001okay thank you so it's okay you can talk we're not in the library we're going to wait for some board members to come up here all right so you can you can breathe all right you can have your playground voices right now [Music] for our parents thank you so much for coming out and bringing your uh children with you we're gonna do three uh we're gonna do a couple housekeeping items mr acker's going to call the meeting to order dr vitale's going to make sure that everybody's here we're going to salute the flag and then the show is all yours okay and we can do all that in about a minute and 30 seconds [Music] all right ladies and gentlemen and musicians welcome to the african heights uh school board meet work session for april
0026th we're so happy you're all here and if we can please have roll call mrs mrs mr abdullah mr azar here mrs henderson here mrs karam here mr merdinski here mr robson here mrs tierney here miss mr acker here mr fleming is absent okay can we please turn and pledge the flag i pledge allegiance to america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice guys that was the best pledge we've ever had thank you okay we turn the turn the uh the meeting over to you guys [Music] [Applause] my [Music] [Applause] now so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] so [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] a small token of our appreciation [Music] you guys did an amazing job
003and thank you so much so noah bowden congratulations thank you noah oh here you want to hand them out mirabella brown imogen casp zenia clark oh yes quinn davison joseph ding dylan ferrell ronan farrell [Music] and i'm gonna do my very best well i'm probably not gonna get it vid gotti vid say your full name for me it's beautiful annie henderson gianna hobbs mauve horahane maeve i'm sorry i'm sorry maeve horahane mackenzie jenkins quentin karam edin kemmerer eden i'm sorry tanner klingel dimitri luciani paige mellet milo my lot wasn't right on either of them i'm sorry alina mitchell brady navalenco well you're welcome molly meats ainsley pace mckenna peters thomas piverato [Music] delena reese rachel reagan [Music] rose for cindy nadir ready kalyn sabou say it again kale in kaolin dominic sunny safarenko i'm really
004trying guys i'm sorry ronan schlink thank you thomas cincus ernesto vazquez vasquez michael vasquez [Music] alex wagner ellie warner [Music] [Applause] and it very much so is gemma warby and i got like 40 of the names correct so thank you guys so much for coming out we do appreciate it [Music] uh you should not be doing if you would like to move the chairs up you can it's okay thank you mr sheehan mr shannon thank you very much mr sheehan thank you very much after i go i'm i'm going to do my yeah i'll do my yeah exactly so to be two back-to-back presentations no no my display is all right so for for those of you out in the audience we i'm just using the microphone because we purchased it um you're going to
005have the benefit of we're going to have two presentations i'm going to do my regular presentation on academic performance this is the last one in the series and then mr mirabelli is going to do the budget and then we'll open it up to public comment okay and because there are really no action and discussion items we're just probably most likely going to have one public uh comment session unless someone at the end of the meeting has has further comments they'd like to make all right dr schaefer all right the floor is yours thank you very much uh slide two so i'm just going to uh bring everybody back a little bit to february where we really started to review our students performance data and at every presentation i reminded all participants that this is just
006one data point that we're looking at and when we think about the outcomes relative to student performance there are many contributing factors and this is just one benchmark that we look at in february we talked about our english language arts performance in march we talked about mathematics and some of our post-secondary data specifically where our students are at after they graduate four five six years out which brings us to april and i'll be talking about science social studies and and world language and that uh wraps it up for us um the data that we'll be looking at would be grades four through eight uh in in pssa and science and i have to pause here just to remind people that science is the only area where we we test in spans in pennsylvania so it's
007grades four eight and then biology in the high school and if a student was being assessed in fourth grade that means they're also being assessed on some of the science that they learned in third grade and second grade and so on and the same thing holds for eighth grade and then i'll talk about the social studies and world language ap scores so the first slide that i'm going to be showing is our 4th and 8th grade pssa science results and what you'll notice in red are the percentages of uh basic and below basic and green proficient and advanced and the barometer that we use in pennsylvania is proficient in it and advanced and as you can see uh the difference between 19 and 21 we had a uh a minus 8.7 percent so there is
008a reduction there that may not have been as steep as we've seen in mathematics or english language arts and i think in part if i'm going to speculate a bit it has to do with being assessed in spans meaning if we weren't measuring one year's worth of learning like you do in fourth grade ela fifth grade sixth grade seventh grade um you're you're being assessed on some of the prior knowledge um that you've learned in in science so that may contribute to some of it either way this is something of a concern that we're looking at and i don't ever want science to be on a back burner despite the state only assessing in grades four and eight eighth grade again we can see 2017-1819 we did not have any 2021 data for eighth grade
009and this is something that we're working on as an administrative team because the next time we're going to get a peek at their performance relative to state assessments will be in biology and to be quite transparent that's a little too late so dr vitale has been working with our with our science teachers to make sure that we can somehow get a formative assessment in here so we can see if we need to intervene in science prior to the eighth graders taking a state assessment and that estate assessment in biology is important because it is one of the pathways to graduating high school and certainly we would want our students to be successful there the next slide is the biology keystone data again i mentioned this this is a culminating exam in high school for biology
010students this what you're seeing here is a drop by 16.4 percent that is very steep and is something that we need to address and when i say that we need to address that i mean going going forward as well as thinking about what i just mentioned are eighth graders preparing for biology how do we close the gap there to make sure that they have the requisite skills and then the students in biology they took this exam as sophomores traditionally and they're going to be moving up into our course of study and science and they will need this background knowledge and they will need most likely this knowledge when they get into college so we want to make sure that we're putting the students in a position where they're going to be successful for not only
011a roommate or high school career but in the event that they want to pursue the sciences in college that we can catch them up the next is our science ap scores and i'm going to preface this the same way i prefaced our other ap scores is that we have seen a drop in ap test participation not in enrollment in our ap courses we have also seen an increase in in dual enrollment programming and that just shows how we're diversifying and extending our learning opportunities for high school students beyond ap ap isn't the only gig in town anymore students have the opportunity to pursue post-secondary credit um different post-secondary science opportunities but what you can see there in 2021 is the drop in student participation and the passing scores seem to fluctuate uh by content areas
012and i will tell you um something that i discussed with dr vitale and and mr snyder and that is uh i'm gonna wait until the end of this year to see where we're at because covid did impact uh ap participation in some way shape or form i can't give you hard numbers i can tell you anecdotally to families and students that i've spoken with that did not feel prepared as they were doing a lot of learning online or in a hybrid format and that they just really didn't want to take the test so hopefully we'll start to see a normalization here in the coming years next we have the social studies same thing if we see fluctuations it may be in tests we have a little bit more participation here you can see that in
013human geography is very popular again same pattern that we see here we're still seeing a high interest in our ap courses and high interest in dual enrollment and then finally we have a world language again we're not we don't have a lot of participation there but i just wanted to report that that's something that um again that we we take a look at we work on what do we need to do to improve uh participation is it anything to do with uh programming is there anything to do with what they may be pursuing at the next level or not pursuing uh at that level so i i get to my final slide here uh next steps and when i think about january until now and talking about this data in public into the board the
014questions that i ask myself or what story does our data tell is this the story that we want if not what might we do to change that narrative and again it's it's one piece of the puzzle and there are other pieces that we're putting together when we talk to our teachers or talk to our students and recently as many of you are aware we put out a district-wide survey to our parents to our students and to our teachers and i believe we're getting close to what 3 500 4 000 responses already so we have a very robust perceptual data that is quite informative that we're going to be uh bringing back to the board and all this performance data the post-secondary data the survey data that anecdotal data that's all used to inform a five-year
015curriculum plan which dr vitale will be presenting in the next month that is going to lay out our strategic plan so to speak for the next five years where we will focus what grade spans we will focus on what investments that may look like what investments in professional development for our teachers will that look like as well as how we support our parents in supporting their children at home and then finally i just said plan execute and evaluate that's something that i talk about um quite often i talked about it in in the interview and uh and i won't stop uh when we think about performance we think about uh becoming the best district what do we need to do well we need to plan and plan and plan then execute thoroughly on our plan
016and then always evaluating where we're at and what we can do better so there are some results that you've seen over the past three months that i would say uh are very strong relative to uh some of our peers and there's others that are not as strong however that doesn't mean that we can't get better and that's what our focus will be on uh if we want to be the top then we have to work on the little things and we have to address the big things that aren't consistent with our expectations with that i'll stop my presentation and i'll hand it off to jim for a budget 101 presentation superintendent schaefer in getting back to the just the ap presentation what what's the passing grade is it three four five is it four or
017five is it five three four five generally speaking and it's a great question because we talked about this i think i mentioned it before how some of the colleges and universities will play around with that to say well we'll give you credit for a five or a four but not a three but we're going to tell you that a three's passing right well that's so that's what i was saying because if you know passing some colleges consider for example if it's in your major you may not get credit for a three but if you're engineering and you take took us history just as an example you may get credit for a three yeah correct and uh i think i'll stand for this one because you know two and a half hours of budget and finance
018you got to get the blood flowing a little bit right um so uh i i don't have two and a half hours of material to talk about tonight but i do have an important topic and that is budget and finance and we're branding this the budget 101 presentation that that is not to suggest that the topic is rudimentary in any way or basic but we do want to level set and make sure that we're all on the same page with where the district has been and you know what our current status is and set a foundation for our next budget meeting which would be the 2022-23 preliminary budget presentation where we talk about what's actually in that budget plan which is congruent with many of the uh the initiatives that dr schaefer and dr vitelli
019are working on so thank you for the opportunity to talk tonight um and uh just a just a quick um rundown of what we should expect to talk about i'm going to talk about the timeline of events revenues expenses fund balance and debt tonight so our timeline begins tonight to talk about the budget although we work budget all year round we're constantly analyzing uh and changing the budget and but we're formally presenting and starting the discussion publicly here tonight our next discussion will be on may 4th when we again talk about and present the 2023 preliminary budget then we need to approve a preliminary budget at the may board meeting the june work session will have the opportunity to talk more about the budget specific initiatives decisions that need to be made and then finally
020once all of that insight is gained and all the dialogue is had on june 29th our the last wednesday in june we will vote on a final budget and and we follow this timeline because it's prescribed by the state of pennsylvania we must approve the final budget by june 30th so we'll start by talking about revenues where does our money come from what are our sources of income and our sources of income are it from three places local state and federal so you can see most of our district in the blue piece of the circle here is funded locally through local taxes and we'll talk about what types of taxes we collect here at the district in the the red piece of the graph what you'll see is state revenues and that makes up the
021second largest piece and then the piece in the green which is usually just a nominal amount that really doesn't factor a whole lot into our revenue streams but does this year in the form of stimulus funds is the federal funds there and you can see this is sort of a progression of a chart from the older years which would be 1920 going forward toward the outside of the graph which is our current year budget taking a look at the historical revenues by source this is the same information just presented in a different way in a bar chart you can see that our revenues have been pretty consistent they haven't increased a ton over time again i want to direct everybody's attention down here to that bottom right hand corner it may not look like a
022large bar but it's it's four percent of our budget uh this year which is one-time revenue in the one-time revenues go away taking a look at specific line items in our local revenues the the biggest line item we have are our real estate taxes and when you combine the current and delinquent real estate taxes together those first two lines you'll end up with a number somewhere around 27 28 million dollars which is more than half of our budget funded uh through property taxes right so um they they are the biggest part and also the least popular tax uh as i'm i'm told been by my own volition and experience real estate transfer tax is an interesting one which has taken off in the last couple of years once real estate sales really went through the
023roof both in terms of volume and value so we're seeing an abnormally high number you see that 797 thousand dollar collection an abnormally high variance there last year which of course is is welcome revenue to the district another one to highlight would be our earned income tax some would refer to this as the wage tax uh on your on your w-2 you you pay one percent to your local uh school district municipality uh a half a percent of that one percent comes at a district it is split with the local uh municipalities so uh that is a little bit more variable revenue stream as i'll show you so but in in good economic times you'll see that number go up and in uh poor economic times that number will uh will sort of decline a
024bit uh interest income you can see a downward trend there that is uh aligned to the downward trend in interest rates available on the market the district is only allowed to invest in very low to no risk investments such as cds and we've been marketing our cds uh to try to get the best most aggressive interest rate available on the market we think we've done a good job with it it's just a matter of the the market is declining there banks aren't aren't offering it the the two percent rate that they used to they're they're near uh they're closer to half a percent which is still uh a decent interest rate but we'd like to see see higher uh and then some other ancillary revenues there on the local side any questions by the way
025i'd like this to be a dialogue i i don't want to sit here and just talk uh you know for i'm not going to say two and a half hours but um if anyone has any questions please just stop me and and we'll go from there okay now our real estate taxes i have a few slides on real estate taxes and millage rates that i'd like to point out um and you can see uh that that navy blue dashed line uh kind of that goes across the center of the of the graph here that is abington heights millage rate over the last oh 10 years or so and the rest of the the lines on that graph are the other school districts in lackawanna county which follow the same assessment system which would have equivalent
026type millage rates and you can see that we start the graph at abington heights as the second highest millage rate in lackawanna county and we finish this time period as the second lowest millage rate in lackawanna county so there were three small real estate tax increases in abington heights at that time now i think it was a one mil one mil and then just perhaps a two mil increase somewhere along the way there so to take a look at it another way to take to quantify that increase over time as compared to the other districts in lackawanna county you can see the the blue bar down on the left abington heights over that time period raised taxes a total of 4.7 percent you can see that all other districts in lackawanna county raise taxes very
027significantly higher the next lowest raised taxes four times more than four times the the rate of havington heights so we've held real estate tax rates in line over the last decade plus uh and uh you know as as i'll show you that doesn't help generate revenue over the overtime yes mr mirabelli is there any reason at the other school districts that they were required other than voluntary spending on things to raise their taxes today did they lose federal funding relative to us or do they not have the same level of state funding over time relative to us are those just decisions based on spending or maybe you don't know the answer to that uh so i'll have to generalize here because you know of course i don't represent those districts i could dive into some
028data we do have software that allows for that to occur but generally speaking the reason why we didn't raise revenue is because abington heights has worked on the expense out of the equation so feverishly over the last decade or so so we've worked hard to keep expenses in line now all districts face the same issues such as the pension rate going up by four percentage points on every job we all pay 35 cents on every dollar in salary that go out the door for pension so for every dollar in salary 35 cents approximately goes out the door and pension we we all face the charter school issue with rising charter school tuition costs which i should talk to about so we generally have the the same hands dealt to us now we all have different
029demographics different situations different facilities uh so i can't speak to that but generally speaking the reasoning behind the tax increase is that abington heights spends so efficiently over that period of time okay so here is the other side of the equation right so real estate taxes are you you take your assessed value and you multiply it by the real estate tax rate okay so there's two parts of this equation so you can't just look at the real estate or the the millage rate you also have to look at what happened in that district over that same time period and what we're seeing is uh that certain districts actually their tax base declined you could see a couple that that are below zero up there and then other districts saw some some pretty rapid expansion so
030rapid expansion if those are taxable properties would uh lead you to not have to raise taxes and this is another factor mr azar that may come into play as to the board's decisions and and having to raise taxes or desiring to do so um so you take a look at that and then when you combine the two right so in the green we see uh the the expansion or contraction of the tax base and in the blue you see stacked on top of that the previous graph and that shows you the expansion plus the rate of tax increase so your total increase in in i guess taxable real estate tax revenue percent increase so you can see abington heights is coming in right around 10 percent total growth in rate and assessed value and the
031next closest who lost value but did raise taxes at a much higher rate is at 20 percent and all the other districts in the county are are comfortably above abington heights in raising revenue through either millage appreciation or increase in the millard trade so when we talk about millage rate we need to talk about the act one index okay and the act one index i think was passed in 2006 something like that uh it went into effect as you can see in 2007 here and what it says is there is a rate established annually which is indexed basically to inflation and statewide weekly wages that sets a cap on what boards can do in terms of raising real estate taxes this year happens to be 3.4 percent and that's kind of a historically high rate
032uh in the in the short history of the act one index and if you'll recall back in i believe it was january this board voted to stay within the act one index right so uh the the only rate that the board has available to it is to raise over up to 3.4 percent now there are limited options even if you didn't do that to go above that anyway whether it be through exceptions or voter referendum so 3.4 percent is is your cap and you can see in other years it was it was lower than 3.4 percent so your opportunity to raise revenue is is relatively limited and then just just an impact yes sorry i just uh to quantify this a little bit uh with the slide that you were showed in the beginning typically
033our federal revenue may be around one percent this year it's four percent we've talked about this before where we uh used the the funds that we received from the stimulus to provide the students with teachers and we mentioned reading specialist math interventionist reading interventionist counselor and that that amount that 1.2 million around there is almost about five mils is that about right if we put that into perspective that's that's a good approximation i would say so when you talk about when we receive the stimulus funds we receive stimulus funds for two and a half years and i've said this publicly that i believe we did the right thing we take a look at student achievement results we see where some students were struggling we needed to hire more reading specialists more math interventionists to make
034sure that we close the gap and when we talk about having to make a decision in two years sometimes i'd like to quantify that decision relative to millage when we take a look at it i mean if you raise taxes 3.4 percent that still wouldn't make up the difference that you're getting and stimulus so you know yeah so we do have a we've set ourselves up for a bit of a fiscal cliff there but with eyes wide open uh you know as you said this was a need at the time and then i just call you it's not displaying very clearly in the top but i usually get questions about impact um so the value of one mill if you raise taxes by one mill is 220 000 uh if you went to the limit
035of 3.4 percent that's 815 000. uh the impact to the taxpayer which is also critical is um a one mill would be a 20 increase on the median tax on the median assessed household and four mills would be approximately eighty dollars uh to the the median uh household so the example that i just gave then what that turns out to the median home owner would be a hundred dollars given an example that the additional federal money the stimulus at 1.2 and what that means if you were to you know hypothetically cover that to fill that gap right yeah so these percentages the index these are the percentages that the i know it's a cap it's a cap on if you if you if you hit the cap that's 3.4 of our gross prior year tax
036revenues is that right i know the millage is a separate number but this is uh so it would you can increase your millage rate by that amount so if your if your base erodes by 3.5 and you raised by 3.4 you still went down a tenth of a percent in overall revenue heights was about 212 mills so then that 3.4 would be on 212 mills 122. but right there yeah right there i did i think maybe i had a typo here but um yes yes so it would come out 3.4 is almost it's right around four mills okay on the on the nose so any anything else on uh tax freights or act one index okay uh our other major revenue local source is the earned income tax and you can see this one's a
037little bit more variable in good economic times we generally see an increase in poor economic times we generally see a decrease but we do see a good positive trend here uh the the that final year is not falling off the table uh that's a year-to-date amount and we do collect this through august so um we're about halfway through the year on this on this particular graph because that's through february pivoting now to state revenues and you can see our basic ed funding is our biggest state revenue source followed by reimbursement of retirement which is pension and social security right so now that line item the the retirement contribution reimbursement has actually increased over time however this is one that you don't want to increase because in order to get the reimbursement they the state reimburses
038you 50 back of what you pay out so in or if you're if your reimbursement's going up that means your cost is going up double that amount right so you have to pay a dollar to get 50 cents so you spend 35 cents on every dollar and you're getting back 17 and a half percent and i i'm using round numbers the rate's a little a couple tenths different um but yeah that's it so if you want to know your total pension expense for 2021 3.8 times two you got what 6.6 or 7.6 sorry uh so yeah so that that is uh that is the one line item that continues to go up but that is that is one reason why the state is unable to put forth uh as much of a increase in the
039basic ed subsidy as they would like you can see from 1920 to 21 our our subsidy actually went down just a couple of dollars which is considered to be flat funding but we rarely see anything more than one or two percent in that category and that certainly does not take care of the inflationary uh pressures that we face in our budget so uh any questions on any of those specific uh line items yes um as the state starts to look at uh public school funding and of course it's it's a pretty big topic i know they're also talking about changing the formula uh how is that the changes that they're discussing going to affect abingdon heights the so a lot of what is being discussed is that there's a a floor uh and you no
040district will receive less and i think they call that hold harmless is the term they use so i i don't think that would impact us in a negative way in the sense that we would lose revenue uh but but i do believe that we aren't in the position to be the biggest gainers from from a new funding formula those funding formulas tend to tend to i don't want to characterize what schools but a little more higher poverty schools usually aren't are negatively affected by the funding formula did i say that correctly i think so that um mr mirabelli is is the the equation for additional funds or is that for all the whole fund from the from the state because i thought the hold harmless only applies to additional funds from the previous year right
041so i was the second part of my answer was i was speculating what would happen if the hold harmless wasn't there so i believe we have a floor i believe we're good at that 6.5 million dollar number 6.6 hopefully we see an increase here um you know the governor has proposed some landmark investments mostly for districts not named abbings and heights but um you know certainly we would stand to get a few dollars um and some models i've seen some models where we could we could make out okay but i never believe any of those models because they come out with really good numbers and then they get negotiated down it would seem that the they're going to direct a majority of them their dollars perhaps to schools with with a different socio-economic level than
042aberdeen heights yes and that's the way the formula is designed yes to to give equitable in the in their funding so yes any other questions on the the state revenue okay here's an interesting it's not the best visual representation here but what we see in this little uh wave like i guess my laser is not working but this little wave-like uh descending graph is each bar on that craft is one of 500 districts and this is the revenue per student so what does each district bring in uh per student and if you want to find abington heights you have to look all the way over here to the right that little orange sliver abington heights brings in um 14 039 dollars total federal state and local per student and that is the eighth lowest in
043the state so we're a bit of an outlier we're a low revenue school from a state federal and certainly local perspective quick look at the federal revenues we generally our federal revenues are usually the title grants title 1 reading and math title 2 in title 4. but we have we also get medical assistants as well but the new one are the the federal covid grants and you can see that those those amounts have increased drastically over the over the three year period shown here any questions on this slide what i wanted to do with this graph and it's a little bit busy but what i wanted to do is show you all of the srarp grants and i wanted to sort of lay them out over time as we have them earmarked right so you
044have your allocations in in column two right and then you you have in 2021 we spent the first esser grant 2122 you can see where each allocation is being used you have sr2 and arp that remain and in 2023-24 sr2 falls off so you have a step down of about 500 000 dollars that the district will have to make up in some way and then in 23 24 we have another uh step down that of almost nine hundred thousand dollars so uh that's that's how it lays out over time uh just so you can sort of visually see what those stimulus funds look like anyone have any questions on this so we basically have two years to make up the funds that they're going to drop off it's it's essentially there's a there's a there's
045a cliff in two years we have to have a plan in place to make up for that yeah there's there's a there's a significant step up uh needed in revenue or you know the latter um which we've been working hard at over the last decade plus so and now we we get a lot of questions and we talk a lot about what do we use these funds for and i just i wrote down i went to every grant application that we filed i wrote down what is in the grant application in summary and generally speaking with with the exception of phonemic awareness professional development we are using those on salaries and benefits for staff to address learning loss and other needs that have been identified through the pandemic and all of this i i have
046the link in this presentation this presentation is already up on the business administrator page on ahsd.org and this as well as well as the specific grants that have been approved by the state are published to uh the business administrator website so those are all available publicly now we'll talk about the expenditure side and here's a similar graph to show where we spend our revenue on and some people are taken back by the figure of salary and benefits when you stack the blue and the red pieces of this chart on top of one another salary and benefits make up 76 of abington heights budget and that may be a jarring figure but we're in the business of people educating people uh we need people to do to complete our mission so 76 is historically high for
047us because of the addition of the 10 staff members that we brought on but it's not out of line we traditionally run 74 or 75 percent and it's not out of line with other districts and you you really it's hard to compare apples to apples because every different district has different scenarios but all districts have high salary and benefit cost structures right and you can just see how that expands though the blue and the red kind of take a bigger piece of the pie as we expand into those outer rings looking at that same information over time there's a lot going on on this slide here we what we do here is we stack salary in the blue i'm colorblind that might be purple and then we have red on top of the blue that's
048medical benefits and then on top of that is green that's your retirement and just take a minute and take a look at the expansion of those retirement benefits over that the course of that time uh we were referring to this as the pension crisis right because the rate used to be two percent and then it went to four percent and then it went to eight percent of every dollar in salary and those are massive increases of 200 000 800 like they were really so uh the only way and that was another situation where we couldn't raise our way out of raise taxes out of this problem so we worked on the expense side of the equation during this time a little more detailed look at this i'm not sure why that's not showing up but
049this is just assurance and i want to just call out the purchased property service purchase professional service and other purchased services those are things that the district pays for such as transportation we subcontract that out we subcontract out some cleaning services these are your utility bills your your electric your gas your water these are special education services these are charter school expenses all in the those three categories there so anything that it that our people aren't doing would fall in the purchased services category supplies would be books pencils also you know technology things of that nature you know air filters to go in this in the vents all sorts of supplies um and you will see our debt service number which we'll talk about here in a second any questions there so i want to
050talk about salary growth and over over time as i said we we had reduced salaries despite paying increases on the on the wage bases basis but the the difference between the 21 and 22 bars there in the salary is 1.4 million dollars and that can very easily be explained by the 10 staff members that we brought on as well as paying the contractual increases to our employees which is about an 800 000 annual increase when you consider salary and the fixed costs that go so that is another cost that we have to wrestle with is paying increasing wages uh over time right so uh that's another if to maintain the workforce you have obviously you have to to pay them and continue to pay at a higher rate as they are here here is the
051head count of all of the employees that we have in the district over time right and you can see the decreasing head count and this is magnified a bit by subcontracting of some support staff positions namely clerical and custodial but if you take a look at the professional staff which i've carved out on this slide you can see where we've gone and now where we are right so the area under that red bar between these two represents millions and millions and millions of dollars saved over that time period right if we had all those people that whole time the the real estate tax rate would have looked a lot different but this is the reality as to as to why when we talk about low spending uh we lowered our head count quite frankly with
052um with the enrollment decline that we've seen over time so what we've done is restore the number of positions essentially to above where it was in 2011. and now here's what the enrollment trend looks like over time as to why those uh reductions in staff were available and in some cases very necessary because you know as the enrollment goes down you have a less need for uh folks to uh to educate them whether it might drive that would drive up class size every time you you cut but the rationale used is to reduce expenses by reducing head count because we're in a situation of declining enrollment you can see that it ticks up a little in recent years but still pretty steady if you look at the differences between uh those that that whole time
053period you have a 7.2 percent decline in student enrollment from 2005 to current any questions there yes do we have other districts enrollment if they've increased or decreased we certainly do and you you can see that um oh the taxes yeah so as a general statement i will say most districts are many districts are in a declining enrollment period but i do have that data and i can bring that back to you next at the next meeting so if i could just take a quick note jim the the the previous slide okay so those 11 and 12 that we had 255 staff members so now move forward and if i take a look at that the enrollment was about 34.52 and we're at 33.78 now so it's about 70 students difference right and i just
054want to call that out because when we take a look at the slide that he showed before and you you talked about uh increasing expenses and we did a good job over a 10-year period of not raising taxes and we did that through cost cutting through staffing is that correct among other uh initiatives but 76 of your spend is here so that this would have the largest impact right okay it would be safe to assume that as that employment figure went down that the number of students per class on average went up i think there'd be a fair assumption yeah the reason why is in my mind and maybe we'll really dig into this 70 students we'll call that three and a half teachers right um if we're just if we even said 20 per
055classroom and the what we're looking at there was the 246 243 243 242 246. um those are some those are some pretty big cuts and when we take a look at where we are this year and using the stimulus money to have those additional nine staff members or 11 staff members those aren't unnecessary i mean these were these were needed positions and i'm not necessarily making a statement here i'm just trying to put some things in context um where we were to where we are right now okay so we talked about enrollment and and now uh here's here's a graph spending per student right so what this is is you take your total cost your total budget and you divide it by the number of students that you have and what you see here are
056four lines on the graph the green line is the state average of spending per student and that state average of spending per student is sixteen thousand eight hundred and seventy five dollars per kid abington heights spends in twenty twenty thirteen thousand one hundred and seventy six dollars per student uh our peer group who has similar demographics and enrollments to us spends very similar to the state average as well as those in our region as you can see they're clustered very tightly together but i i just wanted to illustrate that if if abington heights was an average spending district just average median in the middle we would uh that would represent a 22 increase in in our expenditures and a necessary increase in our revenues of 22 percent uh which we we've already said we cannot
057do we cannot solve that in a year but that would rep that would take your budget from 47.6 million dollars to 58 million dollars if you were just average so it's over a 10 million dollar add-on to your budget and we've presented similar things like this in the past but it is uh it is striking when you when you look at the the difference between an average district in abington heights another way to look at that is spending per pupil ranking and this may or may not be the best way to present it but uh you can see you know the bars sort of come down from the top and the the longer the bar or the lower it extends indicates a lower rank out of 500 districts in the state so you can see
058in 2020 abington heights was 462 out of 500 districts in the commonwealth as far as spending per pupil and that shouldn't be a surprise after uh seeing this as well however oh yes sir so then so what you're saying is there are only if there are 500 districts in the state there's only 18 school districts that spend less per student than we do in 2020. yes so but a more encouraging sign is when you look at the percentage of your budget which you spend on instruction which is in the classroom which is salaries and benefits of teachers which is supplies that go into the classroom things of that nature the percentage of your total budget which goes into instruction abington heights ranks pretty high so in uh 2020 abington heights ranked 154th out of 500
059in terms of dollars that percent of budget that flows into the classroom does that make sense okay so you're saying we on on a relative basis we spend more for instructional expenses than other schools on a relative percentage of budget basis yes so the next thing i want to talk about is our biggest challenge that we're facing uh financially aside from you know the sort of fiscal cliff that we have looming and that is charter school costs when the when the commercials tell you it's free it's not free to abington heights and it's not free to any other district in pennsylvania uh in fact the the tuition rates are eleven thousand one hundred and twenty dollars of taxpayer money that goes to the charter schools for a regular ed student and twenty thousand six hundred
060and seventy four dollars for a special ed student uh that go to the cyber charter and brick and mortar charter schools so uh if you look at that trend i used to describe uh the the trends early those increases to 300 thousands of 100 000 i would describe that as a crisis uh in those times but when you go from 2019 of just under a million dollars to 2020 where we spent 2 million dollars on charter and cyber charter schools that is just an increase of a magnitude that we you cannot absorb and again what the actual index cannot tax your way out of you can see that number came down we project it to come down to finish the year that's not a year-to-date spend that's a projection as to where we believe we
061will end the year 1.7 1.8 million dollars so still much much higher than the trend so here's what the enrollment looks like there you can see a pretty big expansion which correlates obviously to the the total tuition paid 84 of the students in those bars go to cyber charter schools most of them go to commonwealth connections academy do you know what percentage of the increase uh was to brick and mortar it was pretty negligible it was mostly basically basically all cyber charter yes so now i want to talk about governmental funds and debt and really governmental funds is a fancy word for a couple different checkbooks right so we'll try to we'll try to talk about it in terms of household finances right so the district has several different funds the main fund the fund
062that we've talked about the entire time tonight is the general fund you will pass a general fund budget in preliminarily in may and a general fund budget final in june so that is where we direct almost all of our attention that is where uh most of the activity flows right so to use the household analogy your light bill is coming out of this your car payment comes out of this uh all of your general household expenses come out of that right but if you're saving up to renovate your kitchen the equivalent in a school district would be the capital reserve fund right and the capital reserve fund has currently a balance of 5.6 million dollars and i'll show you what that forecasts out after we accomplish a few of the projects that we have slated
063for the summertime uh but uh those items so that those those dollars can only be used for exactly what it says capital projects which means uh infrastructure right so it could be uh technology it could be why technology with respect to infrastructure in the building like wires our phone system the three projects that we've talked we'll talk about in a second technology wise that are infrastructure related but you can't say buy computers or chromebooks with it but you can use it for other things the other funds we have are the health insurance fund we're self-insured here at abington heights which means we pay our own claims right we uh we do buy some insurance uh it's called stop-loss insurance so we contract with a company to buy off the top end of the risk right
064so so it's about 185 000 per person we would pay the first 185 000 on any one person on our plan the rest would go to stop so we do purchase insurance but we're largely self-insured so we take on a lot of risk right and most many years on the average three out of five are good for you when you do that but on the average two out of five are bad years and sometimes you you need that fund balance to kick in and sometimes you just uh the general fund may need a break on the quote premiums that we pay ourselves so that can be used in a variety of ways but it's only there to pay health insurance claims the general fund pays the i'm using quotes premium to the health insurance fund
065and then whatever the claims are you either make out better or worse we've had years where we've lost a million dollars in that fund we've had some years where we didn't have to pay ourselves the final two months of premium payments and we clawed that back that was two years ago and that helped us offset some of that charter school uh increase but that was a one-time savings so there are some benefits but also some risk to a health insurance fund but that that is there right uh we also we have a food service fund which operates as a nonprofit and uh over the last two years we were unable to uh get any major projects going with with the pandemic and things that were going on but we've paid for things when the dishwasher
066goes bad and the the garbage disposal goes bad the food disposal goes bad in the kitchen we don't have to charge the taxpayers for those repairs and improvements we need a couple of ovens in the kitchen we don't have to charge the taxpayers for that right now this this because of the way uh the funding has gone over the last few years where all lunches are free and subsidized at a much higher rate we usually don't have this type of balance in our account but we do have a number of improvements to make in the cafeterias here so we're actually able to buy more cafeteria tables at the middle school to get some more spacing when we needed it took a lot longer than we wanted to get them here but this was something that
067the taxpayers didn't have to pay for jim could you explain a little bit more how those three funds are only one direction once they're in those funds you can't pull them out and the other thing is with the food service fund what can be you you don't what that fund can be utilized for sure and how and also how we can't we don't set the cost of the meals isn't that comes from the state of the federal government so we we do we do actually decide the cost of a regular price meal we happen to have not raised it in about five years but the reimbursement for a free reduce and regular lunch is determined by the state and federal government oh and to your other question i'm sorry um the health insurance fund again
068premiums go in and claims go out you can't just say i'm going to withdraw you know 500 000 out of the health insurance fund to pay for you know a parking lot or something like that but the capital reserve fund is the same way you can't transfer it back to the general fund to pay the light bill but you can do a parking lot with that right a food service fund has to be used for food service related things has to go back into the program right as to has to benefit the students that use the program and the debt service fund is just a it's an in and out we have to pay our bond holders through a mechanism where we pay the debt service fund and then the bond paying agent uh withdraws
069the money and penalty so that has a zero balance but that's how it works that's a one-way street too so when you when you look at the general fund uh 8.5 million dollars of that is committed and an additional 2 million is not so that's a total of 10.5 million if i understand my question is what sorts of things are in the assigned or committed category for that fund that limit our spending on that from that great question i'm sorry i skipped over that it's um it's uh so they're assigned for two things uh that would be future employee benefit increases pension uh medical things of that nature as well as capital projects and how does that differ from the capital reserve fund so the board has a discretion to assign and unassign funds as
070it as it so wishes if it was restricted that's a different story but a sign a signing of fund balance is common practice that boards do in the state of pennsylvania the there's also a cap by the state of how much unassigned fund balance you may have uh the district has a 3.6 percent with in the threshold of the state for a budget of our size is 8 so we're well under that with the arrangement that we have here thank you yes i had a couple questions so the capital reserve fund once the funds go in they can't come out so if we run a deficit in a given year which we haven't done in a while i don't think but if we did it would have to come out of the general fund reserves
071not you can't pull from the capitol to cover a deficit is that correct that is correct so so the money that's in those capital reserve funds it's not like that's a backstop liquidity to our operations it's really just for capital yeah that's okay so um the money that is in the health insurance reserve fund is that only in there from surplus premiums that have been paid or have we funded that over time and if if it's the latter how does that happen so that balance has been hovering in that range uh for quite some time right so uh we we had one year that i could recall that was a bad year where the premiums uh were dr were significantly lower than what the claims were so we ended up having a surplus in the
072general fund so we reimbursed that fund back in that particular year for the deficit that occurred in the health insurance fund so the money that's in that the 7.5 million that's in there is is not just from excess premiums it's actually the board historically has at times in the past put money into that reserve when they were ramping it up in its inception which was you know i'm not even i was well before my time okay and then sorry i just had a bunch of questions on all these reserves the capital reserve fund that is optionally been put into reserve by the board in the past right sometimes from surplus years or other yeah so for example uh the the previous fiscal year we had some some revenues that broke our way right and we
073had some pandemic-related savings with buildings being closed where we didn't we didn't spend uh you know what was budgeted in some areas and we we took that surplus and moved it to the capitol reserve knowing that there are uh projects on the horizon okay thank you so so on the medical on the health self-insurance fund it correct me if i'm wrong we have stop stop loss insurance for high high claims correct yes sir so that the cost of the stop-loss insurance is in some uh fashion related to the the balance we have the higher the balance the lower the premium we pay for stop-loss insurance correct i mean there's obviously a trade-off where you get too high correct yeah so there's that cap there where we know if everything goes wrong we're we're probably even
074with the stop-loss going to you know lose a lot of that balance there um but that that's you know about a year's worth of premium my only point is as that as that balance goes down potentially the cost of the stop-loss insurance is going to go up yes most definitely most definitely so we will be we'll be more fully insured you're more you're more exposed because you have a lower you have a lower balance but you also have a problem because now you have an expenditure that's increasing correct more of a more of a fixed cost if you will than the variable that you know yes sir annually yeah annually and um and sometimes i don't think i'm getting too far in the weeds here but sometimes the the stop-loss carrier will be identi they
075will identify a case ahead of time and they will do what's called a laser which means all bets are off on that uh case um so and uh it's been a pretty we we we bid it out each year and we were aware of those lasers and uh we haven't seen um too too many of them but they do exist but it is it's an annual thing and then our aggregate spec as they call it is uh is set is about 7.5 million dollars which is the about so if everything goes wrong we're going to spend 7.5 million luckily it hasn't this is real wood uh any other questions on that there okay let me catch up will we happen to answer your questions um so the capital reserve fund let me just run through
076these these projects here that we've we've decided upon the last few meetings the south abington roof project that roof has gone beyond its useful life we're seeing some leaks and we are going to be redoing that roof at a cost of about 385 000 which will come out of the capital reserve fund we have a technology network infrastructure project that will as i understand it improve our ability to allow more devices to communicate on our network at greater speeds great and prepare us to uh you know kind of get into the future here or at least bring us up to current um is that fair i would focus on bringing it up us up to current okay yeah we're not into the future that's next year trying to choose my words carefully oh you said
077it right okay uh and then another uh infrastructure cost would be we currently have microwaves to communicate our internet between the buildings which is which has been a great tool for us but once in a while we see i think they're called latency issues where the signals from other antennas or dishes are can cause interference so when you have different equipment with an fcc license band no one else can operate on that band and that we're pursuing that with some grant funding through e-rate to improve that and the balance would come out of capital reserve and then we have a server replacement which runs all of the brains of our district which is sorely in need of replacing uh certainly part of the infrastructure here and that's at a cost of about 200 uh but
078as tax projects go i built in a little reserve there then we received back uh a state police safety audit uh report uh six reports actually one for each school great reading and um we we didn't get any estimates yet but the magnitude of it occurs to us it could be in the half a million dollar range of security upgrades that are recommended by the state police would that be fair dr schaefer yeah and again that is a a somewhat arbitrary figure and what i wanted to uh mention here is when we think about the capital reserve fund and what the board has done uh recently as you can see particularly with the technology committee um bringing us um up to speed where we need to be and certainly there can be some more investments
079that way these are what i would characterize as a near-term projects these are things that we have the funds and plans to go out and do we have the capacity to project match if needed for these and as you aptly framed it this is the purpose of having that capital reserve as we're putting money away to fix the kitchen so to speak and i framed that uh next to what the board approved maybe a month or so ago and that is the the k-12 facility assessment the capital reserve fund would not be the appropriate mechanism to fund some long-term high dollar projects so i want to make sure that we're you know you know framing that the right way so when we talked about we put out a facility study a facility assessment we'll take
080a look at all the facilities when we get those results back and take a look at it we're not going to say well let's take a look at the capital reserve and the you know the four million dollars to address some of these some of these larger issues at the bottom of that slide i just put a few examples of uh items that we paid for out of the capital reserve fund most recently the high school track and turf field project that was 1.8 million dollars clark summit elementary roof 870 million or 870 thousand dollars the high school roof we did a portion of it uh somewhat forced to do so when a portion of it blew off uh with the help of some insurance money we we did uh high school roof and the
081uh the skylights the phone system upgrade was just over 200 000 and also the uh security door access control the swipe cards that you see at the entrances was done at a cost of about 230 000 out of the capital reserve fund so those are the types of projects that you can fund out of this of course you need funds available to uh to do the funding but uh so that's where we project to be about 4.4 million left after all of these initiatives now on to the debt this is what i call a debt aging schedule so we have a series of 2015 bond with one two three four five years remaining on it uh soon to be four years when we wrap up this fiscal year uh and we also have uh the
0822009 lease which was uh the energy savings project in hvac and roof replacement up at the middle school right so we did a new roof and lighting this is before my time but that's the nature of the project there and that will be paid off a little over two years from now and you can see where that that lease payment falls off so you have a small debt payment coming off two years from now and four years from now much more significant debt coming off seven hundred thousand dollars annually uh and you can see at the bottom now it's it's not exactly related to it but in the in the red text there i show you where the sr2 money expires and where the sr3 money expires so you have that cliff you get about
083200 000 worth of help but you still have two years until you get out of debt so to speak any questions on that theoretically though if if you maintain the current course and we didn't do anything you'd be out of debt you'd be debt-free in four years five years yeah after this fiscal year four years yes here's our debt load as we compare to other districts our debt to revenue ratio which is your debt compared to your size of your budget is eight percent the average debt to revenue ratio in the state of pennsylvania is about 66 percent the median is about 62 percent and our debt to revenue ratio rank is uh 466 out of 499 just to give you some perspective on where we where we sit with our debt so we're a
084low spending low debt and part of our low spending is because we are low debt so those two are very much correlated district any questions on that okay i'll wrap it up here by saying here's the major budget challenges before us and i sort of spoke about these uh the stimulus funds expiring after 23 and 24. replacing of the stimulus fund revenue to fund the additional positions is is a challenge financing future facilities improvement projects that would be another challenge for long-term planning limitations of the act one index as we discussed skyrocketing charter schools cost rising salary and benefit costs and inflationary drivers throughout the budget such as transportation utilities supplies services etc and all this information as i said is on the business administrator page on ahsd.org including this presentation and any any further
085questions at this time any questions from the board dr schaefer that pretty much concludes the superintendent so if there are questions now on the presentation by all means please i thought that might happen okay any other questions on the budget presentation from before we get into public comment very much mr mayor valley thank you for a great job thank you very very good thanks jim okay the next is of course public comment normally we have asked you to fill out uh cards and so on we don't have any tonight so i'm going to ask you to raise your hand and just come forward and tell us who who you are hang on mr sheen just a minute and of course we're going to ask you to keep your comments to around three minutes please and
086with that it looks to me like mr sheehan is warming up and getting ready so mr sheehan welcome again thank you got some handouts here there's enough here for everybody including those who are absent so someone would provide those other there's two who are absent all right all across the country states and school districts are producing policies prohibiting locations and i guess foreign [Music] so these policies are coming up being um [Music] opinions [Music] um [Music] that was written back in the 50s and if you redo that list and look at some of the things i've already been accomplished i mean you're shaking your head so you're already familiar with it i'm gonna bring that lesson in next week i believe this critical race theory and this other stuff is done for the purpose of
087them is to promote and they're marxism it through their children thank you thank you mr sheen anyone else maggie would you move the microphone sure can you hear me i'm just going to follow up um what mr sheehan said because i think the point he's trying to make is if you guys have the power to raise our taxes then certainly have the power to make a policy that would exclude any of this teaching from our school district thank you very much mr scandal nice to see you again yeah good evening um amy scandal waverly i had the question and rachel who was not here had just emailed it so i'm going to kind of summarize hers this is to dr dr schaefer would you be willing to share the data for benchmark assessments for ela
088and math k through 12 i see science biology ap classes world i mean that's the gap we're talking about right and i'm not sure if you covered that last that that would be my main focus and i think most parents main focus yeah that would be great and we've been i think pretty transparent about that we have benchmarks and only certain grades and certain subjects and one of the things that we want to do is make sure that we can identify the gap right before it becomes problematic and we've shown some of the what we call ames web results early on but certainly that's something that we can do yeah especially that's it sounds like you have reading and math specialists with the essr3 money but we don't have the data it'd be nice to
089see four four to five years back with that tonight the pssas were just science biology world languages and ap classes i believe i was wondering if we have k through 12. all the way if you go back to my january presentation was it in there okay i may have missed it okay you'll get all the math of what the gap was okay all right so you'll be able to get all that and then rachel sent an email about the benchmarks that we can do right that'd be great you know we have no problem giving you what we have yes okay perfect thank you anything anyone else okay thank you very much for your participation tonight as i recall there are no action discussion items for tonight is there any additional informational items new business all
090business uh we have another chance for public comment on a work session but i think we're good so with that i'd like to adjourn the meeting and thank you for all for being here this uh