001The Pledge of Allegiance. All right, now we have Mr. Steve Niedenberger, partner there with the firm for the audit. Steve, the microphone is all yours. Now you should be able to hear me better, okay. Good evening, everyone. I'm pleased to be here tonight to discuss the 2324 audit. That's for the year in the June 30th, 2024. If you have your audit reports, either electronically or in paper format in front of you, I'll refer to some pages throughout the presentation. The first thing you'll see, obviously, is it's very large. You'll remember last year was the first year that the audit report turned into the annual comprehensive financial report here at Peters Township School District. I just wanted to say that last year was sort of like a trial run. The whole process was done, but it
002wasn't submitted. This second year, it was actually submitted for the end of 2024. It's due at 1231, and usually you hear back in like June of 25, it's like a five, six month process, but ultimately what you're trying to get is an award for financial excellence based on this report. Now this is your first year. There'll be some comments, and quite frankly, we have clients that do it every year, and there's still some comments, but I just wanted to take a moment to say about this. It is quite the undertaking, and it's been a big step forward for the school district management to prepare this. There's, it's about, not quite double the size of a normal audit report, but close with all the statistical information, and all kind of other letters, organizational charts, and everything
003like that. We won't go into any detail about that tonight unless somebody has a question. I'll just focus on the audit report portion of this, but I just wanted to make everybody aware of that, and that the management and the finance office has been really stepping up to do these reports because only a very small number of schools in Western Pennsylvania do that. It's really, you could sort of count them on your hand, the number ones that are doing that and submitting it. So that's an accomplishment to be in that position right now for the school district. So anyways, just to actually get into the audit report, the first thing I want to mention was on page eight. If you flip to page eight, this is the independent auditor's report letter. It's three pages long.
004This is really what we contribute to the audit, and I'm pleased to say that letter's starting on page eight. It's an unqualified opinion on the financial statements to the school district, which means there's no qualifications on our opinion. That's really the highest level opinion that could be provided on the district's financial statements. So it's also known as a clean audit opinion. That's really what you strive for every year, and that's what the district received for this 23, 24 school year. I'm just gonna flip to some of the bigger, more relevant exhibits that are based on how you budget and probably look at your numbers monthly. The first exhibit I wanted to flip to is page 27, exhibit three. Basically, this is the balance sheet for all your governmental funds in the district. The district has
005two governmental funds. You see the first column's the general fund and the second column's the capital projects fund. Just wanted to take a high-level look at the balance sheet here. Assets in the general fund were about 22.6 million, while the total liabilities and deferred inflows of resources were a little under 12 million, and this resulted in your $10.6 million fund balance at June 30th, 2024, of which 8.5 million is assigned, and over 760,000 is non-spendable because it relates to the prepaid assets above. So you can see that your unassigned fund balance at June 30th, 2024 is 1.3 million. While we're on this page, the capital projects fund, you'll see there was assets of 7.6 million, liabilities on contracts of about 2.1 million, and you had 5.5 million in your fund balance at year end. While
006we're talking about the governmental funds, if you want to flip to page 30, exhibit five, here you'll see there's three governmental funds. The reason for the third one is the debt service fund, which has no assets or liabilities or fund balance, so it wasn't on the balance sheet a couple exhibits ago, but here you see the results of the operations for the year. Total revenues, general fund column one, 81.5 million, while your total expenditures were 69.6 million, you'll see the transfer out of 11.8 million out of the general fund. 1.3 of that was to the capital projects fund, and 10.5 of that was to fund your debt service payments, principal and interest on your outstanding debts. So with all that activity taken to account, three lines from the bottom, general fund column, you'll see you
007added to your fund balance 46,000 for the year. The second column, the capital projects fund, you'll see you had interest earnings of 220,000, capital expenditures of 1.1 million, and you had that 1.3 million transfer in from the general fund during the year. So with that activity, you increased your fund balance and capital projects 374,000. And basically that service fund, you had a little bit of interest earnings, and you see here that you paid your principal and interest by means of the interest earnings and the transfer in from the general fund. Those are the main funds of the school district, there's just two other types I'll draw your attention to briefly. Exhibit eight, page 34. This is the results of operations for the proprietary funds, which is your food service fund. Just wanted to point out
008three lines from the bottom on the bottom of page 34. There was an increase in net position for the year of 399,000 in the food service fund. The remaining fund type is page 37, exhibit 10. These are your fiduciary funds. You have two types of fiduciary funds. You have the trust funds, which have a little over 27,000 in June 30th, 2024. And then the custodial funds, those are actually the student activity monies. You had about 222,000 at year end, June 30th, 2024 in the student activity monies. That's a very quick high level look at the main exhibits for the funds here at the school district. Just a few other things I wanna point out throughout the audit report. One of them is the debt level, which is on page 51, which is note eight, long-term
009debt note. About the middle of the page 51, you'll see there that the first line in that note is the general obligation bonds outstanding at June 30th of 24. You were at a little over 107 million. While your general obligation notes, the start of the next little section was a little over 12 million. So this gives you some level of the, some idea of the level of debt at June 30th, 2024. And we previously talked about 10.5 million was paid principal and interest during the year on those bonds and notes. The rest of the footnotes really just accompany the exhibits that we talked about. Steve. Yes. Sorry, what point are you getting at there? I was just sort of getting at the point of the level of debt that the district had at June 30th,
0102024. And then also that of that debt, 10.5 million was paid down in 23, 24. Principal portion of the debt versus the interest portion of that, you could see on page 51. Let me just flip back there to you for a second. Page 51, you'll see that about 5 million was principal between the 1.29 in bonds and the 3.7 in notes that was paid back during the 23, 24 school year. Page 51, the bottom half, long-term debt, note eight. And then you'll see the first row of numbers is general obligation bonds. Okay, yeah, it really was just trying to point out is even though you had payments towards that of about 10.5 million during the year, approximately 5 million went directly to principal on your bonds and notes. And we just like to give an
011idea of how much was paid down on what the debt level was. Because that's another indicator of the school district's financials besides the results of the various funds we talked about earlier. The rest of the footnotes support the statements that we briefly talked about. There's nothing unless someone has a question in a few moments that I'm gonna go into great detail with. I did wanna look at the required supplementary information which begins on page 69. Page 69 starts a line-by-line analysis of what was budgeted for a 23, 24 year versus how the actual results came in. And actually the first page probably to really look at is page 70. Page 70, two thirds of the way down, you'll see the total revenues and other financing sources. You budget 80 million, 145,000. And that's the first
012two columns. And then when you go to the third column, you'll see you actually had revenue of 81.565 million. So your revenues exceeded the budget revenues of a little over 1.4 million. That was a favorable variance for your general fund. On the other side, if you flip to page 75, we'll go four lines from the bottom on page 75. You'll see the total expenditures and other financing uses. You budgeted 80.2 million. You did expend 81.5 million. So there was 1.2 million more spent than was budgeted. Now, when you net the revenues positive of about 1.4 actual over budget versus the actual over budget of the expenditures, for the year, you still had a positive favorable variance of 153,000. It was budgeted to use 106,000 of fund balance during the 23, 24 year. And actually you
013added to your fund balance of 46,000. So that's how you get to that positive result at year end. Yes, Brad. And just to jump in, just so we can explain a little bit on the expenditure side. Yeah, we were overspending almost $1.3 million, but we made the decision to move that in the capital because we had the additional revenue. The actual budgeted amount for expenditures was basically right on. What we budgeted in expenditures and what was actually spent, we just ended up with additional revenues on mostly driven by the state, the state revenue that wasn't budgeted when we adopted of 500,000. You'll see also the increase in the EIT and then the investment earnings that we were able to capture because of the high interest rates. So those things were what drove the $1.3 million
014that we were able to transfer in the capital that wasn't really budgeted for the year. Yes, as Brad said, we actually would have had a $34,000 favorable, less expenditures than budget if it wasn't for the $1.3 million transfer to capital reserve. So that talks about the general fund budget actual. Really the remainder of this report, the only thing I really wanted to point out was, you don't have to actually flip to the page, but it starts around page 105 or 104 actually. And that's the single audit portion of the audit. Anytime you have 750,000 or more of federal expenditures, we have to perform a single audit and we have to follow the federal guidelines selecting major programs and testing them. Basically we had to test the IDEA program as the major program for a 23,
01524 year of federal monies. And I'm pleased to say there's two letters in there. The first letter basically is an opinion on the federal expenditures of the district. That was basically a clean opinion. It's unqualified opinion, just like the audit report opinion. And what that basically is saying is that your federal expenditures followed the guidelines and everything is set in place by the federal government and the monies were expended correctly. And the second letter, basically, we have to take a little look at the internal controls of the federal programs while looking at the major program. And the internal control letter is also clean. There was no deficiencies in controls or anything like that noted with the federal expenditures. So in summary, we talked about some of the big numbers throughout this report. However, really when
016you're looking at an audit report, the two key things are clean audit opinion and then on the federal monies spent, it was also a clean audit opinion. And I guess the final thing to say is, this report's so large now, 130 some pages in the efforts of not having anybody fall asleep. This could probably be digested for three or four hours with all the different schedules and things in here, but I don't think that's anyone's interest to go quite to that level. But if you do have any questions, if you have them now, or if it's just a lot all at once for everybody, if you can think of questions as time goes on, you can always send them to Brad or whatever and he'd get in contact, we'd be happy to talk about the
017report. I did have a question. On page 105 at second paragraph, last sentence, accordingly, we do not express an opinion on the effectiveness of the Peter Township School District's internal controls. But you mentioned for the other letter, the internal controls were checked. I guess my question before you mentioned that on the next page was, is there any concern at all of something that we need to look into further? No. So basically we didn't notice any deficiencies. We're not like given an overall efficiency audit, this is more a financial statement audit, but there was no deficiencies at all noted in the internal controls and that's basically a clean letter. Okay, sounds good. And my other question may be a little bit loaded but I know you mentioned like we're one of the few districts that put
018together this book and I do think it's a great book that the administration puts together. Is there an item or two that you believe we do well here from what you see with other districts and is there one or two you believe just seeing other districts, something we can strive to improve upon? We're mainly focused on the finances and business office. So keep in mind that that's what we're looking at. You have good people in your business office. I mean, you're only as good as your people really, whether it's the business manager sitting here or the staff, three or four people under him that really work with us on this audit. Everybody is an important cog in that. It's easy to see Brad and just think of him but there are other people. So everybody's
019doing their job and even management aside from the business office is involved and it's a professional school district here. We audit about 37 school districts and as you could probably imagine there's a lot out there but Peters Township has strived for excellence over the years that I've been associated with the audit and is one of the top business offices which allows you to do this type of report and have accurate reporting. You may take for granted sitting here and getting reports from your management that they're right. Well, that doesn't always happen in some places. So I mean, you have a pretty good district here and could feel good at least all the decisions you have to think through and make for the district as board members, at least you have good data to try to
020make those decisions the best you can. Okay, appreciate that, thank you. I don't have a question. I just wanna commend you, Brad. Every year it seems like we sit here clean on it after clean on it and it feels like Groundhog's Day but I can't tell you what a joy it is to have such good reporting and I've seen otherwise. So I wanna say I appreciate you and value the work that you do and we're really lucky as a district to have you, thank you. No, I do appreciate that and I guess I would just say back to what Steve said, the staff we have here now gives us the ability to do these things and I appreciate them and the work they put in and I think we're heading in the right direction. And
021I wanna add to what they both said in the sense that although I don't work with the same federal programs you work with, I work with other federal programs and I would say at least half the time, a given program has directly conflicting instructions. So working that balance out in a way that still gives us a clean report is darn impressive. Yeah, keep in mind the last few years, there was additional sources of Essar's monies, ARP Essar's monies, a lot of that's gone now but the last two, three years have had more federal challenges, let's just say for all the districts, so. So Brad, good job, you get to do it all over again, so. But I do have a question on the cafeteria and what's driving that favorability? We did receive federal funding, federal
022grant funding during COVID that kind of turned us to the positive with that increase. We applied for it two years ago, we were one of the school districts who received it but the federal money that was set aside, it went through one round and every district received money for it. They actually had a second round because the money was still available and this was the final third round of that federal monies. So that's a good point, we do see the favorable of the food service but that's driven by the federal grant money that was sent to school districts. So what's the plan with that, I mean? The last couple months we've seen approvals we got from the board for some improvements in our equipment. We got new ovens at all the buildings, we're replacing our
023walk-in coolers and freezers, trying to make an investment with that one time. These are one time earnings, we're trying to use those one time earnings to get ahead of some of our equipment issues. But correct me if I'm wrong, all that money needs to be stay in food service. Correct, yeah, no money from the food service account is allowed to be used for anything besides food service related items. Okay. I didn't quite hear the answer to what I understood Dan's question to be. How do we plan to stay solvent moving forward? Lest the grant funds, we would be solvent, we just wouldn't have the surpluses that we'd see in this year and we've seen the previous two years. So we should have a positive balance. But it wouldn't be in the hundreds of thousands, it
024would be in five figures instead of six figures. Okay, thanks. And without those federal grants, if we weren't that much to the good, but we still needed to replace some equipment, how would we fund that? Just capital project? We usually do end the year food service with additional funds. So we might end the year with $40,000. In the past, we haven't had to replace equipment each year. So we'd maybe save up a year or two and then make that replacement cost. Well, our hope is that with this grant funding that we did receive, we were able to get ahead of that curve and buy us enough time to kind of build up some of the monies that we do have in food service. Now, that's the other side of it. We do file reports with
025the Department of Education on our food service account and they do not want you to have, obviously they don't want it to be a large piggy bank of money there. They want you to have a plan to spend it. So I think we're just following through with that. I would like that to everybody else though. You have certainly spoiled us with the work you've done for us. Thank you very much and please keep it coming. And thank you for all the extra work that went into preparing this. Any save rounds? All right, Steve, thank you to you and your team for good support here. And Fred, you know what I thank you. So I can't say it any better than anyone else, but with that, no good deed, right? So we will move on to
026the 25-26 preliminary budget. Okay. All right, we're gonna move to the 25-26 preliminary budget. Before we get into this, not as good as news as the audit reports, but just remember these are preliminary numbers. This is our first go around with it. The plan as always is to come back sometime late April, to go through another update of this preliminary budget. Prior to the timeline of having to approve a proposed final budget at the May voting meeting. I think this is the second time through for most everyone, at least two times through. We wanna be as close as possible at that May proposed final. The idea of it is to approve a budget that we would be considering in June so that the public would have enough time to make the comment they would have
027the 30 days or more in between before we adopt the final budget. So we're gonna look at, the first thing that drives everything is our actual student enrollment. We'll look at our revenue changes, our expenditures, and then if we have any public comment. How we start our budgeting season is always reminding all of our staff about our core principles. We run lean here and any time there's changes, we have a lot of wants and we really try to whittle it down to what are our needs, remind ourselves that we are majority funded by our taxpayers, we wanna be mindful of that and also remind ourselves that our core work is the education of our children and that we wanna spend our dollars closest to the classroom. And then we just always go back to our
028guiding principles. So going into enrollment, we always do a four year actual and then we project out four years. That's our four year projection isn't a state projection, it's a projection we do internally. And what we're doing is we're just looking, how many kids are we picking up from grade to grade, year to year, taking that over four or five years, average that out. Thankfully, we're in a pretty stable community where that seems to work out and we get pretty close with our projections. So the one number you're gonna see that we'd wanna point out today that kind of jumped out at us when we put this together was actually PV, Pleasant Valley. And we've talked in the past about capacity issues at different schools. And I know it kind of took me off guard
029because I'm always, we always had a lot more kids 10 years ago, 15 years ago, when you actually look at overall district enrollment, we had more kids. So you just assume we had more kids in all our buildings. But when you actually go back and look and I can go back to 2008, 2009, 522 would be the most kids in that time span at PV. So do these projections include any new movement into the district when we have our meeting with the council and they talk about the new developments and the expected buildings, is that projected in here or sort of? No, I mean, I guess it would be as long as the development is consistent on a year to year. I don't think we're picking up much fluctuation to it. But we know like
030on average, we're picking up so many kids between first and second grade, second and third grade, but it's not an exact science. And when we do it, we'll come to an average of 10 over five years, but in those five years, we'll go from picking up 15 kids, zero kids, five kids, 12 kids. So it is kind of, it's all over the board. And hard to project out that way. We will be extra vigilant with things happening in PVs feeder, given how we're tight on classroom space. We just had to move EDS out. We have a little bit of more student capacity because we added more classrooms, but we are gonna have to be very cognizant of development on that end. Where that big apartment complex is going in, which elementary school is that? PV.
031I believe that would be PV. Oh. I thought it was home. Behind millers. Behind millers. Oh, that would be PV. Dr. French, how close are those numbers to building capacities? We're good in terms of building capacity. What our issue at PV is we don't have, we are maxed out in terms of classrooms. We have space to put more children in the classrooms from these added classrooms, but we're getting really close in terms of adding additional classrooms. But we have more seats available because we have added classrooms. Thank you. I feel very comfortable. What about Bower Hill? Bower Hill, we have room at Bower Hill. The interesting thing is when you go back at Bower Hill and you look at their height, they were at a high of 900 kids at one time, and our projection
032is 700. So you do see that is- So although not preferable, you'd redraw the line. If we had to. If you had to. You wouldn't want to do that unless you had to. I think when we get to the next slide, you'll see what Dr. French is saying. I think we're at classroom capacity. We have all the classrooms we could fit in there, but inside those classrooms, there are student capacity that's still available there. But overall, district-wide, we're at 40, 27, 4,027 students. Next school year, we're projecting 40,042, pretty much stable, in rising in the next two years out. 40, 84, and 41, 20. Going into enrollment versus projected enrollment and adding in the class sizes, this is where you'll see Bower Hill. Currently, they have 27 rounds or 27 classroom teachers, grades K through
033three for 700 students. They're picking up three students, but because of grade levels and where kids fall, you actually could see fluctuation of teaching staff just because of how many teachers needed. We always try to cap under 25 students a classroom. That puts Bower Hill right on the border for two of their class sizes. First grade, this year's kindergarten is 164. We usually, that's one of those things, the average, we pick up about 10. If we picked up 10, that would put us 174, seven teachers. That's 24.86, right at that borderline. We have 167 first graders. We usually pick up on average of seven kids. If we pick up seven kids, that would take us to 174 also. So we would take that to seven. So that actually means even though we picked up three
034kids, if the configurations fell that way, we'd actually be down one teacher. But right, we're right at that borderline. You wanna tell them what we budgeted for or what it has in right now? Yeah, so we would budget worst case scenario. So we would budget for those two additional teachers, not knowing. But if we were gonna staff, if we had to make staffing decisions today, we would only staff seven. One staff, right? Seven. Down the PV, so they're going from 497 to 522. You see the third grade was only 106 and they're pushing out and then you're coming in with a kindergarten, you've been averaging about 125. So this goes the other way. We only had five third grade teachers for 21 kids at class size. And taking them up to 135, we would have
035to bump that up to six. So you're actually picking a teacher up at PV. So right now, based on these staffings, you would lose one at Bauer Hill, pick one up at PV, but be right on the border for two class sizes at Bauer Hill. So the potential of having to add two elementary school teachers. Any questions? Moving down to McMurray, 614, they're actually gonna bump up to 631. We know we have high class sizes there, but we would be able to absorb that at this time. Middle school, 954, they would actually drop down to 940. High school, minus Western area, would be 1187, and we'd be at 1,171. And you see the totals of 40, 27, and 40, 42. Any questions on those projected enrollments or staffing levels? I just chuckle how probably 10
036years ago now, somebody did a study and concluded that our population was going to shrink quite a bit and keep shrinking. That just makes me laugh, what? Okay. Yeah, we took that study out of the presentation. Yeah. So moving on to some of our comparisons. And we always think it's important to do these comparisons because I think it kind of tells a story. Everyone knows that we're heavily dependent, like Dr. French said at the beginning, on our local revenue. And the reason why, it isn't really, we're spending so much more than everybody else that we need more local revenue. It's just that we receive less revenue from the state and from federal that we have to make up for that with our local revenue. Move on from that. I want to stop for just a
037second and say what that means is our population is extraordinarily blessed to have less levels of free and reduced price lunch. So that's kind of a good thumb for what we're talking about. We have the resources in the community and the money, the state and federal money is going to communities who do not have the resources in-house. I will say though, if you look at up for St. Clair, same population, we have very similar demographics. They get 2.5 more million dollars than we do. Yeah. Yeah, so this is- But still, they're taxing them higher, but they still get more state funding. So the state funding, and I had to dig into St. Clair's numbers, but their increase would be driven more by the payroll tax reimbursement. So we know they have more staff as we
038know they spend significantly more than we spend on a year, 20 million, just about. So they have more staff, they're paying more salaries. So they're paying more into the PISA's fund and they're paying more into social security, which the state reimburses you for approximately 50% of those costs. So their actual basic education funding and transportation funding and all those other special education fundings, those would be level, but then when you get to those reimbursements that are driven by your actual payrolls, theirs would be higher. So they would receive additional funds from the state for those payroll taxes. Seems like a fallacy in the structure. So the top- Right, exactly. We combined our two Allegheny County and Washington County boxes together. The top box is the Washington County. You can see we're at the bottom of
039that $4,623 per student back in 22, 23. And then just our Allegheny County comparables, Bethel Park, Upper St. Clair, North Allegheny, Mount Lebanon, South Bay, and Pine Richland. As Mr. O'Neill said, there's only one district even in the Allegheny County comparables that actually receives less per student, and that's Pine Richland, receiving $4,500. Yeah, and actually, just because I have to look at these numbers a lot, you'll see on the next slide, the South Fayette, their adequacy fund, by my quick math, bumps them up another 500 bucks per kid. So it's just us and Pine Richland there. Yeah, the concerning thing is, in last year's approved budget, there were additional funding for school districts that qualify for advocacy supplements and a tax equity gap supplement, hard for me to say. We did not receive either of
040them, so I guess it doesn't matter that I can't say it, but there are some other districts in Washington County did not receive a Val and McGoffey, but most did receive at least a little bit on either of those. And then also, the thing that kind of stood out with South Fayette received almost $600,000 on the calculation, and then Upper St. Clair received 90,000. So that is in the 24, 25, and like Jason pointed out, the numbers we were looking at were 22, 23. So we look at those state funding per student, these numbers are gonna skew that state funding even more. So all these districts receiving this additional money is gonna go in when we go back and look at 25 data, those numbers are on state funding per student. And then the governor's
041proposed budget, so this isn't, doesn't, proposed budget. One thing that we weren't thinking that, those school districts received those extra from that formula the funds they received last year, just a double that for this year. So they're getting the increase that they got last year in provision, which is why we had the last column that showed. So two years, South Fayette would receive almost half a dollar and we received two school years. There would be almost $300,000 if the governor's proposed budget would follow that same. So I know you're not at cost yet, but I didn't see it in the cost section. Is there any update on whether or not the caps for charter schools is realistic or? That was part of the governor's proposal was to, this year, they did place a reimbursement for
042charter school, for cyber school. So districts were receiving, I think we're set to receive 90,000, we received half of that already in January. That's been removed and they went back to, in his proposed that they want to set up flat $8,000 cyber school tuition rate. Our tuition rates, 14, almost $15,000, they would cap it at eight. You're looking at $400,000, $300,000 savings, if possible. It's the second year, last year he tried to enact this flat funding, and they kind of blocked it and gave reimbursement instead, which in comparison to what we would get. Thank you. And we're focusing on that, it's just been, I was thinking about getting adequacy in the end, and we were working with the governor and kind of hard advocated that flat rate. I think that's part of the fund. Part
043of that, I think they get a $180,000. And there's a complete knowledge that there were, there were unintended consequences of the formula. 14 million a year, and then consequences and monies that would be distributed. And knowledge that that was, I hate to use the word unfair, did they say they were gonna look, trying to correct that or making it as more even? This represents correction. It was a million dollars for St. Clair. Okay, so then again, just to pick on that one district a little bit north of us, not only do they get rewarded by more state funding by operating less efficiently, they're also gonna get a hell of a lot more money from a different program. Yeah, dude, you're picking up what we're putting down. When we review these, I said we ought to
044just put congressman and woman on the slide. I just wanna make that really clear for us, but also for anyone in the community watching. Thank you. And then just federal funding. You know, we don't have our Allegheny County comparison because those are similar. If you'd seen those, those would be right in line with ours. But this is the federal funding. We did it in adverse, so we're only in $242 per student and you'll see Washington County's the highest at 2,773. I will say, you know, Essar's money has been expended by everyone, so we won't go over that again, but that was a significant contribution that those districts received for the last three years also. I'm sorry, go back up to that slide. So in eight years, I've asked this question twice in months since last
045year. I'm gonna ask it again because things are changing, right? So if you tell the federal government we're not following your rules, you can keep your money. Are we more efficient and can you legally do it? You may not, I mean, I think we need to watch that as things progress because it may be something where we say, look, you're not giving us any money to do that, we're gonna do the right things for the kids, but we can do it more efficient than by following all the rules they have you jump and hoops, right? So it's something to consider as things change to look and say, okay, is that an option? Because we really don't get that much money for these kids from that, so. But isn't the federal money mostly special education? I
046think it's not general education funding, it's special education, right? It is, it is, and I think that's a challenge. We're gonna just pay attention to what's happening with the Department of Education and we have a lot of requirements and a lot of obligations and we'd have to look at what I think was Mr. Taylor saying, let's look at, we still do what's right by children without taking it to a level that is required by the- My intent is not to have any impact on the kids, it's that red tape and everything else that you have to do to meet those requirements costs a significant amount of money, and if you didn't have to do that, you'd still do right by the kids, but do it for less than what they're given you, yeah. So moving
047on to the next slide, which is Mr. O'Neill, me and him were talking it out one day and we thought we were trying to come up with a way to kind of show this. So this is the, we came up with this slide which was pretty interesting when you really lay it out. We know with the earned income tax that's collected from the school district, we know that our school district's rates are all about, are all half a percent. We know with the state income tax is 3.07, we're able to factor in to try to estimate how much each community or each school district sends to the state, and then we know the dollars that the state sends to each school district for education. And you'll see in Washington County, there's three districts at the
048bottom. So we send 45 point, Peter's Township sends $45.8 million in estimated state earned income tax. We received back 18.4, 18.5. So we're sending $27 million more to the state and we're receiving back in educational funding. I appreciate you putting this slide in the presentation. I did find it interesting. I think we probably all knew that we were subsidizing other areas, but this shows the magnitude of it. That I do find it interesting that if the bottom of the second and third column are almost equal, so almost every dollar of estimated state earned income tax is going to education, but it really is just redistributed throughout the county that I hope we share this with CAN and MAC too, because I think they'd be interested to see this. I'm curious, just curious, why did there
049keep being no information for Avella? It's just a matter of that they didn't submit the, I have to go out to the state website, pull down the state data. If they had not been submitted for 22, 23, there's no data. Just curious, thanks. 21, 22, that's the latest expenditures per student. When we go do our update in April, we should have updated numbers. We'll also have a little bit more detail. We'll go through, and I know we like to look at the benchmarking and actually break down individual funding and try to look at what we're spending per student in different categories, but this is just the big bucket number. So for 21, 22, the scholarship was spending $18,817 per student, that's in. That was ranked number 333 out of 500 district, number one, spending the
050most money. So we're in closer to the bottom of that. And then when we also look at it, we were 327. So even though we definitely spent more per kid from 21, we've got 1.8 district. Then we did include the out of 18,000 district that's slightly under, now we're to what we've seen in the previous, after the 20,000. What corrects the California gets a? The expenditures per student that sit outside of all those revenue comparisons that we show from state revenue and federal revenue, they actually receive monies from the university. So we wouldn't see that here, but this is actually spent per student. They have an agreement with them that they actually, I think it's based on them changing. I don't know the details here. Millage rates in Washington County is updated for the current
051school year. We talk about where the funding comes and why that drives our millage rate to be on the higher end of Washington County. We're not getting those additional revenues. We have from our local sources. So we were, last year, we were lower on this list. We had a higher millage rate. As you can see, as the Essar's monies kind of expired on some of the other school districts that were receiving those Essar's monies, you see their percentage of increase. Last year, we had an increase of, even though the index was 10%, we had an increase of 29%. Most of the districts that you see have increases of five or six, so they took those to the index. And then down in Allegheny County, we did have three districts that did not have a tax
052increase, and then three that had greater increases, so kind of a mixed bag there. I'd actually like to stress something there, because you're right, I didn't put all the pieces together, but yes, even though we could have raised taxes a whole lot more last June, we didn't, and yet we also are getting a whole lot less funding from the state and federal government, and I think that highlights even more the fantastic job that you and your team have done to give us a powerful race. I didn't want to let that go to waste. So, Chris, if you look at the residents, you'll see, St. Clair, St. Ernest, next couple of months also, we'll grab those when we get closer to adoption, we'll make sure we protect them. You have a, based on current, we're not
053collecting less earned income, but we are collecting less earned income than we budgeted for this year. We think, previous budget report, earned income, we were way under budget. We, you know, and we had that discussion last year when we created this year's budget, that, you know, we need to bring up that earned income because it looked like it was coming in a lot higher, and it has slowed down from the time we probably adopted the budget, it's slowed down right at that point. So this year, we're trending right now that we'll be a couple hundred thousand dollars under budget, just in the earned income. So we'll take it back to where we projected the end this year, and then we will put a growth factor on that because we usually see a growth factor. But
054taking it back to where we think we're gonna end this year, adding two and a half percent, still leaves us less than we had in the budget this year. So we're actually gonna see a reduction in the budget in the months in earned income. So earned income, you're gonna see a reduction in budget to budget for earned income. On investment earnings, our investment earnings are driven by interest rates. We're projecting the interest rates to decrease over the next fiscal year. So you're gonna see a little reduction in our investment earnings that we're projecting. And then as we've said in previous years, we're projecting all state funding to remain the same level as 24, 25. We did go over the governor's proposed budget. There's nothing really in there for us anyways. It was a small increase.
055So it doesn't really, it's not gonna make much change. Local revenue sources will continue to make up 76% of our total revenues. And then I had my note in here to talk about cyber tuition, but we already covered that, so. District revenue by source, 64 million in local revenue last year, 63.4, 63.8 this year. Percentage-wise, we're still sitting at 76% local, 24% state, and less than a percent in federal and other revenues. So assessed values, taxable properties. So those are assessed values that got added to the tax rules. So we would see an increase in our tax collection just based on these properties and these increases in assessments. Last year, we had 140 million. This year, we have 100 million. You can see where that is. We're trending, we see the development. It's being put
056on the tax rules. But at the same level, slightly behind last year's number. On that, was it less total houses or a lower value of houses of a similar number? I would have to dig into the occupancy permits. So I just grabbed the overall certified sets value from the county just to get a total number. I didn't dig into what actually constituted this increase. Okay, thank you. Oh, I'm looking and seeing a $40 million difference when every other year leading up to that for the past several have been positive. Our 20-year millage history, we did have a few years where assessed values grew to a point where millage rates were able to stay the same, but you were able to generate additional revenue back in 2006-7. Since then, it's been small increases to keep up
057for the lack of revenue in other areas. We're gonna go through the revenues. I know this is hard to see, and then we'll go through a summary at the end also. But line item, we won't go through each line item, but on line item one, current real estate taxes, you'll see a $500,000 increase. That's driven by those additional assessed values. So no tax increases, it's just that we have higher values on the assessment. Interim real estate tax collection, we're gonna increase that $43,000 in our budget. Interim taxes, which gets placed on a property when improvements been made during the actual tax year so that we could send them a prorated bill. We are seeing those developments, so we're seeing an increase in our interim tax collections. There's the decrease for earned income of $141,000 in
058the wrong way. Real estate transfer tax, this is just based on the current year. We do have an outlier. We did receive a large real estate transfer. We were behind our budget numbers until February. The assisted living home on Valley Brook was sold to an equity group that created a huge real estate transfer tax for us. It kind of put us ahead of budget, not knowing where everything is going, but knowing that we collected 975 and 23.4, we're gonna probably collect more than 900,000 this year based on that, at least that pushing us over. So we're gonna take the budget to $900,000. That's one of those ones that we don't know, we're not sure of, we're just kind of taking our best guess. Delinquent real estate, that number is based on the last three years
059of collections. So we see that number increasing. We're gonna bump that up on the budget side. Interest on investments, we're just taking a conservative that interest rates are gonna start to fall. We're seeing that this year, you'll see the actual of almost 1.7. We'll probably hit a little above 1.5 this current year, but if interest rates would fall next year, we would see a decrease on these investment earnings. Couple of small changes with revenue just based on collections of the previous years. Down the basic ed subsidy, that $164,000, that is all due to the current year increase. So we did get an increase in basic ed in 25, 26. So we're capturing that one year late. Same thing with the $70,000 in special education. Transferred patient subsidy is a significant increase of $176,000 driven by
060the state. They finally increased their reimbursement amount after holding that flat for so many years. So we're seeing those additional reimbursements coming in. So we're gonna increase that budget number. That's also one of the ones where when the state has financial problems, they'll hold that money back. The transportation reimbursement is always paid on a delay anyways. So whenever the state does have financial issues, that will usually get pushed to the next year. So you're always has to move that, but knowing what we know at right now, I don't have a problem increasing that budget. And then down the revenue for social security and retirement, those are the state's portion of those expenditures that they're reimbursing us for. Us having higher salary numbers, we're gonna have higher payments in the retirement and social security, but we'll
061get higher reimbursements from the state. No changes to federal. We usually don't receive our federal letters until later in the school year. Once we get those, we will put those in. I'll tell you, our title money usually go the other way. We seem to lose a couple thousand dollars a year title funds, but we'll see when we actually get our letter. Those are based on the free and reduced percentages. So it's free and reduced percentages of ours, but it's really based on the comparison of the statewide. So even if our free and reduced numbers stays the same, but everyone else is in the states kind of goes up, our share of that pie will go down. Total increase in revenues of a million dollars in the questions. Moving on to expenditures. Expenditures do continue to
062rise, even though we saw the enrollment, we got a slight uptick in enrollment, but it's pretty much steady. Those expenditure increases are driven primarily by contractual and mandated staff costs. You're gonna see the major cost drivers, it's teachers and staff salaries, our healthcare costs, and then our investment in the technology. So for staff increases, we're projecting a million dollar increase in staff costs. We know this is one number that we're gonna go back through because there's staff costs, but then there's estimated staff costing that we will continue to crunch and kind of look at where we are this year for overtime or some of our hourly employees to see if those numbers need to either go up and down. So that number will change when we come back, but right now we're sitting on a
063little over a million dollar increase, which is 2.3% greater than our current year budget. Healthcare premiums, we got early numbers from them. They sent a letter, the healthcare consortium sent a letter to all districts saying budget 9%. We did go over their audit last month, we had an audit meeting, the audit was favorable. So I'm hoping that when they sit down and calculate the rates, maybe we're gonna see a rate lower than 9%. Our meetings set for the first week of April where we would meet and they would go over that renewal from next year. Employer retirement contributions are projected to increase by almost $400,000. So that is a 3.18% increase. Technology, we have a sizable increase in technology over the previous year. The first item is a one-time purchase. So this is one of
064those things that we'll make this investment this year, but hopefully next year, if we don't have this, this could actually be something we'll be able to capture as a savings. It's a $233,000 increase because we're replacing our main data center server. So that's the main server that sits below this building. It's kind of at the end of life. We've kind of pushed that off for a year or two and feel that that is something that we necessarily are gonna have to invest in for this upcoming school year. Brad, how often do those have to be replaced generally? So it depends on the equipment that you're particularly running. This system we purchased in 2019 and it is our hyper-converged infrastructure. So these are all of our servers that we use to run all of our applications,
065all of our services here within the district. There's 82 of them in all, consolidated into these four pieces of equipment. They're typically in the wild replaced every five years. So we've essentially gone one year longer than we have. We originally wanted to go longer than that. We try to get seven to eight years out of those types of systems. However, the market has changed with the systems that we currently have in place. We use a VX rail system that uses VMware, which I'm sure everybody's kind of heard of VMware. Things have changed with VMware over the past year. They've been acquired by Broadcom and their pricing and support structure has significantly changed over that time period. We are now running a system that is essentially considered by Broadcom to be end of life, end of
066support. And they're not willing to help us upgrade that and to move that upgrade any further. We've just been upgrading it as we go. Are there security issues with that? There are not. There are not at this particular point. However, if we continue to draw those out, then yes, we will end up having a problem and that's the reason for this. The challenge that we are dealing with is again, we run into the situation of support service, but it houses all of our core infrastructure. So if we were to lose two of those systems in non-high availability mode, we would essentially be dead in the water and we would have to figure out how to spin things up in the cloud and make it work in that way. We're looking at all things on the
067table. We are gonna move away from VMware at this particular time because of the costs that have been pushed on us and pushed on the district to see what is available out there. But estimates that we have is that's what this project would cost. And then the second investment in technology is the planned replacement for laptop schedules. So this would be, you know, last year we entered into a lease agreement for replacements in grades two, six and nine. This would be going on that schedule, replacing those same devices for the new two, six and nine. So this would be year two of the three-year phase. So next school year, you would see that same increase. And then once we get to that level of replacement, it would be just a constant replacement schedule. You know,
068you'd see an increase, but it would just be based on the cost increase of the equipment over the previous two years. And I think we just wanted to note, Dr. Frank wanted to note that. And I just wanted to make a note, we've been watching what the Department of Education is doing in terms of standardized testing. They are going full force, and Ms. Riegel, you're probably aware of this as well, going full force to fully digital testing. We've had a preview of it. And I am very concerned if we don't have our children having a certain level of early technology skills. Third grade PSSA, examples of the digital exam requires a lot of manipulation where you're pulling down tools, you're turning. For a child with a measurement, in the past, we just have a ruler
069be able to measure and answer a question. They now have to go and engage with a computer to get a digital ruler, turn the ruler, move it to get close to what they're measuring, and then log their answer. If we are not ramping up the skills that children are gonna need, they're not gonna be able to show what they know. And it's coming. There's a lot of pushback. A lot of superintendents have looked at these exams, and we're really worried that we're now gonna be measuring computer engagement skills as opposed to what children really know and can do. So we have not, nobody said, hey, we're listening to you, we're gonna stop and not do this. But that's the extent. I don't wanna be behind the eight ball on this one. And if I... Yes,
070not the federal. And if I can pile on there, I won't speak for Janine or the rest of her team, but I don't think anyone really likes this. I don't know how you get around it. I think this is another one of those where I would say, call your congresswoman, and be like, hey, don't force these digital tests for the PSSAs across the board for these young children. But that's certainly where the state is headed. Any of the state funding formulas fund any laptops for these tests? No. And we were left out of a lot of the ESSER money, and that's where people were able to kind of stock well get ahead of their adoptions. Again, we were the EORs of the funding system. I do look, but really no one wants to fund computers.
071Well, in reality, correct me if I'm wrong, Janine, the reason the state's pushing this is to save money on printing, right? So to save a couple bucks, and I'm sure that number adds up, right? I don't wanna understate it. But the very debate that we have here and that we all collectively share, both with the administrators, with the teachers, with the parents, is about too much screen time. To save a couple bucks on paper, that's why this is happening. Is that fairly accurate? Yes, the cost of paper and pencil tests is extraordinary. It's a massive expenditure, and they are trying to streamline and reduce those costs. But again, it kind of gets pushed onto us as districts. The state is not the only one moving to online testing. College Board did it for the SAT
072and PSATs a couple years ago. ACT is moving in that direction. Most of the AP tests are not gonna be digital. I think an exception is language, but I expect those to be fully digital next year as well. So it's everything. And for the same reasons, it's cheaper for them. Yeah, and I know you agree with this. There's one thing having a 10th grader take an online test versus a second grader saying, hey, how do you measure that? I'm like, I don't know. And Janine said they even explored using a ruler, but of course it's not the scale, you know? Point taken, yeah. And then the last major driver that we wanted to talk about was just the curriculum budget. So we do have an increase in curriculum this year. $200,000 you're gonna see in
073our summary document. And this is largely due to the K to five reading adoption for 25, 26. The last adoption for reading at the elementary level was 2016. So this was up for a renewal. And then we are gonna expand that into McMurray Elementary. Retirement. So the retirement rate, you might have saw Feasurer's Board, and everyone saw that they did adopt the official rate for next year at 34%. So that means 34 cents on every dollar that we spend on salaries. We would send two Feasurer's. Like I said, the state will reimburse us for half of that. And even though the rate only increased 0.1, it went from 33.9 to 34. When you get that, you get the 0.1 increase, but you also get the increases that we're actually paying on salary. So you're paying
074more into that. So for every additional dollar that we pay in salaries, we're paying 34 cents for Feasurer's. So the total cost of the district for this year is $192,000, net the revenue we're gonna receive from the state. And then this is just always the graph that kinda seems crazy, but back in 2010 and 11, that Feasurer's rate was just over 5%. So since 2010 and 11, it has increased 603%. One of the other areas that are driving some of our expenditure increases, Mrs. Bowman and Mrs. Schitterer, are not gonna be happy about this, but Western area, we've had a significant increase in Western area enrollment. This current year, we've only budgeted for 52, which would have been our highest in the last five years by a lot. We have 77 kids at Western area.
075This current year, when we look at the breakdown, it looks like that number probably is a good number to budget for next year. We know that's gonna be about additional $100,000 for our Western area bill. Good job increasing the enrollment, bad job for the budget. Now, this is how the state likes to look at our budget. This is how we have to report it. It's by major function. They group it by instruction, so instruction totals, regular instruction, special instruction, vocational instruction, so that would be our Western area bill. 1,500 is the non-public school program, so that's just a portion of our federal dollars that we actually have to send back to the private or parochial school that they have and those students also that we have to share. Down the support services, that just breaks
076out the individual offices. You see those increases there. Most of our increases are salary-driven, salary and benefit-driven. Each kept, other than the technology increases and curriculum increases that we talked about, on just supplies, things that are just used. We kept flat budget amounts for those. We might've moved them around. Schools didn't move, they need different types of supplies, but the overall dollar value stayed similar to previous years. 3,000 is our student activities, so that's clubs, sports, and 5,000 is debt service, so that is our debt service payment, and you see a small increase there with the U.S. school. Total increase in expenditures of 3.3. We saw that we had a million dollar increase in revenue, so that brings us to the 2.3 million dollar gap that we would have currently. So this is just a
077one-page summary of that, just to show. We had half a million dollars in real estate growth, $200,000 increase catching up on our basic ed and special ed subsidies, 190,000 in our payroll reimbursions from the state, transportation state subsidy, we collapsed the public and non-public, they get the 180,000. The Lincoln real estate 157, real estate transfer tax 50, miscellaneous around 32,000, and then there's decreases to earned income tax and interest on investments. It's still our one million dollar number. Changes to expenditures, salaries and wages, a million dollars, that's 2.8%. Healthcare, even though the rates are gonna go up 9%, we do have a change in what we're actually paying based on just the coverages type. Technology, 545,000, that's a 38% increase. Time and social security, 3%. Curriculum, 45%, that's $241,000. With curriculum, I guess the best
078way that I could explain it is it's almost like uniform replacement for our teams. We try our best to spread it out as much as we can, but if you buy soccer uniforms one year and football uniforms the next year, you're gonna have an increase, there's no kind of way around it, and I think that's the best way I could get my head around the reduction of curriculum for the DLA. Next year, you'll see that number go down, you'll actually see a savings because you'll be onto something else at length that is costly. Transportation increase of 145, that's just what we're seeing in our vans, and then what we know we're gonna have for an increased rate for Malacca next year. Western area increase of 114,000. We're seeing insurance, that number will change too, they're
079just telling us to set a budget number of 10%. So that number will get adjusted and we'll get closer to our proposed final. SROs, just an increase in their salaries that are pushed from the township. Actually, small increases in utilities, and if you remember last year, we did have a pretty big increase in our utility budgets, and we're hoping to come in a little under budget this year for that, which kind of delays with the increases for next year. That service, we're topped off on, and if anything else that's not included, we have $10,000 and we're up to $100,000. I've never been a big fan of double negatives, so please make sure I understand correctly where it says delinquent real estate tax, but it's a positive 157, that means we're doing a better job of
080collecting delinquent tax. Okay, just checking. So just going back to earlier, you could leave the slide here. If we received the same amount of tax revenue or revenue from the state is up for St. Clair, we'd have a surplus of a couple hundred thousand dollars. Felt like saying that. So our current fund balance, we saw from the audit that it was, we ended at 10.6, general fund fund balance. The high school project, we finally, we were keeping that money separate, we just took track that as we were spending that down. That is capital funds, we just were trying to show it separately so we had an idea of what we had left in our high school project and middle school projects. Now that those have almost just about been closed out, we will collapse those
081monies in and just have a capital fund from now going forward. So 24, 25 are projected at $3.4 million. When you saw the audit, you saw a $5 million number, so that was the end of June. All those projects that we had approved at last school year, but hadn't paid off the turf, the lighting upgrades, those things weren't included in their balance number because they hadn't been paid out by June 3rd. The general fund fund balance is comprised of 4.5 in the sign for debt service, two million for healthcare, two million for retirement, 1.4 unrestricted, and 760 is non-spendable, and those are just prepaid items that we would be able to use. To talk about the capital fund, our current balance, 4.3 million, so that's as of the beginning of February and the June. We
082know we've already approved the Bower Hill roof replacement. The actual cost of the Bower Hill replacement is 1.3 million, but we're getting the $300,000 grant from the state, so it'll be a million dollar effect on the capital projects. We also approved the 72 passenger school bus and the wheelchair accessible school bus. That was 245,199. We still are finishing up on the caliber punch list. I just need to get the final sign-offs from the architect, an estimated about 165,000, and then I just put a placeholder item in between those things. We're gonna look at carpet replacement for the elementary. We saw some, hey, not pavement, but pathways that we have in between buildings that maybe we might have to look at. Just doing some repairs, small repairs, but $100,000 is the first thing aside for that.
083That would leave us with $2.8 million of capital in that service history. This is one that, previous years, this would be a big budget driver. We are now finally plateaued in that service. The other thing I'd just point out, that in previous years, we were over 13% of our budget with our service payment. Now that that service payment has plateaued the last couple of years, our budget has increased. That percentage of the actual budget amount is starting to decrease. For this preliminary budget, it would be down to 12.25% of the actual budget. And I know it seems a far way away, but we would actually be debt-free, 20,041. So it does seem far, but when you look at a lot of other districts, they will have debt further out. They usually don't see the light
084at the end of the tunnel. I'm not saying we're gonna ever get there, but at least we could always see it. I think that's where you wanna be. Bravinsu? We're looking at, how often do we look at opportunities to refinance some of the debt? I know we don't wanna touch the stuff we did at the high school because we're never gonna beat those rates, but do we have stuff that's not at a higher rate that we have one issue that's a taxable issue that we've looked at in the past, that the current underwriter, they will monitor for us and send this over. The last time we looked at it, there was a savings, but the cost of doing the reissue was almost the cost of the savings, so it just didn't make sense at the
085time, but we'll continue to monitor this. Unfortunately, I think that the majority of our debt, when we placed it, we got such low interest rates that it won't make sense to refinance for some time. It's a big yay. It's a yay, but yeah. So when we look at, we did approve that we would not increase taxes beyond the base index. The index is 4%, so this is just the base index calculation. Current tax rate of 15.66 mills. A 4% increase would give us the ability to increase 0.6264 mills. We currently collect 3.2, almost 3.3 million per mill. So if you increased it by the maximum of the 4% to 0.6264 mills, we could generate an additional $2 million of tax revenue. So preliminary budgets is the summary. No millage increase. We know we're sitting right
086now at a budget gap of $2.2 million. If we would go millage increase to the index, it's taken it up 0.6264. That would still leave us with a gap, but it would be a gap of $200,000. An impact of a 0.6264 increase is $62.64 per $100,000 of assessed value. We know that median household value sits between 300 and 350, so on the average, homeowners increase would be 187.92 to $219.24 per million. Brad, world class. Any comments or discussion around the table? I have to admit I'm missing the bubble graph. Mr. Taylor's already ahead of that. I miss it too. The company that was bought, they used to create those for us in the package that we already bought, and they don't have it, and despite my constant annoyance to them, what they kept sending me
087is all the wrong bubbles, and they just, I can't get it, they're not getting it together. So we're working on our own version. I just have to, I need to make sure it's right. There's a lot of moving parts to that, but that is my favorite thing in the whole world, and I'm gonna find a way to get it, but IDEX went out of its business. I don't, people must not have liked where they landed in their bubbles, so they went away with it. Okay, thank you for the update. I don't have a perspective on this, so this is not a leading question in any way. Have we seen a lot of unfunded mandates out of the state recently? I haven't heard chatter about that. There are a lot of new mandates, but they seemingly
088don't cost money, like the new mandates around what we have to do if we find a tick. There are a lot of little mandates, but no big-ticket items. Our biggest expenses related to mandates are around, what we mentioned earlier, around special education. That's what Dr. Payne brought up. You got something? No, let it hunt. Okay, any public comment? Dan, back to you. No, you're good. All right, any save rounds? All right, again, kudos to Brad and team for coming up with this. Alex, your insights of inputs have been fantastic. Thanks for helping me navigate all this. Oh, go ahead, Sherry. Question, because we do have some audience members, and the call your representative, congressperson, whatever refrain happen over and over, but I think a good way to sort of give them marching orders, if you
089will, is to talk about the cap on charter school spending. Like that most obviously helps us, right? If you get into a discussion with your congressperson about the formula, like they're not gonna, that's a really hard conversation to have. People don't even understand the formula, but if you talk about caps on charter school spending, that's like an immediate impact for us, and it's easy to explain, it's easy to ask for. So from my perspective, that's the low-hanging fruit if people want to reach out, the best way to help us in our budget is to cap the spending on charter schools. Yeah, I mean, Sherry, I think that's a great point. I mean, in my mind, I got two or three talking points to the extent that we're allowed to arm everyone with the talking points
090that I think we should have. I will do so, pending legal counsel on that. Who else? I would just say, again, it's clear we run lean, and when you run as lean as we do, the budget is gonna be sensitive to small movements and the relatively small movements to cost, and it's just something we have to be prepared for, and we'll continue to try to, not continue to try, we will continue to scrutinize every expenditure there. Go ahead, Dan. You started, yeah, I'll finish. Yeah. Just as far as running lean, I mean, just to put it into perspective, I took the data that you had in the pack, and if you look at what the tax increase was over the last eight years, from 2016, it's 2.68%. If you look at the consumer price index,
091inflation, over that same period of time, it's 3.85%. If you look at the COLA increases to social security, it's 3.92. So the administration has done a very good job here making sure that they trim where they can, and they're staying under the inflation rates, which is absolutely fantastic, good job. I know that this is the first budget. Nobody likes to see that number, but I also know from going through this that there's room as we go forward. We find things, so I just encourage you to do what you do every year, find it, make it the best you can. Yeah, thanks, Dan. We talked through some of that last, was it last week? Yeah, this is a new week, last week, but the point's valid. All right, any other saved rounds? Sorry that went so
092long, but it was important. Jett, what's the next, do we schedule the next one here? We'll schedule it after one hour of our voting. Okay, all right. Janine, did you have any saved rounds? No, thank you. All right, that's it, see you.