vaccines uh have not been cleared for booster shots that's not to say that they aren't effective as well the two ways out of this of this issue as i see it are through masking and through vaccination however i will say that we understand that this is a choice people need to make for themselves but the masking that's not a choice in our buildings we need that
020to keep everybody safe so please mask up in conclusion the state of our schools is great generally i think that our strategic plan is going to guide our work for the next five years our staff and our teachers have done a remarkable job going through the covid 19 experience and also coming out on the end where we now have in-person learning taking place and activities taking place we appreciate everyone's patience and flexibility as we go through and continue to go through kind of a trying time but we are here to serve your students safely and effectively and we believe we're going to be able to do that throughout this year i would like to thank the garfield heights community our partners our parents our families and everyone for making this a successful start of the
021school year and we appreciate all of you with that i'm going to turn this over to mr saluka who's going to brief everyone on the district finances i'm not sure it's going to be brief but thank you mr henke i really appreciate the opportunity to update the public and those watching those in attendance i want to thank you for coming uh thank you for the central office who's supporting here thank you to mr fruits and ms bailey who set this all up and allows us the opportunity to uh broadcast us out and not have everybody here i know with the kovitz uh issues going on um i do appreciate those that are in attendance and those that are watching and those that we'll be watching just so everybody knows we will get this powerpoint presentation
022up on our website uh probably sometime tomorrow so to go back and if you watch this you can go back and peruse these at your leisure since we are a learning institution i am going to go through and kind of do a little bit of education on the district finances not just a where we're at today but just um all about the district's finances and and how we account for um all the money and some of the funds that we take in it's going to be pretty comprehensive as i was going through the slides and and working with mr henke and following through and i go whoa there's a lot of slides but there's a lot of information school finance is not just a in and out thing there's a lot that goes into our
023financial picture a lot that goes into our our finances here at the district a lot of moving parts and you'll see that so we're going to go through the key financial areas we're going to talk to on the components that we use for sound fiscal management and that ensures the future financial health of the district and it also allows the board of education to make sound financial decisions as we move forward through the threat to move over through the years but what do i want to talk about here and i wanted to start out with going through the district uh everybody thinks all we have is just one big operating fund and we don't we have a uh all this is this is called fund groups general special revenue debt service capital project enterprise funds
024we have internal service funds we have agency funds overall we have 31 separate funds that go into one of these categories they're pretty self-explanatory we have a lot of federal grants they go into the special revenue funds the capital projects fund is the permanent improvement and the building fund we have a bond retirement fund for the bonds separate accounting for that enterprise funds which is our food service fund all these classifications are dictated by the uh aicpa the american institute of certified public accountants and for public accounting purposes so we don't just have one big operating fund we have 31 separate funds that we need to um account for the different parts of money that we have here the only difference i say is the general fund is not restrictive the rest of these funds
025are restricted so we can't co-mingle between special revenue and the capital projects and agency funds they all have to be accountable in their specific funds so if we run short one where one place we can't use the other ones so that's just wanted to get that part out but we're going to concentrate on the general fund because it is the general operating fund of the district and that's the basis of our overall operations and the basis where most of our money comes and uh how we operate the schools so we're going to concentrate today on the general fund first thing we're going to talk about is revenues and the revenue sources we have um i broke this down because we have really kind of three main revenue sources but i'm going to say it's mostly
026two state revenues and local revenues those are the two main shares and you can see from the percentages up there our state revenue share is 59 makes up 59 of our overall general operating revenues the local sources of revenues make up 40 and then the other financing sources is usually just advances in so the biggest bulk of our money comes from the state and local and i'm going to go through these and what each one is because this is a these are the two biggest areas that uh make up our operating funds from the local share we have our as you probably can imagine real estate taxes makes up the bulk of our local share most school districts all school districts not most all school districts are heavily relying on real estate taxes um so
027we are no different from from that standpoint the only difference is is that we're not as reliant on the local share as we are in the state revenues that we get but we'll go dive into that a little bit more but the bulk of our uh local share is the real estate taxes and i want to talk a little bit about our real estate taxes because um if we're how how are the real estate taxes calculated and how much is the breakdown that comes in school versus going to other entities and i have a little bit of a slide on that because i i think there's a little bit of not confusion but i think there's not many people really know the nuts and bolts of how their property tax bill is calculated and where
028all that money goes the big thing is i think everyone thinks some real estate taxes goes all to the schools income tax goes all to the city sales tax goes all the county and it's not really that cut and dry so we're going to concentrate now on the real estate tax the real estate tax that we get here is based on three things first of all is the tax levy the millage amount that you levy against your property the effective millage which is the tax levy goes against the effective millage amount and then the property valuations what your property or the property in the whole is valued at so you have the effective millage the tax levy and what you're taxed at and the property valuations they all come together in generating our real estate
029property taxes so when we talk about these things i gave a break down here and you could see um here's the breakdown and i'm going to show you real quick here's the breakdown of all of our levees that come to the school you'll see here there's a we call they call the inside millage unvoted then you have the current expense continuing you have we have three emergency levies we have two bond issues and we have a permanent improvement all of these levies here is what generates the bulk of our uh real estate property taxes the big thing here and i'm going to show this too is that you know the current expense we have it's called voted and then we have effective there's a rule and i'm not going to go into this because it's
030real convoluted house bill 920 that doesn't allow school districts put back in the 70s it did not allow school districts to uh receive inflationary revenues it's what was voted in and that's the revenue piece and you can only collect what was voted in so that was the current expense so if you see here current expense you see what was voted in is 29.9 mills we're actually only collecting 23.89 of that 28 that was voted in due to house bill 920. the emergency levies here the difference between that and the current expense levy is because the emergency levies were voted in as a dollar amount so you can only collect the millage is only assessed whatever generates that dollar amount so as our valuation goes up the less millage is assessed but it's only what that
031dollar amount is the bond issue we're only collecting what came due on the bonds annually these bond issues were voted in in 2002 and 2003 for the building of the high school and the addition for william foster we're still collecting on those and those mature 2024 2026 and uh what we've done over the years to help the district and it's kind of like minor uh kind of falls under radar but we've refinanced these uh debt issues over the years to make less millage being assessed to the to the community and then the permanent improvement is a continuing levy you can see here again it was voted in at 1.5 mills but we're only collecting 1.21 so that's the we say effective millage that's it so the school district really is getting 73.21 but for the
032operating you're only going to see the upper ones through the emergency here is what we're collecting now let's uh contrast that with your tax bill also here's the other entities that are collecting property taxes these are all voted taxes too these are all voted taxes from the community you can see cargo county uh the valley career center garfield city the metro parks cloud county library county uh community college the cleveland cuyahoga port authority you'll always see these so these also contribute whoops wrong button these also contributes to your uh the millage that you're paying on your property taxes so it's not all coming to garfield heights city schools and that's why you'll see a lot of levees like the library levion or you see the the the port authority on so i i point that
033out and i i did a little uh figuring out here and what ends up happening is really so 57 of these levees of what's generating your real estate state tax comes to the schools 57 not the whole dollar amount so i just wanted to show that's that's where your money is going as a homeowner here in garfield heights those are that you'll see these on your tax bill when you get the next one which i think is coming up here in december so i just wanted to show you that there's a lot of uh moving parts and levees in play on your tax bill so we go here we talk about property valuation that's the next thing property valuation is broken down in the residential commercial and then the public utility personal property which we
034call pup garfield heights we say this garfield heights is a residential community 71 percent of the valuation that we assess the millage against is residents it's always been a a home community ever since i grew up here back in the 60s and 70s so a lot unfortunately a lot of burden falls on the the residents here in the community um over the years we saw a lot of commercial stuff coming up and down in the commercial but there's just not enough land to balance that out with commercial because it has been a residential property so um so we're highly relying on the residents here so what's this some of the things that come into play when we're trying to determine what our real estate taxes are going to be what's our real estate tax revenue
035going to be and there's a lot of things that come into play in between the years um every three years there's a reappraisal every nine years there's a triennial update that changed the values property tax appeals um if you're you know after a reappraisal you can go down to the county uh board of revision board of tax appeal exempt status changes new constructions all these things come into play when you're trying to determine what we're getting in real estate taxes so we have to be cognizant of these these things in play here and i'll go to show you this in the next slide is because here's the real uh the evaluations over the years and you can see here in our slide and it's kind of like 2015 was a three year reappraisal in the
036residence side the value dropped 13 and for commercial it dropped 14 almost 15 go to 2016. even from the reappraisal you can see our valuation continue to drop in those three years non-reappraisal okay so now we have 2018 the triennial update we could see a increase of 9.4 percent and 11 the valuations are starting to come back and now we come to 2021 i'm not sure if everybody's been reading it's been a reappraisal year and all the information on i know the plain dealer had some articles on there i have a thing from the county auditor right now based on what they're seeing and home values it's really based on home values is that we're seeing a garfield heights could be higher and the sling leader had a higher but what i saw what the
037information was that there was going to be an 80 percent increase in your values in garfield heights your home values the commercial values is going to be an 18 increase so what does that mean yes you're going to probably pay more taxes that's you know your home value goes up you're going to be paying more taxes but the benefit to this is your home value is coming back so your house is worth more and when a house is worth more in the community it brings everything up it it and that's i want to say that even though it's going to raise your taxes a little bit having a higher house value brings everything up people want to come here it just it's it's a boon so 18 you're gonna see some like uh well question
038marks i couldn't think of it for a minute my dad question marks here is because i don't know what the final numbers are going to be for the residential and commercial valuations we won't get these until the state certifies it and the numbers will come in probably sometime november november december until i know what those final numbers are and as far as the pup values it's totally different from reappraisal pup is on the public utilities we don't get those numbers until late december so that's why i don't have numbers for 2021. keep in mind when they say 2021 or any of these valuations it's always the tax year 2021 collected in 2022. so what your value is when they collect it the year after so but i need to caution when they say that your
039value your house going up and you're paying more taxes because of house bill 920 the school district doesn't reap a whole lot of revenue from this increase and that's uh i think uh so it's it's a it's a benefit for everybody else for but from the school district it's not a windfall so we still need to be cautious about that and and watch and make sure now we're getting to the state source of revenue and the biggest thing in the state source of revenue as i said is we're heavily relying on the state so we were really watching the state biennial budget because we get most of our money is the foundation basic aid and this was a i want to say a a very hot topic when it comes to school finance especially in
040the spring when the legislators are going back and forth between the governor between the house and between the senate of just what those final numbers are going to be in the state budget because it directly affects this school district's funding so we were highly in tune to what's going on so the biggest thing is is that we need to look very closely on what the final budget is the benefit to schools and we were so happy to see this is that the state finally came to an agreement between the house and the senate on doing the fair school funding plan which treasurer superintendents board members we were pushing the state legislatures to get that passed this is a long-term funding plan that adequately funds schools so we were highly motivated to hopefully that the legislators
041would come around and agree to that and and they did but once again it's never easy and well you know i'll say here in a minute um we are a formula district that means our funding from the state is based on a formula for us our foundation basic aid there's a new formula under the school funding fair school funding plan the issue is is that which was really good to see except the state that was a six-year plan to fully fund schools so to bring us up to where we need to be that was a six-year plan except the state legislators said well we can't burden future legislators with this plan so we will only fund it for two years so it's a six year plan but we're only funding it for two years and
042we're funding it at 35 percent of the full funding amount that you should be getting so where do we go from here well it's it's better than what we were receiving so but we need to be cautious as we go go through that the fair school funding plan i put this thing up here we slide up here thing slide up here is because i wanted to say it addresses a lot of the issues that weren't addressed in the old funding formula uh professional development for teachers health safety social emotional needs of students academic athletic co-curricular activities and technology it took every school district and looked at those things and said what do you need on top of the capacity what is our capacity to generate revenues here versus the more affluent districts so it takes
043into account our capacity with property wealth and income wealth not just property wealth but income wealth so it took those into account too on top of they officer our funding they looked at gifted education special education english learning english language learners say that quickly economically disadvantaged and transportation all that now comes into play and they have a funding mechanism for each one that was the fair school funding plan that's why we were pushing for that because everybody was on the same playing field and you fell out where you were i like this little slide here i put this in here because this was the estimates that we received back when this was all going through the legislature and trying to determine um what the fair school funding plan would cost so what they did is
044to legislation before they pass any budget bill they got to know what they're passing and how much they're going to cost so they put this estimate out there so this was our simulation that we had a chance to go through and i know it's tough to read and you know the slide and everything else but here's the thing this is the key thing for everything if we were receiving the full funding of this new fair school funding act formula we would be receiving 33.2 million dollars which would have been a jump from from our previous last year's calculated funding amount have been an increase of 13.7 million okay what are we actually getting 2.3 million this year and an additional 2.2 million next year so we're not even receiving our full funded amount based on
045the state's new calculations and on top of that who knows what it's going to be because it's only a two-year budget so i mean don't get me wrong i mean we'll take this we we do it but as treasurers and when we plan out the future and you'll see this later on in my five-year forecast we take this all into effect but when you're heavily relying on the state these are the numbers that you're you're relying on and this is what you need to keep going so so what i did is i took those numbers i have my forecast so i put that in there and all right wrong button again so i put there this is where we're at you could see that we went down from last year and i'll tell you why
046in a minute as we go through and then i forecasted 24 25 and 26. i'm going to give the legislature as a benefit of the doubt and say that the next group of legislature will continue this fair school funding plan and fund it as a six-year plan that's my uh forecast now that's what i'm looking at i'm optimistic trying to be realistic that's my assumption right now but they could say whoops again they could say as we get through 24 25 26 that up well made a minute no we can't afford it so we'll just flatline it across i don't know i mean that's just something that when we get to this two-year period again that we need to reach out again to our state legislators whoever is representing us in that two-year period and
047keep pushing for this fair school funding plan but you can see here we went from 24 down to 21 and the reason being is when they put together the new formula they also under the state legislatures took out we had deductions going to the community schools ed choice schools peterson scholarship and open enrollment they had those deductions directly coming from the from us so what the state legislature did under their new biennial budget they said well no you don't have to pay this through your school anymore we're going to pay it directly from the state okay that's great i mean that cuts our expenditures by four million dollars but okay the four million dollars had to come from somewhere it came from the overall funding of the schools so when they recalculated what we were
048getting under the new they recalculated less four million dollars out of last year's funding so what they did is you go back let's go back we started at 19. instead of the 24 it moved up so it's kind of like you know okay we lose it here we gain it here oh no we lost it here we we lost it here so they're trying to say that's an apple's apples comparison okay so so as i get through this and i don't know because the state said okay we have your calculations we're still working on the final numbers they don't know what our final calculated amounts are they're still working at them at the state level so if i want to show you what our actual funding amounts i don't want to show you the simulations
049because they're not accurate they were just a a budget item that they needed i don't know what our final numbers are they won't come out until october november i'm hoping that they're out in october so at least we'll have some basis i have the calculations that i can work through i have a simulation and i have a program that lets me work through those numbers i'm working through that now with our forecast five but the final numbers are not going to be coming out until late october early november and then the last piece of this funding from the biennial budget as the governor had a wellness funding for the school district that was separate out we were getting wellness funding this wellness funding was now rolled into it's not separate anymore it's now rolled into
050our calculation for our funding which is okay i mean it's you know we were spending it anyways and there's going to be a restrictive piece to this to ensure that we're still spending on wellness and um what that restrictive piece is they still haven't determined of what that's going to be and so we're still waiting on that so we're still waiting for on some things from the state and so as part of our challenge for uh moving forward with that that's okay so we have this all part of our calculation when we go through to the financial forecast now to the other side of the the ledger as we call it the operating expenditures um we follow uniform school accounting systems so we follow the fund we call fund function object it's a step down
051step down step down and i'll go over what each one is real quick it's like as before the train rolls through you probably know if you can hear that in the background that's our train in the background that's actually somebody coming down the hall the doors are open so but yeah well actually it's the wake-up call for anybody that was watching the first part of this but okay so we have it by function which is instruction pupil staff support and extracurricular administration fiscal business facilities maintenance um and uh transfers advances out and you can see i put up to the dollar amount and the uh percentages and almost 70 percent goes to instruction which additional 8 which really puts it at like 76 goes directly to supporting students and when i talk about extracurricular i'm
052talking about not just academic extracurricular but the sports and all those that goes directly to support students and then the administrative piece and administrative um so now we also have the object area and it's broken down by object and this is what you see in the forecast it's personnel services personal services employee retirement benefit purchase service supplies materials capital outlay debt service lease purchase other objects other financing sources this is what we usually this is what i always refer to when i talk about this is more key than than the other ones because i think this kind of gives an idea of just where we are at we're a service organization we're dependent on delivering services to our students so we are people based so the majority of our costs go to people so we
053look at this um we want to make sure i mean that's that's why you see such high amounts so a little bit of a history or not history a little bit of an educational piece is what goes into the personal services well we have certified staff of teachers of 281 teachers classified staff of support 449 we have administrative staff of 28 we have qualified staff of 16 the qualified staff of our are intervention managers and social workers of 16 we have an exempt central office staff of 16. we have supplemental so we're not we're paying coaches through here and personal services and that we pay on the severance anything else that's uh related to salaries wages benefits comes out of the personal services then we have the employee retirement and benefits retirement medicare under ohio
054law we are required to pay 14 of all of our employees retirement medicare under federal law 1.45 percent were required to pay of every employee's salary health insurance health insurance is negotiated through the unions our district belongs to the suburban health consortium there are 20 districts in the suburban health consortium what i like to say of belonging to the health consortium is that does it save us money yes and no but what it does do it stabilizes health costs increase so over the last three or four years and and i'll just talk about even this year the last three or four years i think we've only averaged increases of roughly i think the highest one was six percent we've had two years of zero percent and this year going into um the next period here
055of our um premiums a two percent increase which is in the health industry with everything going on is pretty darn good it lets us stabilize our health care costs and on top of that in the negotiated agreements our employees do pay a share of their health care premium the district doesn't pay the full vote we've negotiated where our employees also contribute to their health care here in the district then workers compensation based on salaries and then unfortunately unemployment kind of over this coba thing reared up again a little bit so we were we're paying a little bit more in unemployment so that comes out of there purchase services what comes out of purchase services property technical services property professional technical services which is our legal services and any other technical services that we do property
056services some of the insurances or do we have like a maintenance contract travel meeting expenses communications which is our phone utilities which is natural gas electricity water come out of the purchase services trade services that we use any outside companies comes out of here special education out of district tuition so we we spend a lot of money for students to get placed out of district um we can't get around this i mean so this is just something it's a necessity if we can't service a student we find them we're the best places for them and we let that that the experts uh educate them and then we pay this out of here open enrollment out of district we have a bunch of students that open enroll somewhere else some districts have free open enrollment we
057have a closed enrollment here we did not allow it but if somebody wants to go to another district we need to pay um for open enrollment the biggest one right now is cleveland i'm not sure why any of our students want to go to cleveland over us but i won't go there and then pupil transportation um there are some special needs students or sometimes that we can't transport we're very you know this year has been really a crunch for transportation so we need to hire a company to transport some of our students so that comes out of here and you can see here we eliminated the community schools that choice scholarship deductions i talked about that a little bit earlier that from the biennial budget were you know not accounting for that anymore supplies and
058materials um real quick instructional supplies comes out of here instructional software instructional software is big big ticket item it allows us to do remote learning we have a whole bunch of curricular software that we use and a whole bunch of software programs that allow our students to learn outside the classroom it was critical last year where as we were learning from home to be able to offer a whole bunch of the these programs and to teaching and learning ms riseland to our technology coordinator ms sherry bailey getting these programs in place so our students didn't have any drop off and learning from home support software we used other software programs to support some of the programs or some of the items in our district textbooks library materials health supplies is a big one right now
059that we need office supplies maintenance supplies we need to maintain our building and the vehicle supplies we maintain our vehicles mostly our buses comes out of supplies materials and then the last one i'm not capital outlay we're mostly um big ticket items it's mostly been computers and servers out of there but here's the other one that we're we're charged for i can never understand this but the county collects our property taxes and then charges us an exorbitant fee to do that okay you know can never understand how they calculated that but that's for another day that's kind of like my uh quantification election fees there's no such thing as free elections let's just say that you know another one bank fees audit fees professional organization membership insurances and building assessments comes out of the other
060expenditures so now we're getting down to really what it's all about for us here in the district this is a this is what we the tool the main tool we use to financial plan this is a tool that we're going to use as part of our strategic plan this is the tool that the board uses that i i bring to the board that allows us to look for okay are there going to be any shortfalls where do we target um any areas here that we have that we go through and just say hey uh oh you know there's a little bit of an issue we need to start looking at what we can do and i'll go through this and show you what i mean here in a minute so we're required the school district
061is required to submit a forecast twice a year the original forecast in november before the next year and then a may update um it's based on and i say this all the time and it's based on critical assumptions i mean we just you know i i base all my numbers on assumptions of events i think are going to take place like these basic foundation a what's that going to look like not in two years i know what that budget is but what's going to look like three years down the road where's our real estate valuations going to be three years down the road and how do i calculate what i think the real estate taxes are based on what are the collection rates the valuations all those things come into play that i put down
062exactly what i'm thinking you know and and try to get as accurate and as as i can so based on and then uh what i like to say and this is i'm i'm a firm believer in in the five-year forecast we do also do a three-year forecast for the board because once again three years is is i think more realistic i really don't in five years when you go out five years a lot of things come into play but the state legislature said five years for their forecast we're going out um three years five years we are the only political subdivision that is required to do a forecast even the state only does a two-year budget but we're required to do a five-year forecast would i be doing a forecast if it wasn't required down
063right because it's good sound financial practice so here we have my forecasted hour i'm not mine it's our forecasted revenues and i have the actuals here and i have what i have forecasting going forward unfortunately revenues not do not grow as fast as our expenditures and you can see here we're kind of like growing a little bit and that's because of the state i have projected state basic aid increasing a lot of times our property taxes unless we get an influx unless the mayor thank you mayor for coming unless the mayor can find us some more new construction in uh in the commercial side where we get a big taxpayer coming in our real estate taxes you know run pretty much true to form and so we go from there but you can see here
064we had a big increase in 19 and then we dropped down to 2020 and the reason we haven't a big increase here is because through the abated property there was a catch-up of we have a shared income tax through a beta property with the city and we were trying to catch up so we caught up here that's why there's a big dollar amount here and it's a little bit of an anomaly so if you're looking at that well why did it go down from there to here that's because we had a big catch up with the city for shared income tax that we did not get the next year some of the things and we talked about in and i put this in my forecast and we the revenue summaries because i like to um
065articulate just what everybody's looking at and what we're looking at here and we always look back we always look back in history and then where we're going to be going forward and am i conservative my forecast yes i am i i freely admit it i tell anybody i'm very conservative because i don't want to be the person that goes to the board in mid year and said we ran out of money or at the end of the year yeah we're falling a lot shorter so i am very conservative but i say that i say how i get where we're at and i say where we're going to be going and we follow through with that so you know total revenue increased over annually over the past five years two point uh two percent but uh
066going forward based on everything that i see today and putting and i have all these formulas and i do i forecast each revenue area as we go through real estate taxes uh the pup taxes the tuition all the all the revenue the fund not the foundation basic aid the restrictive state grants the homestead roll crack i forecast all those areas of revenue the same with expenditures i forecast all those areas of expenditures and put it together to come up with a final forecast that's how i do it so when we talk about you know matching up and then the real estate property taxes um you know the biggest variance and that's because you know i don't know from one year to the next the valuations are going up then somebody comes back and says about
067dropping the valuation down because they filed an appeal so we tried to play that out one year we had a big collection of delinquency taxes next year it was a covered year we didn't have such a big collection so it dropped that way what are we going to collect this year in delinquency taxes i have a forecasted amount hoping the taxpayers follow through and pay it but you never know you know people were last year they were hurting understood that and then once again i always say this with 56 percent of the district's funding come from the state of ohio we're highly rely on the state legislature and anything they're going to do to affect that state funding whether it's the foundation basic aid whether it's taking away any homestead and rollback i know a
068couple years or i want to say 10 years ago 15 years ago the state eliminated the personal property tax on businesses directly affected schools they eliminated the homestead exemption a robot exemption for commercial okay the commercial had to pay that but you know in the directly affected businesses so any legislation that comes down the road it could affect school funding so and we're highly relying that's why we look very closely at the biennial budget here's my uh expenditures forecasted and compared i just wanted to give a little idea and you can see here how i mean salaries are going up we know that uh cost of living is going up inflation's going up we build that into the forecast so forecast expenditures um we show it as increasing two in expenditures and i'm not going
069to read this um but i did want to put this caveat in there because right now i've built in a forecast of wellness dollars and extra money and i'm going to talk about esther in a little bit what i like to do in the expenditure site operating expenditures if there's another funding source that i could shift operating expenditures to save money on the on the bottom line so we can push out i will do that so what would end up happening when the wellness dollars came in i shifted the well some of the um wellness money that we would have used for the general fund i shipped it to the wellness dollars mostly the intervention managers so i ship that to wellness well that's that's coming back same with esser whatever lesser allows us to
070do if i could shift some of the operating money to save the bottom line i shipped it over to esser so but wellness so that was my little you know so i state that in the forecast so people know why is this or why did this drop down why are the salaries drop down so i put that in the forecast to show and state it right there of what's going on with wellness and the yes or money here is the bottom line the basic forecast um i call the simple fight forecast is because my forecast is if you go on our website you'll see there's a very comprehensive document the board gets a very comprehensive document this is simplified and just you know basic you know we start with the beginning balance we have our
071revenue we have our expenditures we have the ending balance but this is the telling sign for anybody out there in the community is as i tell the board about the forecast when you start spending more than you're taking in that's one thing that's called deficit spending when you start deficit spending what it does is it ekes away your balance and then when you start getting to these bigger dollar amounts here in 2024 25 and all of a sudden you're going you're either way your balance is a negative what that tells the board here in 2022 is and i'm going to throw a little caveat here in a minute that you nee the district and us need to start planning for what we're gonna do to mitigate all this the state 98 900 000 spending this
0721.6 1.9 what are we gonna do what this forecast allows us to do we start planning now so in 2024 we don't hit this cliff that's what we do now i put this up there as of june 30th because this was the forecast at the end of the fiscal year a lot of things have changed since then so this is what the board got mostly in may the next forecast is coming out in november and there's a whole lot more that's involved right now as i talked about the final basic eight amounts uh the esser money where that's going well you know how we're gonna shift so the new forecast is is not gonna look like this but i just wanted to show you what we concentrate when we do a forecast this is another
073thing here definitely spending here right when it starts 215 five you know we can mitigate these but the 900 000 1.6 this is the telling sign in the forecast when all things being equal so then i put an executive summary here and when i talk about different things and the cash balances and projected the worst by 2025 i'd like to put an executive summary there that summarizes the whole forecast and it kind of gives an idea where we're going that's the forecast in a nutshell but there's more that comes into play now with with the schools and i would be remiss if i didn't talk about the effort funding that the school district is going to receive we received sr1 we're receiving yes or 2 right now and we're going to be receiving so3 that's
074all we read about is how much money is being thrown at school districts at public entities esther one allocation for the district is 1.29 million we've already used that with our ionization computer purchases for remote learning health supplies we've used up the yes or one money yes or two 7.15 million that we've now planned out for so we have a plan for sr2 and what we've targeted sr2 4 was our strategic plan and hitting those things in the strategic plan that we're identifying that where we can um use esther money for it allows us to start implementation are implementing our strategic plan you heard mr hanke go over different areas of strategic plan so this allows us to stabilize and use that money for a strategic plan and then sr3 16 million is coming we
075need to spend that well i missed that esther 2 it has to be spent by 2023 s or 3 needs to be spent that's wrong it should be 2024. so we still have some time to plan we have ideas we're mulling around but right now we're still concentrating we have to concentrate on s for two before we get an s or three but there's a caveat to that and there is and i'm not going to read each of these but there is a all these things your extra money has to spend under one of these categories so we just can't go out and use it for whatever so we have to target one of these categories and it has to be covered related cova driven but the biggest caveat that we have here is oh
076and i like to put o down here other activities necessary to maintain the operations the continuity of the services in the lea and the continuing to employ existing staff of the lea which is the local education agency i don't know what that means we have asked ode to find it more does it mean we've thrown scenarios out does it mean this doesn't mean that they don't know what that means or what we can use it for under that category i know what we're using it for we're using it to maintain staff but the the problem is is nobody can tell us until they tell us you can't use what you're using for under that category so that's the dilemma a lot of school districts are in of using this money the other thing is is
077that the inspection testing maintenance repair and to improve the indoor air quality of school facilities including mechanical and non-mechanical heating so can we use money for the middle school yeah we can but only in certain areas can we do we can't you know we can use it maybe we can use it to probably put you know air conditioning in can we use it for windows can we use it for uh certain roofing yeah can we use it to fix the electrical grid no can we use it for other purposes to maintain no it has to be recover related and indoor air quality so we're you know we have a plan in place but we're you know we're trying to get creative still live within the guidelines of the yes or money but we really it's
078like you know can we give it to employees and raises it doesn't fall under one of these categories here i don't know can we can't you know what does that mean is that uh so we're still working through that and uh that's kind of our dilemma but that's some of the things that we need to deal with when we talk about escrow funding and and we do it and you know the team works together to figure out where we can best use this money and still fall within the under these and we did a presentation to the board of education our strategic plan and use of asset monies in some of the strategic plan areas and i think that that's uh it was it was a good uh good plan so with that um everything
079that we do as a district in the financial side any financial information can be uh gone out and gotten from any one of these uh websites we try to be and we pride ourselves on being as transparent as possible so any financial information we have is up on our website under under the uh the treasurer's uh area same with these others i mean all of the information that i get i use these resources the real estate taxes and all that information valuation comes from the fiscal officer department of education we get all of our basic foundation uh funding formulas and some of the and some of the documentation from the department of ed department of taxation certifies the overall property valuations and then the garfield city schools that's our website as a plethora of information
080it's out there if you want it it's there we we try to be and the board has always maintained they want transparency and the fiscal side of it with our financial record so it's there and with that that concludes my presentation and anybody in the audience i know that uh mr hankey said you know send us questions anything on here i mean you're going back and reviewing the the powerpoint presentation if you have questions i mean i went through this pretty quickly there's a lot of information there it's a school fund financing is there's a lot of moving parts it's not easy it really isn't easy and it's just very complicated and it's not a fun subject to talk about and i'm sure everybody's at home going maybe i'll watch this at 10 o'clock and
081uh i can fall asleep because i have insomnia and i can just put this on and i'm out but if you are going through and you're interested uh email one of us we have the answer and if we don't have the answers the administrative team has the answers because they they're they're a lot smarter than i am so with that um i just you know real quick you know let you turn over closing comments mr hanke thank you all for coming i really appreciate it if you're watching at home or watching it later thank you so much for your interest in the schools and uh and school finance uh thanks mr seleucan thanks to everybody that has been watching we haven't received any at least on my email any questions i know we have a
082few folks here if anybody has any questions we're happy to answer them at this time um we really appreciate that you know a very comprehensive overview of school finance it can get complicated Mr. Sluka makes it easy for us to understand we appreciate that um is there any questions from the audience about the district well with that i think we'd like to conclude tonight's presentation again if you are watching at home thank you and if you watch this on our youtube channel please don't hesitate to contact us uh i will give the board office number two one six four seven five eighty one hundred yes for Mr Sluka Mr Hanke we will get back to you very quickly and we're happy to answer all the questions about the district thank you