Hudson Schools - September 14, 2020 - Regular Board Meeting & Annual Meeting

001the flag the united states of america to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right thank you no do we have any requests to address the board for a non-agenda non-action items all right moving on then we have the start of school update um turn it over to dr olette yeah just uh you know a couple things one to want to touch on and and we um we talked about this a little bit at our our uh i guess we haven't had a meeting since we started school it's been a it's been a real positive start to the year um you know we had to run our staff uh back to back to school to get together a little bit different than we did

002in the past we did by building we did them in larger spaces and tried to keep people spread out um you know a couple things that i think people had concerns about as it related to mask and as it related to uh some of those uh different pieces uh social distancing this kind of flows into the the cobot operational update but uh the mass knocking would have been you know the kids have been really really cooperative on on the mask and that's been very very helpful as we've as we've started the year uh we are nine days in uh you know as of today knock on wood we continue to go our next major data point is coming up on wednesday uh the 16th is when we make a decision for the next two weeks

003and again we are reviewing the data every day we're looking at the county data every day it's not that we just kind of stick our head in the sand and wait until next wednesday i mean we're tracking it looking at trends it's just we wanted parents to know that on those two week periods they can look for that email from us so they don't feel like they need to be checking every single day that it might change that day because if it does need to change you know it's usually because of you know something that's a much larger uh situation and and we can adjust and work through that as we continue to kind of uh work through the year you know staffing wise teaching staffing wise we're we're staffed um we do have some

004open positions still in our uh school age care ranks and also in our paraprofessional ranks and some custodial ranks some food service ranks so some of our hourly staffs are still we still have some open positions but you know for the most part uh things are motoring along i would say that as you think about the start of the year i've been in a lot of classrooms talked to a lot of staff it's i think people are excited to be back they're happy to be back uh however um there's a high level of stress right now with staff uh which we knew was going to be the case uh and we're going to talk about in the coven 19 operational updates some of the things that we're going to be doing to try dave's going

005to talk about what we're going to try to do to address some of those uh some of those concerns and what we're doing as we as we work through it but i would say overall it's been a great start to the year uh we've been extremely uh um just proud of like i said the way the communities come together the way the kids have come together uh feel really good about the fact that we're nine days in and hopefully we're anticipating being able to continue to stay moving forward we have had a couple positive cases and we did we did send out communication on sunday we had a positive case at hudson prairie we did send out a communication also today we had a positive case at the high school and so i just want

006to remind people that we've we've never once promised that we would not have any positive cases um it's just that we continue to deal with them and and work through those challenges and so we've been working closely with public health and our school nurses uh on that and they i can tell you that i just had a conversation today with public health their lead official and she's been extremely happy with the way we've been able to provide data for them as they think about close contacts and quarantining and then also our mitigation methods um i would say that we are implementing about as tight of mitigation methods as as any place in the county and so um we feel really really good about that uh and we're hoping that we'll be able to continue to

007keep open because of it so uh with that any questions about the start of start of the school year okay which kind of leads into the the next piece which is the um uh covid update or operational update and as i talked about you know we've used the positive case protocols that we we had spelled out for everybody and um you know i i talked to the principal over at hudson prairie today i said how you know did we get a lot of emails a lot of calls because we sent out the very first communication was on sunday he said it's actually been very positive parents have been very good um you know we did have kids that were considered close contacts and head to quarantine but uh overall you know parents have been have

008been very positive i think everybody's just kind of nervous as we have these cases what does that mean uh and and who does that who's that entail um andrea and her team are definitely working through you know as it as it relates to staff related issues to covet and things along those lines but uh we're in a pretty good spot i wanted to uh have dave kind of talk a little bit about how we're going to provide some additional support the elementary level to kind of ease some of the stress that's going on thank you very much so as nick said uh at the elementary level the individual distance learning is very challenging i i think more so than at the other levels primarily because of the just the age of the kids kids at

009the secondary level much more independent so the idea of individual distance learning seems to work a little bit more smoothly especially at the beginning the overwhelming response we get from teachers at all levels when we talk about how it's going is it's really hard but it's getting better that's that's sort of the the message we get over and over again having said that the challenges at the elementary level are pretty significant and they're further exacerbated by the fact that we are implementing a new curricular resource the fontes panel classroom which is a fantastic support and i think most teachers recognize it as a support because it provides structure to literacy which is the the bulk of the elementary day but having said that it's still a lot to implement and it's a material heavy um

010curricular resource requires a lot of work and that is a bit overwhelming for our elementary teachers as well so our plan is and this plan was developed nick andrea lisa scoy and myself started just brainstorming and then has been further refined by bringing in a few other experts that know how we could operationalize this plan but it involves hiring three clerical assistants administrative assistants level three to work in the six buildings so essentially it would equate to on average about a half a day per grade level team per building over the course of a week we distribute them and their hours based on need at the building which would be determined by the number of individual distance learners because that is really what we're trying to support here yes the curricular resource adds a level

011of complexity but it's really about the individual distance learning and the support for support for the teachers that way if you picture the way that individual distance learning works there's a lot of material that has to go back and forth between the schools and and home quite a bit more than the secondary level because it's easier to translate materials electronically at the secondary level there are certain things that just don't translate well to an electronic platform at the elementary level so the purpose of this position then would be to support the teachers by gathering and disseminating organizing this material making sure it gets back and forth comfortably between home and school so the teachers can just focus on instruction it's not a paraprofessional position where they be providing support directly to students it's support for

012the teachers on those managerial duties this is one of the things that we heard loud and clear and i think lisa scoyne was the one that really brought the issue to the forefront by explaining really specifically the feedback she was getting and this was a design to directly address that feedback we've talked to principals today worked through some of the logistics amy wise our elementary curriculum specialist would be overseeing the work that these individuals would do to make sure that it's very focused and supporting primarily the individual distance learners questions on that rob so dave just uh to confirm these are new positions yes yes what is the financial impact of these ads um nick do you remember the yeah i mean or probably less than 75 000 all in in total in total and

013and you know tim will tim can run the exact numbers but i mean it's it's really you know because these aren't going to start just yet um but we have some things in place and and really it's it's what are some of the things we can take off of people's plates um that are time consuming but aren't real you know high yield you know type of things that they that really it takes a certified teacher to do and so um that's where this this came into play so you know it's it's one of those things where um i did give them the go ahead to go ahead and start heading down this path i know it's it's it just time is of the essence on on some of the stuff and we know that you

014know staff are really wanting to see us implement these things and we're also going to be doing something maybe dave's going to talk about with the subs to kind of get immediate relief for our teaching staff until we can get these individuals up and running and these would be one-year positions so these would not be an ongoing these would be one-year position that right is that kind of how we would set it up andrew that's all right so yeah dave kind of talked about what would be our immediate steps because there is a little bit of a gap between when you advertise interview and hire and we know that teachers have immediate needs right now yeah so thank you for that and uh andrea and i have been talking quite a bit about feedback we're

015getting from principals saying it would be great if we could do whatever we can do to support substitutes in helping them become comfortable coming into the school so we put together some advanced training we've had about 40 subs that came into the building very rewarding to see a lot of recent retired teachers come in for that sub training that was wonderful they're they're sort of our bread and butter and they're very valuable to us so having them come in was fantastic but one of the things they expressed and the principles have been hearing is it would be great if we could have subs shadow in the classrooms to get a sense for what this whole individual distance learning environment looks like because if you remember i mean the individual distance learning is one thing but

016obviously it's happening concurrently within person learning so we can talk about it we can describe it we can even do some videos but that's not the same as being able to shadow and see a teacher in action so the plan would be in between the posting and the filling which probably about two weeks by the time we'd get some people to fill this permanent position or the year-long position bringing in subs to spend half their day shadowing in the classroom the other half of the day fulfilling some of these responsibilities that we described that the clerical assistants would be doing what this would do is twofold one brings as nick said immediate relief to teachers secondly it increases the likelihood that we're going to be able to keep our classroom staffed with subs when that

017need arises so did you have a question i carry you okay i was just gonna say nick i am having a hard time understanding you [Music] just for going forward you're having a hard time understanding me yeah i am too just a smidge okay thank you oh and i think maybe what we might have to do is we might have to we might have to take the mask off when we talk just slide it down and put it back up because but you can understand me yeah thank you you're projecting to us though i don't think that's it but yeah that's fine all right sue okay um what are you um hearing or what kind of reports are coming from principals or teachers about um having to have enough time with distance learning to call

018back or have computer interaction or to get back to their students on a personal basis and that's a really good question sue that is one of the primary concerns with individual distance learning especially for those that have multiple kids that have selected individual distance learning if you picture the way this works one now if you just have one individual distance learner you still your instructional delivery model is still completely different it's no different than having two or three or four but what you just described is the difference it's the connections with those students where if you have one it's easier to carve some time out to be able to address those needs and part of the design which i think is a good design in where the individual distance learning occurs with that classroom teacher

019it can create some inequities because there's a bit of chance that's involved we do have some teachers that have zero individual distance learners we have some that have three or four the most i've heard i think was seven and that's quite a bit quite a discrepancy obviously between seven and zero so the idea with this plan is those teachers that are burdened with quite a few individual distance learners would get more of that support in order to try to take something off their plate we even talked about there's some other support we might be able to do where if we bring a substitute into a classroom and allow that substitute to take the lead with the in-person learners so the classroom teacher would have more time during the instructional day not separate time outside of

020the instructional day but during that time to devel to build that report relationships because and especially at the elementary level it is well it is i shouldn't say that's really at all levels it's so critical to have those strong relationships and it's very deliberate at the elementary level the way those relationships are formed when you upend everything in this environment those typical protocols and practices that are in place to build relationships are strained and so that that is an area that we need to support any other questions from board members on the covet update mr president um david can you speak a little bit about i.t and support for the teachers in elementary as far as you know parents having problems are these teachers do they have a resource with the district for that do

021we have enough people in that position good great question weed our i.t department has done outstanding work supporting families so we've reversed things a little bit typically the i.t department is directly supporting staff members teachers assistants different departments and so forth we now we have a help desk ticket system directly for parents and families so if they have an issue and it's linked in all of their google classrooms they click on it and jen lotsy prides herself on being responsive does an amazing job having a really quick response time having said that they are running themselves ragged they're working really hard to be that responsive so it's not that it's easy it's not that it's not taxing what they're able to do but they're doing a great job of being responsive now if you picture

022this what we've really done is we've taken our i t department that supported 5 600 students and 400 certified staff and a lot of a lot of support staff and now we're saying and you're supporting all these families and the support of the families is extremely challenging because they're not using necessarily our equipment our system so you can't just log on and see you know what's going on how can we help it creates another level of complexity again they're doing a fantastic job but yeah it's um they're they're running themselves rag and they're definitely taxed those are questions mr president bruce just just a comment more than anything i i can only imagine how difficult it has been and will continue to be i think the entire year is probably going to be challenging for

023our staff and for our administration um you know this isn't an easy time for any of us i did have a a teacher over at um our house briefly over the weekend from a neighboring school district and um you know they they're not doing schooling the same way that we are uh and their comment was why can't we be doing it like hudson is doing it because it would seem to be easier and i don't know that anything's easy for any of our our staff at this time whether it's here or any other there's probably pros and cons on both sides uh for for our staff um so appreciate you continuing to look for ways to make it easier um to make it a little bit better or at least as as good as it

024can be so thank you for that maybe i missed it nick but you know just curious on the staffing for busing you know i think there was a couple instances there how to safely feel about their pool of resources for busing and uh the ability to um you know keep keep us up and running there you know i can i can have andrea address that um well i think at this time they are maintaining their staffing but certainly a concern we're actually meeting tomorrow to talk more specifically well what if we have uh you know some positive cases i think with respect to the bus drivers themselves too and it's unlikely that we'll have close contacts associated with positive bus driver cases because of the distance between the drivers and the students but we will

025certainly have positive bus drivers during the course of the year and we'll want to make sure that we're supportive there yeah thank you yeah just just close with um saying thank you you know to all the staff and the administration uh support staff everyone that's helping kick the year off it's so great to have kids back in school so um just uh warm health a heartwarm uh welcome and thank you to all of those that are out there doing their job every day thanks and just to follow up and i know bob you have a question but with idl um i know some people there's a rumor out there that we're purposely trying to make idl difficult in an effort to bring kids back and that's that's just not the case we are trying to

026do everything we can to make this a positive experience both for kids at home for our staff at school do we prefer kids to be at school absolutely we think that you know if we if we didn't think face-to-face learning was important we wouldn't have rolled out a model that had us going five days a week face-to-face learning we do feel it's it's it's very important however uh i can tell you as as dave alluded to uh both our teachers our tech team our administrative team everybody is trying to do everything they can to make this go as smoothly as possible but anytime you roll out something that's complex you're going to have hiccups you're going to have bumps in the road and i just want to make sure people understand that that we are

027trying to do everything we we possibly can to uh to make it as smooth as possible bob oh i just wanted to comment our question actually if so what we're doing with the extra hires or that's that's for to be used for basically prep time for teachers and to ease some of that yeah it's the it's the material handling and the um the sharing of materials back and forth between individual distance learners and home and that has nothing to do with the uh with our our sub program as far as having like extras no so i mean it like dave said what it's designed to do is right now teachers are having to chew up their own prep time or they're having to chew up additional time outside of the day to meet these needs

028and so the thought process it doesn't necessarily give teachers more time per se but allows them to use their time in different ways by taking these things off plate i mean we're constantly trying to look at that i know sometimes people may not think that but we are trying to look and see you know what is what how can we pull things off people's plates and what does that look like and so that's really the way this is set up uh to give us the largest bank you know bank across the district so that it impact all elementary teams across the district thank you we should probably mention too that we have added some support at the secondary level it's just handled differently so extending some hours offering additional hours to the folks that handle

029the daily individual distance learning work so actually right where we're sitting here they have boxes that are lined up all through here that each student that signed up for individual distance learning they have a box and the material goes in and out and a lot of people work to make that um successful so we've authorized some hours to ease that burden a bit so i as someone who's relatively recently had kids in our elementary schools i know what a strong supportive presence volunteers have played in those schools and if i'm remembering correctly that's different this year right have is i've had several folks in the community throughout the summer and coming to the fall talk about kind of what can i do is there any way and have we talked about the possibility of bringing

030limited numbers of volunteers into the schools to provide some additional support for teachers i don't believe we've talked specifically about the volunteer piece but we did view and we want to craft these three positions as uh certainly a viable option for parents who want to go to that level like we're going to post it by building so that if they want to have that presence in the in their children's buildings it may be a really good opportunity um to work during the school day but i think volunteers we've been holding off on that primarily because of the exposures one of the things one of the things that's our biggest our biggest challenge obviously is we have to know who's in the buildings when they're in the buildings and then you know it has to tie

031back to when we do have positive cases because we have to do the contact racing as it relates to it and so it's not that we can't revisit volunteers potentially down the road uh and and i think we even have it in our plan to revisit but it may be for providing some additional support in classrooms and and things like that but it's going to be where we need kind of consistency so that we know that on tuesdays dave's always in this classroom so that if we do happen to have a a positive case in in whatever classroom it is and it happens to be one of the days then we can give that as a close contact name um or a person that would be in there and they'd make the determination and so

032that's where um right now we just don't have a plan as to how we could do that it would have to be somebody that's willing to be really regular and we just haven't we haven't gotten that far along in that discussion not saying that it couldn't happen uh but right now that that hasn't been focused and then the last piece related oh did you have some the last piece i wanted to touch on tracy is actually going to touch on is we're looking to get back to some level of of normalcy as it looks at uh utilizing our facilities at night and renting our facilities and tracy's going to kind of talk a little bit about where we're where we're sitting with that certainly so we are no okay uh so we're looking at um

033opening up our facilities again for rentals but we don't want to just open it wide up so our focus uh right now is going to be with our priority two users which are primarily our kids so it would be like our hba groups uh mako so the youth activity groups that we would be focusing on for rentals uh we're gonna align with our athletics department so as far as determining how many people we can support in a gym and all that it will be the same as what we've got going in athletics so just to take away any confusion so aligning those two i met with um aaron last week and again today just to go over that so that we are on board and then we'll continue to set up the contracts with those

034outside users making sure that they're collecting rosters and following all of our protocols when they are using our spaces one of the one of the major things is obviously taking attendance so we know who was in the buildings at what time again it goes back to contact racing uh but as trey said it's going to be limited to those those tier two groups uh so we're still uh the only type of adult use we would really have is tied back to our community ed but you know we wouldn't have let's say there's a aau basketball team from somewhere you know let's say woodbury that wants to run our facility we would say no you can't do that uh if it's not 80 our our kids and so really what it is is we have we

035we do have our community group saying hey you know these kids are together during the day are we able to start utilizing your facilities in the evening and so um and i think most of the athletic stuff aligns with how they would normally use it anyway uh but they the big pieces are just making sure that we can know who's here they're following the masking rules and things like that and um we always have the ability it's kind of like with anything we always have the ability if we start to have some issues we can always tighten things back up and then and um and trying to see you know we're just kind of dipping our toe at different times and trying to see how how we're sitting and there is no um perfect solution

036on any one of these things so trying to trying to give a little bit see how it goes and then kind of go back and forth as we work through it so um that's that's kind of our our plan of attack as we work to it mr president yes rob so how we uh review provide oversight for our teachers is likely different this year do we have an idea how we're going to help them in their reviews if we're not going to be in the classroom or how are we going to provide that oversight so we can provide a proper review and dave can address educator effectiveness but really um our administrators are in in the classrooms they're doing observations actually i just had a meeting this afternoon with one of our principals he said

037i've already done 11 informal observations this year in classrooms and so you know in principles are professionals they understand that you know there's a level of grace that goes with teaching something like idl related i mean it's not going to be you know as as good as if they've been doing it for 20 years you know and i think that's the that's the big stressor right now is you know we've talked about it as it relates idl um idl's not going as well as people would like but better than they thought it would kind of thing you know where people would like it to be much better top of the game but it's maybe not quite as bad as they anticipated and so it's kind of the same thing with the administrators as they go

038into these different rooms is they they take that consideration they know this is brand new to everybody so trying to take that consideration now dave if you want to talk a little bit about what we're doing with educator effectiveness yeah you bet thank you so last year the way the year ended we were really wrestling with that question because suddenly we're closed and we had evaluations to finish up the state provided some flexibility that allowed us to extend those into this year so the principle that nick is talking about and a lot of principals had to finish up actually last year's process so a lot of the observations that are happening now are actually finishing up last year's cycle but as nick said for the most part the educator effectiveness system will run as planned

039with the big operative word that nick mentioned as well is grace so if you think about educator effectiveness and the power of an observation the least important part of that is the evaluation the most important part is the feedback and this time more than ever it helps to have another body in the room just to take an objective look at what's going and find opportunities to provide feedback like they've never received before because every teacher as seasoned and skilled as they might be feels like a brand new teacher this year so having someone else be able to walk in so we don't want to shy away from that process we want to lean in and be part of that process offer the feedback and make sure that it is completely from a supportive lens as

040it should be for the questions comments all right i just want to thanks for the report nick also nick thanks for your outstanding updates throughout the day the first day of school getting the giving the board updates um multiple times during the day as far as how the start of school was going and um it's been today we finished our ninth day of actual uh in-person learning so we got nine behind us anyway i have heard uh the vast majority have been extremely positive and i got one today um briefly to share with a parent who um the kids i'm not going to point out the school because i don't want to you know push one school over another but it's probably indicative of all of our schools and he personally thought that each year

041uh he thinks that the kids have the best teacher they've ever had and uh this year is no exception um men and how outstanding the teachers are um coming through on all of these points and in the case of the one teacher sending two emails a day for the last two weeks giving updates to parents about what's going on in the classroom and how their student is doing so i think that kudos to everyone i know this is a stressful time but um really appreciate the reaction and um follow through that every effort that everyone's given let's move on to the annual seclusion and restraint report erin yep so this is the can you hear me that on okay annual seclusion and restraint report so in each building a crisis team of administrators teachers and

042support staff as well as staff who work in special education are trained in annual crisis prevention and intervention through our in-district trainers the main focus and will continue to be a renewed focus this year is how to effectively use those de-escalation strategies so that we can decrease the need for seclusion and restraint we really do want to focus on empowering more staff to have those de-escalation strategies so that we can decrease the need and increase our student connection to school as well so during the 2019-20 school year we did experience an increase in the need and use of seclusion and physical restraint particularly at our elementary level this was due significantly to a few students who required high level of behavior support and programming and lots of problem solving around what particular program these students

043require so we'll be focusing a lot of our work again this year and continue to support our students and increase their positive interactions with staff and students at school so included in the report you'll find the state required data regarding number of incidents in the school district also included is some demographic information and although this data is required for us to report it's really important that we use this as a reflective tool within our programmings as well so really a few recommendations as we go forward into this year is increased focus training in really quality behavior assessments and behavior intervention plans focusing specifically on proactive strategies including trauma-informed care and so this is really a focus for our school psychologist team as well as our building mental health teams and so to kind of braid

044those two programs together that will help support this work another thing that we are going to implement this year is mandatory iep or parent meeting after the second incident within a school year to discuss additional positive interventions and proactive strategies to avoid future incidents and also help us continue to foster positive relationships and a culture of support with families and then as i mentioned previously continue that training in the de-escalation strategies for staff questions for her mr president okay do you expect the uh the levels that we saw last year to continue you know it's really hard to say i think that we've done an incredible amount of work in terms of appropriate programming and increasing our positive proactive strategies so i'm really um i really do think we'll see a decrease this year and

045these numbers are only through march correct right so i'm just going to say i had occasion um to observe um a principal and staff in the media center uh have to do a uh you know a restraint and take a carry you know lower a child to the floor and i i was actually working with another student but i was really impressed at the carefulness and the kindness but you know this the they all knew what they were doing and um after a few minutes they checked with the child and the child was ready to get up and anyway i had first-hand observations so i i think the training must be very good yeah i mean our trainers are excellent um and you know just as a reminder seclusion and restraint is only used in

046emergency situations so when there's an imminent threat of safety to staff or peers is only when that that is used um so thank you bruce did you have something yeah um and i'm not sure i i are like perez um often involved in this yes many of our special ed pairs are trained and yep so you know i saw that we had um openings where we were trying to hire more people there so just a couple of questions on that um i can imagine that's a very difficult job um and i see our pay there as well and i don't know how i'm sure we look at where that ranks i know we've done some things for that pay grade during or for subs during the covet times is that another area where we may

047need to explore that if we're falling short there so that's question number one um and then question number two how often do those jobs turn over and is it a lot of training that it seems like it's you know something that would be uh a pretty um large task you know just on the ongoing training whereas if we can retain those individuals um you know would that be something else that we'd want to look at from a compensation perspective so just throwing that out there that's a great question and i can speak to the importance of having trained paraprofessionals in our special ed programming our special ed programming doesn't work without them in supporting students in the classroom we can't get to the level of inclusive practices that we want to get to without them

048and you know conversations that we have frequently at cabinet just in how to recruit retain and make sure that people know how valued they are and i would say that um was it two years ago we differentiated between the regular regular ed para and the special ed pair by adding a dollar an hour to the special ed pair rate um i uh we've had much discussion and i'm sure we'll as part of our proposal that we'll be giving next month for wages going into this year i know we've had a lot of discussion regarding further differentiation to one-to-one paris so those paras and programs being able to compensate them at additional level thank you very much thank you all right any other questions okay moving on to the curriculum improvement process and dave thank you

049very much so every year we bring to you an update on our curriculum improvement process uh primarily to set the stage for the series of presentations you'll be receiving from our assistant directors at all levels or the assistant directors and the curriculum specialists at all levels when they run through and update you on the various curricular areas the curriculum improvement process is one of the most important processes we have in place in teaching and learning because all of the work we do related to curriculum instruction assessment is all driven by this process so it's a six phase process and it's based on the concept of understanding by design operative word being understanding it is all about gaining student understanding through a very thoughtful and deliberate process understanding by design is essentially made up of three

050phases we then adjust that to a six phase process that allows us to trade allows us to sort of track our improvement process through six years which is about what we budget for new resources so that drives the six phases that we have the first three are all about development and then the last three phases are about reflection revision and adjustments when we break down these phases it's important to understand one of the concepts or the key tenets to understanding by design is the idea of backwards design and sometimes that's what people refer to this process as backwards design what we mean by backwards design is we start with the end in mind it's very typical and most of us that were trained as educators when we went through our undergraduate work you learned a

051lot about lesson planning you learned a lot about planning experiences and quite honestly it's what motivated most of us i know when i was a new teacher what i was most excited about was planning engaging experiences i wasn't necessarily driven by the assessment or the outcomes that limited my impact as a teacher now taking a step back i understand that and i think teachers going through their training now understand that much better than i did because this is now sort of the the gold standard for curriculum improvement so the first phase is all about identifying desired results when we talk about desired results we're talking about enduring understandings the way i would describe an enduring understanding it's that thing that you talk about now as an adult like remember that class we had in high

052school remember that big concept we explored something that sticks with you long term that's an enduring understanding an essential question is the next level also identified in stage one the essential questions would be those things that you want a student to be able to answer at the end of the course so the summer after you'd ask a question you want them to be able to answer those essential questions there should only be a few per course and then we get into the standards and the prioritization of standards we talk about that quite a bit how important it is to accurately prioritize standards that entire process is led by curriculum specialists and teachers teams of teachers that work through this process none of this happens without teacher leadership it's embedded in each and every one of

053the steps when we get to phase two this is the assessment phase this is where we determine the assessment evidence that allows us to say yes we know that a student knows or is able to do whatever it is that that standard would call for this is probably the most challenging of the phases i presented last september we've made some significant changes to this phase based on the feedback of the curriculum specialists and the teachers and here's what it boiled down to a lot of the curricular resources we ultimately select have assessment resources associated with them and they're often really good so what happens sometimes we go through this process of developing assessments and then we select the resource and we sort of undo what we did so what we're really looking at here in

054this phase is identifying clearly what success looks like not necessarily the tool we'll use not necessarily the test or assessment we'll use but we identify what success looks like that's critical when we have that we know we're ready to go to the next phase the next phase is the one that we i think most often associate with curriculum improvement and this is where we develop learning experiences also an absolutely essential important and in many ways the most rewarding of the of the processes because we are the phases because we go through all of that big thinking about the outcomes in the assessment and then we finally get to say and here's what it will look like when i'm in the classroom teaching and that's what i think really motivates teachers so we plan those learning

055experiences and the instruction one thing i wanted to call out there we've had a lot of conversations about multicultural education diversity and inclusion this is the phase where we would most directly address that and what we're doing is deliberately adding a lens where we're taking a look at the different aspects of the curriculum or the resources we'd select and taking an equity lens to that approach so we've officially adopted that into our curriculum improvement process we did some work last spring and then into the summer we still now need to work through those individual they're sort of mini protocols this is the big process but within this process there is literally dozens of sub processes that need to be carried out to ultimately create the best most robust curriculum for all of our students so

056that happens right there in phase three when we move on to the next three phases they're really all about implementing reflecting and revising so in the past this wasn't considered part of the curriculum improvement process because we've selected the resource we've created the lessons we've created the units and it's sort of hands off and now we'll let that sit and just we'll we'll catch back up in a couple years but what we've come to realize it's critical that we do annually reflect and revise this is another another place where teacher voice becomes critical because they're the ones that are living the curriculum they're the ones are delivering it on a daily basis so they're the ones that can provide input to say you know what i know this is what we're looking at and what

057we thought we'd be able to accomplish but i think if we make this slight adjustment we'll have better results with our students that happens in this process every single one of our content areas at every level is some place on this process there's never a pause it's a continual process that goes on and on and is intended to um it's very much modeled after the plan do study act sort of idea where you do some planning but then it's time to get going and then look at what those results are and make the minor adjustments i want to make clear that in those last three phases these aren't wholesale changes to everything that we planned they're minor adjustments based on the feedback so throughout the year we'll be bringing again a series of different curricular

058areas to you we plan on emphasizing the process this year we want to make sure that when we're presenting you as board members in the community get a strong understanding of how we're applying the logic of each one of these phases to make sure that at the end of the day we have the best possible curriculum and instructional plan that we can for our kids any questions of board members i haven't seen anybody snap up their hand but just one i guess you describe this as a continual process so just taking one area where we've recently received requests for review would be in our you know curriculum relating to racial history and equity issues and so forth so if we were to do a review of that and how long practically would it take to

059revise that's a really good question because there's not a clear answer i think there's a door open somewhere um that the the issue of racial equity would touch many different curricular areas not just one it's going to be heavily involved in social studies obviously very much in english language arts in the literature that we choose and we select but it's going to touch every single area even even something like math that you don't think about there are sample problems in math there are different scenarios and we need to recognize that we can't always have a white lens to that to the selection of the names and the scenarios and then when we talk about our assessment we need to make sure that there isn't racial bias embedded in the assessment questions that would create an

060undue burden for for any student that may not have what we would consider the upbringing of the majority in our community so it's again an ongoing process i would say that there are times and this might very well be one where we need to do more of an audit of the curriculum where we dig in and look at the existing practices as opposed to just let the process carry out where we can dig in and then essentially set ourselves up so when we get to that place in the process we're not we're ready to adjust and make those adjustments that would be necessary okay thank you for that any other questions follow up of that mr president yes just just quickly is there currently a way that um i appreciate that teachers are heavily involved

061throughout this process including that phase three where you said um a lot of the diversity equity and inclusion issues might be addressed are are there ways that community members currently plug into the curricular process or how do people best share the feedback or influence kind of curricular decisions yeah and also an excellent question it's something we've recognized as a deficit in our process we'll be developing what i would say a generic survey when i say generic that would be applicable to all curricular areas that at a certain point in this process would go out and we'd seek feedback from all families as they're experiencing it the other place where we can get feedback is through our teaching learning advisory council i'll just put a plug in we um we have open spots we'd love to

062have more people apply to be part of that teaching and learning advisory council we can make sure i can talk to tracy and get that out to get more voices involved in that process too because that's a very proactive and responsive avenue to have voices heard and we'd love to have we'd love to make sure that we are not essentially pigeonholing ourselves to a certain perspective through that process as well anything else all right then moving on to the action uh items in our agenda and just to remind our board members and we'll be adjourning in 25 minutes so we have first up is the consent agenda items mr president yes i move approval of the consent items and that the chief financial and operations officer be authorized to pay bills in the amount of

063one million four hundred twenty nine thousand two hundred twenty one dollars and seven cents is there a second second by heather uh all those in favor of approving all consent agenda items one through five say aye aye those opposed the items pass next up is preliminary 2021 budget which i will add has been a discussion at the last eight or nine board meetings uh tim um i guess this is uh and it'll still be further updated i guess uh before our final approval of the levy but um why don't you give us any kind of update sure yeah you guys are probably getting tired of looking at this but it does continue to be a work in progress until we get to the dpi when they get the final numbers to us in in mid-october

064if we look at the major assumptions for the budget those really haven't changed much um structurally we would continue to kind of have that decrease in state aid overall there is a situation which i mentioned before where it's possible that we could see a bump up in state aid this year and really due to the underspend that we had in 1920 um but there's you know the state has to determine that it's all based on statewide information how all the other 420 districts have spent or underspent so we're not going to know what that number could be until we get to the final number in october from the state but just a just that's really a footnote at this point we look at the at the estimated mill rate that's down three and a half

065percent in this uh in this budget and we still continue to uh outpace the state in valuation so we're at seven seven point two percent increase in property valuations uh state was at five and a half percent on average statewide uh that also is kind of a double-edged sword because it does uh tend to drive up our negative tertiary aid that's when our aid gets redistributed some of our gets redistributed to the two other districts so that tends to be a challenge uh the under levy is about three just under three and a half million or just under 3.3 million and again that's direct property tax relief to tax to property owners uh if you approve that budget that's three and a half 3.3 million that will not be levied on property owners this assumes

066a one percent board approved increase to wages and salaries and also includes performance pay structures um we have a levy for 225 000 for community services and that's really to recoup some of those coved 19 losses that we sustained and just a footnote on that one about 72 percent of school districts do have a community service levy this would be our first one really when you look at this version of the budget it also includes about one a little under uh 1.9 million for covid related expenses and you can see the list there i won't go through that but when you look at that and look at our total bottom line of expenditures if we take that out we're at about a third of a percent increase in expenses so we're just about flat without

067the covid related expenses so i think that's a pretty telling story if we move on to the the budget summary again i won't go into a lot of detail because you've seen a lot of these numbers before and they haven't changed in a major way but our revenues are up about a half percent um property taxes for the general fund are at 3.3 percent and then you can see the equalization aid which is that line 621. uh that's down 4.1 percent so again that's that structural funding we used to pretty much be a 50 50 district so funding was 50 percent levy and 50 state aid but that is flipped so if we get down to the bottom as i mentioned uh expenditures are about three percent but if you take out those covet related

068items we're at about a third of a percent increase in those expenditures the if you look at the bottom section general fund surplus and you look under 1920 you can see that the estimated budget to actual variance was very high this year so 5.1 million and that was that was due to being shut down in mid-march and so that's that's possibly going to have an impact on on our state aid for this year um we also have you know in this budget we've got for 2021 we've got a deficit budget of about a million dollars so we'd plan to take that million dollars out of fund balance and this would uh leave us with the 5.1 or actually 5.8 going in and reduce it by about a million so when we look at what's happening

069around us right now there's a possibility there could be a budget repair bill that might might affect this year's budget actually maybe a little less likely because the state tax revenues have come in better than i think better than they expected so we're you know that's a probably less of a possibility but when we look at the next biennium the 2123 biennium there's a strong possibility we could be cut cut in one or both years we just you know there's just so many unanswered questions around this but when you look at some of the economic data um you know we've had the karazhak support do a lot of support of the economy right now and some of those things without a renewal of something like that those kinds of things we may start start to

070see some more deterioration of that so um going in that's a it's a big question mark if you get down to the bottom section under the committed and unassigned fund balance section again most of those numbers are the same as what you've seen before so we stand at about 32 projected 32 percent of fund balance so about two 2.4 percent above the policy board policy of 25 to 30 percent so uh any questions so far mr president yes rob as it relates to the self-funded health fund balance you know of course march came people stopped doing everything including going to the doctor do you expect that to be upside down or be worse off next year that's a good question so yeah as we talked before about that the you know that additional 5.1 million

071they got that wasn't spent a large portion of that almost 2 million or about 2 million of that was the was due to you know not taking it you know the only appointments that were necessary were at the absolutely necessary appointments and delays and appointments and elective surgeries so we saw a big drop in our claims and so that was about two million dollars uh what we've seen going into the first first couple months is that that's that's spiked up um i don't think uh you know in this budget we're anticipating that we're not going to touch the 1.9 we think we've got enough budgeted there right now to account for that we didn't we didn't necessarily bring that down because we did anticipate that once things opened up we would probably see a bigger

072bigger than ordinary claims notice for the for the next few months so so right now we're tracking okay with that i just wanted to add on the comment you said about the possibility of a budget repair bill might be less and i just had a conversation with shannon zimmerman who's on the joint finance committee and is also our assembly person for this district and he shared in that he said it highly highly unlikely we're going to see a budget repair bill between now and when our levy needs to be finalized but um after the election and after the dust settles uh he didn't want to make any promises what could happen in the next two fiscal years i guess the biennium that follows and i took that as interpretation we should better have some our

073rainy day fund ready to go yeah yeah i think that's good information to have and yeah good i think we're we're positioned pretty well um to to be able to bridge those gaps in the next couple of years if we have to is there a motion then to approve the proposed budget and levy so moved second all right motion by rob second by sue any further discussion hearing none all those in favor say aye hi hi those opposed nay you guys have it moving on to modifications to the certified staff handbook andrew do you want to take this one as you want me to take it i can certainly do it um so this is just the modification to increase the payout for personal days unused personal days from 75 to 250 so it's just

074the one modification and this goes with what we talked about the last meeting where we proposed to get it more in line with what it cost us for a sub in lieu of a personal day and we know that um our uh keeping our building staffed is probably our biggest achilles heel as we think about covid and and moving forward so it's just really what it does it puts it in line with what our cost would be if they were to take that personal day versus um sell back to the district clarification question then this uh change to the handbook is expected to be one year only um well at any point you can change your back this could be one year only or you can leave it the way it is it's completely up

075to you guys okay is there a motion to approve so moved is there a second second all right motion but carry second by sue any further questions regarding this one change to the handbook which we had approved other changes previously yes all right hearing none all those in favor say aye aye aye those opposed nay you guys have it it's passed next up is title nine related policies and um andrea um you're referring to aaron on that okay very good so we had reviewed these at the last work session there haven't been any changes except with a numbering since you saw them last so just a reminder that this is required adding the new title ix policies and procedures it also required us to make some adjustments to two student policies and two employee policies

076just wanted to talk a little bit about how the title nine works with our we did a lot of work with our non-discrimination and our harassment policies and just how they kind of jive and um work together so really when we get a complaint about anything we really need to sit down and look at what which avenue are we going to go with this if it's harassment on the basis of sex we're going to go with our title 9 policies in talking this through with shaina as well the supreme court did uphold that gender non-conformity and transgender could fall within that category as well if the harassment isn't on that basis then we do have our harassment bullying and non-discrimination policies and procedures to fall back on too so just wanted to clarify that all

077right mr president yes uh thank you for that clarification aaron i really appreciate it was a little i wasn't sure how they um you know kind of merged or no it's a good question it's confusing for sure just as a reminder for you know it's been three weeks since we had our work session on this but um you recall that these are changes that bring us into compliance with um federal code and as well as the interlay with the state law so um these are mandatory changes and because they need to go into effect um i need a motion to approve on first wave the second reading and improve on first reading all right second all right i think heather um moved it for the approval bruce ii any further discussion all those in favor

078say aye aye those opposed nay the eyes have it and the title nine related policies are approved next up we have the strategic plan which has been worked on for basically a full year with studer and we've had two presentations from studer at our last work session this one page summary of the strategic plan was presented to the board and you know discussed is there further change from the last board meeting three weeks ago uh so i did i did highlight some changes we made we got some uh feedback from from different board members um so there are some changes in yellow um we did add uh the the word non-discriminatory in the pillar are students and then we did uh on the fifth bullet down in that same column we did add applying the

079lens of equity for all and then also in the first bullet in the middle column we did talk about trying to have a staff that is representative of the diversity of our student body across the district so those are the only changes that have been made to this point otherwise this is the same one that you saw at the work session i know just to kind of talk a little bit a couple of things i know heather and i matt i talked to some of the other board members is with the strategic plan if you uh remember this was kind of an ongoing process so about four years ago three or four years ago you know the board kind of talked we had a conversation about trying to get consistent data measurement points things like

080that trying to be uh consistently reporting out and kind of the response to that that we implemented three years ago was our uh our district scorecard and we had those you know we worked on it as a leadership team and kind of came up with the different data points that that we look at the whole district as a as a whole um and what those would be and we'd be consistently measuring those data points and then kind of that next step um so we kind of did this process a little bit juxtaposed or in reverse but then the next conversation i remember we had board members asking you know we have hsd 2025 how do we you know have a more operational look at hsd 2025 what does that look like and so then that's

081where really we started down this path of the strategic plan and what we did with that is to get to where we're at we did kind of a crosswalk with hst 2025 our raider way our board guiding principles as we looked at all those different components and we kind of put all those different things together we had focus groups representative of different groups in the community teachers students staff uh to kind of get feedback with studer and then this went through i think five uh edited drafts to kind of get to this point and so then as we kind of unveiled you know this the strategic plan and realized that you know some of our mission vision value statements that are still in hsd 2025 um as of right now they kind of hold but

082we probably are going to be looking at revising those so it's kind of like doing this process a little bit in reverse than where we would typically do it but still a doable process and and i think we're in a good spot so that what also comes from this is after this gets approved uh is then the the building principles department leaders will be working with our representatives from studer directly to create what's called action plans around this and then you'll be able to see the actual actionable steps that people will be taking around this so um the strategic plan itself is designed to be a little bit more 30 000 foot level and then those action plans are really at a much closer level and that's uh what you'll be what you'll be getting

083is and getting updates on as the year goes on thank you for letting us know what the next steps are and is there any discussion or do we have a motion uh just a comment um so i appreciate um that you asked us at our august 24th meeting to please contact you if we had any input and i know heather did and i did i don't know who else did i i hope others uh spoke with you um and i'm i'm glad that we can be fluent enough here to um consider the impact of numerous accomplishments this last year that we've um achieved especially in the area of our discussions on equity and race and so on and so i'm glad they can be at least in some honorable way be recognized uh in the

084pillars and so and i know that way way back when we're doing the post-its on the wall uh this this also uh incorporates um just some initial kind of fun engagement that we had i remember that bruce had a lot of fun doing that and we came up with the you know supporting an inclusive uh environment and i was very impressed with us arriving at that thank you i will just say you know we did we did add the word non-discriminatory in our pillow pillar i mean because i think there's some discussion what does inclusive mean you know we want it to be inclusive the only the only question we'd have would be with this do you want us to move that word or work it into more of the one of the bullet points

085versus being up in the pillar just because a lot of times non-discriminatory is like the bar like the lower bar set by the federal and we want to go to a higher level than that you know what i mean um it's one thing to not be discriminatory it's another thing to be inclusive and i would just because we did have a really good discussion about it in cabinet today where we thought about okay what are we striving for um with our pillars and my only hesitancy certainly supportive inclusive learning environment where all students achieve totally impactful and meaningful my concern not concern my wonder would be that the use of the word non-discriminatory so i don't know if we're striving because we should just be that right like we should be a non-discriminatory uh employment

086school district environment that i um [Music] that was our i think one of our wonders during the conversation is is there another way we can say something we're striving for um instead of the legal compliance which i would hope that we would definitely be in compliance with are there any suggestions i would equitable have that same connotation or would that be more uh i'm sorry i didn't understand what you said kerry equitable yeah carrie that's the same word i was wondering about um to me inclusive is even less aspirational than equitable i mean so i think um i mean i like the word equitable is down below in that new suggested language but um to me that feels more aspirational than non-discriminatory so so if if we were to to work that in i mean

087versus the the term non-discriminatory would would you be okay with that do you want us to bring it back i mean i i think do we have the gist of what that is the only other thing i forgot to mention is this was an older one it's actually 2020 2025 on the top i know in the plan here it says 2019 2024 just because we got kind of delayed about six months we'd all like to forget 2020 i think but yeah yeah so i i i know sue you had one of the the comments about non-descriptor what are your thoughts on that well you know actually as you read that it's really uh it doesn't flow it's bad poetry yeah so i mean are you guys all right so i i think that i would

088trust the uh i would trust the the cabinet and so on to work on that and as you were saying what we are and what we're aspiring to but just somehow work in this new consciousness and effort that absolutely we'll really have i mean we're reading a book and we've all been to wazbee and state conventions and everything's about equity and we're trying to understand that so something that's a little bit you know gives it some vitality and okay humanity so if we go ahead and make that change are you guys okay with us with us doing that then well how about we do it in the form of motion then yeah we could just do a motion to approve this strategic plan with uh that word non-discriminatory maybe being changed or deleted yep okay

089is there a motion i'll i'll move that to um find another way of expressing our our aspirations in terms of equity and not necessarily use the actual word non-discriminatory second is that a motion for approval yes i'm making that emotion all right second all right motion by two second by bob any further discussion rob yeah nick um thanks for the time today talking through this but just to to confirm this wasn't driven just by the district working with studer this was from a community standpoint the community was heavily engaged we offered opportunities for the community to participate can you briefly really briefly just talk to that community engagement please with us yeah so it's it's been it's been over a year now uh since we did that but yeah we did we didn't get different

090stakeholder groups in community we sought out people we invited them we didn't just kind of put a shingle out and see who came i mean we actually saw people out uh gail met with the different focus groups over a couple days uh it included like i said everything from students to staff to teaching staff administrators it also included members of our business community members of our retired community parents uh just uh variety i think she met with like 150 or 160 different folks over over two days from all the trying to get all the different areas so to make sure that there was lots of voice in the process all right any further questions or comments mr president are we voting on just the use of non-discriminatory or the entire thing the entire thing yep

091can i uh make one other comment yeah and the recruiting retaining of the employees the the first highlighted point where you sorry where you say that uh representative of the diversity of our students i i think that's actually pretty limiting it's a pretty homogeneous student body i'm guessing so maybe just representative of diversity yeah i mean we absolutely can do that i mean the the big thing that most schools do strive for is to to have their staff represent their student body and we do have diversity uh not just um you know ethnic university but we also have uh you know a variety of other uh different areas and so that was that was kind of the thought process behind it so that we made sure that um you know our our kids felt like

092uh that people that could relate to and and and things like that so that was the rationale but i mean we i'm sorry what was that point i couldn't hear you the the the rationale was that our kids had uh adults that they could look up to they'd see themselves in they could relate to in that way and so although we may be somewhat of a homogeneous staff as it relates to ethnic backgrounds or race uh we actually are quite a diverse uh student body as it relates to you know other other characteristics um that we would have and so that was that was kind of the thought process but um was just that's typically what we what we've tried to try to work for if we can get to the levels uh if we

093can have as diverse as staff as we have as diverse of student body we'd actually be making huge strides should we do or should we table this then and do another work session or can we have a vote i think we're going to call the question anybody i mean want to table this so we can wordsmith it some more in work session mr president i guess uh i guess point of clarification process we'll have you since there's a motion it's been seconded do we have to [Music] the person who made the motion take that off the table before we table it it's been proposed the motion is pending okay i mean we'll have a vote and if the question is called otherwise we can talk about it more we can adjourn this because we can

094talk about it more after the annual meeting may i make a comment yes i would i would say we go ahead and vote and trust that the administration could wordsmith and we'll look at it again later all right then all those in favor of the motion say aye aye aye those opposed say nay the eyes have it it's approved you know we've got one more agenda item and it was put on uh the request of well i requested but rob pointed out that we have a deadline so we really need he was asked to be on the committee for the resolutions and it's the same resolution we've discussed before except it's been updated i think improved all board members have an opportunity to read the proposals but i'd go either way and defer to rob

095do you think that we can go ahead and vote on this or do you think that we should uh adjourn for the annual meeting and then take this up so we can discuss it into the night whatever's most convenient for you know for the board i mean we do have if if the board agrees to move this forward it has to be postmarked tomorrow yep so that's why the urgency to get it done yes he just said it needs to be postmarked tonight so this this kind of got away from me with everything we had going on at the start of the school year so again we we added some more clarity because that's some of the feedback that we had gotten last year so the stuff in red is is the additional descriptors um

096you know when we got feedback both from wasb and and also from from board members and so i know it seems rushed it does seem rushed i i totally get that but we're kind of um this one is 100 my fault on this i i just lost track of it as we got ready to start the year and everything else going on so if you're supportive of it the intent has has not changed from last year when you supported this is there a motion one way or the other motion to approve second all right it's been moved and approved any further discussion i think it's pretty self-explanatory the changes but go ahead just one comment since we're moving on now i mean i think all of the pluses of this are outlined pretty well in

097the motion um i do feel like i need to say i mean the minus or the argument against it would be that sales taxes are regressive right and so they impact low income people the most because everybody gets a penny but that has a harder hit on low-income people so i just i think to put that out there the pluses and the minuses the pluses are very strong but just to be transparent about that that is an argument against this is that it is a regressive tax mr president yes yes right just uh i guess to tag or not tag on two but to a comment on heather's you know statement you know the idea is to is from a resolution standpoint is to keep this loose certainly if we're fortunate enough and this does

098uh is passed by the delegate assembly ultimately would go to the to the state and our lobbyists would pursue it and at that point it can take up any form to alleviate some of that regressive tax standpoint so for instance sales tax as it relates to certain groceries certain clothing items those things might not be impacted by this but it's up to them to debate the idea is just to hopefully find support for our schools school districts throughout the state so they have other funding options and at the same time provide property tax relief i don't know if that helps or not but the idea is not to worry about the regressiveness of this tonight let our legislators handle that further discussion hearing none all those in favor of the resolution say aye aye those

099opposing a nay the eyes have it and it's approved is there a motion to adjourn so moved all those in favor say aye aye aye aye those nay the eyes have it we stand adjourned uh the annual meeting will begin at seven o'clock yeah i brought my sandwich with me because i don't start call the 2020 annual meeting of the hudson school district to order this time i'm jamie johnson board president introduce bruce hanson vice president uh carrie whitaker clerk heather logelin treasurer member rob brown member sue catas and member bob bauman and uh also speaking today will be our superintendent dr nick olette and our chief financial and operations officer tim erickson at this time i'll turn the meeting over to dr olette who will handle the uh nomination election of chairperson all right

100all right can you carry how does this i know it's you've been having trouble is this better muffled much better that's amazing [Laughter] yeah well i i dave definitely projects better than i do um pursuant to wisconsin statute 120.08 the hudson school district like all common school districts in the state of wisconsin is required to hold an annual meeting to allow the district the district's electors to take action regarding special powers reserved to the electors by the wisconsin statutes including but not limited to wisconsin statute 120.10 electors are those residents of the school district who are 18 years of age or older if there are concerns regarding a resident's status of any a resident status of anyone seeking to vote as an elector please let the chair know and we will address those concerns as

101they arise at this time it is now time to elect a chairperson for the annual meeting i will put a call out there any nominations i'd like to nominate jamie johnson we have one nomination any other nominations any other nominations okay i'm going to go ahead and close the nomination process and with that being said we'll go ahead and take a voice vote of all the elect electors present all those in favor of electing jamie johnson as the chairperson for the annual meeting uh signify by saying aye all those opposed uh same sign all right uh the eyes uh have it uh so jamie i will turn it over to you and i will turn it back over to you so you are i guess gonna use the podium for um providing school district highlights

102actually i'm gonna probably i'm i'm just going to present for my computer here i know that with the hundreds of people we have in attendance they'll still be able to see and hear me as i as i go through the the highlights as we work through this so if we can put the presentation up on the screen maybe it might be a tim minor thing oh there we are okay and um i'm gonna uh as we kind of work through this i'll just say next slide please and then you'll be able to go to the next slide so as it as you see this is our district highlights it's kind of interesting um you know not that i'm going to comment on every picture but as you can see uh just how different kovit has

103made everything when we have people in math socially distanced and and spread out and and what that process looks like so just to give a little background on our school district we are over 830 full-time employees i believe we sent out over 1200 w-2s last year which means full-time and part-time employees we are the largest employer in saint craig county we this year welcomed 45 new certified staff members i think that is our largest i know it's the largest uh new staff class we've had since i've been here uh but it might be one of our largest new new staff classes uh certified staff and then we've also uh welcomed three new administrative staff positions uh plus we had 34 and counting uh new support staff positions that we've welcomed uh as we talk about

104the raider way it's it's kind of surrounded in everything that we do we want to have you know welcoming environment um where we have a safe and supportive learning environment we want to make sure that our students our staff and our families are all involved and and are constant contributors to what we're trying to do here the student-centered portion of the of the raider way is just that we want the students to be the folks who work uh this has been extremely evident as we've gone through our covet planning and and everything that uh is related that i think what's interesting uh as you can see uh this picture was actually just taken last week and this is mrs cottenbarger principal at rivercrest elementary uh reading uh to our to our elementary kids um even

105our littlest learners they're all all messed up and and ready to go it is always neat to get into the buildings and and see the different see the different creative masks uh that they they have on um as we look at transforming learning and wanting that continuous improvement piece there's a couple things that i want to touch on is you know we are we have our district scorecards we also have our newly adopted strategic plan as we continue to push forward and uh continue to get better i think there are a lot of districts that would potentially envy where we're at uh from a standpoint of um you know our student scores and and uh how we how we perform as a district both in the classroom on the athletic fields in these auditoriums uh

106and in different places uh but everybody is is constantly striving to get better as we continue to work through that our continuous kind of improvement model is looking at data and and tracking it and really trying to make decisions based on what we're what we're seeing and how it how it gets better the culture of excellence is about keeping students best interests and minds and and and it is a challenge at times because there are some times when we have to make decisions that may be what's in the best interest of our kids but may not necessarily be what's in the best interest of our adults and you know those are those are kind of competing interests at times and and we try to balance those things but i think one of the things that

107really does uh maximize our culture of excellence is the fact that we do have such a student-centered approach here and that goes from our our teaching staff to to our administrative team all the way to everyone in our in our support staff uh i will say that the one thing i will say about this picture and i know i said i wasn't gonna talk about every picture but this is dave giving the uh uh back to school uh uh lunch conversation with our new teachers and um yeah it's because uh that was a day that i happened to go in because i thought i had a sinus infection uh i did have a science infection but however because my symptoms were related similar to kovid they made me covet test and so then they wouldn't

108let me go back to work um and it was negative so everybody is fine but it was one of those things it was like what do you mean i can't go back to work i'm supposed to talk in about an hour and they said no i'm sorry you have to wait until you get your results back and so dave did a great job filling in but uh and again i'm sorry i know i said i wouldn't talk about all the pictures but i thought some of those were interesting um so our district areas of focus these have been areas of focus that we worked on we've been we've been looking at these things for at least the last three years they kind of come into alignment with our strategic plan but really looking at the

109strong academic achievement at all levels and where our district scorecard tries to measure that and at different points and in different areas of our of our uh k-12 continuum or actually 4k12 continuum or even you could say early childhood 4k 12 continuum preparing students for postgraduate success with life skills supporting a supportive and inclusive learning environment and then uh recruiting retaining and supporting quality employees and i think the the the nice thing about this one and i think it's a point that we try to make with our staff on a regular basis is that we see that supporting our staff and having a quality staff is as important as what we do in the classrooms and it's important that we retain them and and we report recruit quality people and then i think the last

110piece is is not unique to the hudson school district but it is something that we have gotten a lot of positive feedback on which is keeping our parents and our community engaged and that's a big piece of of what we do because it seems that no matter how much you communicate it can never be quite enough communication so trying to look for different ways in which we can work through that uh so as we start to think about some of the district development planning that we've been working on we have been working on the strategic planning initiative as we talked about at the last meeting and it ties back to our leadership development uh with student education we have created the school start time advisory committee and some of these committees started up and then

111covet hit and we had to put a pin in them as we worked through it launched the hudson's virtual charter school that's been a real success uh with dave and his team formed the district wide family engagement committee uh really trying to get feedback from you know how we can continue to to engage families our mental health advisory council in in talking with them about how we can look at the mental health needs of our community but also our kids i think one of the things that's a a bright spot or a point that i should note is we had way more people that wanted to be on our mental health advisory committee than we had spots available i mean which was really great that people wanted to reach out and be a part of

112that we've done things like the district 30 day wellness challenge that was led by our human resources department implementation of our our electronic time systems and then we did start off by creating a facility advisory committee improvement advisory committee however before we could even meet just once uh kovitz truck and so as we've talked about we talked about this summer uh our goal now is to shoot for january is when we're going to kick that thing off once we kind of get everything under our belt but we did we did go through kind of the facility audit with the architectural firm and we're in a good spot um that way so as we think about a couple other things that have been a major focus for us mid-march our focus shifted to the back to

113you know the covet situation that we're in the pandemic situation uh we created our back just uh back to school blueprint and you know we came up with our guiding principles that's trying to just work through or highlight you know what it is that we believe as we make decisions moving forward because a lot of times people say why do you make that decision or why have you come up with that conclusion and so those guiding principles which i think are extremely important and i think just to highlight them that we do believe in the forays that you know academics athletics arts and activities uh you can call it extracurriculars co-curriculars curriculars but we're really it's it's a really about the well-rounded education for for all of our kids and that's important for the well-being

114of our kids uh we do believe in educating the whole child and uh we believe that having face-to-face interaction and instruction with with those kids is the best way to go about it it's not that we can't do it in in different ways but we feel that that is really what we want to strive for as you work through it um one of the other things that you know we've spent a lot of time talking about is not providing opportunities for kids can be detrimental long-term uh i've had this conversation i know we've talked about it at the board table uh i've had this conversation with folks in the community is a lot of times people say well nick uh you don't know what the long-term effects of kovadar i mean they could be you

115know quite bad on heart or or on on a variety of things and i said absolutely and and covet is very serious and and it's something that we definitely want to take serious but the one thing i do know is we do know what the long-term effect is on messing up teaching a kid how to read because it will have a long-term effect if we don't do what we need to do with our kids and get them especially when it comes to teaching kids to read you'll change their life trajectory forever you'll change the type of jobs they can have the colleges they can go to you'll change potentially their socioeconomic status you could potentially change who their uh life partner is and and who their spouse may be i mean all of these things

116can happen and so we do know that the long-term effect of of messing up that process is is a big deal and so that's why um it's not again that we don't uh think covert is serious covet is very serious it's just um we also know that we have to we have to look at these other decisions as well and and and do these things we also know it's our responsibility to mitigate risk uh to our staff to our kids we want to try to provide uh as as safe as an environment as we can uh without you know creating a false sense of safety that we can provide a covet-free environment and that's just that's just not possible and then i think it's um you know it is critical that we believe that uh

117people follow the protocols that we put in place uh both our staff and our parents and our kids um some of the some of the things that i think is is uh district achievements is it's tied back to summer school and you'd say why is the summer programming and achievement well when you think about where we're at just three months ago having kids back in our buildings was a pretty big deal we had over uh 570 kids involved in our k-8 summer enrichment classes another 225 high school students involved in classes this summer 64 of our learners with some of the most challenging needs were able to do the extended school year program to meet their needs we had 193 kids in our summer swim program 430 for middle and high school students in our

118raider elite which is our strength and conditioning program that participated our school-aged care never really closed i mean we were offering child care all the way through the pandemic and we had an additional 81 high school students involved in our marching band program and so uh why i think this is this is such a um an achievement is because we were able to do that uh in a way that we were able to bring kids back uh give them some sense of normalcy after being a couple months off uh and do that in a manner that was able to keep people safe uh at the time uh and again interesting with this picture with the young lady with the saxophone if you notice uh our a lot of our band members were had special masks

119that allowed them to wear a mask but still play an instrument and uh they the marching band did an outstanding job this summer keeping people socially distanced and and working through that um as we continue to move through our district achievements we had 180 ap scholars with honors and distinction along with nine national ap scholars uh that's that's some of the highest numbers you're going to find just about anywhere uh we voted again one of the best communities for music and education our our middle school tech ed department again last year was considered the program of the year uh so for the state of wisconsin uh we had uh some wonderful opportunities uh as it related to placing second in e uh cyber mission and stem competition with our middle school uh where our kids

120are competing you can see a picture with our middle school tech ed team there um receiving their award it was great uh we had competition geography b the math counts the spelling bee science olympiad if you remember we had those kids come in and talk to us and if you remember the uh the spelling bee uh i think somebody asked uh how he began studying for it and he said he started by reading the dictionary and it was it was quite quite quite an impressive feat when you're talking to a seventh grader that that's how they're how they're approaching it and and we had some middle uh middle school uh problem solvers that was great and so getting to see our kids use probable critical thinking skills problem solving skills is always great holton elementary

121uh was a school health bronze award uh and uh which is about the whole school a whole community hold child and what we were doing our ep rock hudson prairie north hudson and willow were considered outstanding schools as it relates to the wisconsin school counselor association program of promise award and our very own sarah fleer was the wisconsin school counselor of the year for the state of wisconsin so that was that was a great accomplishment she was in talking with the board if you remember kind of last year uh towards the beginning of the year when some of that information came out as we as we look ahead uh to uh this year um one of the things that that is constantly driving our discussion or driving what we're doing is is can we uh

122can we stay in uh face-to-face instruction and and what does the pandemic bring for us uh on the screen right now uh you see what's called our school closure matrix uh metric uh or matrix and it guides our instructional uh model and whether or not we're face-to-face or we're hybrid virtual or a combination of both and we've been very fortunate uh that the first few weeks of the year we've been able to stay in level one which is face to face five days a week right now barring any major uh changes which it doesn't look like there probably will be any um it looks like probably on wednesday we'll be able to also make a determination for another two weeks of face-to-face instruction k-12 uh coming up and so and again it doesn't mean that

123we don't have uh cases in our district but it just it means that we're within what we consider a reasonable reasonableness and i think the last couple items i think it's something that we want to talk about looking ahead is we're going to continue our strategic planning we're going to be operationalizing that strategic plan and reporting back to the board as to what that means so that you guys have that information equity and inclusion is going to be a major part of our work i've had some great conversations with some different uh folks from around the midwest uh to engage in equity conversations both to look at doing a formal equity audit both at the desk audit of our materials and policies and and all those components and also then inclusive of focus groups and

124and and really getting more anecdotal and qualitative information as well to get it to get an overall picture of where the district is so then they we can work with uh some different groups than to create what's kind of almost like a strategic plan within our strategic plan how are we going to address equity in our district and i think it's important for people to understand that equity and inclusion is is not one of those things that you just do in a month or two months it's not just something to say hey we talked about it therefore we're done i mean it is going to be a journey uh as we've had conversations with different folks it is going to take it is going to take a while for us to to get to where

125we want to be and we're going to we're going to be starting uh i think relatively quickly but it does take a while as we work through this and that's kind of been consistent i've talked to three different groups at this point i have another one coming up tomorrow and that seems to be the common theme that if you want to do this well um it takes a while to do it well versus just saying that we've done it and so that's that'll be great and so i think that'll be part of our uh process and part of our reports uh moving forward and then i think um you know our school start time committee that resumes here coming up in late fall and winter and then our our uh facility improvement advisory committee that

126resumes uh just after the first of the year so that's really kind of where we're heading uh as a district and then i think kind of the last slide really it's just kind of our mantra that we've we've tried to keep in in uh at the forefront of what we're doing this is what we do with their staff shirts and and everything else um you know be patient be kind keep others in mind and really uh we know that everybody's patience is somewhat frayed as it relates to covid and we want to make sure that uh we're doing everything we can to to try to be kind to folks to try to work to give people the benefit of the doubt as we kind of work through some of these things but it is a

127stressful situation not just at school but in people's personal life so we're working through that so with that being said that's kind of where we've been over the course of the year and then where we're heading this coming year and there'll be lots more to to come as the year goes on as we'll have different presentations at the board meetings so that's all i have at this point all right is there any questions or comments for our superintendent from the electors which includes everyone i think everyone in this uh room right now i just want to say uh there's a way that us board members could uh purchase one of those t-shirts because i'd like to wear it around the house and i believe we i believe we we do have we do have some

128of those shirts so all right yep all right all right anyone else would you say you're going to wear that around the house to remind your wife family to remind you oh okay yeah i thought maybe we need to get them for your whole family you know that you could you know kind of as a reminder yeah whatever all right my son takes an extra large all right so all right thanks for the uh highlights uh it's always great to see our accomplishments uh over the last year i mean we we get them in you know bi-monthly or semi-monthly um increments i should say and and uh but to see them total up over the years it is pretty amazing and and very affirming um so next up i'll turn the mic over to our

129board treasurer and uh heather has a report for the district financial overview you have your choice of the podium or your seat whichever listen someone went to all the work putting in there sure it makes me look ten pounds thinner and two inches taller right well i don't need the height great thanks so much nick um i appreciate especially you putting the photos in there metrics are important when it comes to student performance when it comes to educator effectiveness when it comes to money which is what we're going to talk about in just a minute but i think those photos remind us of what it's all about and why we're here and it's it's those kids and those staff in our building so thanks for including those photos so i'm heather loglin and i'm honored

130to serve as the treasurer of your hudson school board in just a moment chief financial and operations officer tim erickson is going to present the proposed 2020-2021 budget for our district but before he does so i'd like to take just a few minutes to provide an overview of our financial position our annual meeting packet which if you haven't had a chance to review i hope you will i'm sure it's going to be available online as well as here for those of you who are with us includes more than 25 pages in fact i think it's 30-something pages full of financial information budgets pie charts bar graphs that even includes a five-page glossary should you come across an unfamiliar term school financing is complicated with resources coming from numerous local state and federal sources that said

131the biggest chunk of funding in this proposed budget more than 60 comes from property taxes that's right from all of you and from me and i understand that you want to know that your tax dollars are being used well providing an excellent experience for all students requires a wide range of investments from specialized professional development to new curriculum to contracted services to meet all students needs our district is very thoughtful about how it puts its financial resources including your tax dollars to work and i hope that you like me not only board treasurer but a taxpayer and a parent of two students in our district feel proud not only of the outcomes we are achieving but of the way that we are managing our financial resources the good news is that the hudson school district

132is in a strong financial position while there's a lot of information in your 30-something page packet there are three things that i want to call out first even with almost two million dollars of budgeted 19 mitigation expenses the proposed mill rate is decreasing by 3.57 percent what does this mean it means that while everything else seems to be getting more expensive the tax is assessed on your property by the district may actually decrease this year two we have a strong fund balance and we think that's prudent in these uncertain times per board policy 3121 we strive to have a fund balance equal to 25 to 30 percent of annual expenditures the proposed fund balance for this school year is just above that range and we think this is good planning for our district given the

133unknowns with both covet 19 and state funding there is still a possibility that our state legislature will pass a budget repair bill this year that would impact this year's budget which as a reminder is already assuming a decrease of 885 000 in equalization aid and the bill for the next biennium so for 2021 through 2023 could present some serious challenges our district has twice experienced a cut of 10 of state aid that amounts to about 10 million over a two-year budget cycle and we want to be sure we're ready for this the fund balance we have will give us resources to bridge that gap if needed ensuring that we are continued to be able to continue providing an excellent 4k through 12 experience for all students the third thing i want to call your attention

134to is that we continue to have a significant under levy so an under levy means that our district is levying less than it is legally allowed to do so in other words direct tax relief to folks in our district who own property in our case the proposed under levy for this next year is 3.3 million dollars last year we had the largest under levy in the entire state of wisconsin over the past 19 years our total under levy is more than 125 million dollars so the mill rate is decreasing we have strong reserves and we continue to under levy all while continuing to provide a great 4k through 12 experience for our kiddos and to attract retain and support our talented dedicated staff on behalf of your hudson school board i thank you for your

135continued support of the students and staff of the hudson school district and i am pleased to support the recommended 2021 budget thank you right thank you heather for that report well done and next up we have tim erickson the chief financial and operations officer thank you um i want to welcome everyone tonight if you're viewing uh my video that would that's great too um i just want to thank there's a number of people i want to thank um when we look at this budget process that lasts about six months there are a lot of different people involved that help in the culmination of this process so i just want to thank all a number of those different people out there especially mark and tammy in my office that do a lot of the work to

136help assemble the the booklet that you've got uh right now so um without further ado i think you know jumping into some of our budget challenges which is going to be on page seven well okay hold on i'll just back up school funding equation this is a very simplistic view of what the school funding equation looks like so districts in wisconsin are under a revenue limit means they can only raise uh taxes to a certain amount and they and you add state aid in and that's your revenue limit so um you take the revenue limit less the state aid that's determined by the state and then the remaining amount up to that revenue limit as property tax levy that's the the most simplistic terms or equation we can get with this it involves a lot

137more than that but just so folks get a little bit of an understanding and we can jump to the next page tim so we'll cover in this meeting we'll cover the proposed budget and levy the impact on the property taxes and then we've got some comparison data of the other wisconsin school districts and then we'll take questions regarding the proposed budget in the levy so one of the things when we look at budget challenges is addressing reduced state funding levels and what we experience here in hudson is that our property values are growing at a much faster pace almost every year than state average and that puts us into what's called a negative tertiary aid so we have a decreasing amount of state aid and more of an increase in dependence on the local levy

138to balance that budget when you go back to that simple equation so that's that's one of our one of our challenges more long term short term in the next one to two years as heather mentioned we could even have a budget repair bill this year that would affect this year's budget um the likelihood of that seems to be decreasing a little bit but if we look the next couple of years out so 21 through 23 there's a there's a possibility that we could have uh aid reductions from the state as heather mentioned in her report and so those are the things that we need to to be cognizant of as we move through the budget process and making decisions again addressing instructional needs for all learners maintaining the class sizes within their class size guidelines

139and then sustainable funding of long-term maintenance and capital improvement plans for all facilities we've got some great facilities here but you know many of them are aging facilities and we need to make sure that we keep those up over the long term so we go to the next page budget assumptions that are built into this budget our state aid as mentioned before it's 885 000 less they're 4.1 lower than last year and if you measure that and and compare that to the consumer price index for the last 12 months which is one and a half percent uh it's a it's a pretty big delta to to have to make up the estimated mill rate of 9.99 is down about three and a half percent from last year and overall property tax valuation is estimated to

140increase uh 7.2 percent this year compared to 10 last year and the state average is five and a half percent so we continue uh to to really be above those state averages the under levy which is the amount of money that could be levied but is not um in this budget uh stands at about three three just under 3.3 million and that is direct property tax relief for taxpayers it's important to note that our district has had an under levy and continues to have an underlying levy we've had one for several years uh heather mentioned some cumulative amounts which we'll we'll review quickly in in one of the graphs but it's uh we're kind of an island under ourselves when we compare ourselves to other districts in wisconsin um the budget also assumes a one

141percent board approved increase to salaries and wages and also includes performance pay structures um this year we've got a 225 thousand dollar levy uh proposed for community service and that's to recoup the loss is sustained uh due to covet 19. as a footnote about 72 percent of schools across the state levy for community services uh this is this is our first time doing that under the current version of the budget we've got covid related expenditures uh in the budget and i won't go through all of those but they total about 1.8 million dollars and so we'll talk about that a little bit later as we get into some of the detail of the budget so when we look at that detail of the budget and this this piece here is on page 9 of the

142book we've got a highly summarized piece up on the screen here but when we look at our major pieces of funding which are property taxes which is the first line of that budget under revenues and equalization aid two of our biggest pieces of funding funds the majority of our other expenditures so we've got a 3.3 percent increase in that levy for the general fund and equalization aid as mentioned before is going down 4.1 percent federal sources are up uh significantly uh almost double what they were last year which which is good news uh but again when you look at uh the demographics of the district our federal sources wind up to be a half to one percent of our of our total revenue but doesn't it doesn't uh contribute much to it other districts wind

143up being higher than that because many of the formulas for federal funding are based on free and reduced lunch count and that's uh that's how the federal funding formulas work so we're up about a half percent in total revenues we look at expenditures our expenditures for salary and benefits of course were service organization so those are going to be the majority of our budgeted expenditures they're up 0.4 percent now that's even even by adding some of the covid related expenditures that were on the previous page we're up only 0.4 there so that's it's a very small small fraction of a percent when we look at open enrollment out where that number is a little slightly higher than last year it's a real general estimate because final numbers don't come out until later so we'll we'll

144have a better idea as we move into that final budget approval process in october most of the other covet-related expenditures are in fund or in the expenditure lines 300 and 400 so other purchase services and non-capital expenditures and so the the reason why those areas are going up so much is due to due to adding in those things like dividers and and different supplies going down into the bottom line there so total general fund expenditures is three percent if we were to take out the covid related expenditures of 1.8 million we're at a third of a percent a third of a percent increase so almost flat uh in our expenditures uh if we take out the covid related items going down to that next section under the general fund surplus uh or deficit um [Music]

145referring back to 1920 so we had because due to the closure we had we had an underspend of about 5.1 million so that would increase our unassigned fund balance by a total of 5.8 million dollars we intend to take out a little over a million dollars on that next column over a million 52 in this this version of the budget so it would reduce that that fund balance down and as heather had mentioned you know as we look out towards the next the next biennium that's where we could see some budget reductions and you know we don't know at this point if they'd be significant or not but this sets us in a position to to bridge the gap really and uh going forward so you know it's a it's a good we're in a

146good very good spot right now if we look under the committed and unassigned fund balance summaries we have we have dollars for capital projects in at 1.7 million dollars and those are the fun some of our larger projects that just can't be funded through solely through operating we've got self-funded health insurance balance of 1.9 million and incidentally we've saved cumulatively millions of dollars by going moving to self-funding so that's been uh that's been a great uh piece for us uh projected unassigned fund balance uh for 2021 would be 23 million just over 23 million dollars so it's about 32 percent which is 2.4 percent above the board's approv the board policy of 25 to 30 percent and again that just sets us in a good spot when we start to move into the next biennium

147if you look at that very bot that last section at the bottom the estimated mill rate uh is 9.99 and that's a that's a 3.57 percent decrease over this last year and we'll go to the next page the next page is just a representative um 20-year snapshot of our aid membership which aid membership is what drives the state aid pieces and drives the revenue limits etcetera and in the different formulas that we've got for funding in the past few years we've been relatively flat with enrollment it's gone up and down slightly but relatively flat so if we move on to the next page shows a general fund state aid revenue over since 2014-15 up to the projected 2020-2021 that trend line is trending down over time as we've mentioned there's been a there's been a

148shift in the amount of percentage of aid versus the percentage of tax levy so move on to the next page and so in this chart here this is general fund revenues and you can see federal sources amount for a very very small piece of the the total pie of funding for us and when we look at our our state sources uh at 38 local sources at 59 that's where a number of years ago we were at about a 50 50 ratio there between the two and moving on to the 2021 proposed budget now they're changing slightly uh but not significantly so we move on to the next page which has the the chart for expenditures again you can see the expenditures salaries and benefits are our largest pieces so they make up about roughly 68

149percent depending on which piece you look at and then purchase services again a larger piece of that pie at 14 to 16 and then uh and then so on so that gives you a little bit of an idea of how uh we spend our money the next piece really talks about how the impact in levy uh is changed with the addition of of improvements on property so this first example is is a change in assessed value uh but no change in the levy and so each property is assessed at 100 000 value and then that assessment is assumed in the example to go up to 110 000. if we look at that each resident only two homes in this district so each resident owns 50 percent of the total property value in the district in

1501920 in 2019 and 2020 the levy is 3 000 so the same for each year each residence pays 50 of that total levy which is 1500 per residents in the next example now we introduce new construction into this so when there's new construction um in this example we have an assessed value of new construction coming out of a hundred thousand dollars uh after that so the pie breaks down a little bit differently so each resident owns 33 percent of the property value in the raidertown school district and the original two residences shares in the levy is decreased so it shows uh in the example this is how that impact of new construction can impact uh levees and the impact on non-existing residences so in this case the levy per residence goes from the 1500 for

151the two residences to a thousand dollars each for the three residences under that table the table at the very bottom uh that gives us what percentage of values of the total valuation in each municipality new construction consists of for 2020. so the city of hudson is at almost four percent that's about it was running about that same level last year but prior to that uh it was about half that it was running around two percent for the for the uh for three years previous to last year so it's fairly significant for the for the city uh to go up that much uh the town of hudson again and the village of north hudson are higher than the previous few years as well so we've seen more construction activity and more evaluation added uh to the

152to the district and if we go to the next page so the this has a historical evaluation again this page is is a summary uh of the detail that's in the book and um in this case you can see down at the very bottom of that section of evaluation we're at uh just under five billion dollars in a 7.17 increase and if we look at the percentage change for the levy uh it's it's 3.37 percent mill rate drops down to 9.99 and the percentage change uh in the mill rate drops down to 3.54 percent so if we look down at the bottom of that section in the in the book it gives it gives a breakdown between each municipality and their valuations and how they've changed so um we have a low in the town

153of troy of 4.4 to a high in the village of north hudson of 11.68 so we're really we're seeing a pretty wide range of values there and those things do impact the levy so when when the district goes to take the total levy and has to allocate it to each one of those jurisdictions it does have a different impact depending on if evaluations are going up equally across all municipalities or if they're going up in more of a striated fashion here and if we go to the next page [Music] next page is our balance sheet and when we look at things such as receivables there's a 19 million receivable on june 30th of 2020 what that mostly represents is that those are tax receipts um that is not cash that's available for us to spend

154those are tax receipts that are receivable and and we'll we receive those into the following year so fund balance is is important to a school district not only to to help in times when you have lean times where we may be anticipating that in the next biennium but also through the course of a normal year where we have um you know we have periods that we go without much funding at all but although all the while we're incurring expenses so it's important to have cash flow uh to bridge those gaps so the alternative to that is you go out and you cash flow borrow so you have to incur borrowing costs and interest expenses so um we we do not have to do that at this point um as we're fortunate and then we don't

155incur that for for our taxpayers so that's one more page last page is our general uh long-term obligation debt here and you'll see that that balance 2021 stands at 108 million of course that was part of that was our total uh referendum for the the middle school and the high school and the uh the auditorium and stadium and then the payments on that balance for 2021 we'll total about seven million dollars and that's part of our levy uh the board or the voter approved levy and uh you can see the what the levy will be levy will be about seven seven million sixty thousand on that total and then if we jump to the other data this next chart represents the total educational cost per member and total revenue per member for school districts uh

156taking hudson on the left column and comparing it to the state average in the middle and then the c cell 11 average on the right hand side so you can see under total revenue um our revenue per member runs 14 is 15 539 for 1819 and that's the latest data that's available from the state and the at the average for the state was fourteen thousand eight twenty two so we're a little below that uh and a little more below that when we compare ourselves to our cso 11 average we look at the total educational cost per member um we're at fourteen thousand one ninety five and the state average is thirteen seven fifty seven so we're slightly above that and uh even slightly a little bit more above that when we compare ourselves to our

157sisa 11 average if we go to the mill rates on the next page and this this takes mill rates in comparison to our cesa 11 districts so you can see all the districts down at the bottom we're at we were at 10 36 last year now we'll be down down at the 999 level when that will be able to comparatively get that information for next year with all the other districts but i would i would guess that we'll probably move down the list a little bit moving down to that 999 mill rate and we'll move to the next page tim our under levy again this is something that's fairly unique to hudson school districts do under levy from time to time many districts don't do it every single year and many districts don't do it

158in the amount that we've done it over the years so when you look at this chart the annual under levy is the is the is the striped bar and the cumulative under levy is is the uh the diamond shape the diamond shape bar and when we look at that we've under levied cumulatively over um since uh 0304 about 125 million dollars that's i would dare guess that it's more than any other district in the state uh as under levied our annual under levy um certainly has come down part of that's that structural change i talked about in our funding uh where we're ship we're seeing more of that shift uh in the negative tertiary aid going up um and we can actually it's going up from the under levy for this year's going up from

159last year's last year's was about 2.7 million uh this year's proposal is about 3.3 million so that under levy is increasing even over last year's we look at the next page that's comparison that's comparison of uh other districts that have an under levy and we we just sorted this one at to a level 200 000 or greater just because there are many levees that are very small amounts but so these would be the largest ones and of course you can see this is 1819 with 5.1 million as i mentioned we were at 2.7 about 2.7 last year and we're projected to be at 3.3 million this year so um again when you compare that to other districts we're we're far and above uh you know higher and accumulatively much higher than any other district so

160i'll go to the next page [Music] next page is the resolution and that's been broken apart into the general fund debt service and community service fund and then the next the last section after that is that section that heather referred to as for light evening reading if you have insomnia that's a great place to start so so all right thanks for the report are there any questions of our chief financial officer regarding his report hearing none i'll move into the hearing section of the annual meeting we this would call the hearing open on the proposed budget so this is a time where anyone can make comment certainly could ask questions going once anyone going twice third call for anyone wishing to speak on the proposed budget hearing none i will now entertain a motion to

161approve the resolution not specified on page 26. and i think for the purpose of the annual meeting we do need the whole resolution read mr president heather uh i moved to approve the resolution that attacks in the total amount of forty nine million eight hundred eleven thousand two hundred seventy two dollars forty two million five hundred twenty five thousand eight hundred forty six dollars general fund seven million sixty thousand four hundred twenty six dollars debt service fund two hundred twenty five thousand dollars community services fund b and is hereby levied against the taxable property in the hudson school district for school purposes second right we have a motion by heather second by rob again any further comment regarding the resolution as read remember logalin uh pointing out that the three sections um used to be

162just two we had the debt service and the general fund but now we've added the community service included in that total levy amount and this would be reflective of a levy at 9.99 right any questions hearing on i'll call for a voice vote of all lectures present those in favor of the budget signify by saying aye hi hi those opposed to the budget and levy signify by saying nay the eyes have it and the budget and levy are approved i'll now entertain a motion to set the date for the annual meeting for 2021 which is suggested to be the second monday in september at 7 pm mr president yes i move that we set the date for the 2021 annual meeting for monday september 13th 2021 at 7 00 pm second all right all those

163in favor of being here in 364 days say aye aye aye those opposed the eyes have it and the meeting is set for september 13 2021. um at this time there are other annual meeting powers under the statute that can be brought forward to the body [Music] i remember that happening once in the last uh seven plus years so um let's take a motion deal john second all right there's been a motion and a second to adjourn all those in favor say aye aye aye those opposed we are adjourned you