001Okay, good evening everyone. I am Anthony Dall. I'm the intram superintendent of schools here at the East Ramole Central School District. And tonight I'm here with our assistant superintendent for business, Mr. Eric Stark. And we're going to present to you a little bit of the overview of the 2526 budget presentation tonight. Um, and what's really important is that as we look at, and I have it the wrong way, everybody out there because I have it upside down. If we look at this budget, it really looks at investing in the future of our students. And there's a number of things that um you will see in the budget presentation tonight with regards to um I know there's a lot of questions out there in the public about what's happening, what's going on. You know, we have
002these these monies and what's the district going to do with these monies? and you're going to see um a little bit about what we're doing with the monies and then actually what we actually are able to do um with regards to the 2526 school budget. So, we're looking at of course instruction for students because that's what we do each and every day. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how we're going to prioritize our resources in the district and kind of reallocate some of our resources. And then we're going to look at the different kind of pathways for success both for students academically and so social emotionally. And these are our four domains that we talk about when we talk about improvement here at East Ramapo. We talk about turnaround leadership, talent
003development, instructional transformation, and cultural shift. So, as you will see in this presentation and over the last month and a half, if you've watched me at board meetings, you know that myself and my team of the, you know, our uh assistant superintendent in all the different departments and executive directors, they spoke to a little bit about what their needs are, why they need what they need, and then what how that impacts our budget moving forward. And you'll see in a little while that we're going to be able to do a lot of these things in a very fiscally responsible manner. and myself and Mr. Stark. I'll talk to you a little bit about what that looks like. Um, as I mentioned to you, you can see our long range goals. So, what's really important for
004you to understand out there in the community is that this budget is not just about the 2526 school year. This budget is for years to come. and and and one of the stories that I think we've been talking about is none of us want to see the amount of schools that we have on our our state list of schools and some of the things that we have to do from our set programs and other things. But, you know, one of the reasons why we have where we are right now is that the district really needs to do a better job really establishing a strategic roadmap for what it wants to do not only for next year in the future. And that centers around curriculum, professional development, staff, um because that's really important. When I talk
005about staff, I'm talking about staff of teachers, teacher assistants, aids, monitors, deans of students, instructional coaches, and you'll see that as we go along the way. And what Mr. Stark is going to also tell you a little bit about is the importance of this budget because as you know for the last number of years uh here at East Ramapo we've either had failed budgets or budgets that really don't meet the needs of the students and as a result of that we can't do the kind of projects that we need to do and you'll see in this budget we're going to be able to do some things that we think are really necessary um for our buildings and grounds as well as what we need to do instructionally for our students. And now I'm going to
006turn over to Mr. Stark. He'll take you through a little bit of the tax calculations and then I'll come back in a couple of minutes. Thank you. Thank you so much. So, um, what I'm first going to go over is the maximum allowable tax levy calculation. So, as uh many of you are probably aware, um about 10 or 12 years ago, the New York New York State legislature put into effect the New York State property tax cap, which puts a limit on the amount uh that the tax cap can be increased on an annual basis. Uh and every school district has a formula that it fills out. And uh we've gone over this uh several times at at our board meetings. I'll I'll quickly run through it. um you start with the prior year's levy.
007Um you then multiply it by a tax base growth factor which is uh a number that is set forth by the New York State Office of Real Property Services. Um which um has to do with the amount of real new bricks and mortar growth that has happened in the past year within the school district boundaries. Um that gets you to an adjusted levy. You add back pilots from the prior year which are payments in lie of taxes. Um and then you take out the exclusions that are permitted uh from the prior year which are mainly having to do with capital uh capital expenditures and uh the associated um state aid that comes along with that. At that point, you then multiply the um the adjusted levy by the growth factor, which is capped at 2%.
008The growth factor is based upon um inflation. So inflation is much more than 2%, but the property tax cap doesn't allow you to use a an inflation factor of more than 2%. So this year we're using 2%. Um, you then pull back out the pilots for the coming year to get your tax levy limit before exclusions. You add back in the capital exclusions that you are permitted to and you come up with a maximum levy. Uh, that number is approximately $5 million more than the current year's levy. Uh, or uh an increase of the tax levy that would be permissible of 3.15%. Um, and I'm going to skip ahead here just to discuss that. Um, as you see, this is Oh, I didn't skip ahead far enough. In our draft revenue budget, we are not
009going to that maximum allowable tax levy. We are keeping the tax levy uh flat at 0% increase. And we'll we'll discuss why that is happening uh a little bit further along, but uh it is primarily because the district has been the recipient of large increases in state aid over the past three school years, which allows us to keep the levy flat this year. So, I'm going to back up a little bit now just to talk about the taxes. And the taxpayers in this school district are actually taxed at a rate that is lower than any other school district in Rockland County. Uh this graph shows a 20-year history of all of the school districts within um Rockland County. And uh we we are the red line that on the right side comes down uh below
010everyone else. It's at the bottom. Uh what you see uh if you go back 25 years is that North Rockland's I'm sorry, North Rockland was always the highest, but the East Ramapo school district was right smack in the middle of the all of the school districts in Rockland County in terms of the amount of taxes that they had to pay uh per thousand uh in value of your of your home um over that over this 24-year period. Now, um, East Ranapost taxes are lowest are the lowest in the county and, um, are less than half of what the, uh, or actually about two and a half times lower than the highest district, which is North Rockland, which is that green line on the top. So, getting back to state aid, um, if you've been to
011any of the board meetings or seen any of our presentations, you'll know that the revenue budget for the school district is primarily made up of two different pieces. There are a lot of other little pieces, but the two largest pieces are state aid and um the tax levy. This here is showing you that in the current uh for the for the coming school year, the 24 the 25 26 school year, the district is going to receive $16 million in increases in the various aid categories, most of which is uh found within the foundation aid, which is that first line. You can see the increase there is 12.8 million. So overall there's an increase of 16.19 million in state aid. Um and that is one of the major factors that allows us to have a budget
012that increases but not have to increase the tax levy. So again, we get back to the full revenue budget, which includes that number that I just showed you in the middle column there, um, three rows down of 167 million. And, um, again, the overall budget will increase by 9.6 million. Um, and that is primarily due to the fact that, uh, the state has provided us with a very nice increase in aid. This is um a graphic representation of what has happened to our revenue budget over the past three cycles. And it's very interesting to note that in the 22 23 school year, property tax made up over 60% of the revenue budget. Uh making it obviously the largest po part of the budget because it was more than 50%. Moving forward to the budget that
013we have for 2526, property tax is no longer the largest piece of the revenue pie. It is now 46.7%. Um, and state aid with the large increases that the state has given us over the past 3 years is now in in that first position and makes up the greatest portion of that budget. Um, so actually we're gonna we're gonna go back now. Uh I didn't mention this before, but you have two budgets um and they have to balance. So you have a revenue budget and you also have an expenditure budget and those two budgets have to be equal. So I've gone through all of the items in the revenue budget and now I'm going to turn it back over to Mr. D. Carlo for a few minutes to discuss uh most of the main changes
014that we have to our expenditure budget and those are uh involving um positions and uh people working in different places within the district. So thank you Mr. Stark. So I want to go back to what Mr. Stark talked about before and he talked to you about state aid and um back in the in the fall I had a conversation at a board meeting and I talked about foundation aid and that um East Ramipo had been shortchanged for almost close to 20 years or more. What do I mean by short changed? I mean the following. The state of New York was looking at poverty rates for East Remipole based on the 2000 census. It's because they went and they updated it to 2223 census that we saw a windfall of money in state aid because of
015the the reasoning of this this community changing. Second piece that oh you know the last five years four to five years we've had an influx of students coming in from all around the world many of whom of course are L's you know we are an L district I mean we have over 60% of our kids who are Larners and what happened was we were not coding the students properly and so what was happening is we also were not getting the amount of financial aid that we should have gotten for actually the number of students that were in seats who Larners and thanks to our assistant superintendent, Miss Morales and her team, they've really cleaned up those roles. I think this last year, they had us down the year before for approximately 5,000 students. We actually
016added another two, which is more indicative, and that also helped out with our state aid numbers. So, that's a really important understanding to get a better gauge of why we are in the situation that we are in because that's really important. Next piece. We always look at things shortterm but at East Ramapo you have to look at things over time. So the next couple of slides you are going to see a number of positions that we are looking for. But if you go back to 2010, 2014, there was approximately literally close to two 300 staff members that were let go because of the f the financial issues here at East Ramapo. So many of these positions that we have put in, we're bringing them back. And mind you, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, 15
017years ago, we had many of these positions with 8,000 students. We now have 10,200 students. And that's a really important piece to understand as we move forward. Um, our assistant superintendent for curriculum instruction, um, Dr. Gonzalez has said at a number of meetings recently, we're actually trying to level the district. This is not that we're out there just deciding to bloat this district and putting position after position in. No, no, no, no, no. We're trying to level where we should be. So, you will see in front of you, we're we're looking at a variety of different positions. And these positions will help us throughout our K12 continuum here because we know and the state of New York has said this September of next year there's a big push on the state to say guess what
018we need kids to be able to read and write by the time they finish their experience in third grade. And you need to concentrate on what that looks like. So, in our conversations with our our principles, our assistant principles, our executive directors, directors, assistant superintendent, we know how important that is. And we know to help enhance that instructional practices, we're looking at instructional coaches both in mathematics and in literacy throughout the district. What does that mean? that allows our teachers to have service providers in classrooms with them helping our students better be ready to read and write. Um, and these these are really the core of what we're looking at doing. We're looking at adding teacher assistance in our elementary, especially kindergarten classes to help teachers with students to get them ready because one of
019the things that we struggle with in education is getting students to understand that they have to build stamina. What does that mean, Mr. D Carlo? Building stamina. That means that as they go through each ed each grade level, they have to be able to sit for more time to do the kind of work that needs to be done. done so they can be successful. So, if we can bring teachers assistance in to help with our kindergarten teachers, that will go a long, long way. And then we're looking, of course, at district level clerical transportation, and you've heard me mention this all the time. We are second to New York City in transportation, yet we have a very barebones transportation department. We need to add to that. HR, our HR um department, we add to we
020need to be able to add clerical supports there for that. So you can see a lot of these positions are across the district instructionally, social, emotionally for kids, and in each one of our offices. And then you'll see another series again of some of the things I talked about when it comes to clerical workers, groundskeepers, and the like. I do want to share some really positive information with you. This past Saturday at the district office, we had a um a job fair. It was packed everybody from the time we started at 10 o'clock till we ended at three. We had so many different people in so many different aspects of this institution looking for jobs. Um and it was really enlightening and refreshing to see that people truly want to come here and work in
021East Ramapo. But one of the struggles that you see in front of you with these vacancies is the following. for the last decade, no money, no budgets, contingency. And so at times, even if we could hire, we were hiring at the end of the cycle. Guess what? Everybody was taken and went to other districts. Number two, who's coming to East Ramipo? Those of you who are out there watching this, who's coming to East Ramapo when we we were last year at this time, the board of education, the community thought we were closing down the district. There was no money. So, people aren't going to come to a, you know, a school district where they don't know from year to year if it's going to be open or not or if there's enough money to be
022able to function. So, we want to start to create that difference. And I said this the other day to many of the um applicants that came to see myself and Miss Rusco because we were at the administrator's table. I truly believe with this budget as was presented um by Mr. Stark as zero is fiscally responsible and this really can begin a renaissance in this district. I really truly believe that. I really truly believe that this is that seinal year that we can start to rebuild back where we need to be and then from there we're going to be able to take off. Um but we can only do that with the support of the community. Um and again, you know, one of the things and I'm going to turn it back to Eric in a
023second that's really important about this budget, it's 0% but yet we get to add these positions, but most importantly we also get to do work in our facilities. You know, ladies and gentlemen, and people in the public, if you travel to any of our schools and you look at the condition of our parking lots, it's deplorable. It's a health and safety issue. But because of what I told you 5 minutes ago, and because we are in contingency budgets and zero, okay, Moody's, which oh, by the way, is a third party. They have nothing to do with the state. They have nothing to do with the board. They're a third party and they've said guess what East Ramapo you can't get money lended because you don't pass budgets and if you do it's minimal you cannot
024so we have a junk bond rating so we can't go out and do the kind of work we have so I want to reiterate this at in this budget currently as it stands at zero if it passes we can take $5.5 million and put it towards capital projects that we definitely need, especially our parking lots. That's really, really important to understand because at the end of the day, these are the kind of things that we need to do. So, Mr. Stark, I'm going to turn it over to you to talk a little bit about what we've done and this is really important. This is changing every day when it comes to the federal government and funding. Thank you. So, um I'm actually just going to go back for a second just to talk about all
025these other positions. Um one thing that uh wasn't mentioned was another thing that made it very hard for us to hire um staff members in this district is that the pay that we were paying in most of our contracts was very very low in terms of uh this the other school districts in Rockland County. So, we were below market. Um and during this school year, we have now settled four different contracts. And in those settlements, um the contracts, uh now have wages that are substantially greater, um and not necessarily over market, but at market within Rockland County, which is also going to make it uh easier for us to to bring people on board. uh because we're not going to be struggling with at least the one piece was which would be I can make
026more somewhere else. So uh that's another piece that we've worked on correcting. Uh the last piece in terms of uh additional positions these are these are positions that had been being paid for out of federal grants. Um and one of our goals that you had seen earlier in developing the budget was to move uh grant funded positions back into the general fund budget. Um and um that having been one of our uh goals, uh some things have been happening recently within the federal government and uh the downsizing of the Department of Education uh that have made this uh a very important piece. Um recently we have found out that we will not be receiving some of the federal aid money that was promised through the SSR ARP grant. Um, so any positions that are being
027funded within any of the federal grants are suspect now. We're we're certain we're we're we're in the very early stages of learning about um how the how the federal government is going to be cutting funding to school districts throughout the country. So we're working on that. Um both the assistant superintendent groups and the superintendent groups are meeting later in this week and uh we imagine that that will be one of the big topics of conversation as we move forward there and as we have more information about that we'll be sharing it with everybody. Um I'm sorry the we had we had a slide here um that was talking about what are we going to do in order to hire all of these positions. It's obviously uh pretty daunting when you're looking at a number of
028positions to hire that have uh that total more than 200 um especially when we've talked about the fact that we have uh that we're not properly staffed in human resources. Uh but we have put together a really good plan as uh Mr. D. Carlo mentioned earlier um we are holding several job fairs of our own. We are attending job fairs um that others are having including um some universities that train teachers and and get them certified. We're also creating uh new relationships with some of the local universities uh to help uh get some of their uh graduating students to learn a little bit more about East Ramo and um create some some partnerships so that we can um hopefully bring some of those graduating students on board here. We're also putting together hiring committees uh
029which include many of the um central office administrators as well as building level administrators um to create uh different areas where we can divide up into different groupings um how we can hire some of the different areas. So, for example, you might have one hiring committee for um teaching assistants for the kindergartener classrooms. Um and you might have another committee that's going to be focusing more on central office um directors and executive directors. So, um we've put a pretty good plan together and uh we're very excited about the prospects, especially when we saw the great turnout that we had um at our job fair this past Saturday. So that moves us on to the final piece which is the expenditure budget. And you can see here um again the budgets uh from each year for
030revenues and expenditures are always going to be equal to each other. So our expenditure budget here is increasing by $9,640,000. Um and there are a couple of things that I want to point out. Number one, you'll see that the general education and special education lines are going down. This is not because we have removed um teachers or um supplies or anything from those lines. This is created by um us correcting the budget uh where things had been miscoded in prior years. Um, we we've talked about this several times during board meetings during the school year that we would be taking the opportunity this year to put things in the right places where they're supposed to be according to the coding system that's put forth for by the state of New York for school districts. Um,
031most of our or a lot of our multilingual education um expenditures were either sitting within the general ed or special ed areas. So, those have all been corrected. The other two large decreases that you see the decreases are I have the red numbers in the right column are uh the first is transportation. So you can see that uh we have a decrease in the amount budgeted for transportation of just under $10 million. And that's very important to note because uh there have been many conversations, many complaints from board members, community members that the transportation budget was overly inflated in prior years. We've looked at that very carefully. Um we have agreed with that and we have rights sized that budget and reduced it to where we believe um it will be coming out um relatively
032uh that we will spend most of the budget whereas much of that transportation budget in the last two years although it was much higher wasn't really being spent. Um, in addition, um, in the debt service area, in prior years, we've, um, budgeted approximately $2 million for revenue anticipation notes. These are, um, this is a category that is in a budget when the school district needs to borrow money to um, get through the summer months before the tax levy is collected. Um, and with the fact that we have a healthy fund balance now, which again is a very good thing, um, we no longer have to budget the $2 million that were earmarked for the revenue anticipation notes. Um, so when you when you look at those few items, um, the transportation the decrease in transportation
033and debt service and the fact that the, uh, overall budget has increased by 9.6 6 million. What that tells you is that overall we are able to with within this budget increase spending on the educational portion of our program by over $20 million. And we're doing that all without increasing the tax levy which is very important. The other part um that you see there that we also want to highlight is that last line of interfund transfers which Mr. D. Carlo just mentioned a few minutes ago and th those dollars will be used towards doing capital work um on parking lots as he said also some boilers. We have two boilers that are over 50 years old in this district and we would hope to replace those um using those funds as well. So that gets
034us through the uh the major pieces of the expenditure budget. We have one more representation of our expenditures in a graph form. And the interesting part here is that in most school districts, you'll see three pieces of that pie that are that are much larger than the rest. And those are special education, general education, and employee benefits. Here we have a fourth. So we have a very large piece. The orange piece there is transportation budget. And because we have such a large um population of non-public students that we must transport, um we have a much larger uh transportation slice of our pie than you would find in most other school districts. But um for the most part, those other pieces uh are relatively would be would be relatively similar if you were looking at another
035school district in Rockland County or in the lower part of the state. And I think, yep, that's getting us to the end. So, back to Mr. Darla. Thank you, Eric. Uh, and in closing, I I really think this is important. I want to thank Mr. Stark. I want to thank building administrators. I want to thank central office because here's what we did. This is all based on a zerobased budget. We didn't do what has been done in the past. Take the current year and then roll it over x amount of percentage. We started from ground zero and that's really important for the public to understand that there was a lot of effort and transparency that went into this as I mentioned to you at the beginning uh of u what the each one of the
036assistant superintendents reported out on to the board. Eric has a document, I think it's 118 pages of the budget properly coded, which was not done in the past, with notes as to why lines went up or down. So, I mentioned this before, you know, we are really wanting to provide the public with the most accurate information, transparency around all that we're doing because that's the most important piece moving forward. So over the next couple of weeks, um you know, you'll be hearing more from us because the the board has to adopt the budget number by April 22nd. And then we'll be sending home a variety of different newsletters and information out there. Myself and Eric are going to be going throughout East Ramo to present the final budget to the community. But here's the really
037most important thing, and this is what really can be frustrating, and I mentioned this to you because I think it's important. The past is the past. And I've said this before. I I can't give you back the past. We can only work on the future. And I hear a lot of things being an interim superintendent here that, oh, this is just the way it is, Mr. D. Carlo. This is what happens. You know, people feel that, you know, there's no sense in going out to vote because this is what's going to happen. That's the wrong attitude. Every year is a new year and you need, if you can, to exercise your right to vote, to voice your opinion on if you think the budget that we are presented is fiscally responsible, right? Those are the
038things you have to ask when you go into that booth. Is the budget I'm voting on physically responsible and does it meet the needs of our students so they can be successful, be ready for career and college? That's what it's all about because here at East Ramapur, there's a lot of stuff that gets thrown in with that and that conflates what's important for what's best for kids. So again, I thank you those of you who are in the audience who came out tonight to listen. I thank those of you who are home, you know, watching this. Um, again, thank you to, uh, the team for all your work and dedication. Uh, and we hope that come um, May 20th, you come out and, uh, you voice your opinion on the budget. So, thank you all
039very much for tuning in tonight. I thank you. Have a great evening.