001Second. All in favor. Now return to regular session. We all stand for the pledge of allegiance. America to the republic for it stands one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Okay, that brings us to 5.01. Do I have a motion? So move second. Second. All in favor? opposed. Motion carries. Um, we are going to open the floor for Oh, we're doing Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Freeze. We're going to do a presentation first. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for your time tonight. Prepare reserves are funds set aside to cover the cost for repairing components that wear out like those in sidewalks, steps, retaining walls, doors, windows components. More specifically, repairs are designed to make it less of a burden on the district's operating and capital budgets to ensure repairs are completed timely. By completing
002repairs timely, the district avoids more costly capital projects in the road. Emergency repairs may disrupt classes and ensures a safe and comfortable learning environment. Tonight, we are asking you for 1,221,000 from our repair and reserve account to make the repairs that are delineated in the in the public notice and on the following slides. Good enough. We're going to do some projects that I just mentioned sidewalks city walls in Alexander Hamilton High School. Next slide. Also some of the things we want to take care of and also Carl Dixon Dixon. So if there's no question, Jim, just one question for you. So the um the numbers that we have are budget numbers and if the actual now comes in less than that, then that money would return to the reserve. Is that correct? Correct. Yes, that
003is correct. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you. Um we're going to open it up for a 20-minut session for three minutes in person. Um if there is any questions about this um specifically this because we'll have our regular meeting um where we'll have um another session where people can question on other items. So if anyone has any specific questions about this, now's the time. You won't. Hello. Good evening, lady. Excuse my voice. Allergies are getting the best of me. Um, so I just want to express my appreciation for addressing many of the structural uh concerns within the district that have been longstanding and directly impacting our students. Um, it's my understanding that there are three areas in our current B budget that align with these critical repairs. Um, the 2016 capital reserve line, the
0042024 capital reserve line, and the repair reserve line. Um, in last year's budget, the capital reserve seemed to hold about $20 million. Um, and about $9.6 million were um was allocated to projects such as the HVAC, the roof repairs, classroom ventilators, PA systems, the roof that fits in. Um, and so now we're considering the 1.2 million. And so, um, my questions are what is the current balance of the capital reserve? uh so we can know where it stands before uh the money is um uh taken away. Uh and if the $1.2 million is withdrawn, what's the remaining balance? Um and then lastly, what are the long-term implications of depleting the reserves? Is the intention to bring the reserves down to uh zero? Um and if so, what are the longstanding uh implications of that for
005our students? um that may have an impact well after those of you who are on the deis um are are still here. Um additionally, I'd like to request an ongoing status update for the capital reserves um moving forward. For instance, last year's budget. So, let me just stop you there. This is just for this project. Yes. Yes. You can the capital the capital reserves and what we did, we can you can ask that in the next section. So if it's not specific to this particular item then save the other comments for after you can certainly ask those questions afterwards. So if you can just stay to this lane because this is specific to only this and then we're going to move on to the regular meeting. So with the repair reserve that's what this is
006pertaining to the repair reserve. So what is the what's in what's in that line already and what would be the balance once the 1.2 is taken away. The 1.2 is not being taken away. It's just being approved to use if we need it. And anything that's not used, like Justin just said, Mr. P's answer is that that will stay within that fun. Um it's not a withdrawal of $1.2 million. It's as we need it, we can draw down from it for the particular uh items that Mr. F just said. And where is it coming from? The repair. The repair. Correct. So once it's drawn out, it's not once it's utilized for the repairs. Once it's utilized for the repairs, what what will be remaining? So we're going to have a proposed budget uh presentation and
007I will be addressing uh the reserves. So that will be something I address during the presentation today. Ju just add a little more to that too, Lydia. The um previous to last year when we closed the last we actually put a significant money in reserves. that reserve had, I believe, on average between$100 and $300,000. So, the district really never carried much money in its building reserve line. And you can always check the status of those uh reserves by looking at the audited financial statements and they're posted on the website. So, the most recent one would be the 2425, excuse me, the 2324 audited financials. That'll show you the current balance of all the reserve lines and then whatever happens during the course of this year will be reduced from that. Okay. So, it's money that's
008moved for repairs specifically. Correct. from the capital. No, the capital is completely separate. These are these are these are specific repairs in kind replacement. So if it's a AC unit that broke down, it's the AC unit that gets fixed. A capital reserve would be used for something like putting a whole new system into the building proposition. These are these are steps that are broken. We're not putting a new staircase in. We're repairing those treads, those steps. So it's repairing existing items, but it's not considered a maintenance item. So like cleaning carpets is maintenance, but possibly replacing the subfloor would be a repair to shore that up. So that's the difference between maintenance, repair, and the capital improvements. Thanks for the clarification. And so funds go into the reserve that um repair reserve for in the
009instance like we need it. Now the the funds are the funds move to the the reserves based on the the uh approval of the board when there are monies to allocate. So the district can only maintain a 4% unassigned fund balance. So if we run a good year where there's a surplus, the district is allowed to allocate that additional money in separate reserves, capital is one, building maintenance is another, and there's a number of other reserves that we're legally allowed to maintain for unforeseen circumstances. Since we are only allowed to maintain a 4% on the type of fund balance, which for the district is about 1.7 very small small number, I'll save the other question connected to the last for the next segment. Thank you. Hi, thank you. Um, just a quick question. Um, so
010let me just make sure I clarify and understand what you're explaining. So, not all of these funds that are being allocated to this reserve bank account fund is going to actually be it's a repair repair reserve. It's not actually going to be used. Okay. So, this is like uh for instance, if these repairs are needed, that's what this list is. Yeah. We don't publicly tell you that we want to fix these things and utilize as a repair fund, we can't legally touch it. So, this is a notice, a hearing notice to say we need this money released in the case that we need to as Mr. Freeze sees these items that need to be replaced. The pictures he gave you there, broken steps, broken them. Those are things that need to be repaired. So, they
011are actually going to be repaired. Correct. They are going to be Yes. over time. It's not like tomorrow we're going to say we approved it and all of a sudden you're going to see 20 different crews out here working. No, but I thought there was a Yes. Yeah. I thought there was some sort of estimate or some based on an estimate. But then it's it's it's going to happen over time. Over time. So, okay. Because like for instance, the HVAC unit um I think it was installed here in high school in 2019. So it's pretty much new. So are there repairs needed now for that system or you just in case there are repairs needed and putting So everything that is allocated in this repair reserve is to fund all of the projects that need
012to be repaired. So right now what for example here we have identified 1.221,000 worth of repairs. These are repairs that are not anything that we would say is a capital project where we go out for proposition, which is what I think the district is used to. What we're saying is is that the repair reserve is for one-time use only for things that need to be repaired, not maintained, not replaced, but they need to be repaired. And it's one time only which is why we use the requesting the board of education to vote on a resolution to expend these uh funds for the repair reserve. The reserve fund is really for what we feel are important and maintenance related repairs that have long been standing here that we need to take care of. And so instead
013of having that those funds go through our general funds and our general budget, we're requesting that the board have us use to extend the funds from the repair reserve so that we can begin to fix these issues. Okay. I just going to highlight it because I think I think what I was what you might be getting at is these have been identified as defects. These are not maybe they are defects. The the budget amount to come up to that 1.2 two some odd million are not based on actual invoices at the time this time. They're just based on a good budget number of what staff or maybe our consultants think it's going to take to to fix these items. But but again these items definitely control yes by control and all that stuff that definitely
014that needs yes. Thank you. Okay. If we have no more, we're going to go to um ask for adjournment. Do I have a motion? Motion. Second. Second. All in favor? Carries. Okay, we're going to open up our regular meeting. Um, roll call vote, please. President, Vice President Lazama here. Trusty Dino here. Trusty Hec here. Trusty Phillips here. Superintendent Yang here and district clerk here. Okay, with that we're going to go to the student leazison report which is item number three. Love the shirt. Congratulations. In case before you start. All right. In case everyone doesn't know, um, he's got a full ride to Harvard, real proud of you. And, uh, that's awesome. Now, I'll let you go. Uh, hi everyone. Welcome to the April student report. Uh, so for starters, we finished our winter dance. It
015was pretty successful. We had a lot of students come. Everybody had fun. We had pizza. Overall, pretty successful dance. Uh, as for upcoming events, we have a rec night planned for tomorrow in the gym. Great opportunity for students to uh play games and de-stress from the schoolwork as quarter 3 winds up. Quarter 3 winds down. We're going to have volleyball and basketball in the gym open to all high school students. Uh, we also are planning with the PTSA a collaborative movie night. We are planning on showing Moana and two and it'll be open to all students in the district and uh for this movie night we plan on having it outside. So we already spoke with Mayor Williams and we're going to borrow the town's uh outdoor screen. Uh so we hope to see everyone
016at the outdoor movie night. Uh in addition, we have our middle school dance currently set for May 2nd. Theme is glow in the dark. And that's about it. Awesome. Thanks. And if I didn't mention it, a full ride to Harvard. Well done, man. One thing I forgot to add. Uh, a lot of the students of Hamilton wanted to ensure that the calendar was amended to include the snow days that we missed. All right. Thank you. Okay. Um uh item number four, we're going to go to PTSA update. Good evening everyone. My name is Anelise Valerio, PTSA president. I have some updates for you all this evening. All righty. So, if you are a PTSA member, you recently received a member hub notification and that member hub not had various Google forms on it. One of
017which was to sign up as a volunteer for April, May, and June events. Um the events that were hoping to lift include the movie night in collaboration with the student government, teacher appreciation, um in addition to a mental health awareness event, and a multicultural event in June. On Saturday, April 5th, we had our first strategic planning meeting in preparation for the next academic year. We want to make sure that we end the school year knowing what events we're going to be supporting initiatives for the academic year to come. So, we had one meeting to start strategizing what those events would be, what they would look like, where they would be, and what type of support we would need. And we're going to finalize that calendar in June uh in May, May 31st. And then the
018hope is that in June we connect with school building and district leaders to talk about some of the ideas that we came up with as a committee and fine-tune logistics, what's feasible, what's not feasible, what can we do. Um, and we really hope it's a collaborative effort between PTSA members, executive committee, uh, and school building leaders, uh, so that we could, uh, finune our calendar before we enter the summer. And we're not planning as we go. PTSA executive committee elections are in May. So, in that member hub message that was also shared on Facebook, there's a link to a Google form where you could throw your name in the to nominate someone or be part of the election committee. We are listing a senior scholarship. Right now, we only have one applicant. A project has
019gone out. So, we'll continue to promote um our scholarship and hope that we get more applicants from Hamilton. We want to make sure that we give a multiple of scholarships to our graduating seniors. And that's it. Have a great night. Thank you very much. Okay, we're going to go to superintendent report. Good evening everyone. Uh before I do my presentation tonight, I just have a few updates. I want to uh announce our valadictorian and saludiatoran for this year. And our valadictorian also happens to be Matteo D. Bart Berto. So, not only the student, but uh he's also the valadictorian this year. And our saludiatoran is Ay Simon. Um Matteo, as you just heard, will be attending Harvard in the fall, and he plans on studying computer science and artificial intelligence. Uh for Ellie, she will
020be attending the New York School of Visual Arts, where she plans to study 3D animation. So, congratulations We congratulate our Hamilton students who gave an incredible performance of Mean Girls 2. I want to thank Miss Doolittle and Miss Sampelle. And our students, if you don't know, they designed all of the uh sets from scratch. So, everything is handmade by our students. if you uh had the opportunity to attend uh this past weekend. I was mesmerized by it. Um our students also consider their own costumes and their design, the lighting, all aspects of a full theatrical production. Uh our students did a phenomenal job uh for Mean Girls 2. And our students and our actors, our actors and actresses also practiced for weeks. They memorized lines. They also had to sing songs with full heart. Uh
021I cannot tell you enough it was a tremendously rewarding experience to be an audience member. Uh I want to applaud our staff, students and faculty who assisted even from ticket sales and other behind the scenes. So we thank you uh for wonderful production and we look forward to next year's production. The Alice E. Grady Student Council Executive Board was sworn in at the Village Hall on Wednesday, April 2nd. And we give a kudos to Dr. Hamilton, Miss Cruz, Miss Barbosa, and Miss Nunes who coordinated with Mayor Williams to arrange for Justice Rosalie Tannis to swear them in. While the entire community, this was so phenomenal, the entire event was streamed online so that uh parents as well as u members of the executive board for village hall were in attendance and students could also watch
022um from their classrooms. So, we thank Mayor Williams and we thank Justice um Rosalie Tannis also for hosting uh our students and making sure that uh they were legal. Uh field trips, they're back. They're back. Uh so Dixon went on their field uh first field trip to the Greenberg Nature Center. And what was beautiful was that I had seen all of the lessons in the classrooms uh from the Ark uh reading units and then our students were able to go to the Greenberg Nature Center to apply what they had learned through experiential learning. So that was an exciting experience for them. And then our first graders, they're going to the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Connecticut tomorrow. So, uh, Dixon students are excited and we're so excited to resume field trips. Um, and we thankfully, uh,
023thank our partnership with our parents and our teachers who are so critical to bringing the real world to life from our classrooms. So, we talked a little bit about the repair reserves tonight and we have a capital projects update. So, the district is nearing the completion of several technology upgrades as a part of the capital project. I want to thank uh Mr. Yap as well as the entire technology team that has been working diligently. We have had um employees in our buildings from 3 to 11:00 p.m. every night for this project. If you notice, you will see our new PA systems. They're right up on the walls on on the side of the walls. You'll see one there and you'll see one there. And we will have the board um take a walk with us
024so you can experience it. It does feel like you're in a very very fancy uh um airport or aisle 9 and a grocery store. When you hear the announcements, it's fabulous. And again, Mr. Yak, thank you so much for your work. We heard that this was a dream of the making for many years for our district. and we thank you so much, Mr. Yap. Uh, we also have wiring that's going to be completed. Um, and so there's quite a few things from the capital projects updates that you will see also in our phone system. So, our phone system upgrades, and I'm not sure if we can visually see one in this room. There is one right there. So, uh, we have a new phone already installed. So you'll have a new PA system and a
025new phone system and that will be at levels of speeds on the internet that will allow us to have voice over IP. So again, this is Mr. Yap and we thank him for this leadership. Also, we want to just uh point out this is a a project that happened over the summer, but I don't know if it has been emphasized as a part of the capital projects. And we want to thank uh Mr. Freeze and Mr. D'Angelo who did a presentation about 2 months ago to go over the capital projects. But um in process of preparing for the budget, we have learned that the uh parking lot project that you now have where I heard that before there were some potholes and different things completely repaired and thank you Mr. Freeze for that leadership. um
026has come under budget and as a result of that those funds will be uh sent right back into the capital repair reserves um capital project reserves. Um we have also received green lights and we thank NYED our HVAC projects. Uh we put those plans in and there's typically uh about a 3 to four months wait time for the state of education. Our HVAC and our roof projects have been approved by SEDD. So what is the next process? The next process is is that we are looking to uh either uh go to biders for this project either through a cooperative list that is provided through the state of New York through the government or if those bid lists do not come back where we feel as though we can recommend them to the board, we will
027be going out to bid. So, what does that mean for our district this summer? This summer, unfortunately, it will mean that uh Grady and Dixon will not be accessible at all. We will be having roofing projects done at both schools as well as we will be having HVAC units being replaced in 16 classrooms with brand new unit ventilators. So, we are excited about this. One thing we have learned is that our architect has designed an HVAC system using a BRF system that will allow when available with our relationship with Con Edison and transformers those 16 units can be turned on as air conditioning as well. So, more to come, but we just wanted to give an update in those areas. And then I'll transition to the update uh for the proposed budget. Uh we have
028put those line item budgets on our board docs for anyone who would like to see them and the presentation will also be there as well. So, I I'm going to move to the deis over there. So I just want to just add to the capital project. While Dixon and Grady will not be accessible, there is a summer camp that is going to be run in place of at Dixon and at Grady, it will be run here at Hamilton. So we will have a bevy of different summer programs. Our high school will also be having some classes for regions and so forth. But the summer camp that we are in partnership with the village will be hosted here at the uh at Hamilton High School. So everything will be happening in uh this building as well
029as all personnel in Dixon and at Grady and district office will all be in Hamilton this summer. So the title of this budget is excellence in action and it is student focus. Everything in this budget that we are attempting to do and asking the board to adopt tonight has come from months of preparation. I want to acknowledge our administrative staff here tonight and I want them to just kind of stand for a second because they are heroes in this process and working. So if they can stand so we could give them a round of applause. They have been uh the leaders in thinking through our systems, our district and how are we going to be student focused and so we want to present a budget that we have spent the month of March. We did
030a preliminary Saturday Saturday presentation and we feel confident um in what we are proposing as a budget for the 2526 year um and we are hoping that uh you will accept our recommendations our budget priorities uh when we first started and as you craft the budget and I want to thank Dr. Ryan who could not join us tonight. However, he was the genius to the beginnings of this budget. He started in July to work on this budget, but it actually started the year prior when he was here. And then uh he handed the baton to me in uh January. And these are the priorities he had as well as we believe these are the same priorities we wanted to maintain in this budget. So we wanted to be fiscally responsible. We want to continue all
031support for all academic co-curricular and extracurricular programs. This includes many of the programs that we started as a result of the SR and ARP funds. We want to continue that. We want to continually upgrade safety and security issues. As you just heard, our PA system, which will be an unbelievable upgrade to safety. We want to continually build on a technology infrastructure that meets all of our instructional, administrative, and business needs. When we upgrade the internet, when we upgrade to voiceover IP, we will have an ability now to be at a 21st century highway level. We want to also, as we saw tonight, and again, we thank Mr. freeze to continually have a facility's improvement mindset that it is not one and done but it's a continuous improvement process. We also want to address cost deficiencies
032and we want to be as transparent as possible. So here are the big highlights and we did go through these in depth and what we do recommend that if there's any questions that anyone has this presentation tonight also has at the end the budget highlights and I I shared this on Saturday when we did the presentation sometimes I'd like to read the end of the book so if you were to not hear anything tonight we want everyone to walk away with some of the first two slides which are highlights. This budget complies with the tax levy cap. We do not go over. We do not ask for more. We are going to maintain favorable class sizes, sections, and staffing levels for all existing programs. We are going to meet all contractual obligations, including all staff
033benefits. I want to just note that we also have on the agenda tonight our teaching assistance association contract. That means that those obligations are being in this budget as well. We want to continue our investments in ARC reading reveal math science 21 as well as PNW Bose social studies as well as continually look into the science of reading to strengthen our literacy programs. We're also going to add 22 new courses at the high school level. We also want to introduce American Sign Language. We are going to amplify support for athletics, co-curricular activities, enrichment programs. uh we want to continue to build um an extracurricular uh lens to the experience of our students. For example, we have an existing relationship with WJCSC and they have awarded they were awarded a grant through New York State that
034they want to partner us with us to extend the day after school for students with enrichment. That is a grant that is exceeding $200,000. That is an amplification in this budget highlight. We also want to create some additional staffing positions. We have a district registar state reporting that we would like to recommend a Hamilton art teacher. We only currently have one art teacher and we would like to expand the opportunities for students to have different levels of art um uh opportunities especially those that are through the computer. We have uh a need for Hamilton bilingual subject area teacher in the area of social studies as well as a Hamilton bilingual school counselor. We want to establish a new kinesthetic lab at Dixon to amplify reading and literacy. We know that a multi-ensory approach to reading
035is going to go uh leaps and bounds for our students uh because we know that students have different ways in which they