001Okay, if we can stand for the pledge [Music] [Applause] to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. This is the Wednesday, April 9th, 2025 meeting the board of education. Uh, first item is the acceptance of the agenda. Motion, please. Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? I opposed. Agenda is accepted. Next item is the consent agenda. Resolution 093, 2024, approving the items on the consent agenda. Motion. Second. Joe discussion in favor. Any opposed? Consent agenda is approved. That brings us down to new business. First up is Jake Wood. Is Jake here? Yep. Jake, come on up. Where would you like me? Hey, thanks for having me. Um, I'm here to talk about and answer any
002questions about the library's budget. um which fortunately is not very complicated. So um first of all uh we were tremendously fortunate last year to have the voters approve a substantial increase to the library's tax levy um which really kind of assured our sustainable future and lessened the amount of you know fundraising we'd have to do on a daily basis to offset our operational expenses. So, uh, this year our operating budget is about $600,000 on a tax levy that was approved, uh, last year and received, uh, last fall of $511,000. Um, this year, we're asking for a modest 4% increase largely to just offset our, um, you know, uh, increased costs. Uh, as well, um, I mentioned the budget's not very complicated. Um, you know, twothirds of the budget is, uh, staffing, um, employee benefits, uh,
003taxes, things like that. Um, the other things we really have control over are collections and programming. Um, aside from that, it's, you know, utilities, maintenance, um, insurance cost, things like that. Um, last year, 2024, was a really banner year for us. Uh, we saw increases, um, to all of our counting stats. Um, building attendance was at an all-time high. I think you guys have handouts in front of you, so I don't need to recite um everything, but you know, we had almost 60,000 people in the building all year, which is tremendous. Um, one of the things our board uh did within the last year and a half is open our camel community room up to um private reservations for community groups. And we've really seen um a number of after hours uh community civic organizations
004come in and use that space for um get togethers, board meetings, um then some private birthday parties and stuff like that. So um everything's looking good. We're trending upwards. Um the only other really notable thing um digital circulation now accounts for roughly a third of our total circ which is um really surprising for me. You know digital circuit kind of tapered off um you know 10 years ago and only in the last you know two or three it really started to rise again. Um so we've put a lot of um our money into uh some new services like Hoopla. Um and the other popular one is Overdrive Libby. Um which given the recent cuts to IMLS. Um we may feel some stress uh with regard to like new titles being added to digital platforms. Um
005again we're very fortunate that we get the vast majority of our funding from uh the local taxpayers uh which is great. Um, so we're anticipating an operating budget next year of somewhere in the 630 $640,000 range. Um and a 4% increase would be what $530ish,000 um that the public will be voting on uh coming up soon, which would leave us um you know in the range of $100,000 which will make up through uh we do a spring uh spring membership drive and end of year annual appeal and then um book sale and some other fundraising activities throughout the year. Um so that's a brief overview. Um, happy to answer any questions if you guys have questions for me. Jake, I think we say this every year, but I'll say it again. We really appreciate you
006coming in. Sure. This is the most misunderstood part of the ballot. The uh the funding for the library. So, it's good that annual kind of, you know, opportunity to kill people. It's, you know, your money is really like a pass through, right? People get confused thinking that it's coming out of our budget. We try to explain. No, that's not how it works. Yeah. And I noticed like the wording on the proposition had changed slightly uh from last year. So I was wondering if that was were you trying to be more clear to the the voters? Probably. Yeah. Jake, I have a question for you. So you mentioned cuts at IMLS which the Trump administration has basic that institute is gone now, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I know like you know historic Sarin Lake across
007the street was waiting for I think $100,000 in grant money that had been approved I think to be sent out literally the day before cuts were made. Um, and that's money for them that goes to like their collections. I think one of their full-time positions is funded that way. What's your do do you have any exposure to those cuts? Um, it's going to impact largely we don't get a lot of federal money directly. So that money is funneled through the state library and then to our local library system, the Nessics Franklin County Library system. Um and that's money that's largely used to supplement our digital collection in uh like the Libby platform. So I think Patron using a lot of that will notice um the lack of newer titles potentially. Um again, I think they've
008already received the majority of their funding for calendar year 2025. Um, so this is maybe some things that won't trickle down to, you know, average everyday users until next year. Okay. How about the library construction grant? Is that Oh god. Um, yeah. So we we've um we've received almost $300,000 over the last two funding cycles um to that money. Um you know, we put solar panels on the roof. We replaced the um interior lighting with all energy efficient LEDs. We spruce up the technology in the Canwell room. We replace those um big front windows. Um we had climate uh control to the upstairs and the community room downstairs. Um I don't know and nobody seems to really have a concrete answer at this point. Um but I mean that money is it comes from the
009department of education and you know dormatory authority above them. Um so I expect there will be some serious cuts to that. It seems like this upcoming funding cycle um which I think my grant applications are due um in August. I think that money is there. Um but even our library assistant doesn't seem to have for sure answers at this point. Jake, I just want to thank you with all of the um with everything that's going on and there's so many changes. Thank you for making library a place that kids want to go and that people want to go with the climate control and and just being a safe place um a good place for kids and community members to go. Yeah, we need that right now. I appreciate that. And um again, you know, you
010look at the year-over-year stats um it's really getting used more and more. Yeah, that's fantastic. Um, you know, I think a large part of that too is just open more open access to the community after hours is helpful to a number of groups. Anything else for Jake? Thank you for coming. Cool. Thanks to Thank you guys. Next up is uh from Hi. Thanks for having me. And Jake, I want to tell you I'm a I'm an avid Libby user and I contribute to your uh the Clinton Essex Franklin. We appreciate this circulation quite a bit. So um uh thank you for having me. Um I I have a presentation that I'd like to uh uh speak about. Uh the Bosey's admin budget. Every single year this year it's on the 29th of um of April.
011you are asked to vote not only on the Bosey's Avenue budget but to vote for Bosey's board members who've been nominated by component school districts. Um if Jake was talking about one of the most misunderstood things um in school finance probably the Bosey's admin budget would be a close second to that. Um so u I hope to bring a little bit of clarity to this. Uh the you know I want to start with a little bit of a history lesson. In 1948, legislation was passed that I think was actually pretty um pretty outstanding legislation. You don't hear that said very often, but um that allowed for the creation of cooperatives to service school districts in New York State um to school districts could get together and form cooperatives to provide services that would be more
012difficult for them to do by themselves. Uh a biggest example of that, of course, is our career and technical ed programs. buying things like dump trucks and skid steers and things like that would be very difficult for individual school districts. So, um that's where a cooperative like a Boseies can be really helpful. Also included in that legislation um was that the state education department should promulgate regulations that talk about how those things get funded. And again, there was very a lot of forethought put into those regulations in 1950 that said when districts get together and form their cooperative. Um, there are certain expenses that once the cooperative is formed, you have to pretty much commit to paying for at least those expenses because once the train starts going down the track, you're going to have
013obligations um that will live on for a number of years. So that's the Boseies administrative budget. Boseies is made up of three uh parts. The administrative budget, the program budget, and the capital budget. The program budget is what you sign up for on a yearly basis. So, you don't vote on that because you sign up to participate in BOSI services or you choose not to sign up. And all of those expenses are um based on tuition rates and things like that. So, um uh that's that's a whole different thing. But the admin budget is really what's in the regulations that keep the wheels of the Boseies moving uh from a central operation standpoint. So that's what I'm going to talk to you about this evening. Uh the slide deck, it's right here. We have our
014mission statement. I'll go through all of these uh first several slides really quickly. It's outlined in EDL law what should be in the admin budget. And essentially it's what it takes to just keep the wheels of the Boseies moving. And you know, just to kind of be brief on this section, it's the district superintendent's office, the expenses of the Bosey's board. Um, uh, you can have other administrators in there. So Lori Torville is here with me tonight. She's our deputy superintendent. A small part of her salary is in there because Lori does under her area of supervision. She does have responsibility for regional planning which is um in the legislation in in the regulation in terms of what should be in the admin budget as well as just central office support. So the people who
015do payroll for the Boseies, the people who uh purchasing agent, treasurer, uh business official, things like that. Um the biggest part of the the commitment that districts make when they join a cooperative and form the Boseis cooperative are legacy costs. And that's something that I'm sure you spend a lot of time talking about as a board as well. When a Boseies employee retires, the expenses related to their legacy costs go into the Bosey's administrative budget. That is by and large uh by and far the largest part of the admin budget as you'll see when we show you the numbers. So the first several um slides just talk about right out of adaw 1950 what should be in the Bosey's admin budget. I'll skip down through those. Um, and there are paper copies if anybody wants
016to grab one on the way out. Um, this slide I created a couple years ago. if you've heard it already. I forgive forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but Boseies in the in the word administer or administrate um creates a lot of issues for us because um the administrative budget which is what I'm talking about this evening and that's kind of laid out in statue is one word one use of the word uh administrate. Um but we also have Bosey's administrators you would think of in a school district like principles or assistant principles things like that. We have a principal at Aderondac Ed Center. He's an administrator. Um we have a director of career and technical education and a principal at Northrankton Ed Center. Um and we have a few other people who have quasi
017administrative titles. None of those people are in the administrative budget. So I I always like to point that out that that's what can cause confusion because people say, "Well, they have all these administrators and it adds to our administrative budget." Um the two are pretty much unrelated. uh as the program budgets grow or contract, we add or subtract uh various leaders to help with those programs. Those are covered all under the program budget. The only administrators in the administrative budget are Lori and myself, part small part of Lori and the office of the district superintendent. Um and then we also have Bosey's administrative services which is a third category. Those are actually programmatic things. Um Boseies typically operates instructional services and non-instructional services. uh like HR, labor relations, transportation support, things like that. Those are
018oftentimes called administrative services because they're non-instructional. So, just wanted to point out that can create confusion oftent times. Um and uh I'd like to educate folks when I can on that. Are those administrative services? Are those under program two? They're under program two. Yeah. So, you choose to sign up for those or not sign up for those on an annual basis. Um, we had five major considerations this year when building our um, uh, our administrative budget. Like I said before, um, retiree health insurance should all according to the law and we recently had the comproller uh, doing an audit for us. They they reminded us all of those expenses by law should be in the administrative budget. Historically, we've only had about twothirds of those expenses and the other third was spread out amongst all
019of our program budgets. Um the con the pro of that is that it does place a little bit more of a burden um on those legacy costs on the programmatic side of things. So the the heavier users of programs paid a little bit more. Um but the con of that is we weren't meeting statutes. So this year we decided to move everything into the admin budget once and for all to to make it legal. It's going to create a massive increase in our admin budget. But we are scheduling and offsetting revenue because basically what we finally did is we talked to other posties and said how do you meet the letter of the law by still having some of those costs allocated out in your programs and they said it's simple you just schedule an
020offsetting revenue. So we finally said gee it took us this long to figure this out but now we're going to move everything in there creates a massive increase but we also schedule a massive offsetting revenue to almost zero that increase out. Um, so we are now going to meet the letter of the law and um still allocate some of those expenses out in our program budget. Also with uh retiree health insurance, you I'm sure you've talked about it around this table. Our cons our health insurance consortium that all of our districts belong to including the Boseies. Um that consortium's done really well for a long period of time in keeping costs down. However, um the pendulum swings with health insurance and unfortunately we're on an upswing right now with our consortium. Um you know, it
021it's it's I I can confidently say our consortium costs are much lower than the neighboring consour consortia around us, but that still doesn't make the fact that our increase of 12% going into next year, it it doesn't mitigate the fact that that hurts. And um so we have the same increase in cost and with the largest part of this admin budget being health insurance that 12% is significant. Not to mention that um we're upside down in terms of numbers of employees we're covering. So we currently have about 145 active employees. We have 160 retirees that we're paying on in our um admin budget. And that's due in large part to the fact that our Boseies used to be twice the size. We had over 300 employees back about 15 years ago, but when the 2008
022recession hit, a lot of districts pulled out of services um to try to balance budgets and our Boseies went from a over 300 employee agency to what we are now about 145 people. So that is uh that's what's left us being upside down is that transition about 15 years ago. Um, I hate saying this, but that is an issue that will get better with time because um, as those people age out, um, or term as the insurance companies call it, uh, that number will start to equalize and we'll start to have fewer uh, retirees on the books compared to our active uh, employees. Dale, is that 12%. I mean, we saw huge increases in our budget projections as well around health insurance and $600,000. Yeah. Um, what is it normally? Are you expecting it to
023stay at 12%. So, uh, I'll take off my presentation hat and put on my co-chair of the joint governing board um, hat. We, uh, for the last decade or so, we've had tremendous success, um, through active management of the plan, uh, by the consortium members, participating in savings programs and rebate programs and and things like that. Um so our increases over the last decade have been zero 2% 3% 1%. Um I think last year was a little higher 6%. But um unfortunately two things are happening at the same time. A a healthy healthy reserve that we built up in that last decade uh has dwindled very quickly. So we have less of that money to use to offset increases. And at the same time, our claims are coming in um much much higher than uh
024normal projections have historically shown. So, um you know, we don't know if that's a rebound effect from COVID where people deferred uh elective surgeries and things like that and now they're kind of getting back into the swing of things or if it's just bad luck. Um, but it's projected uh really our our consultant um said it probably should have been a higher increase this year to keep us safer. So, we're probably looking at a few years of increases at this rate or even higher based on what our consultant is telling us. Is this the kind of thing where if you have an aging population in an area like we have in the aderondex that drives up costs as well just because it's more expensive once you get older. it it that's a small part of
025it but right now it's just claims claims are higher than what they normally are. Yeah, health insurance is expensive in this and medical inflation is not helping. Um and availability of um you know treatment in this area sometimes leads to people having to take longer trips, but it's it's a combination. We can't really pin it on one thing. We've done a lot of the analysis at the joint governing board tape. Nikki's been relatively new to that, but she's been party to those conversations. Um we can't really say it's one individual thing. It's just a combination of a lot of things that's driving that right now. But we should expect those increases in the next couple I think the next few years they're going to be on on this at this level or even higher unfortunately
026and I hate to bring a damper to but it's it's it's what we're talking about. Um so moving on um want to talk about our business office audit. We we took a we actually hired a consultant to come in this year um a retired OC's uh business official because we knew uh our business office wasn't operating efficiently or doing trying to do too much. We're trying to operate a shared business office service and just try to run the Boseies and we weren't doing either one very well. So um we've made some tough decisions. A few of those were to take some administrators out of the administrative budget and actually add a few more boots on the ground people because we were the proverbial contractor who had the worst house on the on the block. You
027know, we weren't taking care of ourselves. We weren't paying our own bills on time. Um we were struggling with uh doing some of our own internal work while we're trying to provide a shared business office service to um districts. And so we've made some tough decisions to say let's stop trying to do everything. In fact, and it's public information because they presented um last week, but we have worked it out with Tupper Lake who was a big subscriber of our shared business office where they're actually going to try to bring that work back in house and hire their own employees because at this time we just had an honest conversation and said, "We don't think we can meet your needs and do a job that we're going to be super proud of. So, we want
028to work with you to help make that transition." So you're going to see a slight increase in the support staff in our admin budget this year because of uh of these kind of hard look that we took at ourselves. Uh the next uh oh those are all the people in the admin budget and that I just show that's what we had last year in the spending plan. By the way this is an old slide deck because it's been updated. I had admin FTEE as 2.76. It was actually 1.76 because I was counting the business manager but business manager typically isn't looked at as an administrator um in a even though they are a quasi administrator. So really just in the term of what people normally think administrators it should be 1.76 and that would have
029been 6.27 and you can see we've dropped it down to 1.2 admin and um it'll go up to 7.85 but you can see these are the positions. The green are the ones where we've made reductions in the administrative parts. Uh business manager, we made some title changes and some things like that. Um you know just an example of our audit that we did. We split the business manager between two different people for our own Boseies which led to no one ever knowing knowing what was going on because we were trying to do a shared business office service and take care of the Boseies. We had hard conversations internally. We said we're no longer going to do that. It's one person who's doing the Bosey's work period. So we're heading in that sort of direction. And
030you'll see the others are the the small increases in FTEES that we made to have the years of the Boseies move along a little bit better. Um let's see the head. Bosey's cash flow and interest expenses. This is another ongoing conversation I've been having with our superintendent. Um, and this is a hard conversation to have as well and a frustrating conversation for some of our school districts. Uh, the Boseies was never very good about sending the bills out on time. We now are at the 18th month 18month mark of getting them out on the 15th of the month every month. Um, so I wasn't ever going to even have this conversation until I knew that we fixed that problem first because if we weren't sending the bills out on time, we shouldn't expect to get
031paid on time. Uh, we now have 18 months of of uh getting them out on time. So I've started this conversation with our superintendent. uh in 2324 we paid over $160,000 in rand interest at the Boseies uh and that's in the administrative budget um to borrow funds just to float us with cash flow because um districts typically we don't bill in July and August even though we get bills from other Boseies in July and August um and they're usually pretty high bills because they're cross contracts with like cap region for technology and stuff like that so we get bills in July and August but we don't bill in July and August and often we have some of our districts who um might go a month or two before they pay their bill. And so that's
032what that's what adds to this expense. Again, the controller was in our building and he said, "I've done a cash flow analysis. If every district paid on time all the time, you wouldn't have to borrow a single penny. You would have enough money. You wouldn't need to do this." So, we're we're having tough conversations with our districts right now about not only moving to a 12-month billing cycle, but the law does allow for uh payment penalties if you're uh if you're paying late because it's frankly it's a fairness issue. Um I'll borrow money all day long if that's what you tell me to do, but I have a hard time with certain districts always paying their bills on time essentially subsidizing the districts who are not paying their bills on time through the bank of
033Boseies. So, um, if districts are having cash flow problems, that probably should be more of a local discussion, not managed through, um, how you pay your bills at the BOSIE. So, those are, um, we're we haven't made a sol firm decision on this. I'm still kind of negotiating with our districts to make sure because I don't want to leave them in a tough spot, but um, this is something that we've had hard conversations on our last several superintendent meetings um, just to uh, make sure we're getting to the bottom of that. But again, like I said, we had our own issues, so we had to fix those first uh before we moved on to this. Uh and finally, uh this is this is a good news uh thing. Um we do have growing um services
034in our HR and labor relations specifically, and we started this uh service called On the Bus where we're providing consultation and training to transportation supervisors. Those services have grown wildly outside of our region. We have over 60 school districts signed up for our on the bus service statewide. Um we have several employees now providing uh working on that service. Uh many of most they all work remotely actually. None of them live here locally. And we have um our HR labor relations service. We now have three full-time uh labor negotiator u HR people and we just added a HR assistant position because another district signed up for some services. Um, but a lot of the school districts we serve are outside of our region. So that's it's good reputationally for the Boseies to have some strong
035services like this. It brings cash flow into the district. Um, we take advantage of having those people on our staff where we can get really good advice from them without having to pay for it pretty much. Um, the problem with this is eventually those folks in those services are going to retire. Where do those retiree expenses go? On the local admin budget paid for by only the component school districts. It would not be fair for us to have this really robust statewide service and then once those people retire, the local school districts pay for those expenses. So there is a method to offset that. It's called a um administrative assessment or a cross contract fee. Again, when you buy something from Cap Regent Boseies, you pay something like this. Now, we are going to start
036doing the same thing. any non-component school district who subscribes in any of our services will now pay an extra 6% admin assessment. That goes directly in as an offsetting revenue to our admin budget. Um and it we're uh it's going to generate over $100,000 of revenue this first year alone. Um which will help offset those retirey health insurance expenses and and that'll happen on an annual basis moving forward. So that'll that'll be a good thing to help keep this admin budget in check. So, a lot. I'm throwing a lot at you and I apologize. I'm trying to be as brief as possible just to show you the numbers. Um, you'll look I'm pretty proud of the fact that we did we tried to trim as many line items as possible. A lot of parentheses there,
037but we also see that um increase moving all of those retirey health insurance expenses into the admin budget as required by law raises the admin budget by $1.2 million. So you'll see that yeartoyear the admin budget not the assessment to school districts but the actual budget itself it's over a 44% increase. So that's wow. Um but I now feel better we're meeting the letter of the law. Remember we did schedule that offsetting revenue. I'll show you that. Um, so you have that 44% increase uh there, but we are bringing in nearly a million dollars of offsetting revenue from the program side uh to uh mitigate those retirey health insurance expenses. The cross contract fee were uh it's a conservative estimate of 113. It should come in higher at that. And we have some other revenues
038we bring in. Um so it's an overall um the assessment increase to our school districts. is going to be a $231, uh, $600 increase or 7.5%. Uh, am I am I excited to stand here in front of you and say our increase is 7.5%? No, absolutely not. Am I proud of the fact that I've been able to keep it at 7 and a half% considering that about 65% of all of this budget went up 12% with health insurance? I I think we did the best we possibly could do this year. There's these are the expenses written into statute. There is literally no fluff in here. Um there's a lot of things that should be here on according to statute that we don't put in here. We're taking advantage of strong programs to you know HR
039is a perfect example. Um it says right in the law your HR expenses should be in there. We have zero of Jake Towski in the admin budget. We take advantage of the fact that he is part of a strong service and he just helps us when we need him to help us. So um that's that's what you're voting on on the 29th. Um, again, I uh it's it's kind of like a section of your own budget. Some sections just go up and they're they're obligated expenses that they just go up and that's all you can do. And that's I I wish I were here and it had ways in which I could trim this down, but it's uh most of these are pretty much obligated expenses and that's uh that's where our increases landed this
040year. Uh just as an aside, um we also have a capital budget. Boseies can't do capital projects very easily like a it's not that it's easy for a school district but believe me trying to do a capital project for Boseies compared to school district school districts a cake I've done both school districts a lot easier um so uh because it is so difficult and we did just complete one but that took a lot of work to get the vote in every component school district uh you as boards had to agree to either bond for it or um if you had cash you put the cash forth, but it was our first capital project since those buildings were built in the early 70s. Um, so how most Boseies have what's called a capital budget. So we
041assess $400,000 a year. All of the school districts pay into that for a total of $400,000 a year and we that's one of the few reserves uh boseies are allowed to have. We put that in a reserve and when the time comes to fix something major or do a small project of some sort, we take it out of that fund. That fund was completely depleted when we did our capital project because whatever was in there was used to offset that. This makes me nervous because we have estimates right now of $10 million to replace roofs for both AEC and North Franklin within the next 10 to 15 years. It takes a lot of years of $400,000 to add up to $10 million. Um, so just kind of a little u asterisk to put in the
042back of your brain. Uh, we're going to have continued conversations about this. There's some really, really interesting things happening in this space that I want to look deeper into. Um several Boseies around the state have discovered that you can build new facilities for what it for less than what it costs to maintain old facilities through public private partnerships with um with private contractors where you have a private contractor build spaces um separate and apart from the state process which allows you to build for half the price and then you sign long-term leases with those um builders. Uh, and then there's grant money that can help. So, I I'm just starting to dip my toe into that water to see if it's a more cost-effective way for us to maintain high quality facilities, but that's that's
043the conversation to happen in the future. Yeah. How are those uh how's that diving up by school? Uh, yeah, a great question. A a lot of what we do is based on what's called arwada or resident weighted average daily attendance. So, that's a number that comes from the state. There's a a calculation that goes into that. It's basically the number of students you have um factored in with your attendance figures and stuff like that. So number of students that attend both these no no number of students in your school district. So the school districts who um have a higher arwatada pay a higher percentage. So and every year um so the the $400,000 um what we do is we take our nine component district 10 actually because Racket Lake actually has a little tiny piece
044of that. um we take a look at all those Arwatada figures that adds up to um you know say it adds up to 7,000 students regionwide. We then divide uh that 7,000 by your number and come up with a percentage. So you have 30% of all of the students so you pay 30% of that 400,000. Um you know so you are one of the bigger school districts so you tend to pay a bigger chunk of certain expenses. Is that actual 30% or is that just a hypothetical that I Yeah, I can't remember what your percentage is. Not a lot. Yeah. But uh I I do know for a fact we have around 7,000 students posties wide. Uh combined with all of our component school districts. So whatever your what what's your enrollment, Diane? What do
045you have like,200? 10:30 1039 1039. So you know whatever. I'm I'm not good at fast math. I didn't bring my Boseies. So roughly that that would be a very rough estimate. So um but yeah, the Boseies admin budget the uh capital uh the capital fund um and there are other expenses that are built into Boseis. Remember we we are a cooperative. We have no money. Um we every we don't levy tax. Um we do have a few federal grants that we work with although we know that that's who knows where any of that's going. Um, so all the money we have is either out of statute based on here's what you should collect to keep your admin budget going and by um having pro districts sign up for for programs. Um, we set a tuition
046rate uh based on what we think uh who we think school districts are sending in the coming year. We charge that tuition rate. Um, we pay our staff, we pay we buy supplies and materials and equipment and things like that. And at the end of the day, whatever's not spent at the end of the year goes back to the districts in the form of a refund. So it's just a zerobased budget that we build a spending plan. We operate the Boseies as your cooperative and then at the end of the year whatever is not spent goes back to you according to the percentage of what services you participated in. So the just to be clarified you said the arada percentage is used for the capital um you know revenue or component it's also used for
047the administrative also for the administrative and then the program is program is basically a tuition and based on what you I mean some of our programs are built on arwada some of them are not we have hybrid models um you know we we try to do what we think is best whenever we can. Averaging. What's that? The averaging. The a Yeah, we do an averaging model for certain services. Um law the law does allow us to allocate these things differently. One of the models is by tax um property tax value. You would not want to do that. Um because you know, you know, you're what like last time I looked like 2.1 billion in property overall property tax here. So, you know, you would pay the vast majority of this if we use that model.
048That that would not be fair. Um, so pay if we got the taxes from that value. Well, right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But the diff but we do pay in that our Boseis reimbursement from the state. Our our aid ratio is much less than most of the other district. Yeah. You you're at what's called millage is the minimum amount, but it's still 36%. And and I I always like to say it's still 36%. Now there are certain limits on Boseie salaries, but um I don't know if I had a 36% coupon, I still would use it if if it made the most sense for you. And there are times when it doesn't make sense, but you still do generate um you know, significant revenue on the services that you participate in as an incentive to
049work collaboratively with your other school districts. And we're hoping I it's in both house budgets right now at the state. I don't know if it's going to get across the finish line, but there's a cap on your only the first $30,000 of any Boseies employees salary is aidable. So that's one of the deductions we take before aid is calculated. Um there is a proposal to increase that over a few years to $60,000 which would generate a considerable amount of additional aid for all of our districts. And and this is all all this is aable. It is. Yes. I've sat in Diane's seat before when presentations went way too long. So I apologize Diane, but um again I this is oftentimes very it's tricky to understand because we operate so differently than a than a school
050district does. Um so it's I like to get out and try to do education whenever I can. Just while I'm here, by the way, I just want to thank you. We have uh we've had some really good partnerships developed between the Boseies and your school district in the last few years. Cara Mun has just been um out of this world with uh the work she's doing in the new vision education program. Um actually we're sending them there's a Boseies well event in the well of the state capital. Um just to promote Boseis uh and what we do and actually we're sending Cara and the students down to the well event in a few weeks to show off to the legislators of what a Boseies can do. and we're really excited about our latest partnership um
051with Josh Marlo with Josh Marlo with the marine tech program. So um and everybody I have spoken to about that is just out of their minds excited. So um we really appreciate that strong partnership between the Boseies and the school district. Who else? We're going to see you in a couple weeks anyways, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to it. So okay, thanks a lot everybody. Have a good evening. Thanks. Thank Okay, we're gonna take a break for uh executive session. Folks, stay here. We're actually going to move to another room. I don't anticipate it being very lengthy, but uh the or the order is somewhat important. like to get a motion to adjourn to executive session. So second in favor medical financial credit I'm just pass this out for now same one a particular
052personal corporation or matters leading to the appointment promotion to motion discipline suspension dismissal or removal particular person or corporation favor I opposed we are adjourned to executive New session.