001The May 15, 2025 Forest Grove School District budget committee meeting is called to order at 6:01 p.m. If everybody could please rise for the flag to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you so much. We'll do a quick roll call of board members or members present. Brad here. Mark here. Christie here. Peter. Yes. Pete here. Pete. Oh, Pete. I thought you said Oh, when when she calls Kate, I'll say here. Here on the record. Thank you. Nicholas David here. Jordan here. Melinda here. Kate, I am here. And I am here as well. Do I have a motion to approve tonight's agenda as presented? So moved. Second. Great. All in favor? I. Thank you so
002much. Do I have a motion to approve the May 8th, 2025 meeting minutes as presented? Madam Chair, so move. Great. Great. Move to second it. All in favor? I. Thank you. Okay. We are going to get started with Eileen and or Dr. West and kind of go over if there was any questions or comments and just some thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. Uh so just a reminder of where we are in the budget process tonight. We are at the second budget committee meeting. We do have one more additional meeting that's optional if we need it after tonight. And then from here it goes to the board for a board hearing and adoption. Okay. Um, I want to orient us to a topic that we just briefly touched on in the last couple meetings we have, which is
003the revenue forecast that comes out quarterly from the state of Oregon. There was one just released yesterday. Um, the one prior to that was released for March. In the revenue forecast that came out yesterday, the state is projecting less revenues than they originally anticipated. You can see the reductions up there on the slide. For general fund and lottery resources, the state is projecting $800 million less than they projected in March. And for cap tax resources, that's the corporate activity tax, 44 million less in resources than they projected in March. They also projected state reserves to be down 400 million which means for us that we're unlikely to get more than 11.4 billion in the state school fund. There seems to be some consensus that that number with advocacy would probably stick the 11.4 billion. But
004as we've discussed, there were bills moving through the legislature for addition special education funding and some additional resources in other areas. Those likely will not gain much traction after this revenue forecast. I do want to note, do you have the purge in there somewhere? No. Okay. I do want to note that the governor last week signed into law a little bit of PERS relief and that's good because we actually had that built into our budget, we were expecting that. Had that not been signed into law prior to this revenue forecast, it may have required us to do some adjustments. Um, so we lucked out a little bit there. It's already baked in, so that's a good thing for us. Um but we wanted to start here to orient you to the fact that the conservative
005approach that we are taking to budgeted budgeting for this particular cycle is affirmed through forecasts like these. If you're really interested in the entire revenue forecast, you can find it on the state's website. Um they have both the reporting as well as a slide deck that you can follow along with. There's a lot more information related than this. Um, one more thing I want to highlight before turning it back to director flute. Um, something that was particularly interesting in the forecast is that the state um demon showed us through graphs that in 2008 I think it was there were more children in the state than there were adults aged 65 and older. Today there are more adults aged 65 and older than there are for. So we are an aging state and what that means
006for us in terms of enrollment is that we are likely to see declining enrollment for some time. With that I'll turn it over to director. Yes sir. And is that peculiar to Forest Grove or is that statewide? Statewide. Yeah. And our own projections show that enrollment will continue to decline and then eventually plateau for at least a few more years. We do see potential for increased enrollment about a decade out. Is that right? Yeah, about a decade out. Yes. Is it usually normal to have decrease in the sp cap and the high post disability when we have this kind of troubles within the state funding over the years? Is this what happened over the years? Is the decrease in special education funding tied to this? Uhhuh. And then and then the high cost disability. Is
007this something that usually happens all the time when we have when we are down with our state money? Yeah. Do they cut any other programs or do they just go for state? It's not special ed specifically. I think a better way to say this is that any effort at the legislative level to expend more resources than were already planned will is highly unlikely for us in education. That is particularly impactful to special education bills that were moving through the legislature. But it would also apply to transportation and housing and emergency services. Other public sector entities that were hoping for additional resources may find it very difficult to acquire those resources in the upcoming bianium. So the special ed bill that is right now on the on the table down in Salem might be affected because
008of that. It most likely will be affected. If if it does come to pass, that's great for us. Uh and and at this point given this revenue we think that's highly implied. Okay. Um so over the last week we've gotten a few questions um from budget committee members. I think I've reached out to most all of you and uh the next few slides will just go over some of those questions to get those answered and then from there we'll have an opportunity for public comment open discussion and then it will be you will have an opportunity to vote for the budget or decide to wait until next week. Um, so if we start going through some of the questions that came out over the last week, one of the questions was really targeted to the
009IIA reductions. And this graph just shows over the last 10 years, it's all classified staff across the entire district with all funding sources. So this is migrant, it's title one, it's IDA, uh, general fund, all classified staff across the district for the last 10 years. And so you can see we've decreased in enrollment districtwide by 6%. But our classified FTE has increased by almost 56%. So us reducing 11 FTE out of the district's budget in the classified group is still considerably above where we have been in the last several years. And so I just wanted to start with this as to get a little bit of perspective of where we are with our classified staff across the district. And this one just breaks down the classified IAS in by building um that include general fund
010title 1A measure 98 and SIA classified FTE. It does not include sped, prek or migrant. So I kind of tried to break out that a little bit. Um, so we could really see by building what the classified FTE allocations are districtwide and then where those reductions are coming from. The red is where the reductions are. Those are what we would have rolled forward into the budget and then the green is what did get rolled forward into the budget. Um, these are not equal between buildings by any means. What we did is historically we've taken the classified FTE and just rolled them forward year-over-year. You had one and a half last year, you have one and a half this year. But we know enrollments change building by building over the last 10 years. And so we
011wanted to look at how do we make sure that um even with these reductions, buildings have equal or equitable amount of staffing levels between each building for their classified staff. And so you'll see that some buildings get a little bit more of an impact than other buildings, but it's because it's where their starting point was from. So um this is just to show what are the numbers on the left the 5 10 15 20 FTE that is so they're they're like the IAS at the building there's 10 there's going to be 10 at Cornelius and there was 11 that's showing to clarify FTE is not the same as a single individual so if for example we're looking at Cornelius with 10 FTE that may in fact 13 people because many of our instructional assistants do
012not work a full eight hour day. They work six and a half hours typically and a few work even less. There are some who work a half day or two hours during the day. So if this is FTP in all those categories at the top, how does let's say you're cutting I don't know too I'm from how does that have affect the general fund or the general fund is what got reduced by 11. So their title allocations would have maintained the same. We did rebalance the SIA allocations with this rebalancing model. Um, but the reductions are coming out of jungle fund, not title. Okay, got it. But that's why you might see like Echo Shop more uh FTE there than Harvey Clark even though they have the same amount of students or similar amount of
013students. It's because they're a title school and so they have additional funding. Okay. So, you're showing I see what you're on that graph you're showing all of the Got it. Yes. It does include the title. Yep. Okay. But so really it's like when you're you're saying we don't really hire full-time, it's it could be like 30 IAS. Most of them are 6 and 1 half hour IAS. Um and some buildings it's a you know 8125 was the reduction which is a 6 and a half hour. Uh another building was a 2.0. So, it's going to be a couple of FTE um or three different bodies um or pieces of multiples um if there was temporary hours added to others. But your larger point that looking at that number for example at the high school the
014number of people that are encompassed in that number is actually greater than the number of exit. Yeah. Well, that's like for Harvey Clark specifically. That could be six people or portions of six people. A lot of the times in the buildings we'll have somebody at, you know, a 6 and 1 half hour IA. We add an extra hour temporary to them. So, in the future, they're just going to maintain at the six and a half hour and that's where we can grab one hour temporary that was added to them without doing it. So in looking at this, we really tried to make sure we could do it with current staffing and current turnover without going into a rift situation and that's pretty much what's happening. So that's an important point. So this reduction does not
015gain a specific risk happening. We're just going to be dining back hours for people that are already there or letting a trip go unfilled or things like that. Natural attrition. Yeah. So to be clear, we are not renewing vac temporary positions. So those contracts, they terminate in June every year anyway. So we're not rolling any forward. That's one way that we are realizing savings. Another way is through vacancy savings. So we have identified some vacancies that we are not going to fill. And then we know we will have attrition especially in our classified ranks. So over the course of the next several weeks um and probably into the summer, we will monitor closely resignations and retirements. And rather than fill those, we will move people around to make sure that schools or staff based on
016our methodology for instructional assistance and other classified support positions until we reach our goal, at which point any further vacancies that arise would actually be posted for hire. How often uh will we establish the goal in this case for what our reduction should be or our target for IIA? Yeah, it's a good question. Um we started with the long-term forecast and I'm going to ask you to jump in at some point here. Any point actually. So we start with the long range forecast to see what are our projections um for the upcoming five years and what do we need to do today to make sure that we remain solvent at least through the next bianium and that allowed us to arrive at a reduction number of 1.8 million in addition to the FTE adjustments that
017we made based on enrollment and we talked about that previously too. We made a reduction of eight FCE and licensed staff based just strictly on the decline in enrollment that we've seen over the last few years. That adjustment hadn't been made since enrollment started to decline. So it was time to do that. So the 1.8 million coupled with continued deficit spending. So we're we've still made the decision that for the next bianium we will engage in deficit spending. That's how we arrive at the first number. Yeah. Then what we do is we look at what are those things we're committed to. What does our strategic plan say that our values and the programs that we will uphold and that we will continue to invest in? And by we, I mean as a cabinet and all
018of the teams that we support, we went through a process of making sure that our investments aligned to those goals. Um once we did that to a base level then we identified where can we reduce this document that we passed out. This is super high level. It doesn't get into all the details but this gives you an overview of what those reductions look like for the time. That's that's like a 30,000 foot level view of what we did. Does that answer your question? That's sufficient for now. Yes. Thank you. Okay. Great. So the next question that came up over the last week was um in last week's presentation there was a line item showing that we were reducing curriculum and instruction by 186,000. And so what specifically was that? Um I was able to break
019that 186,000 down into three kind of subcategories. Um reduction in curriculum adoption. uh this is training, materials, software, combination of everything, but it's across the science, the literacy, the math, and the social studies adoption plans. Um, and so it's not stopping the adoption plans, but it's necessarily reducing how much we implement each year and how much we push each year. So that's 271,000. And then we had a general reduction in the curriculum and instruction department budget of 82,000. And looking at this, there's a lot of items that we reduced. Um, some of them $1,000, some of them $5,000. Uh, but or $25,000. The larger items uh was innovation fund decrease, teacher professional development, summer school, and but out of the equity budget. So that was 82,000. And then these were then offset by when we
020were going through the balancing process and um doing all of our grant budgets. Um we do have a title 2 FTE that's been funded out of title 2 over the last several years that we were shifting back into the general fund. So the total reduction is higher, but it was offset by um a shift in moving that title one or title 2 FTP back into the general fund. Then the question specific to delaying curriculum adoptions. Um we can do that sometimes and we are doing that for the health adoption mentioned that before. There are a couple of things that I think are important to note when it comes to delaying adoptions. Adoptions that are delayed do require the department of education to approve that delay. we have to submit a waiver and then the department
021has to say yes you can skip it this year. Along with that we submit a plan that says how we we intend to return to compliance. So any waiver that we submit is temporary at best. Um we call that a one-time savings. It's not a sustained savings when we do those things. Um so it provides short-term relief but not long-term relief. That is something that as I said we have done for the health adoption. Also something that we take into account when we're looking at reducing curriculum is what is the impact to the work at the most basic level. Our job is to educate kids. That is our charge. And in order to do that we do need materials that are of high quality. We do need staff that are employing the best instructional practices
022which means that we have to have colleagues who can come alongside and train. Um it means sometimes that we need to bring in outside support to make sure that we are employing those best instructional practices. All of that is looked at and then we identify and this is the process that director Lomali went through with his team. Then we look at what can we reasonably shrink down for the upcoming budget cycle that won't impact the progress that we need to make in our instructions. And that's how we land at the instructional reductions that you saw on the previous slide. I hear every time I've gone through a reduction process like this, I I hear from people, well, just stop buying curriculum or just stop the professional learning. It's really not as simple as that because
023our our our core charge is to educate kids. And to do that, well, we do need some resources and we do need some professional learning and we need some experts in position to help us with that. So there's a tension in there that we're constantly trying to balance between the real needs of the organization and what we're hearing through surveys and other sources when it comes to curriculum and to what degree we can stop buying. A little anecdotally in one of the districts that I have worked in one of the cost-saving strategies that they employed for many years was to not buy curriculum. By the time OD caught up with that, the plan that we had to submit to return to compliance, it wasn't a seven-year plan. Seven years is the typical cycle to get
024through all the different curriculum. We had three years to return to compliance in all curricular areas. That was an enormous outlay of cash for the school district to return to compliance. It is better for us to smooth the expenditures in a planful way than have to catch up all at once. What questions do you have on that? I don't have a question so much as a comment. I appreciate that kind forest type. in a rather unsympathetic uh era as to funding. um making do with all we have and for lack of a better phrase spreading the pain is I think uh a little bit more um pound wise than what um people have done district you mentioned or alluded to um that kind of surgery you know it's very successful except the patient died. Um,
025I think that's I think what what what you're doing and what the staff is doing is entirely appropriate. Painful, yes. Probably unpopular, yes, but absolutely necessary. So, thank you for that one. Okay. Do we have any public comment? No. No. Okay, cool. All right, so now we're going to open it up for discussion and comments from the budget committee. Anybody have anything? Go for it, N. It seems like, you know, given a declining enrollment and the need to reduce expenses as we are, um, I noticed that our projected outlay for support services is still showing growth from prior years. I'm assuming that's just because the cost of labor is going up. Is that an accurate presumption? That's where most of the expense is is in the labor, right? Yes, for support services, a lot of
026it is in labor. We also have all of our contracted services. So, um, our Sedexo and Midco contracts for custodial and transportation. And so, those are going to naturally go up every year. Um, transportation, just because we have a couple of students less doesn't mean our routes necessarily change significantly, but our rates and costs of the labor and everything still. So, um, some of that stuff is just our contracted services and utilities is another big one. Uh, and insurance, uh, utilities and insurance typically go up considerably more than just CPI. So, okay. So, how do we change the trajectory because, you know, we do have to be, as you mentioned at the outset, our enrollment is not going to be growing for a number of years. Um, and so somehow we need to change the
027trajectory because this picture that you filmed last time, the red and the green lines has been on my mind a lot. And um, and I'm just wondering, you know, are are we reducing enough now? Do we do we have a notion of how we're going to get that green line to flatten out and not hit the bottom? Because that's our job, right? Just make sure that doesn't happen. We can't insist that we don't have to look for six years out, but we can see just in four years out that we're going to hit the bottom if we don't do something. Well, and there's I mean there's a lot of assumptions built into that. Yes. Um you know, what is the state school fund going to look like in the next bianium? What is um negotiations
028going to look like in the next bianium? So, we can look at it and each year make incremental changes to keep pushing that line out. Um there's definitely a balance of using you know funds today for students of today and um you know looking longterm. We do have our reserves using but we also budget conservatively and save every year. So kind of every year looking at that conservative budgeting along with what changes are happening and then just readjusting and readapting so we can smooth that line a little bit. Um yeah. just based on history in this district when things don't when the budgets start to drop and the funds start to drop and we have to make hard decisions about reductions in staff and other things and I think that that the reductions over we're
029probably going to see reductions over the next five years based on enrollment drop that's just fact so a lot I'm assuming a lot of these a lot of the the schools state school fund reductions have to do with the way the economy is right now. And so if that continues, we're going to continue to make even more reductions over the next five years. And I've I think I've seen it for the last 30 years. And there's been like this. And I think what I from when the time that Eileen came in, it's kind of flattened out. It's not like this. So big reductions. Don't make any cuts down here. and then next year we have to make big reduction. So trying to smooth that line out. I think in my opinion we've seen that from
030Eileen over the over the last since she's been in that position. So you feel like we're smoothing it out enough that we won't it feels like we're smoothing it out enough. So we have we have the we have the uh revenue to make it to the next year and then we'll look at our enrollment and look at what the budget how much revenue we have and maybe we need to make a little a bigger chunk. So I think it feels to me like we're I'm brand new to the school budgeting. I'm pretty familiar with city budgeting. Yeah. And I've been doing that for quite a while and looking at their reserves and how many years that would last and so on and so forth. This is making me a little nervous because you know with
031the city I can see well we're probably good for four or five years and chances are we'll never dip down there anyway. When I see the projection going down like that one chart. So it makes me just nervous and I'll have to defer to your longer term judgment on this if that's not something to be nervous about yet. But I just have to wonder, you know, are we diving back fast enough? Um, that's the only question I would toss out there. It's an important question. I think I want what I want to highlight is that making these smaller changes consistently over time will prevent the system from experiencing. No, I totally smooth. I totally get that when I say that and it's it's it's the right way to budget plan for sure. It's just a
032degrees. That's all it's about. Are we tweaking enough? That's you know we Yeah. Don't don't go hammering one way or the other like you know economies don't like that. If it makes you feel any better eight since for eight years we've been I've been sitting on this and every year or two she'll be like we're going to drop. we have a board objective or guideline of policy that we don't go below 8% or whatever it is or any fund balance and she'll show the projection that in two years we're going to be at 2% and the school has never gone below probably 10% so I do have lots of faith the city holds a 25% line so now you can see why okay they have a lot of problem well actually this is a much
033bigger budget but they have yeah it is it is the one thing I was kind concerned about is that I'm just worried we're not going to get as much as they're saying or as much as you believe we're going to get in the state school fund. So that's my only concern with this budget. It's possible. Um if you remember I said with advocacy, right, we might we may likely see that 11.4 steady. I I think our legislators, for those of you who were involved in advocacy, they need to hear how important it is that that number stay steady. And I I'll add to that because I do agree, David, there's a reason to be nervous. I mean, we're talking about existing cuts that we're going to have to make, but the bigger discussion um is
034happening around the other piece of Oregon, the transportation that is today, not being able to fund their whole budget and meeting that. So, I was at um Lou Frederick's town hall last weekend. chair of education and he took questions from the table and the questions were where are you going to find the money to fund our schools and transportation and he said you know where is this community where is our community of Oregon going to find that the conversation is not even necessarily with the legislators at this point there are some valid to your point that definitely do not feel like the 11.3 is enough but there are some that feel like it's too much because they know other pieces are competing for that. But his his point was the will of the community. Communities
035like well even in Portland I passed measure five tax so we could fund some of these pieces when we're coming back to communities for these bonds and levies. There's resistance to that now which so the conversation I thought it was a really good point is conversations we need to start having with our neighbors about what is the state willing to commit for the things that we want for our kids and our elders. you know, and you and when you listen in these ways and means commun uh committees, they had 10 millions of dollars asked by community members coming to advocate outside of education for long-term care, for transportation. And so, I think we are at a point in this state where the conversation needs to start happening with each other and and our families and
036what what are our communities thinking around how we're going to be able to support these revenues that we don't have. We're doing a great job with what we do have, but there's a broader conversation outside of this budget committee, a bigger conversation, I think, for a greater state that we're not h that we're not willing to have or when we are, people are voting no, we don't want to pay anything else. And then they're telling us, but we would like CTE programs and we need increased activities and we need a rec center in the city, but we're not willing to give any more. So I think we are that's a really going to be a big discussion going forward. Well and something else just to think about this budget is a best estimate based on
037what we know at this point in time. So assuming everything comes in and all of the revenue comes in. This is setting our maximum spending limits for the year doesn't mean we have to spend those limits. We almost never do and we we almost never do. Um, but also if we do see that the legislature passes lower state school fund, it doesn't mean we're going to keep these appropriations and spent. We will have to make internal adjustments and we will have to make decisions um based on what resources come available once they close the session. If I remember, I got some scenarios that you've already cooked up that we have some ideas in your back pocket. You can pull out if you have to, right? And we've done that before. multiple times through 2008 to
038what 2013. So I mean we've done that. So one smaller scope question I'll just toss out there. Um how much of a difference would it make if we reduced the uh cost of living increase that we're allocating our employees by a small amount? What percent say? So 5% is kind of what we're targeting now. Right. In the budget, we have an estimate, but we're still in negotiations. Yes. So our budget committee is not setting the cost of living adjustment that we can allocate out. Um so once we finalize with negotiations, we might then still have to come back to this budget. Budget committee could give you suggestions of what you might want to bargain for, right? Not nice try. Ultimately, the board approves the contract at the end of the marketing. David, I think if
039we go back to what we don't do, that's one of the items that we don't do. You just spitballing that. I could be wrong. Um, as long as director KPI led on the prison brief here about other other subjects, uh, I've been involved with Westside Economic Alliance. They are very concerned about the economic growth of Washington County in the west side and their concern is over the I won't say collapse but the contraction of businesses such as Intel. In the past we've ridden the Intel expansion um very hard. Even Forest Grove has picked up some of those some of those dollars through gain share and the like. Um that's gone and it's probably not coming back with um the worldwide economic picture. And with measures, you know, we're celebrating what, the 35th or 36th anniversary
040of measure five, 30th anniversary of measure 50. um those aren't changing and it's almost as if the state wants us the voters in this state want us to do stuff but they want us to do it for free and that train's left the station. um teachers buying pencils, um that kind of thing can only go so far. That's not going to balance a multi-million dollar budget. Um we have to have a serious conversation statewide about what state funding is going to look like and it's going to be painful. Um everybody's grabbing for a a bigger piece of a pie that's getting smaller and smaller. Um, we haven't figured out how to replace the bridge that's going to have to go across Colombia if we're going to be able to continue our economic development, transport of
041food and and goods and services. Uh, we haven't uh done what we can for the transportation issues that plague eastern Oregon and we need to continue that. We have not met the challenge that our current administration in Washington DC has thrown in our face about doing doing less on a federal basis and saying that the states can pick it up. Um, we are facing a potential fire danger in this state this summer that could curl our toes to bring back, you know, September of 2020. Um, and we don't we don't have the funds to deal with that. something like that happens again, uh we are in serious serious trouble because we're not going to have uh aid coming to us from outside. What aid does come from the outside will come from fire departments in
042California and in Idaho and in British Columbia and in Washington and are coming from our quote friends close quote Washington DC. So, we're in a we're in a bind here. And I don't want to I don't want to I guess whether I want to or not, I'm painting a rather bleak picture, but public education is part of that. Public education is constitutional responsibility. We need to answer that. Um how we're going to do it beats the hell out of me. But, uh that's the challenge that we have. And I applaud Dr. West. Director Clinton and the rest of the staff were facing it head on here in Forest Grove as to what we can do. There are some governmental agencies that are not. U Multma County comes to mind. But um we need to we
043need to be the adults in the room. And on that note, I'll shut up. I think I have a question for you is what percentage of our budget I know that we get grants federal grants and that but what percent are we getting from the federal government? This is about 8%. It's it's not a big number. It's it's not the majority of our resources. Well, director has set up the majority of our resources come from the state from the state. Yeah. the vast majority of our resources. And um the other question I I I can't remember, but the free free lunch for our kids and breakfast, where does that money come from? Yeah, that's a federal grant as well. Um is that going to be cut? Do you know? Uh as of right now, I'm
044not seeing anything about that being cut. So I have a little mouse behind me with frame that. That's right. No, that's good. It is partially funded through the state as well, correct? Yeah. So, it's partially funded through the state, partially through the federal government. Um, when when I saw the news around the federal government floating reductions to nutrition services across the nation, there was quite a bit of blowback. Um, I have not seen any conversation about it since then. And in I I'm monitoring this pretty closely. I've not seen it crop up again. So I I assume for the time being that is safe. Yeah. I I'm really concerned with prices going up and being a lower social economic community needs um our children need to be fed and uh I've been so thrilled that
045we've been feeding the kids you know K through 12 the stigma you know you know the way we've done it before that these kids are really going to need nutrition parents not are going to have less money. So I I don't know if we can put a plan or a contingent or fundraiser program, but I I think it's I think it's really essential for the children. And that is one of the reasons why we need healthy reserves because if at a moment's notice funding like that disappears, we would not want to simply cut off meal services to our youth. We would want to continue that until the state helps us with some level of contingency plan. And I do know that the state is working on that. There are a lot of contacts that I
046had at the state that their plans, they're mostly keep it to themselves, but there are conversations taking place at the state level about what would trigger state action in terms of pushing resources to either schools or fire services or um transportation or health services. They're they're trying to navigate that conversation just like we are about what does like a B, C, D, and E look like. You have our federal resources from the presentation last week is four and a half% of our total resources. Um it's about $10.8 million a year. For food services, we get about $2.7 million in federal resources a year. So what is the total of that nutrition budget perhaps? The nutrition budget is just over 4 million. Okay. So it's roughly half a little over half. Jesus Christ record. I had
047a question that kind of piggy back on what David was saying earlier on the about the support services. So on page 27 the general the major function was saying there was adding essentially just over seven te and reducing by 17 on the instruction piece and then on the major function basically. over. So adding the seven essentially increased the budget by the 2.3 million and decreasing the 17 change the budget by 1.9 it just didn't quite add up. Where am I off on? Would you repeat that page number please? So you're asking about the decrease of this for instruction and the increase of seven for for services. Yeah. So decreasing 17 FTE seven but the instructions still went up. I guess there's other obviously other things. Yeah. But so the instruction site is going to be
048partially that um the 8 FTE for license and then classified associated to it. Give me a second. I had the other and then was there a section on the seven support services that were being added on that was that's what I'm grabbing for you right now. Um we have maintaining one FTE for maintenance that's been funded out of ESRE funds for the last few years. We have so maintaining it is viewed as adding as one of the seven. It's adding to the general fund. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Um we have the math TOSA that was shifted from the title 2 grant that we talked about. Um we have an investment in SLPs that we talked about last time. Um and then we have oh reserve FTE of 3.0 license. Yeah. And so that's most Oh, and
049the HR benefit specialist is in that too. So Thank you. While you're considering if there's any other questions, I want to chime in here. I don't want to paint such a bleak picture that we all walk away with our headphone low. Um, we need to be careful. We need to be conservative and cautious, but we are in the fortunate position of not being in a crisis. There are districts, school districts across the state that reached crisis levels, some recently that continue to be in the news. That is not us. So long as we are steady, careful, cautious, thoughtful in the way that we expend our resources, make reductions and increments so that we don't shock our system, I believe that we will continue to be okay. And all of that is credited to director and
050her team for such good fiscal stewardship. And do I understand correctly that if things go well, we may not need to be going into deficit very much at all this coming year. But we we budget conservatively. So and we never spend everything in planning to spend. So as easil we spend significantly less than budgeted and few things go our way. Might we find ourselves really not going into the deficit for this coming year? We typically save about 5% each year. Um, we will probably still have some level of deficit spending. That 5% savings will allow us to extend those lines you talked about further and further out. Um, we will still need to do incremental reductions in the coming years. Sure. But that 5% savings that we have historically realized is something that the district
051has come to rely on in order to make sure that we have a soft landing in front of us and not a hard landing. Does anybody have any other questions or comments? And if not, then I guess I'm wondering how everybody feels about voting on this this evening. if they need more time, if they need another meeting to digest more stuff or if they feel ready to make a vote. I move for the adoption of the 24D. Um I guess motions two and three can wait. Perfect. We need them in separate action. Yeah. Okay. I will second. Okay. Okay, we'll go through and do a roll call vote and we can go from there. Brad. Yes, Mark. Yeah, we need discussion first time or ask for discussion. Yes, but does anybody have any discussion? Okay.
052Yes. Mark, yes. Christie, yes. Peter, yeah. Pete, yes. I know response. Nicholas, yes. David, yes. Jordan, I'll be the outlier. No. Okay. Melinda, yes. Kate, yes. And I am the guest. Motion one passes. Motion two. I move to have the permanent tax rate on adarum taxes of $4.9142 per thousand be applied to the total property value determined by the Washington County tax assessment. Do a second. Second. Great. Roll call vote. Brad yes. Mark, yes. Christy, yes. Peter, yes. Pete, yes. Nicholas, yes. David, yes. Jordan, yes. Melinda, yes. Kate, yes. and I am a yes. Okay. Motion number three. Madam chair, I move the levy the adorum taxes for debt services at $13,587,300. Great. I will second. One more roll call vote. Brad, yes. Mark, yes. Christie, yes. Peter, yes. Pete, yes. Nicholas, yes. David, yes.
053Jordan, yes. Melinda, yes. Kate, yes. and I am a yes. Okay. I want to reiterate that we will not be meeting our meeting on May 22nd. So, please don't come. No one will be here. If there is no further business, I will adjourn this meeting at 6:51. What? I It's not a question. I just want to say thank you. That's all. You you've volunteered your time to dig into our budget to ask us the questions that we we need to be asked. um who looked at the survey data that we had and asked us questions about that to ensure that we incorporated that into the work we've done. This is what we need in order to put together a budget for a public school system. So, thank you for that. Um as a reminder, we
054regularly bring our financial aids into the boardroom. So, if that is something that you are interested in, you can check in when we have those. And I think we talked about sending the quarterly reports to this budget committee. So we'll we'll start doing that as of the next quarter. So again, thank you. I'd love to add something. If we are worse than this month, next month, are we going to come back and meet and then talk it over again or what are we doing as such? Yeah, the budget committee's work is done. Um if the state doesn't approve 11.4 4 billion. Let's say they come back at 11 billion. We will have to do some internal work to adjust our expenditures. We can't spend more than we receive. So, we'll do that internal work. But
055what the budget committee recommends and what the school board approves is the maximum level of expenditures. We can't go over that, but we can spend below that. So, that would be the school board, correct? Yeah. School board and the district. Mr. D. Yeah. Well, somebody far as smart as I did once had a plan is a budget. The budget plan budget is plan for the upcoming school year and basically for beyond. It's giving us blue to what it looks like. And Dr. Wes says that's is not the most opi optimistic thing, but we still um and I did not paint an optimistic picture, but I do trust and I do respect the leadership of this district that includes all of the all of the people involved in the education of our kids. And uh when
056Dr. West said the important thing was taking care of our children, that's that's hitting the nail on the head. Um we can talk about other other things. We can talk about uh lines and on graphs that show decreases and increases, but it all comes down to that towhaired kid in the third grade classroom. What kinds of dreams he or she has uh and we have to do our best to make sure that those are realistic and that those are attainable for that child. Dr. West, Dr. Plume, thank you very much for your work. Peter, did you have something? Do you want to add? Oh, yeah. I guess I was just gonna comment that um yeah, we could maybe see some of the the numbers coming along for next year. You know, assuming that we may
057need to base some more difficult decisions at next year's budget meeting, you know, just sort of seeing where we are and where things are headed earlier. Yeah, might be might be a good thing. No, I wonder if we could send out when we do the budget updates or the financial updates in those meetings if we can send the budget committees and things saying this meeting it's going to have it I mean because you can even watch it on Zoom after the fact if you can't make it to the meeting but just so they'd have a more clear heads up. I mean even now you guys can go back and watch the meetings throughout the year on the Zoom but just something to think about. The next one will be the end of October. Okay. Okay.
058Don't want to end it too soon. Does anybody else have more things they want to say? All right. So, there being no further business, the meeting is adjourned at 6:55.