Hanover School Board

001I am Ryan Flatley. I am the new Handover School Board or Handover School District moderator replacing Tom Chattery after 20 some odd years. Um so let's get started. Uh Yeah. Cool. Okay. We good? Okay. Uh the discussion phase of the 2026 Hover School District annual meeting is called to order. Um, the following warrant articles apply to the operation of the Hanover School District, which includes the operation of the Bernie Bernese A. Ray School, grades K through 5, and the special education obligations of the Hanover School District, as these relate to both the school population and applicable special education students from Hanover up to age 22. The legal voters of the town of Hanover, New Hampshire School District are hereby notified and warned that the two phases of the annual school district meeting will be held

002as follows. Discussion phase, Saturday, February 28th, 2026 at 11:30 a.m. at the Handover High School Auditorium, Hover, New Hampshire. A virtual option will be available to attend via Zoom link and the information will be shared via the SAU70 district website at sau70.org. Voting phase Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026 from 7:00 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Richmond Richmond Middle School Gymnasium in Hanover, New Hampshire. Ballots are available now. Discussion, sorry. During the discussion phase, the voter shall have the opportunity to discuss the following warrant articles and to transact any nonsubstantive business that may be leg that may legally be acted on during the discussion phase under article 6. All voting on warrant articles 1 through five shall be conducted by secret written ballot during the voting phase as outlined in chapter 160 of the 2004 session

003laws of the New Hampshire legislature entitled an act relative to the voting procedures in the handover school district. The handover warrant was posted on February 26, 2026 by Terresa Taylor, designate of the Handover School Board, District Clerk at the following locations: Handover High School Gymnasium, Municipal Building, Richmond Middle School, Hover Food Co-op, Ray Elementary School, How Library, Etna Country Store, Etna Library. Chair Kelly McConnell will introduce the board. Hi everybody. Is this on? Oh yes. Great. Um I'm Kelly McConnell. I am the chair of the Hanover School Board. Thank you everyone for being here and for watching online. Um with me today I have at the far end here Carrie Russell. Next to her Deb Nelson, next to her, Renee Sullivan. And then we have Marcela Delasi who is doing double duty today over there.

004Um and I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of the school board members this year. It has been a lot. Um there's been a lot going on at the state level, a lot going on on the budgetary side of things. Um and I wanted to give a special shout out to um a few of our board members who are not here. Um so Ben Keaney and uh Tara Velo forgetting anybody? That's it, right? Yes. Okay. Um, Ben is the chair of the handover or the Dresden School Board, sorry, and has been um very active on uh budget committees, negotiations, and state matters. Um, I also wanted to thank Tara Vlo who's been um very active on uh the tuition committee, the Hannover Finance Committee, staff development committee, two budget committees um

005and has really gone above and beyond. And you will hear a lot from Renee Sullivan today, but I also wanted to give her a shout out um for representing us on the capital improvement planning committee uh in Hanover and for serving on multiple budget committees as you will see today. So, thank you to everyone for the hard work this year. >> Uh and now, Superintendent Robin Steiner will introduce the administrators. >> Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here. We have a few administrators in the audience today. The first is Teresa Taylor. She is our business administrator and she's worked hard all year putting these budgets together for us. The second administrator I'd like to recognize is Nan Parsons. She's our associate principal at the Ray School and we are happy to have Nan

006here today. And finally, Liz Murray who is our associate principal at the high school. I thank them all for being here today. >> Uh, okay. The two districts in handover are the Hanover School District and the Dresden School District. The Handover School District is responsible for grades K through five handover sixth grade students became a part of the Dresden School District's student population in fiscal year 2023. The Dresden School District is responsible for grades 6 through 12. The Francis C. Richmond School with grades 6 through 8 and Hanover High School with grades 9 through 12. The Dresden District includes Hanover and Norwood students in grades 7 through 12 and Handover students in grade 6. The Dresden School District was the first interstate school district in the country and was created by one of the last

007bills signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Um, for our meeting guidelines, the moderator, me, will recognize speakers before they allowed to speak. Speakers should walk to the microphone and state their names and addresses for their record. Uh, all comments should be directed to the moderator. The moderator will not allow cross talk among those at the meeting. Everyone will be allowed to speak before someone has a chance to speak a second time. Speakers should make every effort to be brief and not repeat comments that have already been made by the other speakers. All speakers should be courteous and respectful. Speakers should be certain they are addressing the business of the meeting. This means staying on the topic of the warrant article being discussed. It is the moderator's intention to recognize board members to speak

008to warrant articles before allowing members of the public to comment. The moderator shall rule out of order any speaker who does not respect these guidelines or who acts in an univil or disruptive manner. So let's start talking about the warrant articles. Uh article one to elect by written ballot for one-year terms a moderator, a clerk and a treasurer and two school board members, one for a two-year term and one for a three-year term. Those who filed for these offices are for moderator Ryan Flattley, for clerk Ryen Shawn Gorman, for treasurer don't have anyone for school board members Christopher Rivet three-year Renee Sullivan two years Tara Velo three-year uh and now Marcella sorry yeah I have to read the uh now it's on to article two sorry first Okay. Uh, article two, shall the district appropriate

009the sum of $75,000 from the Don S. Bridgeman fund during the 2026 2027 fiscal year in order to afford additional advantages to the students of the district not provided by taxes. The school board recommends this appropriation. Note one, in his will, dated January 20th, 1917, Don S. Bridgemond left a portion of his estate to what is now the Handover School District. These monies are known as the Bridgeman Fund and are currently invested to provide a stream of income for years to come. Expenditures from the fund are used for projects that would not be covered in the school's regular operating budget. Monies are taken only from the Bridgeman Trust Fund. So the appropriation has no effect on the tax rate. And now Marcella will discuss article two. Hi everyone. Um, so thank you so much for

010introducing me and thank you um, Robin for helping provide all of the texts for all of these various articles. I appreciate it. Um, and this is going to be a little bit redundant. So in his will dated January 20th, 1917, Don CV Bridgemond left a portion of his estate and trust to what is now the Hanover School District. In 1997, that trust was disbanded and a Grafton County court decree left the remaining funds to the Hanover School District in the amount of $800,000. The monies were accepted by the district and the management of the funds were placed with the Hanover Trustee of Trust Funds. These monies are known as the Bridgeman Fund and are currently invested to provide a stream of income for years to come. It's been managed uh similarly to an endowment fund.

011As of June 30th, 2025, the Bridgemond Fund had a market value of $2,276,811.39. Historically, the school boards have only suggested warned articles to spend the available earnings and not the entire fund, although it could suggest doing so. The quote assets of the fund may not be used by the Hanover School District to reduce taxes, but to afford advantages in addition there too, to the students of the Hanover School District." End quote. Expenditures from the fund are used for special projects, one-time or out of the ordinary opportunities and/or new initiatives that can be petitioned by the school's educators, other employees, parents, or taxpayers. The school board then votes on whether or not to support the Bridgeman Fund requests. So, uh, for example, the new really beautiful equipment at the Ray School that, um, is being installed

012is, um, a new accessible playground that has been funded by, um, the Bridgemond Fund. So, monies for this article are taken only from the Bridgemond Fund and so the appropriation has no effect on the tax rate. Thank you. Any discussion on that one? Seeing none, let's move on uh to article three. Article three. Shall the district determine and fix the salaries of school district officers as follows. School board members, $1,000 per member with an additional $300 for the school board chair. School district treasurer, $2,75. school district clerk $300 and school district moderator $300 in accordance with RSA and further raise and appropriate the sum sum of 9,975 to the to fund these salaries. The school board recommends this article and appropriation. Note one, the stipens for school board members, school district clerk, and moderator remain

013unchanged, and there is a small increase for the treasurer position. The this article's effect on the tax rate is negligible, and Deb Nelson will discuss this article. So, as you can tell, this article sets the stipen for the positions of district clerk, moderator, treasurer, and board members. The district clerk and moderator are duties are instrumental in a district's annual voting processes. Together they officiate and record annual meetings, set the official ballots, monitor voting procedures in the polls, direct vote tallying, and ratify results. The treasurer receives a small percentage increase between 1 and 2% each year. Their duties are mandated by New Hampshire RSA. They're charged with oversight and independent balancing of all district funds. They review expenditures weekly and balance bank accounts monthly. After the review of expenditures by the board, they sign all district

014funded checks. Each board member is expected to attend monthly meetings from August through June in a normal year. I just added that in normal years meetings are suspended during the month of July. During budget season, additional ME meetings are required. In addition, board members participate in various committees such as with handover, budget and finance, evaluation, negotiations, networks, policy, and with Dresden. And remember, the same people for handover are also on the Dresden board. Again, there are budget and finance committees, athletic advisory committee, central staff development, evaluation, negotiations, policy, program and procedure council at the high school and the Hartford area vocational technical center. I would also add that the chairs meet weekly, the four chairs, Norwich, Handover, SAU, and Dresden. A small addition was made in the 2019 2020 budget year to add $300 to

015the board chair stipened as the chair participates in more meetings than other members as they're instrumental in setting the agenda in consultation with the administration and the article's effect on the tax rate is negligible. It's less than 1 cent. Are there any questions? This was my moment. Okay, thank you. >> Uh, not seeing any comments uh or questions, let's move on. Uh so article four uh shall the district vote to approve the cost items in the collective bargaining agreement reached between the handover Dresden service staff AFSCME local 1348 and the handover school board which calls for the following increases in salaries and benefits uh for the year uh the estimated increase is $28,179 For the year 2728, the estimated increase is $26,894. For the year 2829, the estimated increase is $23,827. And further shall the

016district raise in appropriate the sum of $28,179. And such sum representing the estimated increase in support staff salaries and benefits for the 202627 fiscal year brought about by this collective bargaining agreement. Majority vote is required. The school board recommends this article and appropriation. Note one, the sum necessary to pay the so-called status quo salaries and benefits for the support staff if this article is defeated is included in the operating budget in article 5. Note two, a favorable favorable vote on this article shall be considered the approval of the cost items in all years of the proposed collective bargaining agreement. For this one, uh, first we're going to have Kelly McConnell speak on this. Hi again everybody. Uh so in January the Hanover and Dresden school boards and the handover Dresden service staff employees reached a

017tenative agreement for a three-year contract which you just heard described. Um I want to thank again Ben Keaney for serving on this committee on our behalf. uh the this group of employees in handover includes 4.5 custodial positions and in Dresden only uh 8.5 positions at the h at the high school and 4.5 positions at the middle school. So it's a pretty small group. Um and I'll just skip to the punchline here. Um we value their contributions immeasurably. Um so they have a huge impact for us. Um but it is a very small impact to the overall tax rate. It's uh less than 1 cent from Hanover and less than two cents uh from Dresden. So it's a it's a very small impact overall. Um just a few highlights on the uh changes. Um you can

018read most of this in Simly, so I'll skip over some of it. Um but there were some changes to the health insurance wording um to offer more uh options for them. Um changes in vacation language to align with other contracts. Um the service staff will receive a 5% increase on the base hourly wage scale for each of the three-year cont uh three years of the contract. There's a new level of longevity pay for 35 years. Um workers will receive $3,500 and uh we agreed to increase the medical opt out from $1,750 to $3,000. So thank you again. We recommend this article. Uh any comment here? Seeing none, uh Peter Soulberg right from the handover Finance Committee uh is going to go ahead and speak to this article as well. >> Hi, I'm Peter Soulberg, a

019Hanover voter from Etna. Um I'm going to just say a word about the Hannover Finance Committee since you're going to hear from us a couple times uh today. Uh but we're an appointed town committee composed of handover residents. Um, and we're basically charged with reviewing the town's financial matters and providing guidance both to town officials and to the Hanover School Board as well as to town residents. So, we help in a review capacity. Um, the the Hannover Finance Committee is actually composed of seven members that include five general members and a representative both from the school board, uh, Tara and Carrie Callahan from the select board. So, seven in total. Um the Hannover Finance Committee voted unanimously to support uh this article. We uh recognize that it is a relatively small uh $28,000 uh u

020cost for the first year with reducing costs. I think we wanted to appreciate in particular that this is a period of transition from staff that were a contracted staff to now full-time employees for this service area. We also wanted to appreciate the willingness of the those service staff in the negotiation to bear some increasing um incremental responsibility for some of their healthcare co-pay costs as the contract progresses. So this is going to be a theme that we continue to talk about thinking about how to negotiate these these important questions of benefits. So again, we supported unanimously the idea of supporting this article. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Uh, any comment? Seeing none, moving on. For article five, shall the district raise and appropriate the amount of 16,956,54 the support of schools for the payment of

021salaries uh for teachers and other school employees and school district officials and agents and for the payment of stat the statutory obligations of the district for the 202627 fiscal year. This sum does not include the funds appropriated in any of the other articles. The school board recommends this article in appropriation. For this one, we are going to have Renee Sullivan discuss. >> We put it here and then talk here. >> I think it detaches to you. Yeah, I would wrap here because I please hold for the technical aspect of the program. Okay, the suspense I know is killing you. Okay, and I need to share my screen on Zoom. Can I get a thumbs up? Oh, yes. Great. Thank you. Okay, wonderful. Um, this is the most exciting part of the handover portion today. I

022know you're all just on pins and needles. Um, we wanted to start off just by acknowledging the folks that have really invested the time uh into many iterations uh of the budget this cycle. uh the committee uh myself, Kelly McConnell um and then our administration team uh Robin, Teresa, Colleen, Nan, and Dela uh from the Ray School. We were all part of the budgeting process starting in September of this year. Um and of course our school board members who uh Kelly mentioned before um have all been part of this process as we bring uh new information to our meetings. So what Let's see if I can get my clicker back. Go. Yes. Uh what we're going to talk about today are the beautiful photos that the team provided me. No, but I do love this

023one. I don't know if it's morning or evening, but uh this is the race school and uh what we're actually going to talk about today is what happens inside of it. Um so we have our summary and timeline. I'm going to kind of give you the highlevel takeaways of our budget proposal uh and talk about how we got here. Uh we'll talk about the key factors that really informed the budget. There's five that I'm highlighting here. You can imagine there's many more. Um, but there's five that we want to, you know, have top of mind for you. All of that feeds then into um our proposed expenditures for the year. Uh, and then we'll layer on our projected revenues. Both of those feed into our projected net assessment. And my screen is doing weird things.

024Um, and then we'll talk about tax rates and then reflections and next steps. So, let's get that back. There we go. Um, quick budget concept review. I know everybody here probably is very into budgets and knows everything, but I think that there's just a a really important thinking uh that we have to have moving into any budget cycle. Uh, we know that there's revenues and expenses. We know that revenues and expenses go up and down and all of those things translate into um really what we need to be thinking about in terms of money raised from taxpayers. So this very technical picture here um really if we have more revenue and fewer expenses that is generally a happier feeling for taxpayers uh and the budget cycle uh you might not be surprised to see that

025this year we are working in the sad face uh box. So we are looking at less revenue and more expenses and so that's what we were solving in uh in the realm of this time. So let's unpack that a little bit and say where are we ending up? So, our proposed budget summary, again, the sadfaced costs uh are way up, driven by healthcare, with revenue down. Throughout our budgeting process, we want to be super clear that our goal really is to smooth the volatility and taxation as best as possible without sacrificing our key improvement initiatives and minimizing the impact to educational experience and programming for our students. We believe our budget proposal does this. With that, there's back one. Um, there's a couple important pieces of information. Uh, as we began our process here, the

026school budget committee sets a budget guidelines um, early on in the process. That's like our first thing that we do. Um, and it's based on kind of year-over-year projections, looking at uh forecasted costs and looking at other things, inflation and uh that are happening uh around us. At the time of our first initial meeting, our expenditure budget we set to um the guideline being no more than a 3 or 4% overall increase, which was driven by the projected medical that we thought at the time was between 12 and 15%. high but not where we ended up. So that is based on our initial budget projection of that 12 to 15% increase in medical costs. Um and the time because we knew that was happening we also set a 0% increase in non-personnel costs. So another

027layer to all of this um that you'll see throughout this presentation uh is that ultimately in the end our budget proposal is driven by an unanticipated school care. That's the medical um component. Uh school care expense in um our current year and an unprecedented increase in healthcare costs for next year. 26% increase is what we are seeing. Those two things together total $844,000. We're going to get into the details of those throughout this presentation. And all of this is to say uh at a very high level um if we include all our warrant articles. I know this conversation technically is about the 16,956, uh54. I said that probably weirdly. Um, that is wrapped into the first line there of 17,69,28. I think that's right. Um, we believe it makes more sense to talk about the

028budget overall given that it is a small amount that you'll see added on from the warrant articles. Um, but overall, if we look at all of our proposed expenditures less our projected revenue, we are seeing a net assessment of a projected 14.5 million, which is an increase year-over-year of about $1 million or a 7.5% increase. So, um, I told you that the first thing we're going to talk about is that highle summary and then how we got here. Um, I think more than potentially in years past, how we got here is relatively important. um because we did our best as a committee to really try and kind of I call it whack-a-ole. Um so in September when we kicked things off, we set our budget guidelines. Again, that was the 3 to 4% increase overall

029in our expenditures with a 0% increase in non-personnel. Um and again, that was based on our 12 or 15% increase um in school care costs, which now you know was much less than what we are actually seeing next year around the 26% So, we set that and then our wonderful administration team went and did the work and they did a lot of work and they did great work and there's a lot of iterations that are not shown here in little dots. Um, but there was a lot of conversation to get to um our November 12th ultimate uh projection at the time uh administration reached 0% increase in non-expend or non-personnel. Hooray. And a 4% budget goal overall. Hooray. And then the whack-a-mole um is that in November, which at this point is fairly late into

030the budget process, uh that's when we found out that school cares projected increase was actually 26%. And not only that, they added on uh a bill for this current year, which was not planned and we need to pay for um and that those two things combined pushed us up to around 6%. We felt that was not reasonable. We did not like that number. We didn't think that we wanted to put that onto taxpayers. So, we went back to work. So, the next set of information um that came through was a week later, the committee met uh to really investigate what are some scenarios we should be thinking about uh that would again meet our goal that we stated initially um of hopefully smoothing the tax rate as much as possible and still maintaining our high

031quality student experience. Um and from all those scenarios, they were all based on a hitting again a 3 to 4% increase in our expenditure budget. So then uh what was great uh is that we hit that and 3.91% is is kind of where we landed on the expenditures, but the that pesky revenue problem or what looks like a revenue problem um came to push us up to that 8.3%. So, the cost in this current year for school care that we did not plan makes it look like it shows up on the revenue side. We're going to get in the details of that, but what ended up looking um what ended up showing us is that we were back at 8.3%. Again, not happy with this. Um we tried our best. We met again. Um I

032don't even know if it's like a week later, a couple days later, I can't see exactly. Uh it felt like every week, every day sometimes. Um but we we really went through line by line and say what what really do we need here? What can we do? What decision do we want to be making? Uh knowing that medical is the driver for the the conundrums we are in. So that all fed into our proposal to the board in January uh and then we are here today. So, um, very interesting whack-a-ole scenario, uh, for the year, but the committee really, we think, worked very hard and were very committed to making sure that we did the best we could, uh, with the information we had at the time we had it. So, let's lay out those

033key factors that really inform our budget. So, overall, um, we have enrollment year-over-year. It's roughly fat. We'll get into that. We'll get into all these in a moment. Um, if enrollment were much higher or much lower, that would you would see an increase or a decrease or some at least some conversations about that. Um, so knowing it's relatively flat, that's helpful. Um, number two is student need. It's decreased slightly. Um, we know that need changes over time. We know that if there was a really high need that came in mid year, we would really want to make sure we were supporting that. Um but this at this point in time given projections um from our very talented staff we are seeing a decrease slightly in student need. Uh student performance uh we see has been

034strong continues to be strong. Again I think similarly if we were seeing a major drop in an area um we would be really wanting to investigate that as a school district and say how do we support really mitigating the the losses we see but overall we see strong performance which um is really a testament to our educators and administrators that run our schools. Uh the fourth factor here is district priorities. Um the new thing here is an ELA curriculum which I'm very excited to talk to you guys about uh briefly. There's a much more in-depth conversation uh from recordings and assembly in January from our uh curriculum team. Uh and then of course the the fifth factor here uh is the inflationary context. Uh this is based on the budgeting time frame. Uh so we

035had about a 3.3% uh inflationary number that we were using to compare against. So all of those we're going to get into a little bit more detail on so you have the context. So ultimately over time um you can see we're looking this is this is many years back but for the past few years um we're seeing relatively flat um enrollment. One really important piece if you're paying really close attention to our wonderful principal updates uh monthly in our board meetings is that we do see an increase in students midy year often. Uh and so right now we are seeing uh the race school enrollment at 455 as of I think it was the January board meeting. Um our budget was based is based on uh kind of the best case scenario for what we

036can project at the time that we have it. So um really that's what we're looking at here. Um and frankly we we do anticipate probably that 451 number increasing as well uh mid year next year. We'll we'll see. Um but that's our enrollment. Um the second kind of key factor here uh student need. Um again if we saw a major increase in need we would be working to address it. Um but what we do see is that there is a decrease in need within our English language learning. Um as well as a decrease in tuition needs for our special education. Uh and so when we go through our expenditures we'll be I'll call those out. You'll see those in a little bit more detail. Um I think really important for us to acknowledge again just

037is that uh these are really like one time we are just very lucky uh in terms of a budgetary context to have decreases uh in student need this year. So we get to capture some of that savings. Uh there is a risk in that these are not per in perpetuity. These are things that would fluctuate and change over time. So as a budget committee it has to be top of mind for us as we move forward in future years. uh we don't want to just rely on these one-time I guess I would call it a benefit but it's it is a I guess a budgetary benefit um because it's not guaranteed um student performance we live in handover I have kids in the hand school system I know our many of our board members do

038um we are here we are very proud of being here because our uh performance in our schools is is very high very high um so we look at our comparison to the New Hampshire state average here. Uh you can see the the kind of the targets on the right here. That's the New Hampshire average. And then the big the box on the left um is the Ray school. This is data from the New New Hampshire Department of Education from school year 2425. Um and uh the outperformance of the Ray school students compared to the state. Um and then similarly the another way to think about this uh and I know that we've kind of shared this way in the past as well um is that thinking about where race school students are performing and many

039of them are performing at the top levels. So every uh kind of category ELA math science is broken into four levels. Level three and level four are the highest um proficiency levels and many of our students really are are at that range. Um and then of course it is not to be remiss that um our school was a acknowledged as a national blue ribbon school last year which took a lot of work I know to also uh have that be reality but is very much worth noting as well in our performance. Um district priorities um there's a lot of things that you can imagine um are a priority. Uh this is just a few of them and these are the things that uh we've been kind of continuing to prioritize and I want to highlight

040the new ELA curriculum especially. So uh we we know our community values a strong curriculum um across grades and across schools that has been uh implemented in math and science in past years and this year we are moving forward with a recommendation for um arts and letters which is a new ELA curriculum. I want to highlight here it is high quality and the cost that is associated with includes the materials and professional development associated with implementation. Um it is aligned with the science of reading which was a really important point that a lot of our handover uh families raised during board meetings. Um this program or moving forward with a new ELA program allows for the benefit of a unified experience both across Marian Cross and the Ray School and then within each school. So,

041one of the things that we were trying to solve for in a new ELA curriculum was the experience that students were going to have. We wanted to be high quality, but we also wanted to be consistent so that when our students from Mary and Cross and the Ray School move into the middle school together, they have that common background, that common knowledge, um, and we know it's of a certain caliber. And similarly, within each school, our teachers are amazing and they have developed wonderful curricula and we love them for it. But it makes it difficult for collaboration or really understanding what is the experience of one student in one class within a school to the next year. And so you might end up having students moving from grade 1 to two who had different teachers

042having different experiences. And so we wanted to make sure that we were providing all students with an amazing opportunity in ELA that was consistent and allowed for better collaboration um overall both again across the the schools and within each school. Um and then the cost associated with this also includes implementation across K5 in year one. Um our wonderful team did just for transparency offer an option for a phased in approach. We believe that for the highest quality of implementation it makes sense to have it be implemented across all grades. We know sometimes teachers move from one grade to the next as well um year-over-year. uh this just provides one continuity for the teachers and a better experience overall as the school's conversation around ELA is happening uh in a unified way uh and our students

043are experiencing it across grades in a unified way. Um so we believe that this will generate the highest impact. So that's arts and letters um like I said if you really are interested this more um there's a much better presentation from our um curriculum folks from our uh January 14th board meeting. Um but really important there are lots of other things we are continuing to invest in in our students uh in our schools and we think that these continue to offer extremely high value. So we know there's Spanish across K5. We know we have strings and band for our upper grades. Um we have curriculum and in enrichments like trips and guests. And I will say for this one, I know that our um administrative team really thinks strategically about these things when they're going

044through that budgeting process and having conversations about where do our kids really need to go and what grades make the most sense to attend. Um and for our littlest kids in our schools and our littlest leaders, I guess I'll say, um outdoor and unstructured play is so critical and is worth emphasizing as an investment um both in recess and outdoor classroom. Uh and then of course the last two here are certain priorities for our district if we want to make make sure we are doing our job to maintain our contractual obligations and our negotiated increases um as well as balancing maintaining our high quality and sustainable operations um with fiscal prudence. So that is uh our set of district priorities rolls right off the tongue. Um so the last thing I uh mention here as

045a key factor in our school district budgeting process um is the inflationary context. So this year um we were looking at about a 3.3%. It's slightly lower than last year. This chart is fuzzy. I'm sorry. Ask the Bureau of Labor Statistics to not make it fuzzy. Um and I pulled it from December which again was our our time of our budgeting cycle. Um so you can kind of see I' I've called out here the December comparisons. um it's up and down and you can see there's a gap in October because the government shutdown but ultimately it's around a 3.3% slightly lower than last year but that's um the context with which we were working in. So all of these things are on the minds of our administrators and our budget committee as we are going

046through and saying what is it we want to be investing in which leads to our proposed expenditures. So, um, on the, uh, I guess on this particular article, uh, article 5, it's the big orange bar there. It's the 16,956,000. Um, the blue bar next to it on the left is our budget from last year. Um, the the FY26 proposed budget and then or I guess past budget and then the far right includes all warrant articles, which is the 17.07 million. That is the number that we're really going to be digging into a bit today. Um, and that's where that's what we are proposing for voters on Tuesday. Oh, and I guess to say uh it represents an overall ex this is expenditures. This is the expenditure increase overall including all warrant articles is 3% um

047or about $57,000. So if we take that 17 million and say what is in it? Um one of the ways we've looked at this in the past is broken into uh kind of these these specific categories. Salaries, benefits, special ed tuition, sport and operations, transportation, capital debt, transfers, things like that. Um we know that salaries and benefits are always the biggest part of our budget. Um but we want to actually take a look at that benefits piece given the conversation about medical. um we want to say okay what really has happened with benefits over the past few years is this normal what what part of the budget has this been and um is it going to be uh I guess compared to last year so um looking at our benefits component it's projected to be

048if in this proposed budget it's 30% of our overall budget uh which is now on the far right hand column so we know benefits driven by medical as a percent of the budget jumped this year and is a critical area for the board and district to address in the FY28 budget cycle. So, um I will kind of talk through what's in red. Uh but basically what we see is that 3% jump in like actual um and what that translates to is a 10% increase year-over-year if you're doing the percentage math. Um both of those numbers are scary and we don't like what we're seeing and we want to emphasize the fact that we know this is an area we need to address and given the timeline of when we received all this information um we

049feel like we have done our best to get to a place where we feel the budget is a strong proposal um and want to acknowledge to the public that this is something that we are keenly aware of needing to be addressed uh in the next budget cycle. Um, if we break down our increase, so if we say, okay, year-over-year the budget is increasing by about $500,000. Um, here we're looking at uh without warrant article um for the service staff, but ultimately we've looked at in years past a way of breaking out our increase year-over-year in terms of the function. And so we say, okay, we are choosing to make changes to our budget from this year to next. What are those changes and where do they show up? Some of them show up in regular

050education, some of them show up in special education, some of them show up in ESL, etc. That's what's on the left here. This, I know, is something that we've typically done, so I want to make sure we we could share that again for those that are looking um at previous year's presentations. Um, one thing that is helpful, I think, with this look is the conversation about student need. So, if you recall, we talked about a decrease in need within the English um, second language and within special education tuition. Those are both showing up in those lines. So, that's where we can see some of that kind of, I guess, captured benefit in the budget. Um, what this makes hard to see is the medical component because medical is inextricably tied to individuals and there's individuals

051in all of these. So, what we did is we took there's um there's some lovely charts about the top 10 uh big increases and big biggest decreases in our budget book. If we take a look at that um I broke it out into what I'm calling major use. Um and so we then we can see much more clearly what are the increases in medical specifically. Um what are the increases from our negotiated contractual bargaining agreements? Those are things again that was a goal of ours. We want to maintain um all of the expectations and the payments for our negotiated increases. Um our ELA curriculum I pulled out here because again that is a really important investment for us. I hope that you believe that too. Um and so we want to make it clear where

052that where that falls I guess in the realm of all of our investments. Um then there's some other investment or there's other increases. Uh transportation we know professional development we know there's um uh what do I say retirement there those kinds of things um are all part of that other increase. And then there is the biggest decreases. And so you can see there's a lot of work that was done to really say where can we pull back a bit. Um and that is primarily in some FTE which we'll talk through in a moment. Um just for comparison and transparency uh want to highlight things that we are aware of and cannot act upon in this particular budget cycle at this point in time um but are on our mind. One is that uh the increase

053in medical again not a shocker uh 26% that is unacceptable. um we need to be figuring that out next year. Um and then the uh increase in contract uh negotiated contractual bargaining agreements across all of our um bargaining units uh is uh just under 6%. So both of those if we think about the inflationary index and comparing those it's it's not awesome to see that uh as a taxpayer and are things that are going to be on our minds uh moving forward. Um, and then one of the things that I really want to make sure we dig into here is the conversations we had around those tradeoffs, which again were primarily in the FTE realm. So what we did is we actually said um to our team um let's take a look again at the

054staff we have in the building, the vacancies we have in the building and what can we do um to still meet all of our current needs um all of our student needs and make sure we're not, you know, really impacting the student experience if we can. Um so given all those trade-offs we looked at uh these are classified as just certified staff and then other staff very uh technical term there. Um and you can see our uh in the top the certified staff the the decrease there in the ESL uh again due to student need and then uh what we looked at were also seven vacancies in our inclusion ed assistant realm and from that we were able to make a decision and say we can still meet all of our uh student needs. we

055are currently meeting them with with those vacancies. Um, and we're going to leave two of them open and what happens if we close five. So, there's some other math which you can look at on the lovely assembly document. Um, but ultimately that that rounds to about four and a half FTEEs which we were able to pull back um which were all vacancies. Um, there's a few other support staff. I know tutors were reorganized as well. Um and so from that we are looking at about uh a 6.7 FTE reduction year-over-year um at the race school. So all of this is the expenditure side which again as you'll recall was one half of our equation and we felt really good about ret achieving our between three and 4% budget target on this side and then we

056get into revenues um which is not as fun. So the story with revenues is a little bit more nuanced. So overall revenues are declining. However, the biggest driver on what I will call the re quotequote revenue side is the fact that our fund balance um has decreased because of that unexpected and therefore unplanned school care bill this school year. Um we did decide to pay it this year which was consist all this year as opposed to some other I guess scenario. Um but that's consistent with what all of the districts have done um within the handover and Dresden realm. So this is where we are. Um you will notice on the left um our FY26 total revenues being higher than our blue bar on the right our FY27 projected revenues um by about $59,000. So

057if we break that apart, the components of that become um a little bit clearer. You can see a little more than half is that unexpected school care cost, which would be lovely if we didn't have to have that at all and it vanished and went away. Uh but that's really what we kind of came up against is that whack-a-ole um thing. Uh which is not really fun. Um and then there's a few other components to that. uh some good things of vacancies being filled, but you know, then you have to address that. Um and then uh just overall state and local sources. Uh if you're following anything in the news, there's a lot of uncertainty uh out there in the education space at the state and um federal levels. So, um we're not we're not

058surprised to see some decreases uh overall in revenue, but the biggest driver here on at least our version of a revenue side is that beginning of year fund balance um becoming a lot smaller than we anticipated it being initially. So, expenditures, revenues become a net assessment. So, this is the chart that you saw initially. Um but when we combine those two uh things with all the warrant articles included um we see a net assessment projected to increase about 7 and a half% or about a million dollars again driven by medical. Um so what I'm calling out here is actually the little medical component which you can see broken out. So we talked through uh the first line there being the increase in medical year-over-year. That's that 26% increase. uh the the amount that that is

059is $580,000. I can't actually see it here. Yes. And then on the quoteunquote revenue side, um we saw that school care bill of the $264. So that's where we get the $844,000 as the medical component. Um so that is that is the context for this year. Um, we are, I think, very proud of the fact that we were able to keep this under 8% given all the things that were up against us throughout this conversation. And we wanted to make sure that we did the right thing by our students um and did not impact their experience um any further. Um we want we felt like we we did a good job holding it um where it needed to be. So our projected tax rates uh get into I guess a few different components. Um one

060is that we have our handover net assessment. We just talked through that you saw the handover kind of pieces here. Um if you are new to this lovely world of the crazy education uh space of interstate school district uh we have the Dresden district net assessment which is going to be coming up in about 45 minutes to or half an hour um where they're going to show you a little bit about like what is the kind of rationale for the net assessment for our middle and high school and then of course there's the the state education tax. So, these things together all generate the tax rate for the town um for the sorry for the schools in the town. I'm not good at this tax thing is kind of weird, guys. Uh and the way

061it's really extra weird is that we um we this is our best guess. So, at this point in time, we know there's lots of things that can change with how tax rates are calculated, not just for schools, but for the town overall. So, we know that. However, we wanted to show numbers that we felt were um conservative and really emphasized really where we think we need we will be going. Um and so between our local school tax uh and our state school tax, we are seeing a projected tax rate um of $99. Um and this is an increase of about 63 cents or about 7.84% 84% um year-over-year for our handover taxpayers. So, with that, I would be remiss to if I didn't get to talk about reflections and next steps. Um so, we talked

062about how how we got to our budget. Um we know that there's pros and cons to any decisions we're making. Um are we think that the pros in our budget proposal are that we are maintaining that current high-quality student experience. We've not initiated any reductions in force. We were able to address the healthcare bill in our current year and we'll able to meet all contractual obligations. Um the cons, these are things we talked about. There's no changes um to the underlying cost structures. We benefited from some one-off changes. We are aware of that. We are going to be moving forward knowing that's the case. Um we haven't been able to invest in infrastructure. That is a thing that is kind of starting now. We are working on figuring out uh what is our multi-year facilities

063investment plan um from a capital improvement perspective. Um so that will be something that we're going to be considering more intentionally next year. Um and we did not in invest in a social worker. I felt like this was important to put on here because if you were following early conversations, this was a big thing that we were very excited about across all of our districts. Um, and given the conversation uh about medical, that ended up being something that every one of our Dresden um and Norwich and Hanover we uh pulled back on this year. Um, tailwinds, headwinds. This is just a way to think about what really was a boon for us this year. Again, some of the things we've already talked about. And then headwinds, we know are things we're be facing next year.

064We know medical costs aren't going away. We know there's a lot of uncertainty. And I think uncertainty is an understatement. I feel like there's probably a word that's more um more uh bigger than this. Uh but there is within federal, within state that we'll be thinking about as well as within the economy, not just education. Uh we know that just another layer of uncertainty. We're heading into contract negotiations next year with our teachers union. So that'll be something um that we'll be facing as well. So there's key next steps. There's a lot of next steps, but there's two that I want to call out. One is there's a budget process committee. It is going to be fast and furious. Um our charge, we start on Monday. Our charge is that uh from the uh SAU

065board last month, we will be bringing a proposal for a um revamped budget process uh for our next school year and we'll be bringing that I believe in the May um time frame at the SAU meeting. Um and then uh obviously I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we would be researching other medical options. If you have questions, if you were able to sit through all this and still not able to ask you what you want to, but you get an idea later. Um, we do have coffee and conversation at the race school this Monday, March 2nd from 7:30 to 8:30. Drop in anytime. If you're online, you want to come and ask us questions, please come then. Um, voting is March 3rd. So, that'll be your last chance to ask questions. And no,

066I am not leaving before showing some really wonderful pictures of all of the kids that we work with. And this is just I love our school. Um, and then thank you for supporting our students. So that's it. Any questions, comments? Uh, I think Carrie Callahan from the Handover Finance Committee wants to say a few quick words while we we're still on this topic. Thank you, Ryan, and thank you, Renee, for an amazing presentation that really was um superb. So, uh job well done. Um so, uh notwithstanding um concern about the tax rate increases well above inflation um and local income growth. Um the Hannover Finance Committee voted unanimously on February 5th to support the proposed FY27 Hannover School Board budget of 16,95654 article 5. Um we recognize the difficulties that you face. This was as

067Deb mentioned not a normal year. Thank you for elaborating on all of the challenges. Uh and we would like to thank um district administrators, school level leadership in navigating the various pressures that you did. You you did a terrific job. We uh we really appreciate it. Um again, just for um benefit of the voters, and this is going to be um a little bit repetitive and not nearly as elegant as what Renee just put forward, but this this year was a little bit like an onion, right? The uh 2.89% increase in expenditures. Well, you had to peel back a few things to recognize that at the school level um reoperating that was about a 5.7% increase, but that was driven by the health care costs. You know, it was kind of this is a little

068bit mind- spinning. Um but we commend um all of you for making the difficult um decisions to balance the interest. As I mentioned, the 356,000 in savings rendered from the um building maintenance reserve fund which was amply funded. therefore didn't need to do that and also um as you pointed out the chips kind of fell in in a favorable way from a budget perspective on some of the uh specific spending needs of um uh special ed etc. So um uh so we first of all thank you for I guess we hadn't appreciated um the um change budget process. You're already moving on that. That was one of our recommendations. We appreciate the very quick action. Um we do feel it's important um that the SAU70 leadership and relevant school boards um do look at structural

069changes do look at um compensation, benefit structure, staffing levels very carefully again to balance interests between maintaining the super education um that's afforded to our students with um also the pressures on those who live in Hannibal have to pay taxes and it's it's a difficult town to live in from an affordability standpoint. Um, let me again, um, you pointed it out, but, um, tax rate up by 7.4% for all the reasons that you put forward, Renee. Thank you. Uh, and again, looking forward to headwinds. Federal and state funding is in a period uh, for schools is in a period of flux. It's unclear if those le levels will be sustained. Healthcare and personnel costs continue to drive expenses. Uh these headwinds again highlight the need for serious consideration of um uh long on a longerterm

070basis of um some of the u actions that can be taken again to balance interests. Um and also thank you again for the changes to the process. That's important. So we'd like to just finalize by um commending all of the efforts of administrators, faculty, and staff in our district's pursuit of educational excellence. So thank you very much. Okay, that brings us uh to uh article six uh to transact any nonsubstantive business that may legally come. Not seeing any. Oh, there is one person. Hi. Hi. >> Uh we need you to talk in front and uh if you could say your name real fast into the microphone. Uh my name is Bruce Franks. I live at uh Five Gibson Road in Hanover. And I believe this information is so well done. The presentation quite good and

071very thorough. The one missing element that the town has and to some extent the school board has is the inflationary effect on the homeowner on their personal property taxes. So when both parties talk about five, six, 7% and the homeowner gets a 20% increase in property taxes. It's complicated to be comfortable with that. I think the overall assessment, retail, real estate assessments are something that could help. If there was some end of that story that taxpayers could understand, all of these budgets would go a lot smoother. I think this one will pass given Hanover's history. Uh we'll support it as a family, but the complication is when we saw a 10% 15% 30% plus increase in property taxes, it makes everyone want to say no, no, no. So the town needs to add this element

072into their conversation. They need to talk about what that means as an implication. And I think it makes the schools, the districts a lot smoother and easier to work with with that element being talked about. I brought it up at last town meeting and it wasn't it wasn't a conversational point. So I encourage thankfully we have some of the town um employees involved people here today to hear my comments. But when I look at uh the work that's done here, I commend you for that. I think it was really well executed. I think the data is clear and I thank you. Thank you, Mr. Franks. Um so anyone else? Uh this concludes the discussion phase of the handover annual meeting. The voting phase takes place from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, March 3rd at

073the Richmond Middle School Gymnasium. May I have a motion to adjourn? and