001[Music] uh [Music] hello i'm peter light superintendent of schools for the acton-boxborough regional school district thank you for joining me for a few minutes of your time to learn a little bit about the work of our schools and our proposed budget for fy23 this month marks the two-year anniversary since the pandemic forced our schools closed i think about this milestone and i'm struck by how our mission along with our students needs has evolved during that time so before i talk about our fy 23 budget i would like to share a little bit about our school's journey over the last two years our values of wellness equity and engagement served as a cornerstone for our schools throughout this time but the traditional role that we served shifted two years ago and we found ourselves focused on
002finding new ways to reach students and families including bringing technology and services into their homes and meals to their tables learning was remote for a period of time and then we focused all of our energy on reimagining all aspects of our physical spaces and health operations to make them safe for our students to return to in-person learning two summers ago our staff developed an entirely new school curriculum and programming for nearly 1200 students and families who chose to remain home and learn remotely last year as the pandemic evolved and we learned to operate safely with the virus we've made a slow but gradual return to normalcy we've been in person with most of our students since fall 2021 and last april returned to full time in-person learning this past fall we were joined again by
003our remote students and families and have been operating successfully with all of our students since the start of this year with new cases of the virus now in decline and an extremely high vaccination rate among our students and staff we've been able to relax our mask requirement in our schools and take that next important step to give our students the normalcy they need and deserve while i can't predict the future of the virus and i know we will need to remain vigilant and flexible we're on a path to a brighter future for our students the pandemic and the last two years of school interruptions though hybrid and remote learning and health and safety restrictions in our schools and classrooms has had an undeniable impact on our students the students who entered high school as ninth
004graders this past fall had their last full year of school as sixth graders in elementary school in our current second graders this will be their first full year of elementary school without interruption our most vulnerable students those with disabilities have been particularly hard hit by the disruptions to education and the services they need to make progress as we returned this year we used some federal grant monies available to schools to add additional staff and supports for students but recognize that this is only the beginning of a recovery process that will likely take several years these last two years though serve as an important backdrop for the development of our fy 23 budget and our future planning while we were fortunate that federal and state grant money was available to our schools to support many of
005the increased operating costs during the pandemic which allowed our reserves to remain in a relatively healthy and strong position some of our special revenue generating programs such as extended day programming community education food services athletics and our all-day kindergarten fund all incurred significant losses since they could not operate as usual for approximately 18 months we're also seeing significantly higher than average health insurance increases that are adding costs to the budget of nearly half a million dollars beyond what we would expect in a traditional year state and federal revenue for next year is expected to be relatively flat an increase of just over a percent and the towns have limited ability to generate revenue through taxes and new growth this is the backdrop for our fy23 budget and provides some of the reasoning for us as
006to why we use more reserves than typically would be used to maintain a sustainable budget we believe that as we come out of the pandemic we need to maintain a high level of services for all of our students so i'd like to talk to you a little bit about the fy23 budget and how we went about developing that we develop our budget over a series of several months and this year we began planning internally in december and with our school committee in january we've had a series of five different major budget revisions over the course of this process and that brings us to where we stand now just after our fourth budget presentation which was our public hearing on the proposed fy23 budget we're asking our school committee to vote our final budget recommendation on
007march 17th this is in anticipation of our two town meetings this year the first town meeting will be for the boxborough and begins on may 9th and the town meeting in acton begins on may 16th and so by our policy the school committee must vote the budget 45 days before the earliest of those town meetings which will be march 17th our total budget request for fy23 is just shy of 103 million dollars which is an increase of just over three percent the total assessment to acton will be 3.18 percent and the assessment to boxborough will be 4.59 percent assessments are driven almost entirely by enrollment changes and so as we've seen an increase in the number of boxborough students as a proportion of our total enrollment we've seen the increase in assessment to boxborough be
008higher than what the assessment to actin was the budget as requested does three major things it partially funds our strategic priorities this includes a reduction in all-day kindergarten tuition from three thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars per family in per student to eighteen hundred dollars per student this also completes the mtss multi-tier system of support staff build out initiative that was created in response to pandemic learning and student needs it also provides funds to our accelerate our work around diversity equity and inclusion across the district and allows us to fund and begin work on social emotional learning and the needs of our students around social emotional needs mental health and behavioral needs in order to be able to stay within the available resources of the district we also needed to reduce our personnel by a
009total of 20.6 full-time equivalent employees and then finally we used approximately 1.8 million dollars in reserves in order to limit assessments to the two towns i'll be speaking to each of these in a little bit more detail all-day kindergarten is an incredibly important strategic priority for us we are one of only about 20 communities in the state that does not provide for free all-day kindergarten for all students it's important in our quest for equitable opportunities for students that we do not charge tuition for kids to learn kindergarten is an incredibly important year for students as they transition in and it's the beginning of their educational journey and we know especially coming out of the pandemic it's particularly challenging for families to pay for all-day kindergarten the budget we're proposing accelerates the tuition reduction from our
010original plan and includes an additional 180 000 of our existing kindergarten budget that will have to come into the district budget from outside revenue sources and we're intending to use some of our money from our arpa grant from the towns to be able to help fund this reduction our original tuition plan for this current year is we had planned to get to three thousand dollars for fy23 and the budget we're proposing actually reduces that to eighteen hundred dollars per student other strategic priorities included in this budget include expanded leadership for diversity equity and inclusion at the school level in the form of teacher leadership positions to help us accelerate this work we're also providing additional anti-bias training for our staff in providing for additional trainers across the district we're continuing our plan to provide coaching
011for our leadership and school-based leadership teams around culturally responsive schools we're also funding resources to expand equitable opportunities and outcomes for our students as part of our early literacy initiative we plan to purchase decodable texts for our elementary classrooms to support evidence-based tier 1 early literacy instruction and are implementing a social emotional screening tool and curriculum resources so that we can more proactively identify and support students social emotional needs this also includes a data dashboard that helps bring together both our academic data and social emotional screening data around our students in one place so our educators can more easily identify our students needs and support them as we begin our important social emotional learning initiative in addition to the screener i just mentioned we're expanding our training in responsive classroom which provides elementary educators strategies
012they can use every day in their classrooms to support students social emotional needs we are implementing and expanding advisory programs at the junior high school and high school and need to provide professional learning for our educators to support students in those programs and we're also providing additional con consulting with a series of world-renowned experts on student behavior and mental health in order to make sure that all of our schools and school teams have just what they need to support our students to the greatest of their ability overall the budget includes seven new positions and i'll explain why it's actually just three positions in a moment but it also includes 27.6 reductions in staff and i want to go through those for you we have three new positions being funded in this budget we have an
013elementary special education coordinator in order to make sure that we provide the highest level services for our students that they need at our elementary schools we also have funded a literacy coach from miriam and mccarthy town schools which remain the only two schools in the district that do not have that position and we're also funding in one english language educator in order to make sure that we provide the required number of hours of service for every week for our english learners in our district in addition to the new positions that we're adding we're also bringing back into the budget some of the positions that were funded through other outside resources we're converting two of our library assistant positions to full-time licensed certified librarians which does not change our fte count we're also restoring a pre-k
014assistant to the operating budget that had previously been paid through for that revolving fund and as i talked to earlier that's a function of the pandemic having depleted revolving funds so that we need to bring those positions back into the budget which creates additional expense similarly we're returning three of our all-day kindergarten staff from being funded through an outside revolving account into our operating budget as part of our all-day k process in terms of reductions to the budget in order to meet the needs of the communities fiscal constraints we're converting one of our assistant superintendent positions to a director of dei we're reducing 3.2 teaching positions at the high school as enrollment has declined there we're still able to maintain reasonable class sizes at that school we're reducing a junior high teaching position we're reducing
01514.4 equivalent classroom assistance which is the equivalent of two grade levels of elementary classroom assistance three bus driver positions one security staff one operations or ground staff half a position of a capital projects manager equivalent of one high school clerical position and a half time junior high school clerical staff and then additionally we're going to be moving the funding for two of our special education teachers from the budget to a grant fund that we were able to secure we're using significant reserves to help balance this budget and reduce the assessments to the communities we're using 1.5 million dollars of our excess and deficiency fund in this upcoming budget our current certified excess and deficiency as of july 1 2021 was 3.2 million dollars we don't yet know what fy 22 turnbacks will be however our
016historical average is between 1 and 1.2 million each year we're also planning to use 300 000 from our capital stabilization fund two hundred thousand of that is interest that was earned on our previous fund balance and one hundred thousand is from the actual principal fund balance which was one million dollars as of june thirtieth twenty twenty 2021 this equals our total of 1.8 million dollars worth of planned reserves for this budget over the course of the last several months we've been working to reduce the budget impact on the communities as the requests came in from our school principals and various departments across the district that would have resulted in a 4.71 percent increase as originally proposed in december we reduced that to 3.69 as we presented that to school committee which included um a 1.7
017million dollar combination of reductions and additional use of reserves and in the last month we've been able to reduce that by another million dollars through additional reductions in reserves to get to our 3.19 budget request that we're proposing to summarize our budget is just shy of 103 million dollars as a total request which is a 3.19 percent increase from fy22 the assessment change to actin is 3.18 and the assessment change to boxborough is 4.59 i'd like to take a final moment to just explain how we get to assessments from our operating budget our total operating budget request is again 103 million dollars or just slightly under that amount we know that our revenues from the state and other resources are 18.1 million dollars and we're using 1.8 million dollars worth of reserves that leaves the
018total assessment to the two communities at 83 million dollars in total which is 3.4 increase from last year we then look at the rolling three-year average of enrollment for acton and boxborough and we've seen a shift from actin to boxborough in terms of the enrollment where the act and percentage of the enrollment has declined by 0.2 percent and the box per percentage of enrollment has increased by 0.2 percent over that three-year period we use that calculation to then calculate each town's assessment and we're left with the seven the seventy million dollar assessment to act in which is three point one eight percent and about a thirteen million dollar assessment to boxborough which is four point five nine percent we will note that as we work with the actin leadership group uh we were able to
019achieve a balanced alg plan as of february 18th through the combination of reductions and reserves at the district level and some adjustments on the town budget so i want to thank you very much for joining me for this budget presentation it was very important to us to explain some of the needs of our students and why we were making decisions to use additional reserves to help fund this budget so that as citizens you can understand the needs of our students as we balance that with the fiscal constraints of our meeting the needs of our citizens thank you very much for joining me and i appreciate the time you've taken [Music] you