001being conducted remotely via zoom webinar for our remote participation policy b-e-d-j-a nine members are in attendance via zoom well nine members are about to be in attendance via zoom because amy will be joining us but babylon avaya you said diane baum kyra cook adam klein um [Music] john peterson angie so yep wang myself and amy christian murthy i think will be joining us shortly all right in an ongoing effort to make our meeting as secure as possible we asked members of the public last week to view the meeting using actin tv's youtube channel found at the top of the agenda those who wish to comment during the meeting were asked to register 24 hours prior to the start of the meeting using the link that was found also at the top of the agenda we
002know now that that didn't really happen or work out and because we couldn't have the meeting last thursday i apologize so if there are people that are watching on youtube that would like to participate in the next meeting next thursday um we would ask them to use the link i imagine that is at the top of that agenda to register 24 hours prior to the start of the meeting and the only reason that you would need to do that is if you would like to have the opportunity to participate in live public participation or to comment or question during any of the agenda items otherwise it's just our business meeting held in public that you can view on youtube this meeting is also being recorded and will be posted on active tv's website at actiontv.org
003for our remote policy all votes will be done by roll call i'll call each member's name and they will state how they vote thank you for joining us um welcome everybody to the first of two meetings this week sorry for the extra meeting time um everyone was frustrated by our inability to hold the meeting last thursday which unfortunately makes us have two meetings this week because of the complication of february vacation and the timing with which we need to pass um of to have a vote on not pass if we need to have a vote on the initial budget um and that is required because of the timing of box bros town meeting and and when we need to get everything done so because we voted to suspend the public participation policy at our last
004meeting we are required to review that suspension at the next meeting to confirm whether or not it should stay suspended um so i think that we are continuing the suspension of the policy this week because there was some confusion around um how people could participate and i know not everybody had the same ability am i correct peter i'm assuming that you're muted correct okay so um is there consensus from the committee that we continue the suspension of this policy i don't think we have to vote we just have to nod yes okay all right um there will be a revised public participation process um basically for for the next meeting although if there is i think only well if actually it there are people that have that that did actually register to attend this meeting
005so with that if there is anyone that wants to participate publicly and make a statement now at the beginning are the same rules if you had already registered will will will count tonight so to speak so if anyone that is a panelist who did register for this meeting would like to make a statement during public participation i'll allow you to do that now just need to raise your hand so again similar to um what we've done in previous meetings if you are an attendee in the zoom meeting and you'd like to speak if you would raise your hand please that would be great and if not which i don't see anybody i know that adam has some comments that came into the school committee um address that we had set up for public comment um
006that he will read you are muted is it my turn now it is your turn now okay um here's the first one that came in to the members of the acton-boxborough school committee thank you for the challenging work you do day in and day out for the benefit of the children of acton and boxborough it is unfortunate you experience pressure and intimidation from some within our community who disagree with your thinking and decision making to disagree respectfully is fine to harass is not please know that the opinions and sentiments of the minority although loud do not represent the views of the majority keep up the good work respectfully yours bridget and anthony chambers the second one that came in hello to all the school committee members thank you for your tireless and often underappreciated work
007that you do for the schools enacted in boxborough i'm sorry that you have experienced harassment regarding the retiring of the colonial mascot both at the meetings and in between and week after week i appreciate the work that you are doing to improve the av community and ensure that all feel welcome and included please know that the comments of a few do not reflect the opinions of many sincerely carol chittel and the third message that came in dear school committee members i want to thank you for your leadership during a most turbulent time i grew up in scarborough maine and played sports for teams known as scarborough redskins the teams are now known as the red storm after difficult wrestling with tradition honorable and honor and cultural disrespect what you are leading our communities through is
008most difficult that i know i'm sorry you're having to endure harassment during and in between school committee meetings over this matter the individuals responsible should be held to account i hope the students and community can finalize their choice of a mascot in the near future and we can all move forward respectfully thank you for your leadership kelly cignas and that is it thanks adam um i have been informed that our student rep will be attending the next meeting to give us an update um and so then the next thing on the agenda is peter's date okay great um so in order to keep the agenda moving tonight and really focus on the budget discussions um i will just give a few brief updates uh one we are welcoming three high school principal finalists tomorrow night
009to a community zoom meeting um so you know for school committee members would like to attend um i think we sent you that link but that is also uh on our website and you know we will moderate the questions and answers uh but we will have each of our candidates coming and they'll be talking for about five minutes and taking questions for about 25 minutes roughly uh we have three candidates over an hour and a half so we'll hold very strictly to the half hour time frame um i have been in the process of checking references since last week when candidates visited so that process is nearly complete now um you know we will give our families probably about a day to provide feedback um on each of the candidates to me and then i
010will make a selection uh you know likely you know hopefully be able to announce that by the end of this week so we are closing in quickly on the end of that and it would be a nice way to head into february vacation knowing who the next uh high school would be special education director search uh we decided we conducted an initial round of interviews we have decided to extend that um we had nasdaq do another mass mailing across the state who administrators everywhere we also reached out to boston college posted there we posted on linkedin as well we created kind of attempted a social media push to try and get the word out um to you know continually generate candidates for the pool um so that that is something that's in process as well
011um that posting will close at the end of february vacation and then you know the screening committee will reconvene take a look at any additional applications that have come in and choose about next steps in the interview process um pre-k update uh coming out of last meeting there were a couple of questions about the pre-k programming where we had wanted to move the early release date for all the elementary schools um to wednesday and have the pre uh k program align with that date what i can tell you is actually i wanted to confirm this with joe and debbie dixon and debbie's here to answer questions if you have them but there is no change to that one aba program that we have at the pre-k so that program actually stays at the full five-day
012program um that it always has the aba services continue um on that fifth day so i just want to make sure we're clear about that you know really the impact is on all the other pre-kindergarten classes that did not have that fifth day of programming they're the ones that actually uh you know will be more consistent with the elementary schools um the school building project we had an exciting update on that the steel beams have started to go in on the school building project if you're on the mailing list for that you saw a few pictures go out but i will hopefully pair some with you in the next few weeks but i would encourage you to drive by gates at some point probably over the next month or two it will start to look
013more and more like a building that you can see but it's going to be very exciting and then i want to end with just a nice positive this week we are celebrating lunar new year so for those of you that celebrate you know happy new year um and although i will say we get to have one more school committee meeting before you get to start celebrating um but you know lunar new year's this week and i just want to point that out forever to take any questions on that update angie you have your handwriting yes okay okay um peter cage is clarifying after tomorrow's interview that parents join what is the process for them to provide any kind of feedback marie do you want to talk about that sure um we have a form that
014we will share with the community that has an opportunity to give feedback about all three candidates that we will um send out ahead of time have available in the chat that night and ask people to respond by the end of the day wednesday okay thank you thanks angie i don't think i see any other questions right i don't think so all right thanks so we have one presentation um tonight we uh tonight we have jessica harms and three students here to visit us from the national honor society theater and jessica if you are ready you can introduce yourself and the reason you are joining us all right i believe i am actually playing a video first and then we will um i think at that point jess haley and sabina will will probably turn their
015videos on so let me share my screen there we go and if you cannot see the video when i start please let me know and we will uh fix that we the student leaders of presentium circus student theater at abrhs are incredibly grateful for for the school committee's continued support of theater in our community thanks to your support we were honored as a national leader last year being one of two schools to be chosen as a disney pilot school we've highlighted the disney productions of twice charmed and freaky friday thank you for helping over 120 students participate in this project and girl confidence and their skills also getting a college level training in a high school theater production has given me personally the confidence to pursue theater professionally last year pc earned the state championship
016for best production for a matter of life and death this win marked the fifth year in a row pc has won the state championship and we have qualified to compete at the international level your support has enabled us to travel with the largest team in the state and nothing compares to that experience personally it's taught me how to innovate adapt and meet challenges as a team and how to be a proper leader these skills are what i need to be successful beyond high school so thank you for supporting my future because we have multiple theater classes which allows us to slow down and really hone in on our craft i achieved to be one of three students to be awarded a state scholarship for theatrical excellence thank you for allowing your students to not only
017develop and grow as people but as artists while they're in school i don't know who i'd be without this theater program today when quarantine began theater remained a constant as our lifeline of community support and routine we hosted trivia nights we brought in special guest artists to teach us advanced skills and we are now one of only two schools in the state to produce a musical this year it took over 75 students six months to produce our musical worchester academy we are very excited to be debuting our musical this weekend and offer free streaming passes at av drama.org this summer 30 of us learned how to write and compose music for our own full-length musical we never heard of another school riding their own musical especially not one to be performed virtually but now we
018have four other schools who are going to be performing the show that we wrote writing this musical has given us a voice in a time where we felt like we've had none our musical is about the pain we experience when you put your own self-worth into tests and grades and to expose that pain in a community that accepts you is freeing thank you for supporting a safe community where we are free to voice our opinions this fall when for her star musical in the sun snow and rain up until thanksgiving break and we thank you for letting us use the tennis courts as our stage because we were able to have in-person rehearsals we were able to continue upholding pc's goals of collaboration and community while also providing a safe space and sense of normalcy
019personally having a reminder that there will always be a home for you was especially impactful and needed during these isolating times and while our scripts might have gotten wet pc has proven to me again and again that tribulations only make us stronger as a program as individuals and as a community we thank you for supporting us in the continuation of that message throughout this unprecedented fall season we aim to use our art as a tool to inspire conversation and promote empathy so this year we produced act free an anti-racism play about juneteenth i'm so grateful that this play gave me the opportunity to research parts of our country's history which have too often been sidelined actually allowed me to ground my own understanding of racial justice in this country and more importantly how much further
020we have to go thank you for promoting the representation of all voices in our community and for giving us a voice to begin to dismantle systemic racism we also aim to give back and connect to our community so our acting class is performing readings of children's books to celebrate the diversity in our community and we've created a playlist on youtube for any elementary student to access additionally we are continuing to plan some fun spring activities to bring our pc community together presenting circus has truly defined my high school experience and while i gained amazing and valuable skills like leadership teamwork and confidence when looking back as a senior it's the community that's the real reason i'm glad i did pc whether it's our student community or the community we bring together with shiz pc is
021a place of belonging and inclusion and one that i will value far into my future thank you for the support that has made all of this possible [Music] hello school committee i am honored to be here this evening to express my gratitude for all the time and energy you give to our community i am jess harm she her hers the theater teacher at abrhs and i am happy to introduce student leaders holly and sabina hi everyone i'm hallie um so i am president of presenting circus at the high school and yeah we said it in the video but we just wanted to say thank you so much for the support that you've given our program and um yeah just been able to allow us to continue through um this unprecedented pandemic secondly everything that they
022all said thank you all so much it means a lot to have a space a safe space in a home during this quarantine and i'm sabina i am the head choreographer for the basketball musical and i'm also on the pc board great well thank you guys so much for uh making that video it was really enlightening i think a lot of information that people didn't know that was going on if they didn't have students involved in pc and i think it's really wonderful to see um what you all have been up to and um how creative you've been able to be in the pandemic and still being able to continue your craft in your art um did anyone uh on the committee want to say something amy i just wanted to say i am so
023incredibly proud of all of these students i am i mean the stuff that jess arms does with the kids the kids they're so eloquent and adventurous um and creative it's it's just a real i'm just i'm just really proud of our community and i thank you so much for doing this adam uh yeah first of all thank you guys for a wonderful show this weekend i enjoyed it thoroughly when i was watching it um and i i just wanted to say that in in one of my previous careers i was a college professor for technical theater at ithaca college and we had some av alum come through the program there and it's clearly evident that the quality of our program remains at the highest level and so i'm so happy to be part of this
024community and to be someone who has a background in the arts and to be able to support the amazing arts program and theater program that we have here thank you guys kyra i just want to say as an as a mom with elementary school kids uh that i i first i'm just i i'm ever impressed ever impressed with abrhs students y'all are just the most poised and powerful um young people i've ever experienced i'm just so proud to experience this and um i i when i watched this video i just dreamed of my two little boys being part of this program it was just so inspiring to me um so just thank you so much for being um for being leaders and for being inspirational and for being young and creative and amazing um and
025as a writer i just i so appreciate that this is community that loves the arts um and encourages y'all to be who you are um so congratulations on everything that you've achieved and i'll just say thank you again for taking the time to come to our meeting i'm sorry it couldn't happen last thursday i know your video was produced so that it would have we would have all known but um that you were uh presenting the your show last weekend um i don't want people to be confused because you were supposed to present in our meeting last thursday but um it was a wonderful show and i'm i'm just pleased that you guys were able to take the time out to come tonight and thank us it's really appreciated thank you thank you for all
026that you do we have received a lot of really great um public feedback um so we are going to be extending the run of our show through this weekend for folks who were unable to miss it because our whole aim with the program is to bring our community together so making it more accessible to our community is our role well that's great news thank you for the update and and where would people go if they wanted to get tickets and they missed it the first weekend yeah if you go to abdrama.org it'll be on the website there and it will be on demand for you to play through this weekend and then it'll come down great thank you so much all right the next item on our agenda is the consent agenda um items on
027the consent agenda do not usually require discussion and are approved with one vote unless any member would like to hold an item for discussion in a separate vote i will read each item name and if any member would like it held please say hold approval of meeting minutes of 121-21 recommendation to approve gift of two thousand sixty three dollars and six cents from lifetouch national school studios to the rj gray junior high school for student activities great all right then i will entertain a motion some move that to accept both of these i hope that worked sure okay all right and we'll do a roll call vote tara sorry yes with gratitude you're in the top corner of my screen so you get to go first amy yes angie yes adam yes diane yes kevin
028yes john yes evelyn yes and myself yes great thank you everyone all right just a note about the order in which all of these next couple of things um appear on the agenda after meeting a budget subcommittee last week we had sort of a lengthy discussion about how to best um approach the budget so that you would understand what was being asked at the end of the day and so there's a lot of dense information that was included in your packet and a lot of information that is pertinent to understanding why the budget is how the budget is but in order to best understand what peter and dave and the rest of the administration need from us tonight um we're presenting it in this order so just keep that in mind i think peter's going
029to be very clear about what the ask is tonight so that everyone will really understand um how you should process that information so peter or dave or whichever one of you is going first yeah dave do you want to give a quick verbal second quarter report and this is not the full we can send you the materials for the full second quarter report but we wanted to give you a very high level perspective at this meeting dave you're muted we can't hear you i keep muting myself when i think i'm doing the reverse that's a problem um i think you've got the i think you've got the materials which consist of a one-page overview a one-page revenue summary and a multi-page expenditure summary i think you've got all that so i'm just gonna very quickly
030talk about the overview and so this is where we think we're going to be at year end right now or or through the second quarter of actual uh of actual transactions we have we we're looking at a revenue deficit this year that's comprised of a couple of pieces one is the um state aid and the the second big piece is our local revenues medicaid and investment earnings we'll we'll talk more about that uh as the year unfolds and and hopefully the news will be better but as of right now we're looking at a revenue deficit but we're looking at a budget surplus uh more than offsetting the revenue deficit and we've again in the in the material we've talked about some of the main pieces of what we're projecting now um again through six months
031of activity so at the this is typically when when i first give you a projection for year-end and so what we're saying now is at year end we're looking at about a 362 000 surplus net of expenditure surplus and revenue deficit i will say that typically i inject conservatism at this point i'd rather as the saying goes uh under under um estimate and over perform um and i expect the numbers will get better as they usually do as as the as the year goes on but that's that's the current snapshot and the overview also just for your information has where we stand as far as end we use the million 145 to to pass this year's budget and certified end came in at 3.4 million or three a little over three and a half percent
032it was it was extremely late it only came in last month um so that in very broad strokes is an overview of where we stand through two quarters dave can i just a couple of things for clarifying so dave always says he's conservative so right now you're projecting about what for the end of the year 362 000 to the good okay last year at this time what were we projecting last year at this time which understand was on the eve of the pandemic we were showing about six hundred thousand dollars in the hole it was primarily a salary of a personnel deficit and through the primarily through the what happened as a result of financial activity is during the pandemic that just changed 180 degrees we won't we likely won't have the same uh flip
033this year but we're starting from a more solid position as as peter's intending to get me to to remind you what did we end up turning back last year dude at the end of the year i think it was about 800 000 net okay so dave dave loves to be conservative and marie and i always like to give them a hard time uh at this time of year so you know traditionally we are projecting some kind of a deficit at this point of the year right now we're a little bit to the good so you know we're moderately optimistic um i as dave said i don't think we're going to see the kind of swing we saw last year um because we're not going to all of a sudden cease operations for an extended period
034of time that that's not in our forecast um but i think you know we have reason to to have some optimism around turnbacks this year so that's that's really the broad picture because i don't know if you want to pause now for any second quarter questions or if you want us to continue through it's up to you i don't care if they're if there are questions i would suggest ask the questions about about uh fy 21 because we're going to pivot to fy 22 budget okay so amy and then i don't have a question i just think that peter needs to to knock on wood right now because you can't you can't you can't say we're definitely not going to be you know all shutting down operations you're jinxing us okay john dave i just
035wanted to be um clear with respect to the 500 000 contingency so when you project the 362 is that 362 plus the 500 or is that 362 working its way back to the 500 no that's an excellent point that's missed in in looking at the overview which yours truly did miss it because it's not singled out there so when i say we're projecting uh a budget variance of 600 and change to the good that includes 500 000 of contingency appropriation for which we're expecting to not spend any of it or 125 for the good plus 500 to the good of contingency now with that said it's a it's masking a little bit because the the contingency is part of the budget so we have the ability to spend that money but just on a on
036a single line item basis yeah there's a there's a 500 000 line item that we're expecting to under run by 500 000. dave i see some confusion can you just what's the total projected variance right now total projection so the the revenue projected variance of negative 263 expenditure projected variance of positive 625 you add a negative and a positive and you get a net positive 362. okay and then the 500 000. no 362 is built into 500 is built into the 362. and that is clear if you look at the seven pages of detail for the expenditures budget subtotal is 124 000 to the good or about a tenth of one percent of the budget and then the very next line after that i'm talking on the last page of the detailed expenditure report that
037i think without um total contingency budget 500 projected year-end balance 500 that means we didn't spend any of it and it all dropped to surplus okay my apologies i thought i heard you say something different before so so i'm just going to note that it's hard to listen to all those numbers when you're not sharing your screen with the thing that was in the packet which is fine but i just i i know what you're talking about because i've already looked at that sheet like 18 times because of budget sub but for those who haven't i think we're showing a little bit of confusion about what you're talking about especially would it help to bring up the screen for one minute um beth do you have it handy or does someone want to give me
038a i can share it and it looks like i have permission to share so i will bring it up just make sure i've got the right thing here thank you uh so so actually if you just stay at where you was where you entered we'll just get this piece out of the way keep going down to the bottom so as you see the budget subtotal is all the other line items all the other admin cost centers and we're projecting to be 125 000 to the good at year end that's as of now projecting at year-end a lot the amount just below that is that we're expecting to not need to spend any of the contingency which follows if we're to the good on all the other line items we need not spend any of the
039contingency so that's where the 624 comes from and there are no there are several pieces in that report that we've projected out to year ended and we don't we don't need to belabor this and go through them now but if you go if you scroll up to the first page of this presentation that's the one here's what i tried uh confusingly to to say in words and pictures are worth you know how many words 262 000 deficit in revenues 624 000 surplus and expenditures i just gave you the breakdown of that which includes the contingency and the net is 362 to the good projected at year not that's not the year-to-date surplus that's that's projected uh as of the end of the fiscal year and sorry sorry tessa this would have been much so just
040for additional clarity because of the question that john asked if the 500 000 wasn't baked into the expenditure total there we would still be at a negative right now correct 362 minus 500 would be about 130 negative projection and then going back to what peter said we were much further in the hole this time last year so we do expect things to turn around uh there's a revenue component that is going to turn around um these things these things come in and and reports are produced and distributed and then new information comes in and it's just not practicable to redo reports uh but we'll update them we'll update them that in the in the next go around no that's fine i just want to click for everyone really understood what it was you were talking
041about and now that you showed it it was much clearer does anyone have a question about that before we keep going diane yeah before we leave fy21 i just wondered david you would comment on any expected coded relief from the federal government you mean further than what we've received already so there there are two pieces that have come in one relates to fy21 and that's the that's what i had just alluded to that that information about that came in after these reports were were prepared that's a fairly fairly small amount of money but um it it's going to make up for the minimum aid that we did not get with this year's budget which which causes the the chapter 78 variants in in the revenue report that's about 160 000 and change the second one
042that we know of is called sr2 uh we got the esr grant last year it's a um uh title one based allocation and so to the extent that acton-boxborough does not have a tremendously high low income population relative to other communities our tank is relatively small compared to other communities 25 no this is 460 dollars which can be spent over a three year period of time those are the two we know about neither of those importantly includes anything that's currently on the agenda of the federal government the 1.9 trillion that the president is proposing and meeting with some positive and some not so positive reception in the in the legislative branches what what seems to be on the jet on the horizon is that action is expected to have to take place fairly quickly so
043we should know we should know fairly soon a couple of things one what's in it for what's in it from the federal government two how much of that flows to massachusetts three how much of that blows to individual districts and very importantly for how much of that what are the what are the rules of engagement on use of that money that's that's going to be very important uh when that information is known that's all i know about i don't know any speculation on on numbers you know predictions of numbers and things like that adam yeah i just want to add diane to your question we have received funds for the copic relief fund or we've applied for some of that we've received funds dave for fema reimbursement so there have been some funds that have
044come in into this year's budget to help offset some of the additional expenses of supplies and remote learning program and technology and whatnot yeah and to be to be honest i didn't rehash that because i've given that report before and there's nothing changed as far as anything tangible we've not received any more uh funds ourselves the two announcements both occurred within the last couple days we've not heard anything about our fema number two application yet which is significant in amount um so there are lots of irons in the fire some of them if we if for example we were to get a significant amount of funding from the fema grant that's not going to improve our bottom line because those costs were all accounted for in a fema fund so what what the fema reimbursement
045would do would be to preclude those funds from having to be funded via other means including potentially our operating budget kira i'd like to ask a stupid question if that's okay there are no stupid questions kyra okay brilliant um so we we are we express surprise and delight that we're not in the hole for q2 but they're they're we were in the hole for q2 last this time last year so i guess what my question is is that the normal pattern that q2 is when we get the numbers uh with projections that look dire and then you know we get to qp q3 and it's kind of all okay is there a is there a ebb and flow and and um tied as it were to the budget um or is it or is there
046some other pattern that i'm missing here for for a stupid question that's remarkably superbly uh enunciated and and very very astute for a stupid question uh the couple of things that that really are able to be predicted that would have a material impact on the end of the year budget are health insurance projection we're pretty good with that because health insurance starts earlier in the year we prepay health insurance so we have a pretty good beat on that and that's running a deficit because we hired staff for the for the rlp who were not budgeted and so we're running over on our health insurance costs that's a pretty good number special ed tuitions i don't have anything as far as a year-end projection for that because the jury's still out uh in the in election
047season that would be a too early to call the other big one is personnel and personnel is the is the poster child for the numbers always get better from here right about now is when we've really gotten our first good projection for the end of the year and we're showing a significantly positive variance in all of the personnel accounts that's usually where we start off very slow and get better because things like leave leaves of absences are not quantified in the in the way that we are the projection of at this point some other things that we don't have a good handle on are just carried at budget and lo and behold they come in under budget by the end of the year so there's a high degree of conservatism especially in the personnel lines
048that typically will get better and so when you look at the the detailed uh expenditure expense projections that i've given you watch for the next iteration to see changes all right and my my prediction will be health insurance is going to come in about the same we'll see where we think we're going to be for special education and and related tuitions and look for the look for the how the personnel cost has gone projection has gone up and down upward down see not a stupid question very good question thank you tessa uh so thank you dave for the for a good number so i it's good to see we have some we projected to have some surplus so i just have some similar question like akira actually very preliminary so you you put a uh
049under the big category you put a percentage right the progress against the budget basically 47 or 50 percent so i understand the different category probably we will expect the different numbers in terms of a percentage i don't expect to probably 50 right by the second end of the second quarter is that correct yeah so those those numbers are in there um i figure i do them for myself as kind of a sanity check but since since the data are available i put it in there and you'll see a lot of the instructional departments the buildings and whatnot they tend to hover around 50 which there's there's some there's some logic to that and the fact that they're all in the same range it provides some comfort when you when you say i think i think
050i'm okay with these numbers because they're they're around 50 at this time of year yeah yeah that's great so but some some number is really i mean i don't know if she should i worried about it or maybe some number is really encouraging right we only spend 27 percent like uh people services uh and for the other some others we spend already 50 65 or 80 80 something 80 percent so if that's a so i just wonder if it's possible say uh have some guidelines uh by first quarter we expect that this this category will spend the 25 percent by the end of the second quarter we expanded we expect that this number is going to be say 80 percent nobody i mean by looking at some number like 89 right i understand that's uh
051information technology it's a it's a it bothers me right so for this i just wanted from the just very high level uh is that's a i mean from the like fy 20 that is at the end of second quarter do we expect this 89 number on also i jump in on that one yeah but i don't think at this point of the year the percentages are necessarily all that helpful um you know sometimes like something like instructional technology you're gonna see a lot of that purchased very early in the school year uh because we need to have all of that equipment in place um similar a lot of times building based supplies you would see purchased earlier in the school year so that those materials are in place other times it has to be spread
052out because you can't store you know 25 pallets of paper um at any place in the school so you know the there's no great trend that we can tell you for that um other than to say you know take the percentages a little bit with a grain of salt right now we do tend to spend a lot of our funds up front um just because of the the nature of schooling and needing to have things in kids hands early in the year so i'll just i'll just try and in 30 seconds give heben some assurance here because he's pointed out some information that's on here and probably deserves a little bit of my brain for a couple of things so the 89 percent it's as peter said we front end loaded a lot of the
053technology hardware as i think you know to to provide support for the rlp the finance department at 65 remember two things that includes debt service that includes the middlesex county retirement um uh payment the debt service uh principle has not been made so that so that actually that's not a piece of it but middlesex county is a three million dollar payment that's made on july 1st that's what skews finance to be to be more prepaid 27 pupil services and you'll see the reason why i'm pointing on these three pupil services includes circuit breaker as an offset so to the extent we have reduced the spending that goes through the appropriation by circuit breaker and what happens with circuit breaker we spend what's in the balance as of july 1st first so all of the money
054that was in circuit breaker at the end of last year two and a half million dollars is is already accounted for and that's why it looks like we're way under spending people services we're we're not understanding people services by uh you know 27 times two fifty four percent we're not understanding people's services by 46 yeah that's though those are great explanations right thank you i would just say like peter said of course it's very difficult to offer some guidelines so for us to look at those numbers right to understand that so yeah and this is this is last year like this is fy 21 and so i you know as we move forward in this process i really would encourage especially people who are new to reach out to dave offline not during a meeting
055to kind of help understand some of these these things um because it is part of the global ask of what is being asked tonight in order to understand these things but in order to move forward and kind of stay on top of what we need to understand for tonight's meeting it's a little extra yeah okay all right keep moving all right that's fy21 i'm going to pull up fy22 here while peter's doing that i'll just point out that masc is running a training this wednesday at lunchtime on chapter 70 funding and i'd encourage anybody who's got questions about that to attend that training i'll be there who doesn't even know what chapter 70 funding is it would be a great thing to do all right so this is our february 4th presentation which is now
056the february 8th presentation i want to acknowledge that we have two budget presentations within a week we have some areas that we really need some strong school committee sense coming out of tonight so that we know what to come back with for our meeting on thursday um in terms of you know giving you kind of a something that you could vote on for a preliminary budget so you know we have some questions that we're hoping for feedback on it's not intended to limit what you give us feedback about but we do need some help with the bigger picture here to home for thursday is it just my screen or is that so super pixelated to everybody else i can't like to me i can't even see any of it wow mine is fine it is
057okay yeah once better okay that's fine okay i just wanted to ask i don't know why the video was before too so i'm going to very quickly go through um the remaining timeline and where we're at in the process we'll also give you a very quick overview of what we presented at the last meeting on january 21st just to refresh everyone's memory we want some feedback about preliminary budget approach to inform our next steps and again that's between now and thursday that we have to refine this again we want to review some of our budget changes that we've made since we gave you the last presentation and give you a summary of the recommended budget and then any additional feedback and anticipation of a preliminary budget uh three days from now so we are right
058here um the eighth presentation you have the line adam budget uh actually you do not have a lot of budget correct dave yes they do yes you do i'm sorry yeah yep i don't have my packet up i'm missing a screen here right now um so you have that um the all-day kindergarten tuition vote you actually voted that last year you do not need to revote it because you've already set the tuition rate um unless you decide you want to change it somehow it's not something we're recommending but we wanted to leave them there and the cip project and funding update we'll talk briefly about that but not that's not an in-depth presentation tonight we will have that later in the process um and then february 11th we come back uh with the recommended budget
059budget version two and be looking for a preliminary vote uh you can change the budget after the preliminary vote so keep that in mind and you know we'll talk more about that later again coming up on the preliminary vote and that's a majority vote of members and so now just to refresh where we left last meeting we were essentially looking at a 3.73 budget increase which is roughly 3.6 million dollars with that number in that budget increase in place and this is important this year the overall assessments go up something around four point six percent um in an actin that results in about a four point four percent increase and in boxer it's just about a six percent increase so we've been doing some work on our staff um remember just a few big big
060ideas from the last meeting we presented a level service budget so that it you know represented a decline in anticipated revenues about 156 000 we had about a four percent contractual increase in staffing costs there are no new staff included in that request there's actually a decrease of 2f health insurance um is now projected at seven percent um it had been at five in our initial assumptions that's been set now at seven percent increase mcrs middlesex county retirement assessment 12 percent um and resuming funding of a capital improvement plan which is an addition of 345 000 that was another one of the major budget drivers in the line item preliminary level service budget the net increase again was 3.6 million or roughly 3.7 um we did reduce in that budget some of the use of
061e d reserve to the tune of about 180 000 there was some partial funding from transportation reserve and capital reserve included in that as well and then again i already mentioned it but the total assessments are at the bottom so this i think is important for the discussion this year and i wanted to just talk briefly about budget and assessments that they are not the same um our budget is all of the combined costs that we pay to operate our schools our revenue is the sources of funds that can come from the places other than the town so when we talk about revenue we talk about the places other than the towns for that money so state and federal uh are typically the sources the reserves are the various savings accounts that we have and
062then the assessment is the portion of the budget that the towns are responsible for one note circuit breaker is a unique type of reserve because it's applied directly to the budget and decreases our overall budget so if we choose to use two hundred thousand additional circuit breaker reserve that decreases the actual budget by two hundred thousand the other types of reserves end transportation and capital are actually applied after the budget is set so they don't reduce the budget but they do reduce the assessments that the member towns have to pay all right for those of you wanting to follow along the budget is all of our operating costs minus as i said just on the last screen minus circuit breaker reserve and that's our total budget increase the assessments are the budget increase minus the
063revenue minus additional reserves and that's what gets assessed to the towns so the total assessments um and then times active enrollment is what acting pays for an assessment and then the total assessment times the percent box for enrollment it's what foxborough would have to pay and it's roughly an 85 15 split so with our numbers put in here um our operating costs plus the reserve circuit breaker use that was the 3.6 million or 3.73 this 3.6 million it's really important to remember that that is on a 97 million dollar budget number so you know that's where we get the 3.73 to look at the assessments though the total increase was 3.6 million the new revenue is negative by 150 000 the additional reserve use is 170 000 so the assessment change would be 3.6 million
064however it's not on 100 million as it was up top it's now on 77 million because that was the previous assessment that's why even though the numbers are roughly the same 3.6 million and 3.6 million you're seeing a much higher percentage change there right and then when you go by enrollment you can see how we get to the various town assessments so in in a year where we have negative revenue growth from state and federal funds that's why you're seeing that assessment percent go higher if we had positive revenue growth and in the last few years we've actually had substantial positive revenue growth it's possible to increase a budget but you actually see that the assessment change does not is not as high as the actual budget percent change all right so we're in a
065situation we have not seen in a few years peter yeah yep do you think because because we're going to go into another direction in the presentation should you ask if there are questions sure i'm happy to any questions on what we just presented okay peter i'll give you props because that really was a very good explanation and understanding the difference between a budget increase and an assessment sure yeah no we thought it particularly in this budget that's really important um especially with you know again typically our assessment percent has been lower than our budget number and this year it's a higher percentage and that you know i think grabs everyone's attention and it's helpful it's helpful to to get to grasp the math that the budget increase at this point is 3.6 million the assessment
066increase is 3.6 billion wait that's the same well the revenue and the reserve offset each other so the budget increase remains the same so it's coincidental that it's the same amount of dollar increase for the budget and for the assessment but as peter said it's a different denominator budget versus the assessment i agree this is this makes it really clear all right so now recommended budget a couple of guiding questions you know that we've been thinking about um one is meeting our students post pandemic educational needs and the balance then of the financial impact of our budget on the community those are two um big important ideas think about as we go into this budget um the levers you know one thing we have to think about um obviously actin is at its levy limit
067um and we're also in kind of just a tough tough general budget cycle and a tough financial outlook uh for communities so if we want to moderate the impact of the town we have two basic categories of levels one is to reduce our budget so the first way typically do that is to reduce expenses so personnel expenses capital expenses other things like materials and supplies all those are a very very small part of the budget really it's are the two big chunks and personnel is by far the largest the other way to reduce the budget is it to increase the use of circuit breaker reserves so keep in mind those are the two levers for reducing the budget the other major lever to moderate the impact to the towns is to increase use of reserves
068so the three areas of reserves we talked about were end transportation and capital reserves so the two choices we have reduce the budget or increase use of reserves or some combination thereof so just a little fbi uh some big numbers to point out what we're going to show you has gotten our budget numbers the percent increase on the budget is down to three point one seven percent uh which brings the actin assessment to three point four six in the box four to five just over five so we're certainly heading in the right direction so let's get into some of the details of that um in terms of our first lever and the little blue sticky note there which was to reduce the budget um we did basically five things and we're gonna need some feedback
069on at least one or two of these one we reduce the building-based operating expenses by about a hundred thousand dollars that is based on an anticipated in-person program and elementary allocations are based on projected enrollments right so that's a hundred thousand dollars our principles and we are very comfortable with that reduction um and we just we're making sure you see what that is the other area of the budget we reduce we're in teaching and learning and facilities and those are 25 000 each the fy 20 case collaborative credit um case collaborative its version of e d is called cumulative surplus and that is capped um just like r e and d is capped at five percent they have a cap on what they can carry for cumulative surplus they've been uh very well managed over
070the last few years and they have exceeded their cumulative surplus we are getting back about 500 000 out of that cumulative surplus what we're proposing is to use that over three year period um so about 165 of that would be applied toward next year we believe that's conservative and can carry us through the next several years with with a little bit of positive news from case sr2 federal relief uh we have just about half a million dollars dave could give you probably a more precise number than that we're proposing to use about 100 000 to reduce some of our tech budget needs and essentially defer those into federal relief instead and then the last area where we really want to have a discussion tonight when it comes time is a proposal from dave to cap
071our total spending for middlesex retirement and opeb um which would reduce the liability there to about by about 129 000 in next year's budget so these were the five levers in terms of reducing the budget um we definitely know we need to have a conversation particularly about the mcrs this summarizes what you just talked about for the case credit yeah so again operating budget hundred thousand system wide budgets fifty thousand that's the same as was on the last slide and we're just showing you the details of the case credit that's five hundred thousand dollars we're looking at a three year plan all right better overleaf dave do you want to say something on this slide right so so our allocation you see the bottom half of the slide 418 thousand and we're looking to use
072a hundred thousand of that in a similar manner in which we use the 000 of sr1 uh last year so we knew we knew we had this um allocation we had 115 000 earmarked in the budget to buy chromebooks for grade nine we reduced the edtech budget by that amount and we bought the chromebooks out of the esser uh grant so we're looking we don't have an identification of exactly what we'd use this hundred thousand for but it's the same thing we'll reduce the edtech budget by a hundred thousand and buy the stuff that was that was intended to be bought out of the budget with a hundred of the sr2 grant and tessa i see at least one person with hand raised do you want to pause here or do you want to yep
073that's fine adam go ahead yeah i just have a quick question about this sr2 grant these it shows here it's fy21 through 23 which would be our current budget year through next year and the year after and you're proposing using a hundred thousand of it in next year so that means that the remainder would have to be applied to fy23 is that correct or would you apply some of that somehow to this year so like the rules i'm sorry give a quick overview on that and then you can jump in um yeah so we're also in the process of finalizing summer programming um for this year we expect that to be a fairly substantial cost probably about a hundred thousand dollars total um worth of summer programming to you know for elementary through high school
074level um we also are looking at um our pool testing program so that hundred thousand looks good right there but i anticipate that that will the use of that so there's some potential i guess my question was there's some potential use for it in this year as well as what you're budgeting for next year and reserving for the third year of the program or the of the grant yeah the whole testing piece would be this year and then we're looking at summer program and then 100 000 from tech thanks angie thanks tessa uh so just to clarify so this budget is based on the assumption we're gonna do put a pool testing and the student will go back to school in full and there's no remote so yeah so the the what i would say
075is we have to have some preliminary assumptions about next year even if we know they're possibly wrong um just like last year we had to at some point pass a budget based on some model we have to do the same thing this year um and we know there's going to be adjustments i am sure there's going to be some type of remote programming needed next year um at some level there'll be something we don't know what that looks like yet because we have no information from the state the pandemic continues to change course we have no information about vaccines for kids um so there's just a lot of unknowns and so to try and guess at all of those right now we think is is premature and so we just need to set a budget
076based on the in-person learning model and then just like we did last year be able to pivot from that and make adjustments i just want to know the base thank you yeah yeah it's incomplete and i i want to recognize that but you know if i had any good information to go on i would but there's nothing yeah thank you sure all right so we'll continue on here find the right screen share all right yep so now dave you're on okay so peter gave a quick overview i'll give a quick overview the the middlesex county assessment increase for next year is about a 12 increase there's an anomaly in how that was determined um it has to do with head count it's way in the weeds but the assessment which we must pay is up
077by twelve percent opeb we have funded for several years now at nine hundred thousand dollars this is the payment to the opeb trust this is a voluntary payment that goes into a trust for to pay for future health benefits the increase year to year from 900 to 900 is zero what i'm proposing is to count the combined increase of the middle set of the middlesex county assessment plus the opeb trust contribution at five and a half percent i'll i'll tell you where i came up with five and a half percent but by doing so it reduces the combined hit to the budget by 129 000. so let's go to the next page and we'll see the the mathematics of the and twenty nine thousand so the middlesex county assessment uh goes from two million eight
078to three million almost three million two or twelve percent increase op contribution flat at nine hundred combined you see the numbers three point seven and four million eighty if we cap the total of those two cost centers at five and a half percent that total is three million nine fifty one or or a reduction of a hundred and twenty nine thousand what we'll see on the next slide don't go there yet of where how the 129 impacts our our long-term projections the one quick one is the footnote middlesex county projects that assessments should go up six and a half percent through fy30 after which they'll go up four percent until full funding which is now expected in fy 37. it's at 12 actually because we employed we employed bus drivers and made other new hires
079in fy 19 and yes the fy 19 irs are just making themselves known in the actuarial calculation which underpins the assessment that's a lot that's a long sentence but just so you know there's a basis for why i'm doing this because i believe the fy 22 assessment is an anomaly that won't be that won't be likely to repeated and by combining the two we'll have budget certainty as you'll see in the next slide and short term meaning fy 22 some savings to help us come in and lower the assessment to the member towns so 129 000 savings in fy 22 what happens with that so if we look at the next slide what i've done is don't get frightened i'll walk you through this um what i've done is to project this out through 2033
080and set and so the mcrs column takes takes the assessment and increases it by six and a half percent a year through 2030 and four percent a year thereafter the total column what i've done is applied a five and a half percent increase to the total so we skip over the opeb column for a second and get to the total because i know what they i know what the assessment is because i know what this year's is and i'm going to increase it by six and a half and then four percent therefore i know what the total what the total will be because again we come up with a total for fy 22 and grow that by a constant of five and a half percent through this period of time the plug is the opeb
081contribution so what it has typically been nine hundred thousand dollars that's where the savings comes from and so what i'm proposing would reduce the opeb trust contribution in fy 22 by 129 000 or down to 771. it would go up slightly thereafter because it has to do with why i picked five and a half percent it results in some growth in that opeb contribution and ultimately and and notably when the middlesex county increase reverts to four percent which is projected for fy30 then the opec contribution will go up significantly and make up the lost trust contributions if you will from the earlier years of this plan it also should be known although not shown here that the middlesex county retirement assessment could be less than six and a half percent it was several years ago
082less than six and a half percent why is that same thing head count if we if we have a strategy which reduces bus drivers which we did this year if if the under uh if the lower bus driver costs get themselves into a um actuarial calculation their assessment could come down so again not to get too far in the weeds but the six and a half percent is their target increased contribution what i'm saying is to match that with a target of five and a half percent for our district and and tie in the open contribution with the middlesex county contribution and you can see that by the end of this analysis so through 2033 which is on the eve three or four years away from when middlesex county expects to be fully funded by
083that point the opeb contribution the opeb trust will have been contributed to by seven hundred thousand dollars more than if we just went along with uh paid the assessment pay the 900 to open that's a long that's a long time from now and is probably going to be looked at with a scan says as as far as how how comfortable are we that in 11 years we can do that but this is more or less to show you that this is not a one-off one year hey we need to find some budget savings oh i got it let's do this there's there is some intellectual basis and some thought behind uh coming up with a one-year something which manifests itself in a one-year savings so this is tessa thought and i think rightly so that
084you can possibly get your arms around this analysis or at least maybe have some questions that i could answer about it well i think adam is going to ask the best clarifying question ever right adam uh yes so um the i i want to start with some comments and some overview with sort of explaining how i got my head wrapped around this and then i'm going to lead that into a question dave so first mcrs is middlesex county retirement so that is our retirement liability for all of the the the the staff in in the district stop adam can i interrupt it's for the non-certified staff certified staff are in middlesex are in mass teachers and to which we do not contribute these would be custodians and hourly personnel and then the opeb or other
085post-employment benefits is essentially retiree health care correct correct so um this the reason we draw these out is because we know we have these long-term liabilities based upon the staff that we employ in the district so my question dave my clarifying question is why is it that for mcrs we have to continue to pay uh six percent and then four percent but for oped we can pick how much we want to pay each year including zero which if if you if you you know follow the opeb presentation many of our peers have not yet begun to fund their future opeb liability the direct answer to your question that it's in the statute decades ago the legislature passed the law that said you must fund your contributory retirement systems on an actuarial basis and so middlesex
086county retirement system essentially sends us the bill and says you must pay this but there is no such organizing body or statute that says we must fund our other post-employment benefits in a similar manner no and if you want one of the members asserted that i have a crystal ball what i'm of the opinion of is that once middle once uh the contributory retirement systems achieve full funding which is projected to be in the mid middle of the next decade so the mid 2030s all of a sudden there is going to be significant amount of money comes off the table as far as what needs to be appropriated every year a big chunk of the middlesex county retirement assessment is to pay for actuarial liabilities of what's called past service costs those that's what's going
087to be fully funded that's what's going to drop off the need to be funded via appropriation and my bet is at that point you'll see state law come in and do for opeb what it did for um county retirement systems that just as a practical uh answer how is the state going to come in now and mandate you need to fund your opeb but they did it for retirement systems and and cities and towns and districts have been doing so for for 20 30 years thank you john are you sort of raising your hand yeah thank you the um the part about this that i do love is the part that these are long-term liabilities and whenever we discuss things it's good to put them in a common bucket so putting um the middle sex
088retirement and opeb you know in one point of discussion you know is a great thing to do the second thing that i'll note you know sort of to peter's point at the top is it's a hundred million dollar budget so a million dollars is one percent and a hundred thousand dollars is point one percent so you know at some point um you know we're sort of getting a little bit into into the weeds when we get down below a hundred thousand but this is a little bit above that um i think the other thing to this point about you know the precision uh that can exist in a spreadsheet you know we've just finished a discussion where we're trying to figure out what we're going to turn back at the end of this year which
089has some uncertainty in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet you know i look at the spreadsheet which you know projects many things out you know with great you know refinement for a long period of time and i think you know both there are reasons to be skeptical both about the middle sex projection and i'm not saying that it couldn't be more favorable you know or less favorable i'm just saying that you know it's going to be different um you know and i'm particularly concerned about the open projection because you know it's grounded in our own healthcare cost experience you know which i believe has been below market and that's influencing where the projection is um and so by way of a specific comment um you know i think this is an interesting idea
090my personal preference for this year would be if you want to pick up 129 000 take it from end leave open 900. [Music] uh diane yeah thank you john for saying that um so i guess my question to dave is because you know you floated this idea of when we fully fund the liability for mcrs you know we can then you know have all this money to push it over to oped and retire that liability a lot later than i think what was originally predicted by that actuarial um report at like i don't know 2097 or something crazy crazy so um i mean it it it seems like a great plan but like what so the actual actuarial assumptions um how much can you trust that and and what could throw a monkey wrench in
091this plan the monkey wrench in the plan would be if the retirement systems under perform their investment objectives okay they don't earn as much as they think they're going to earn we just got something that um in the calendar year just ended i'm going off the top of my head but i think they earned 12 last year their their actuarial number is 7.3 that's that's a monkey wrench but that is a monkey wrench that fell on the accelerator pedal and so it was a was a good thing in returns aren't always going to be there so that's that's one you you can you heard that i'm i'm maintaining that the 12 percent and i verified this with the executive director of of middlesex county um the 12 anomalous assessment is because we hired more people
092in 2019 to the extent we continue to hire non-certified staff and add to our head count that that our county retirement system eligible the the assessment will go up more than six and a half percent to the extent we reduce our hourly and non-certified staff there should be at least a one-year adjustment in that and then it should resume once it once it normalizes once once head count normalizes the the the increase is six and a half percent the only the only swing factor would be head cut so there aren't a lot of levers to to change that which is why i kind of came up with this idea and said i think i think there's probably where we are now there's a there's a pretty good feeling on my part that six and a
093half is a good number that will not often be exceeded meaning there should be opportunities to restore the opeb contribution up to 900 up to its current level and perhaps an increase in in excess of its current level but what i'm also doing is i'm anticipating the point at which the middlesex county assessment goes goes from six and a half to four percent if we have the budget certainty of five and a half percent increases for both of those line items we will have the ability to achieve what some have wanted for a while which is to put more money into the opeb trust all i'm saying by this by this analysis is it's going to take a it's going to take a few more years because there are six or seven years which right
094now our budget is six and a half percent increase so i guess my question is john like why um why do you why would you say just take it out of end keep us at 900 for john peterson why would i say that yeah yeah because um you know i think the use of end is transparent it's clear that we are drawing down our reserves to deal with this you know dave commented that uh the middlesex retirement you know is a one-off to the extent that the spirit of you know ent usage relates to those one-off events you know i would invoke that um you know in general you know as we're going through this process you know my desire would be to say it fine if you want to if we need to maintain
095the budget at a certain level then you know we will draw down reserves and make it clear that that's the way that we're doing it um you know creating a problem that everybody will understand exactly what it is you know here and there and everywhere then figuring out what we did and why we did it it's going to be complicated um but john what about this is not transparent dave has made like an incredibly transparent graphic that shows exactly where the money is going and exactly what we're doing so you cited that as a reason that's the only reason i'm pushing back on you because you said the use of end is transparent to me using e and d for something when there is a clear explanation of how we could be using it is
096less transparent okay so to respond to that if i provide a hundred transparent explanations the sum of the hundred transparent explanations is not transparent it's just confusing um and so i think you know whether we're talking about revenue adjustments where you know i would have been happy to say hey you know we've got a negative revenue variance it's 262. here are the things i really don't care what's inside that i don't think it impacts you know our ability to manage the macro budget um you know i i would rather see you know fewer levers you know that you say okay we're going to use these three levers and this is how we're going to get there as opposed to you know if you think about the slide that peter just showed that said i got
097this lever this lever this lever this lever you know that's not a conversation that we can hold in their head all the time as we're making a final decision about where we go if the issue is you know we're going to clean up the whole thing and we're going to take end from you know some number to 450 thousand dollars more than that number that's clear the fact that it happened to be you know three little events you know somewhere buried in the line item of the budget you know i think that's not so helpful to the school committee to be down in those kind of weeds okay angie yeah thank you so this maybe maybe uh so my understanding of this one we're putting with one side we're required to put certain percentage into
098the fund and the other that we're not there's no set percentage we need to require but regardless both are for future funding we're putting the future funding and the performance because it's a long term so the rate of return the performance on the phone that we put in will have a huge um result impact of result you know 10 20 10 years later so my question is how would the the performance of the money are they managing the uh the money that we're putting and regardless and when maybe even one year they're outperformed maybe the year out they're underperformed and regardless that we are required to put that much where there's is any other impact um you know i don't know how we are able to control or knowing by the but by this long-term
099investment and knowing there it will get the result that we expected yeah so by they angie you mean middlesex county retirement system so they're they're overseen by a similar group as uh mass teachers retirement and and the state uh retirement system itself and they're they are professionally managed and i mean i can't really comment on what what they do but i can tell you that for the most part retirement systems in massachusetts all pretty much track about the same and that is that over a 30-plus year span they've returned an average of nine percent their as their assumptions were at eight percent until a couple of years ago when interest rates on on and the ability to get returns that they were used to have gone down and they've reduced their their target rates of
100return down to seven and three quarters down to seven and a half and most recently from middlesex county down to 7.3 that may not sound like a lot but but when you're talking 30 40 50 years of returns that's a that's a massive potential swing they've reduced their projected rates of return meaning it's going to be harder to come to full funding which is one of the reasons why their full funding estimate went from 2035 to 2037 alas we're now in the weeds but it's professionally managed to angie it's we don't have control but we have an obligation and i think it's chapter 32b of mass general laws we are plain and simply required to make this contribution to our to our contributory system okay so in other words regardless of the rate of return
101and and the percentage that we are required to contribute that will not be changed yes okay thank you okay now that we're thick in the weeds are we ready to move on to the rest of your presentation absolutely peter if you can just refresh by going back please to slide 41. so peter went through all these these are the five identified budget adjustments and we've we've where required spend a little more time on on a few so now we want to resume on slide 47 so those were the budget changes so as you remember from what peter said there's two ways to impact the assessment one is budget adjustments which we've just talked about the second is reserves and so what this recommended budget does is restore the use of end to the same level
102as fy 21 or a million 145 and that results in a 180 dollar reduction in the assessment but it didn't change the budget so just by way of backup here's since full regionalization the um ins and outs if you will of e and d and so the pink number we had we had said in the first iteration we'd be using 96 965 to try and to try and soften the use of e and d year to year and systematically reduce it now we're saying level fund it a million i've added to this uh which which may have looked familiar to some i've added a column net turn back slash adjustment to e and d that's the plug because i know what the ending balance i know what the beginning balance is i know what's been
103transferred out i know what's being used to fund the following year's budget and so the difference is that column and that represents the turnbacks and it represents the dor adjustments when they certify end there is a there's a mini trend from onward that that the turnback has gone down it's hard to focus on just that though it's it's hard to say that that there's a trend and in particular fy 21 is not going to follow any trend because kovit is going to uh kobet is going to wreak havoc with our normal operating activities so this is just how a million 145 usage fits in historically with uh with the with the district's use of dnd and if i can show one thing on this you know these years right here in particular were important years
104if you look at the percentages we have a five percent cap on e d and we were getting very close to that this right here was the feasibility study funding for the the elementary school project that we have going and then the following year you know you can see this was when we um established the capital stabilization fund and so you know you can see the turnbacks and that was a very intentional move to bring this percentage down because we were at that cap so as a function of total reserves you know even though the e and d balance went from 4 million to 3.6 million that was in addition to the million that we transferred over correct john do you have a question i do so um you know i was really glad dave
105that you included those turnbacks and so you know if you look at you know those 2018 and 2019 um extremely large turn back numbers you know school committee said you know just as we are sitting now and looked at budgets made that e d appropriation um and we could go back and watch the tape but i'm guessing you know there was not extensive discussion about how we expected to turn back you know one and a half million dollars which is material relative to our budget number and i'm wondering how we should feel about that you know as we look forward you know to future budgeting how we can have swings of this size that you know are not a deep part of our budget discussion big components in 17 18 and 19 of that net
106turnback was revenue my predecessor had not budgeted interest income or medicaid reimbursement she also very conservatively budgeted for chapter 70. in one year i believe she she budgeted level funded chapter 70 and the district received minimum aid that's that's a that's a big amount to the district right there the interest income and medicaid went from unbudgeted to and i kept i would say for years the the revenue budget were chasing our actual and we we this year the the dog bought the car because we're medicaid rules have changed the reimbursement's not as robust as it's been interest rates have plummeted and we're not going to make the the interest income that we made so the the revenue components of the turnback john were something that is not repeating itself now and so there are three
107components to that turn back there's revenue there's expenses and there's the dor adjustments the back and forth the prepaids the the negative accounts etc which as tessa knows right now we're in the weeds and i really don't want to be in the weeds when we have this discussion which is why i i requested that we we talk about it the the way we we have been talking about it so i think that john there's lots of complicating factors from those three years and the discussions that school committee was having you may recall that we were in like major you know superintendent flux at the time so there was lots of things going on then i don't know that we would want to go back and look at the tapes and talk about you know the
108the turnbacks because it's just it's just so much more complicated than just than just a number i think that that what that chart does show is that i know that dave has made a concerted effort over the last couple of years to really hammer down what our revenues were going to be and to get much closer so that we didn't have this unwieldy number at the end of the year that wasn't expected and i think that that is what's reflected in that chart and what's important for us to take away from looking at that because he has made a really concerted effort to really account for all of the things that we're adding to revenue adam yeah i i would say that the other thing that that chart shows is the work the district has
109done to build up its reserves since 2014 which is something that we really allowed it as a as a really good thing um and and john i think in response to identifying all of those turnbacks while we may not have seen them in the moment because we were clearly busy with a lot of things we have in those um ensuing years put in place better defined policy about how to manage those reserves at least on the outbound side of spending them um even to the point of the the capital stabilization fund and the policy for that as well so i think that um where hindsight being 2020 we did take a look at that situation and try to manage that both from our perspective as a policy side and from dave's percep perspective from a
110budgeting side to really say it's it's hard to turn the aircraft carrier or what what i remember the analogy but something having to do with it's 100 million budget and if we come in at one percent plus or minus we're doing a good job and we've gotten much better to that than we have in the past which i think is what's what's important to note there in terms of reserves diane yeah um a quick second to that and um adam like when your first year here dave you were like you know just really i was blown away by you know just the the uh the attention that you gave to the the percentage of you know the variances and all the cost centers and it really helped me understand you know what was going on
111here um i i have a couple of questions about end i'm looking at the policy dk on our reserves and it and the guidance is and it's guidance it's not hard and fast rule that that we want to keep a reserve level between four and four and a half percent of operating expenses and we're below that right now now we're we're gonna use another 1 million 145 for fy 22. so um i just wanted to say that out loud and then the other thing is so i'd like some clarity on what why level what are we level funding ind for like we have we have targeted we developed a policy we have five targeted areas where we stated that we're going to use e d for one time expenses so the five are phasing in
112new initiatives capital expenses expenses that will be reimbursed or funded through other sources in the future emergencies and perhaps this is what this is or funding of the capital stabilization fund which we did um using end funds for these one-time expenses may result in lowering the budget and assessments to the member communities so i i guess i just need the breakdown like is this just we're just lowering the assessment um or and this is an emergency or is there like a breakdown because this is really the first year that i know it's you know some if there's 200 000 and we always kind of put to lower the assessment but for a couple of years now it's been very targeted to like you know buses and really one-time expenses and then i'll just um piggyback
113on that that you know we have agenda item 3d and we're looking at a potentially significant liability there with regard to edco and i think that it's important for the committee to understand what might be happening i don't know what the timeline of that is if it's fy23 because it would inform our choices now would inform my thinking now about using emd if i knew that we had to earmark some of that for a what might turn out to be a significant amount of money that we might owe so i'd like i guess i'm that's a question for peter and then the last thing is um you know when when you take out of end the idea is to replenish it and so you know i pulled you know one of the references in the
114policy is is from the uh guidelines an advisory on fund balances from the government finance officers association and you know i'm i don't have a financial background so you know i'm going to defer the experts here and what they say is that they recommend that you know that that governing bodies establish a formal policy we did that and that we set um we set that policy and articulate a framework for how to increase or decrease the level of our fund balance okay we kind of we did that and then we should provide guidance in our policy for how resources will be directed to replenish those fund balances and they recommend a timeline of between one and three years should the balance fall below the level that we prescribed which is between four and four and
115a half percent so these are the things i'm thinking about um i know that's a lot but i i just would like some clarity on on the 1.145 million and all of the other things that i said about the you know upcoming potential liability um with regard to edco and replenishment so i'm going to mute myself and hopefully get an answer i think from my standpoint there was a break and it probably occurred last year because i'm looking at through 2019 and i probably could recite you all the pieces that comprise the use of end whether it's as you say buses uh or buses again etc in 2020 and 2020 the so the 2020 budget fiscal year where we appropriated a million 145 for the following year so for this year if you remember last
116year the budget dragged on because of the pandemic and we ended up not settling the scores until doom with both towns and to get there the the towns and the school departments together both had to reduce the the impact on the on the two communities and the way it was done was was via um e and d and the last the last bit of it was was via end for the district and so in my view from the the la the the both the 145 numbers on that on that slide on that chart have lost their individual character where where they had them before and i think it's safe to say that two things number one if you if you directed me to do it if it was important for for presentation purposes we could
117probably we could uh we could define the use of e d in in the specific terms of the policy but remember as you said the last one is to reduce the impact on member communities and so that's that's where that's where the body lies at this point if we didn't need to reduce the the assessment to the communities towards to a certain level so is what peter showed before the first one out of the box was four and a half and and six percent that's not gonna fly and so to get to where we are now the last piece of it was instead of reducing from the million for 145 that we appropriated for this year and trying to glide path it down to a more normal historical level we said we need we need
118we've got it it's in the bank it's for a rainy day it's metaphorically speaking reigning we're gonna we're gonna use the same level of e and d reserve i will also say one other thing at the beginning of this presentation one of the things peter said is we're looking for direction and so this is this is a proposal but we obviously need your input and ultimately support for where it goes and so this this direction um is a two-way street here so before i call on john because i think that that was a good description of what you said i want to make sure that we are still staying on target of what you need from us so we've heard a lot from you know diane understands budget really well she ran the budget subcommittee
119and has asked really good target questions john understands the budget well and adam understands the budget well i want to make sure that the other members are understanding what is being asked and if you don't understand what is being asked now is the time to say that you don't understand what is being asked so that we can clarify and so that um peter and dave can get the information that they need in order to appropriately adjust whatever they're going to adjust for thursday and just so you know you know we've gone kind of out of order from a typical presentation where we go through the whole presentation but a couple of our slides at the end have the specific questions that we're asking of you well and that's fine so i wanted to make sure
120though because sorry your questions tend to lead us to the weeds and so i don't really want to let you ask another question if it's going to go there is it going to go into the weeds again john you know i'm not sure it's always the question sometimes i think it's the answer i i i do want to ask one i think sort of straightforward question which could get a completely long answer but i'll let you cut it off if you don't want to entertain it at this point dave just said that 4.6 assessment increase for actin isn't acceptable but you know acton doesn't spend the same amount of money per student as sudbury does or concord does so what what's wrong with letting it go up 4.6 why can't we do that so john
121we have a slide on that coming up if it's okay i'm good with that angie do you have a question now um maybe it's i'm also because at i think i asked a question at esu so basically we're trying to over um to make sure that we avoid the override so is there any percentage that of increase that will be tipping over that's kind of a question so the i think the questions i'm hearing now are kind of germane to like the next nine slides so i wonder if maybe we could do like the next trunk and then come to questions because i think it would come together a little bit okay thank you okay great questions but amy are you in the same boat there i know you had your hand up yeah okay
122okay go ahead peter all right so just because we've gone in a couple different directions just to recap we're at so far we talked about two major levers one is reducing the budget that's items one through five so you know if all of those including the mcrs open piece which is is a piece we need to talk about more that would get us to about 550 000 if we level fund e and d usage that gets us to about 723 total adjustments that would bring the numbers that i led with at the beginning of the presentation it brings us from a 3.73 increase down to a 3.17 or about 600 000 change um notice again this is highlighted the e and d piece is highlighted here uh because it's an increase um we want to
123point that out and the assessments come to 3.46 5.02 respected so again headed in the right direction now good news is over the weekend this continued to evolve um diane noticed in the line item budget that there was an unusual increase in assistance she pointed that out marie was able to do further research we realized that we had actually double counted all-day kindergarten assistance in the budget um so there's once you take that out there's a savings of 180 000 the health insurance trust rate i mentioned this earlier but that was voted at seven percent um which is two percent higher than we anticipated so that um effectively cancels out 180 000 um in addition though we've now been able to look through um all of the various leads and retirements that have been committed
124to and that's about two hundred thousand dollars worth of savings so we're just shy of an additional two hundred thousand dollars worth of savings in that budget and so when those come into play the overall budget increase um is 2.97 and note some of that's capital so the operating budget is going up about 2.75 but the overall is just under three the actin assessment is around 3.21 and the box for assessment's 4.70 um and that's where we're kind of at at this point tonight and we're looking for some feedback on some things that will help us uh continue to refine that so you know where we need guidance and consensus what is the target and this goes to what angie just asked um and point a goes to what john had just pointed out why
125are we having this discussion tonight it's very important to understand that acting is at the levy limit it's not whether or not acton wants to increase taxes or doesn't want to increase taxes there is a hard cap on what the act and taxes can go up without triggering an override status this is not the economy to be doing that um so one thing we really would like to hear from the committee is what do you feel the assessment target is and what do you foresee as the budget target do you want to see us to continue to reduce the budget um what's the impact on assessment that we want to have and that that's guidance i think we need from the committee a little bit there's no easy answer to that um because the idea
126of hitting the levy limit is not just the school district budget it also takes into account you know the the town municipal side projections around revenue it takes into account municipal reserve usage it takes into account municipal budget increase we can't control all of those but what we can control is our assessment our budget two use of reserves what do you feel is the appropriate use of reserves in the level that you'd like to see out of us as a recommendation and feedback on our proposed uh increase in the use of e d and then the third area are reductions to the budget how do you feel about the mcrs opec contribution proposal that they've floated um and you know any additional reductions in the budget really are coming out of staffing at this point
127so you know we want to have that explicit conversation just as a sample um up above at the top you know 100 000 budget reduction is about a tenth of a percent reduction to the budget increase and 100 000 assessment reduction is about a thirteenth of a percent uh reduction to the or 1.13 reduction to the assessment um in terms of when we get into staffing um example one just so you see how it goes if we reduce the budget by two hundred thousand dollars and increase the use of reserves by a hundred and fifty thousand dollars um we could actually get those numbers to what you show here another way to do that would be to reduce the budget by 350 000 the budget increase is lower but the assessments are still the same
128so the difference here is example one splits the changes between reducing the budget and increasing reserves the other one decreases the budget but doesn't change the use of reserves we end at the same assessments so there's different ways to get there we just want to point that out as as we have this next discussion um in terms of staffing implications these are the same guiding questions that we we asked where we we need some feedback but essentially for every two staff licensed staff that we reduce that's about 120 production in the budget and so when we come back over to this slide when we talk about the hundred thousand dollar budget reduction you're probably talking about roughly two staff all right um just as a couple notes what we are not doing right now in
129this recommended budget because we need to know your sense of numbers um this does not increase class size so that's good um it does not have additional potential staffing reductions yet because we want to get a sense of the target from you um it um does not continue to defer capital appropriations we bring that back in restoration of all day k to previous level that that's not in the budget we've kept it at the reduced level um it does not increase the use of reserves over our current level it does not have um potential for unidentified federal relief so we may have additional federal relief coming that could further reduce some of the districts costs and it also does not provide for continuing the remote learning program in fy 22 and i alluded to that
130at the beginning where there's so much unknown about what next year looks like that we have to pick a starting point and that starting point really needs to be what can we do and what we can plan for right now is a return to in-person learning i do anticipate there's going to have to be some form of remote but we need more information before we know that so again next steps you know it's actually not in the upcoming week we need to get that feedback very quickly because we need to turn around um a recommended budget for a preliminary vote for thursday um you know we will have our comprehensive budget presentation uh with kind of details on various things that we're doing um so if you say that you'd like you know three hundred
131thousand dollars of reductions tonight for example um we would go back with our leadership team um we've started brainstorming ideas we're not ready to share them yet around what type of reductions those might look like um but we would bring those back you know in more detail on march 4th and then leading to a final school committee vote so that was dave's person that has a question um but what we really need to what i think we need is admin from you is what's the target what's the level of reserves you're comfortable with and looking at if we want to reduce the budget a looking at that mcrs opec proposal and any additional reductions beyond that so those are our big big points for today marie here i'm sorry just a quick question um can
132you go back to where it is right now after the additional 200 000 reduction slide 53. yeah yeah um okay so the budget is at 2.97 correct yes so i think the examples um yeah the examples are old yeah the examples that slide was done before slide 53 was updated before the the new information which which i got today so this slide that you're looking at 55 was done last thursday this came in this morning yeah i just think it's a little bit out there people to know that this is where we are right now which already does what those examples show for the most part right so if we reduce the budget another 200 000 then this number will come down dave check my math roughly two tenths of a percent so that would
133get us to just about 2.75 well if you look at go go to the the the other slide go to 55. so it says reduce budget by 200 thousand well that's essentially what we did and the budget increase is now 2.96 so thereabouts and the actin and box for assessments are there but the assessments aren't where they are because we all we did not also do another 150 reserve right that's the one difference between marines but the budget has already lose to those levels but we but those take into consideration or that a takes into consideration 150 000 yeah that slide was intended to be illustrative and not you know an iteration of where we stand all right amy you're muted no it's still not working all right john yeah i think one thing that's
134come up a few times is this question of the remote learning program for next year you know in my view you know that is clearly a one-off we don't expect to have a remote learning program in fy 23 so that that is explicitly addressed i'd be very comfortable with the idea of saying we're going to um budget you know 775 thousand dollars or whatever the number is for the remark learning program and that money will come from end um and that would be presented to the towns exactly as we presented um the kova circumstance this year it's like if we need a remote learning program here it is we're going to pay for it out of end and then life goes on so that's my my sort of i could try and be a little
135bit helpful the um the other part of it is you know the issue of um you know i don't think that fy 23 in terms of the dynamics that have been discussed here looks a bit different than fy22 um so you know i i think people really need to see that no we're going to face exactly the same issue next year what will limit the ability to increase the budget is the limitations on the rate of growth of the active assessment um and that means that that's what we're going to be facing in fy23 and that whatever we do in fy 22 which should be reflecting the idea and that's sort of what we we think fy23 will look like and then the only thing you know that i would leave you know as a
136wild card as i think has been presented is surely we expect some more federal money and perhaps some more state money to show up we don't know how much we don't know when but i think my willingness to be more aggressive with end is that one way or another if those incremental funds show up we will ultimately be able to allow them to flow to end if we get there so you know for my nickel what has to happen at the moment is we need to get to an active assessment that takes us off you know the growth rate that acton's assessment has been at so acting's assessment over the last years has been growing at a rate of three and a half percent which simply once you get to the levy limit that math
137is just not working even once you do overlay and new growth it's like no you're not getting a three and a half percent and you're really not getting a three and a half percent if the economy is not chugging along so um you know i think for this year if the active assessment is three percent or less um ultimately alg will be able to figure out how to manage that but if it's more than three percent i just don't see how the numbers are going to work amy is it working now yeah i got it working i'm using my husband's computer and so it shuts down at weird times um so so first to clarify that the budget that we is presented marie that we have already completely eliminated the remote learning program and that
138staffing and assumed that that staffing has been absorbed or so those adjustments have already been made yeah so amy the um we treated all of the remote learning program additional staffing as one year temporary staffing for this year we can't say we're not going to have to do it next year but if we do have to do it next year we're truly hoping that there'll be more grant money to help pay for it which is significantly how we paid for it this year um for the most part so um we sort of think if one thing happens the other thing will also happen um so to john's point i don't know that we'd ask the town to vote a much larger budget using emd unless we knew we needed to and you always could make
139the e d adjustment as a budget amendment if you had to but the hope would be that there'd be grant money for that thanks yeah thank you um i would say that i i um [Music] i really um i completely agree with the opeb um analysis but even on in my mind i would i would go lower than that considering where we are right now so we are we have uh what 13 we've we've thought we've funded 13 of opeb and 90 of the the other districts in in the state of massachusetts have done almost nothing so i i think we are already in a really good position and when we're facing a crisis like this i i i don't see i think that that's a legitimate place to kind of look at but i'm
140looking at dave's face and he's like okay but that's okay so that's my opinion um i would also say i know i can see dave's face like i don't know um i i would i would also say that we should really look at the capital improvement plan that we have for next year and the the things where we can reduce um to get to a place that acting can afford without actually going in and reducing staff now i say that with the the understanding that that we don't have fluff in staffing so if we have staff that that we don't really need then yes we should be doing that regardless of what our budget is we should be tackling that if we aren't there i don't think that's the first place where we need to
141be looking at cuts i think we have other areas that we should be looking at in this year um and if you can make an argument for why we should reduce staff because it's not really necessary i'm fine with it but if you can't then i'm gonna say look we need to look we need to look someplace else so that's my opinion adam so i think i'm i'm saying essentially what amy said as well which is um we face a number of challenges uh i am concerned about some of the long-term risk that's unknown so particularly with what we're looking at for edco i'm concerned that we are drawing down our reserves and if i had to make the choice between two teachers or offsetting some of that expense against long-term liability which is fairly
142well known i would much prefer to take the hit on paying down some of our liability then essentially increasing our class size because the other challenge that we're facing is a year and a half of of not necessarily learning loss but definitely a different learning environment and i think the last thing that we want to do is affect um the the district's outcomes we are um a premier district we have one of the highest rated high schools in the district and to john's point we spend less per student than some of our comparable towns so we're we're running a highly efficient um education facility department um and i'm really proud of that and the last thing i want to do is sort of cut ourselves off the knees around the area that i think is
143most important that we take our pride in um i i want to be fiscally responsible um and and to that end i want to both protect our reserves for future risk but also want to find unique areas to save money and i think that the reduction in payments to oped is a unique way to do that cara this is my next stupid question so uh if we're if there are other districts that are not paying into opeb and we are paying a lot into oppab what what what happens why is it that some people can get away with this and and others cannot and is there a penalty or some sort of other um negative uh thing that can happen to us if we choose not to pay in for a year while we deal
144with the crisis at hand first question can i give a a a couple of facets and try to be quick the the the penalty isn't so much a negative it's the positive you wouldn't have gotten so we last year we issued 80 something million dollars worth of bonds that had a triple a rating and got tremendously low interest rate in one of the i i discussed with the ratings analyst and one of the things that was really to our credit was our opeb funding policy and it's it's really arcane stuff but when it comes to compa when it comes to is this community a double a or aaa or the the grades in between you need some things that stand out and so when you hear that we're at 13 funded and and many other
145communities are not well that's in my view one of the things that pushes us over the top and gets us a triple a rate and a two percent bond uh interest rate for 30 years paying for for the new school project i will also say that having having done this in this industry for for a lot of years the easiest thing to do when when faced with the need to economize and the choice is do we lay off teaching staff or do we do something else the easiest thing to do is the something else and those things can be capital improvements we did that last year we zeroed out new spending on capital improvements opeb it's one thing to make the proposal that i did that has a rational basis for making a one-year reduction
146because of the because of the size of the middlesex county increase this year but then it comes it trickles back it's by no means saying well we can just walk away from open we can take an opeb holiday i would strongly urge against that because you're where you are because you had the fortitude to get to an annual funding contribution rate of 000 don't discount how important that will be for future tax paying generations in the community and in other things that um there aren't a lot of other things but those that's the low hanging fruit when it comes to stuff that's not teachers in the classroom but it has longer term implications if we don't if we if we went another year without adding to the capital appropriation uh ability the district will find
147itself back in position where it was a few years before i came here where you were spending a hundred thousand dollars a year on capital and just and that's why we needed a seven and a half million dollar bond and a 13-year plan to spend 20 something million dollars on capital not even counting the new twin school so there so there are trade-offs but but hopefully that answers your question cara as to why you wouldn't just simply look at the opeb money and say well that's that's so far out we can we can tap that the problem will be you tap it this year and then you'll get into a habit and before long it'll it it will you'll be down to funding opeb at 100 000. zero and just saying that liabilities too far
148in the future for me to care about diane yeah this is what i wanted to say um along the lines of what dave just said um first of all i would like to see the percentage increase three percent or below i'm going to offer a cautionary you know note regarding opeb and cutting cip this is the classic kind of you know it's of course you don't want to cut your greatest asset right but this is a classic kick the can down the road thing and let someone else worry about it thing and this is us saying you know maintaining our buildings is a nice to have and only in years when we can afford to do it and i you know members if you look at the archives that when we were not re fully
149regionalized and there was a there was a school committee for the act in public schools this is back in like i don't know like the mid 2000s or something you you will see school committee members unsuccessfully fighting to increase the capital spending for our elementary schools and where that got us is a 23 million dollar punch list and 170 117 million dollar new triple school so i i think you know you never you never really build that back into the budget you know and i think we need to protect the plan because there's just too many there's always going to be competing needs so i i mean i i don't i don't want to cut personnel i i mean peter you had some pretty creative ideas about managing and restructuring personnel so that you know
150you have you lower you know your costs but you're you're still um you know maintaining services so i don't know is there any creative room for some creative thought along those lines um i would really i'm just i'm nervous about cutting um e and d like this and we need to do it but then there's next year and i mean this is there's a lot there's a lot to think about and i guess i just i really i don't think we can i don't think you can i don't want to send you back to alg and say you know 3.21 and you know that's that's all we got um because i think we need to come in lower than that for acton at least because we're in that precarious position so diane just to you
151know quickly respond to that um you know we we have been talking about some ideas around you know shifting some resources around and things like that it's it's not ready for presentation yet um but we we have been having some of those dialogues um you know that that's something that we foresee really kind of being on the march presentation but you know i think from this year perspective you know so far when we've started the budget process since i've been here it's been with you know a good amount of new revenue and so we've always been starting from a position of strength there i think the discussion of this particular budget almost needs to start with the assessment um and you know to be honest i've heard you know basically look staying under three percent
152on the assessment increase i i you know and i don't want to misspeak but i i think that that's doable coming into the next iteration of this um you know without damaging our programs and without you know doing a lot of serious damage to what we're doing i think we have some tightening up that we need to do over the next few days but um my gut is telling me that coming in under three percent on the act and assessment we can get there um you know and that reduces box pro 2 which is a good thing but obviously the active piece is the levy limit component of it john so you know i really would just want to sort of reinforce what i think you heard dave say and and diane say that um
153you know it's easy to walk away from the long-term commitments that you know committees need to make to things like capital projects and you know to the committee's credit over the last few years the committee did build the reserves right it was there was the opportunity you know to take money associated with savings from regionalization and revenue favorability and use that to build reserves and the committee did in fact do that and that was a good thing to do likewise you know to establish the capital plan you know and do it was a good thing to do and the committee now it has a track record of funding opeb to the tune of nine hundred thousand dollars a year and that's an easy thing to do um the other thing that dave has said you
154know more than once is that things are really different now and i think um it's worth reflecting on the fact that um what the committee has faced over the last few years just hasn't been this kind of budget challenge and so if people are feeling pain that they're not used to feeling i i think it's completely understandable because you know and peter just said it you know we've had you know more revenue favorability we haven't had this kind of challenge but that's where we are now so um i don't forget for a second um our social emotional needs you know are larger than they've ever been and that there's lots of things that we hope to uh catch up on you know over the next year um that would benefit from more resources i absolutely
155get that but um when i look and say well where's that money going to come from there's just a problem so at some point like any family budget it's like this is the bottom line we've got we got to figure out you know how we can best use that money to provide you know the outstanding educational services that everybody you know continues to expect from the district angie yeah thanks so i agree that i think acting because the the feedback i got because this year the property tax bill comes in and a lot of people a lot of families are screaming already so i really think that being able to keep under the three percent it is actually crucial for this year and so i wanted one clarification which is this is based on the
156um the enrollment assumption is that we're gonna have a three percent increase is that what we are based on the assumption enrollment yeah is there any because um the reason i bring this up because um i see an article today california i see a like five times of increase of people not enrolled the dropped rate so i was wondering if there has anything um what what's our base of uh kind of understand what is the base that we assume the same number of students right everything right angie we use our enrollment projections to determine how many students and how many sections we need at every grade level right so if you look at the 99 increase it's just um what the enrollment projections showed which is a slight decrease okay slight decrease that's what what
157i don't remember okay thank you okay so i didn't weigh in but i think that you know i think that our committee has worked really hard to kind of put some of these lanes in place to make sure that we are maintaining commitments to things like capital and things like our liability and i i have had to sit in the opeb meetings listening to all of the things that we are doing right and um you know talking with the people who are who are in charge of investing that money and everything else and you know it is important and and as dave pointed out it has contributed to the the um favorable ratings that we've had and the ability that we had to get the bonds which you know are at a very low percentage
158that said you know we also have enormous educational needs the next year you know in front of us the social emotional pieces john noted this is is enormous so i just i i too would be very wary of any sort of decrease that would impact in any way our ability to manage that um heading into next year and i would be very much in favor of of reducing handy or adding to however you want to look at it taking ent money to reduce the assessment if if the general act feeling is that we need to be at three percent or below in terms of their assessment that's fine i i really would be wary of cutting any sort of you know educational positions because if anything i think we're going to need more than we
159have this year and obviously we're not adding staff or anything like that so um you have been incredibly creative in the past in terms of of the funding mechanisms you've used and i think um you know i think continue um evelyn has her hand up and then i'm wondering do you feel like you have enough feedback of what you were looking for i'll call another i no i i think and i i want to hear evelyn too i think this is very very helpful because you know like we want to be creative but we can only be creative by making sure we stay within you know we need the boundaries first in this particular budget and then we can figure out what do we do within that to make sure we're maximizing the impact i
160i don't have much i i was i guess some of my questions got asked by others and they got answered but i do agree that we have to be cognizant i mean of the as my limits for acting but also what i worry as i listen to folks talk about all this is we don't even know what the school year is going to be like next year and and the work all this kobe situation is going to take us so in whatever decision we end up with we have to keep that in mind in case whether i know that we're projecting all of this in in hopes that we may not have the remote school or whatever but we really don't know where where this whole new virus that are coming up is going to
161take us and how effective the vaccines are going to be or not be so you know i i i actually i'm just sitting on the fence i don't really know how to to think about this just giving all the uncertainty around around the situation that we're dealing with right now i i think we we all feel that way to some degree with it where we're sitting here going okay we really don't know what to plan for but i think if we can accept the uncertainty again like you know we're going to need this in a budget we know that we know something else is certain that there is an upper limit to what we can in the community can handle so if we can get to that initially then we can accept the uncertainty that
162might lie below it and the need to be able to shift funds later uh you know and look at other sources you know you know john mentioned dnd as one possible funding source long term i know we also have other liabilities out there and we're going to talk about edco in a little bit that we need to be cognizant of that but then we're also you know looking at potentially more federal stimulus and we don't know what that's going to look like but but that's also an opportunity to think about offsetting whatever costs are coming in so you know i i feel like you know for the frustration of how many unknowns there are i feel like a good number of them feel like they're likely to be close to offsetting each other in some
163ways you know like i look at you know we have a potential echo liability but i also just talked about a 500 000 case cumulative surplus return um so you know it's a weird unpredictable level of equilibrium that we seem to be hitting somehow okay okay so the next um items underneath your budget presentation this and discussion are a budget subcommittee update which i'm not sure that we need to have okay i didn't think so um we don't need to have a blf update because i don't believe that blf has met and uh is does there need to be an alg update amy's shaking your head vigorously now so okay then i think that if if you've gotten enough feedback and i would say i think that this is one of the best budget discussions
164that we've had um in terms of everyone participating then i think that we can move on to the next item which is the edco update and i i'm gonna turn my video off sorry i just wanted to say that i'm sorry you know alg is not meaning to eat me until this thursday morning so we'll have some people we'll have a lg update on on thursday night that's fine yes okay that's fine i'm not really leaving but i have to step out for one second so peter go ahead and do your thing um so you know there's a memo in your packet and i i tried to summarize um the information that is is publicly available um you know i know we met an executive session last meeting to talk about edco that information is
165privileged obviously to executive session um for the reasons stated on the agenda but there is a wealth of public information that's available around edco including in the memo we had a series of discussions over the course of last spring and to to summarize that if you recall last year edco had an audit report that raised substantial doubt about the organization's ability to continue and that was actually the fy 19 audit report which we had received in december over the course of the spring we had a number of districts including i think lexington was first you know pass a motion to withdraw from edco and also consider termination of the organization we had multiple presentations and discussions about edco and its financial status over the course of the spring which ultimately we ended up deciding to
166reaffirm our commitment to edco the executive director at the time who since left the organization had a plan to try and recover from some of the financial challenges that co had i can say that pandemic almost entirely stopped any progress that edco could have made and certainly exacerbated the financial challenges that edcom was already seeing um you know dave and i you know have both looked at edco's finances where we're at right now the greatest challenge that we see is we just can't see a clear path to recovery for that organization in our ideal world there would be some path to recovery for the organization which could then reduce our longer-term liabilities but every time we go in there's a greater liability than the previous time we we learned something about so you know it
167has a tremendous history as an organization it has done some remarkable and wonderful professional development over its time it has supported round tables for school committee members for superintendents for assistant superintendents curriculum staff the ideas program it's tremendous of edco has also supported some remarkable programming for students with disabilities in particular its deaf and hard of hearing program that was based out of newton um you know they also serve as a grant channel for you know quite a few deci operations but the the financial picture of edco is just so bleak right now that you know i guess at this point my recommendation is that you know it really can't continue as an organization and be financially solvent um i think the concern i have is that the longer the organization goes on and carries
168on in a way that isn't uh turning around the greater the risk of liability to a b and so my recommendation to the school committee tonight unfortunately um and i i want to emphasize unfortunately is that you know we would vote to initiate termination proceedings from it for edco um that would trigger you know some board actions at the edco level and then in addition i think the committee probably i i could consider a motion to withdraw from edco at the end of next fiscal year because that's that's the process um i actually would also recommend that the committee take that action uh you know i can't speak for other school committees and other superintendents you know i know that there are a number of committees considering similar actions to this um we were going
169to vote have a vote on this last thursday based on that information i provided a copy of my memo to you to all of the other edco districts so they had a copy of it and they knew what was happening and i've communicated with superintendents along the way there is an edco meeting tentatively scheduled for wednesday of this week for the board um because they know we're considering this motion tonight and if you um vote for this to initiate term termination proceedings with edco then on wednesday morning the board would actually consider that um and consider whether or not the board was initiated termination proceedings i have to believe it's likely that that could take place although i have not spoken with people but i i i do know you know all of the edco
170board members sit in the same meetings where we hear about the financial people we all you know have grown increasingly concerned about that so that's that's the update i have for you um i will say you know to initiate termination proceedings is not a fast process um it would actually take an entire fiscal year after this year so you know should we initiate you know should you vote to request initiating termination proceedings that would then have to go to the edco board the edco board would have to vote to initiate termination proceedings then um i believe that has to go back to the other member districts as well and then for their school committees and then um it would take a full year after that in order to actually close out the organization so we're
171really talking about you know the first of july for fy23 would be when that organization finally would disband um we don't know the exact liabilities that we could face in terms of that there's a lot of legal questions out there and the reason that it takes the entire fiscal year is because there's an accounting that's guided by deci and kind of external organizations and entities to close down a collaborative and until you go through that you don't have a true sense of what the liabilities are my guess is you know depending on any legal analysis it could be between you know a total of a four million dollars all the way up to 750 on the very high side was the the highest of the estimates we've seen no i don't take that lightly uh
172which i think was you know speaking to diane's concern previously um so that's that's kind of where we're at right now withdrawal from the collaborative similarly takes an additional fiscal year so if we vote to withdraw now we would submit that to edco and that would become effective at the end of fy 22 so again july 1st of fy23 is really the date of that um that would protect say edco continues as an organization beyond that and we are unsure of their financial viability we would still own the liabilities from when we were a member district but we would not own future liabilities after that so that's kind of just a safety net in case edco does not choose to i terminate that provides you know a good general overview it's pretty much what was
173in the memo but i just wanted to talk that through for you and i think the motions were included in the packet and i did have colby um double check the motions just to make sure from a legal perspective requirement um if you do vote for termination and or withdrawal um beth is actually going to be recording that vote tonight um and we're going to put that into a medal and that memo will get sent off either immediately following the meeting or first thing in the morning um to all the the edco board members and their districts so that they have that in advance but they're all anticipating that we're considering this tonight amy i was just gonna say my understanding of what's going on and the history i i completely agree with you peter
174i really um i'm i'm sad to say it but i do think that we need to withdraw from edco we need to terminate our relationship so i'm not going to make the motion um i can later but i know other people want to talk so but but that's my feel diane yeah i just wanted to ask um how many students we currently have there how many students we currently send there um in a typical year and what what's going to happen to those students yeah um so from an inco perspective we have one student currently placed in any edco programs that student's a senior this year and scheduled to graduate at the end of this current year um i don't know that this is accurate to date but i actually believe the one of the
175last conversations i had now with debbie about out of district placements i don't know is that we've placed any students out of districts here so that's you know when we have no one on the docket for edco john i think just sorry i'm so sorry tessa question one of the reasons you know i think it's important you know i think all of the board of directors doesn't want to have to think about terminating edco but i think the reason that i feel like it's urgent that some committee make a movement in this is if edco is going to terminate um is probably looking at ceasing a lot of its operations at the end of this year as a possibility and we need to allow all of those districts time to place students in appropriate programs
176and by doing it early and notifying districts early we're giving people more time to make sure kids have good educational placements moving forward um and are not kind of left on the hook so um it's unfortunate but i do think it's important to do it sooner later john i move to request that the edco board initiate termination proceedings pursuant to article nine of the edco articles of agreement second may i speak to the motion i just want to thank peter for his leadership this is one of these things that's really hard you know i'm sure lots of people are sitting there saying you know we know this needs to be done but just not willing to move forward and and i i particularly appreciate that you're moving forward not only because it's something that needs
177to be done but to do it in a way where the timing um helps you know optimize outcomes for students it that's it's just a great thing you know i understand it's completely painful but um this is very good work does anyone else have a question or a comment before we vote there's like a mosquito in my ear okay um then we'll vote john yes amy yes adam yes angie yes kevin yes diane yes and this is very sad to see a 50-year organization um it's heartbreaking to see this happen but yes i vote yes kira yes evelyn yes and myself yes all right that is unanimous and just considering the second possibility of also looking at withdrawal yeah i was going to say john did you want to make another motion well if i'm
178on a roll i move that the district will provide written notice to the edco board of the acton-boxborough regional school district's intention to withdraw from the edco collaborative effective july 1 2022 pursuant to article 10 of the edco articles of agreement second ticket is there any additional questions or comments um good all right john yes there's really a mosquito in my room i don't know how there's a mosquito but there is amy yes adam yes uh angie he is yepen yes uh diane yes kyra yes evelyn yes and myself yes all right that also passes you meaninglessly thank you everyone okay um next up we have subcommittee and member reports and john has graciously agreed to move capital improvement and health insurance updates until next time um and to have those as an fyi so
179policy thank you okay i'm looking for um see if kirsten is here but i don't see her here so okay so we in your packet you have two policies both are first reads um the first policy is efd meal charging um kirsten nelson is our food services director she approached the policy subcommittee requesting that we codify in policy what really has been the practice in a b now for several years the policy articulates our dual commitment to prioritize the well-being of students by providing healthy meals every day regardless of ability to pay so students can focus on their school work also encoding fiscally sound procedures and practices around collecting outstanding balances for school meals and and those are in the edfr and for those of you who don't know any policy with an r after
180it means it's a procedure and that is not our purview that is the purview of the administration we write the policy they write the procedures and then just to be clear this i think your student mentioned to us that these procedures are not going to take effect until the fall meals are free right now for all students this year until june 30th 2021 because the u.s department of agriculture granted two waivers now so that's that's a good thing um anybody uh have any questions i'm happy to take questions this is a first read so um i'd ask you well tessa you didn't put this on the calendar for next for two days from now did you or three days from now you're not even sure i can't even remember okay honestly what the agenda i
181don't think it is okay because we're not meeting until like the 12th so just waiting till the next meeting yeah okay yeah we we took it off the agenda for for thursday great okay so i'm happy to take any comments now or questions now you can also email me um just as long as you do it before our next meeting on the 12th so i think john i see that you're raising your hand but just as we've done in the past if you have you know comments that you really want to put forward then send them to diane if you have questions that would help clarify your understanding now is the time to ask oh john you're not raising your hand okay okay adam as though go ahead i have just one quick question um
182and it's around the language uh in the third paragraph that says the district will provide meals to students who forget their lunch money or have a negative balance in their account was there discussion amongst the committee around saying something to the effect that a student would not be denied i i know they're kind of saying the same thing um but i i guess for me the language of saying that no student would be denied a meal feels more affirmative then we'll provide a meal to students who um lose their money or have negative balance all right thank you okay all right i'm going to move on to gbaa this is also a new policy commitment to an inclusive and representative district workforce um i just want to say that this is the likely the most
183vetted carefully vetted policy that has ever moved through this district and it came before this committee probably a year ago and has since undergone revisions based on feedback from the dei subgroups under marie's purview and the paul and don's purview and the policy sub it's come to us that i think twice there are three times now since there since then there's been a local election with new school committee members on on this taking their seats on at this table so even though we've seen this policy before last year we're just kind of wiping the slate clean and we're considering this a first read tonight so the vetting process for gbaa was driven by the imperatives of community buy-in accountability transparency inclusivity and a vigilance to having many voices shaping it and i want to recognize
184um don bentley and mariel tinari for their work on this policy um yeah if you're on this table long enough you you know that the superintendents over the years have comments who have commented to us that the quality quality work doesn't happen without a team of dedicated and deeply committed leaders who are mostly out of the public view and quietly doing their thing um and all the things that have to happen to get the work done and this is this is just true um in spades for i mean this is just like on steroids for this this policy this is a historic policy i think for us um so i i wanted i have kind of a little speech that i wrote um because i feel like this is such a moment for us but
185i did want to offer marie and dawn i didn't know who didn't i don't know if you want to um jump in and just talk about the process or the policy it's fine if you don't um i don't mean to put you on the spot but i wanted to give you a chance to say something if you wanted to i think you covered it diane i don't have anything to add okay thank you okay is dawn here as well i am and i agree with marie thank you diane okay it's been a labor of love and it shows for sure so so here's my speech in in 2019 um as part of a school committee discussion on the long-range strategic plan for this district peter presented to us a graphic representation of the long-range strategic
186plan which essentially was a roadmap of our goals from 2019 through 2025. the graphic is a venn diagram with four giant overlapping circles on the periphery of the circles we see in bold our overarching goals and values engaged learning is in like a greenish bluish circle and then you have equitable opportunities and outcomes in a pink circle on the other side you have inclusive practices and a yellow circle and then on the bottom part you have the social emotional well-being and kind of a bluish purplish circle interspersed are all these aspirational items like school culture and responsive instructional practices and key indicators some of which are are made actionable each year in the superintendent's goals but smack dab in the middle of this venn diagram this is the center of the diagram of all of
187these ideals and ideas at the very core of all of this work has printed the words educator recruitment learning and growth and this is what this is what lies at the very heart of our entire long-range strategic plan it makes everything else possible educator recruitment learning and growth so gba's articulation of our commitment to diversity in our workforce will touch every strategic initiative on that graph that's what i see when i look at that i hope that the policy subcommittee won't mind if i say that we consider this policy a direct action to encode a better future for our district and our communities but especially for our students teachers and staff it is a continuation of the work we started on october 15th when we voted to retire the mascot it just doesn't diminish the
188mascot in the eyes of those who feel um like it had has value in their lives but this is the work that we're doing and this policy continues that work so with that i will take any reactions and questions to gbaa okay i hear none if you amy's got her hand up oh okay sorry i just want to say thank you diane that was um that was very well that was beautifully spoken thank you so much i i completely agree thank you amy angie so sorry um we voting tonight or we're not no no just a first read okay questions and comments okay okay i'm happy to take any comments you have as you reflect on this policy um our next meeting again is scheduled for friday the 12th at 8 30 a.m and so
189if you have questions or comments you can send those directly to diane you don't need to copy me you certainly don't need to copy anyone else on the committee um and diane i would just really congratulate you on bringing something for us you know the three years that i have sat on the committee i guess this is my fourth um i did sit on the policy subcommittee and as interesting as i thought it was going to be we didn't really touch that a lot of policy subcommittee is continuously updating policies that exist already and updating language and making sure it's still in line with our goals and things like that and this is this is really sort of revolutionary and getting and really moving forward some of the things and initiatives that we've decided as
190a school committee are important to us and so bringing forth the policy a brand new policy that reflects those goals that we have all stated are important to us is is really wonderful so thank you for taking on the hard work of chairing the sub policy subcommittee this year and making sure that something like this um made it through this this has been a lot of work as you as you stated i mean this did come to us a year ago so and certainly a lot of people contributed to that work including everybody that sat on the po is sitting on the policy subcommittee but making making that that work really really move forward is important so thank you i would just say thank you as well um this was an important policy for us
191uh to have in place and i i really appreciate all the work and time and effort that went into this you know i look forward to getting feedback in and being able to move this forward excellent work okay so we're going to move john's things all right the statement of warrants does anyone have it open i i can i can find it in my vote i can do it yay i move that the school committee vote to approve payroll warrant as follows number p2116 stated 128 2021 and the amount of 2 687 703 58 cents payroll deduction warrant as follows number 21-016 pr dated 128 2021 in the amount of one million one hundred seven thousand four hundred eighty eight dollars seventy five cents and vendor warrant as follows number two one dash zero one
192five dated 121 2021 in the amount of four million twenty four thousand five hundred ninety seven dollars twenty seven cents second all right angie yes uh amy yes adam yes diane yes evan yes john yes here yes yes evelyn yes right uh and myself yes that is unanimous thank you we're at the end so peter is there anything that you wanted to highlight in the fyi i know i wanted to say to anyone who's watching on youtube that if you would like to participate in a way that you get to ask questions or comment at during public participation time or anytime during the meeting then you need to pre-register which the link is on the agenda for the next meeting i believe and that has to be done within 24 hours so that all of
193the cross-checking and making sure you are who you are can happen um before you attend the meeting and as always everyone is welcome to attend via youtube and if you want to send in a comment i don't see any reason why we can't continue that process as well if we want to read those at the beginning but if you would like to physically participate in the meeting it is imperative that you register preregister 24 hours before the meeting on thursday the only thing i will just add it's more of a reminder from the beginning of the meeting that we do have our three high school principal finalists coming in tomorrow night so that starts at seven o'clock so we have seven seven thirty and eight o'clock are the three presentations and opportunities to ask questions
194and you know we're sending that out to families for feedback um through a form and asking any school committee members to email that directly to me and diane did you have something to share you muted sorry okay i just wanted to quickly share that um i i attended an masc division 1 workshop called navigating a mascot change it was on the 25th and they recorded it and i just want to encourage everybody to watch it because it's just it's about how walpole and midfield retired the walpole rebels and the medfield warriors and it's it's a real education um about what the how thoughtful um and their their process was and how they engaged their community and brought them along and there's lessons learned in there and and it's it was it's always painful um but
195it's i think it's a really valuable workshop and and they recorded it which i was very excited about so i would um encourage everybody to watch it it teaches you a lot about about process and about how how hard this has been through every just for every school committee in every district that has gone through this change thank you thanks all right then i will entertain a motion to adjourn move to adjourn so moved oh sorry kieran got it yay kyra all right amy are you seconding that no adam got me before that but yeah that's okay diane yes amy yes adam yes angie yes evan yes don yes hero yes evelyn yes and myself yes thank you everyone and we will see you