001All right. >> Good evening everyone again and welcome to this work session of the East Rockway of Education. I'd like to call this meeting to order at 6:04 p.m. Can we please stand for the pledge of allegiance? >> I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> [clears throat] >> Okay. Uh, first on the agenda is old business. Mr. G. Tomaso. >> Yes. Uh, I'd like to address an issue um that happened at the junior senior high school on January 27th. We were having a heating issue in some of the classrooms when we uh got back from our snow day and we were able to determine that it was an issue with
002a hot water pipe that was not pumping heat into some of the classrooms. So, the building administration had to adjust on the fly and get the students and the teachers in classrooms with heat. Uh, the tech the company that came in was able to fix it early into the evening on Friday night, early Saturday morning. Uh, but I want to take a minute to uh thank the teachers uh for their professionalism. I know it was um unpredictable circumstances that mother nature threw at us. Uh but they remained professional and did their best to continue instruction. So I want to thank the teachers and also Mr. Van Ward and Mr. Dailyaly for expediting that process. Obviously, we know it was a really cold week and a bad time for uh pipe to break, but we're glad
003to say that we're able to fix it and we only have one isolated problem left in the building uh that we are working on at the moment. Oh, and I'd also like to thank the monitors, too, because there was a cold in the hallways, too. Uh so, a big thank you to everyone for being a good team. So, uh that's it for all business. All right. Thank you. Um, okay. Next on the agenda, are there any questions from any uh of the board of of from from the uh minutes of the regular uh uh regular board meeting? >> No. No. No question. >> Okay. Um, how about questions on the board agenda for next week's meeting? >> No question. >> Okay. >> Um, all right. Next on the agenda, budget work session. Uh budget work
004session presentation number one. Mr. Van Wart >> Thank you everybody. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about project development overview of our process. Um, I hope for many of folks in the room, you've heard of this before or I think it's important to start there so that any first- timers watching this video understand exactly what goes into development of school budget. We'll talk a little bit about the uh governor's executive budget proposal for state aid uh which came out at the middle of January. Um, we can talk a little bit about our revenue sources for the upcoming school budget and uh I will share some information about the tax levby cap forecast for the year. So when we develop the school budget, our primary objectives to ensure the budget supports educationally sound,
005transparent, fiscally responsible expenses, maintain always strive to maintain our existing programs and where we can provide for enhancements, do the best on behalf of our students. Um provide for a healthy and safe learning environment and align our uh our expenditures with our strategic plan. So before I before I start talking about where we're going, I'd like to start with where we where we were and kind of highlight some of the some of the achievements that we have supporting the 2025 26 budget. A couple things I just wanted to highlight for the community. We did complete our energy performance capital project um which upgraded our LEDs and our lighting throughout the entire district. to all three buildings. Um both interior, exterior, all lighting was updated to latest LED technology which allows us to get some efficiencies
006in terms of our electrical bill. We've added motion activated license lighting smart controls to most of our instructional spaces as well as offices. So it's kind of like you ever walk down the freezer aisle in the supermarket. Um the lights start turning on as you walk past because they have motion sensors. They turn off and there's nobody around there. yet another energy efficiency measure that we have put in place. Done significant work with our vendor to weatherize our building envelopes. So our doors, new weather stripping, our sopets around our buildings, any additional insulation in there, all to prevent heat that's being generated inside the building from being able to go outside of the building. Um, couple other things that we did with the energy performance contract. We also added some smart relief dampers. So when
007it's hot out, the dampers open up automatically in the roof, let up the hot air. When it's cold, they close to keep the heat in. Um, valve insul in insulations and pipe insulations, just another efficiency measure to prevent heat from being lost from the pipes. At Rain Avenue, we added two brand new boilers and burners, which um, which is a significant capital expenditure. With the energy performance contract, we were able to do that in a way that made it cost neutral to the taxpayer. And then Center Avenue, we were able to enhance our steam traps across the entire building. Center Avenue is our only building that has steam heating, steam trap. Um, valves and and receptacles are what keeps the, uh, the heat inside of the actual steam units. Couple other things that we've done
008this year, um, districtwide, we updated our, um, our bus radio and our security radio system. So we actually put repeaters on the roof of the high school which allows us to be able to talk cross building between our security guards and also be able to talk directly with our buses as our buses and our bus drivers when they're on the road. We've even tested it out and we can reach as far out as Westbury one of our bus drivers as a Bosey's route. He drops some of our students off at Barry Tech. We've been able to talk to him from East Rockway all the way over there which is great safety measure for the district. Um, at the high school, we did some significant um, cosmetic work in the uh, in the hallways. We upgraded
009our uh, lockers. We refurbished them to a nice black color. You can see the picture here. And we repainted all corridors with some East Rockway colors. So, you see phase one was the lockers. Phase two was the actual corridor being painted. And that's the final product right there across our entire building. Um for for for 256 27 something that we're contemplating is to complete that project with the um the stairwells which we have weren't able to touch last year uh the priority was the hallways and the funding for that. This year we're to see if we have funding to complete the rest of the work. Also in the junior senior high school we upgraded some cabinetry and storage space and refrigerators and fax room. Um and then we as we've talked uh previously about we
010have Koopa restoration project that's ongoing right now. We actually just took delivery of the windows that are going to go into the renovated Koopa. They're sitting in a container in the back of the high school waiting for the weather to improve. At Center Avenue, we upgraded the allpurpose room projector screen. Um it's pretty old projector in uh screen that was in there. It was held up with a pulley system. Now we have an actual automated system that allows that screen to go up and down. And then Rainbow Avenue, uh, we're going to be doing a refresh project at the main office that's scheduled to conduct be conducted and implemented over the February break. Just a couple other highlights from the 2526 budget. We added a humanities director, which gives K through 12 alignment of our
011instruction. Um, for our for our humanities block at the junior senior high school, we added a special education teacher and a district-wide. We added a part-time an additional part-time occupational therapist to supplement the full-time occupational therapist we added in the previous year. So now we have 1.5 FTE OT services which allows us to meet all of our mandates. Um this past year we also added the full-time bus driver to our uh to our staff. Uh what this gave us the ability to do was to take back some of the Boseies routes for our career and technical education students uh that were previously serviced through Boseies. There were a lot of challenges with those routes that we had in the past. I'm happy to say that with now bringing back in district, we feel that we've
012um we've been able to stabilize some of those concerns that we had in the past from the from the community. Uh we incorporate we uh rolled out a summer boost program last year for our elementary school kids and um at the junior senior high school, Mr. Schaefer and and the administration team work really hard to upgrade student the student broadcast studio. Just quick synopsis of what the actual budget development cycle looks like. We started in November. This is when all the budget materials come out from my office to all of our budget builders. Um they get the instructions from me in terms of what um what I'm looking for in terms of submissions come back. Uh that happens through the end of December. That's the deadline for them to submit all their documentation for their
013budgets back to me. Then we have meetings one-on-one to go through um some of the submissions. At this time, I'm also projecting out our salaries, our retirement system contributions, our district-wide expenditures, [clears throat] but not that are not uh department specific uh insurance costs, contractual costs, OC services, etc. January, it's usually around the time when we finish complete all those meetings with our department um budget builders and we start reviewing our staffing.