2025-8-20 Board of Education Study Session (Audio Only)

001All right well it's six o'clock and I'm a little um we'll get started with the St. Brink Valley Schools Board of Education study session of August 20th 2025. Sarah would you please call roll? Sure. Mrs. Babs? Present. Mr. Berthold? Present. Mrs. Gilligan? Present. Mrs. Horanek? Here. Mr. Lechuga? Here. Mrs. Ragland? Here. Mrs. Blex? Here. Thanks Sarah. And today we have with us the early childhood education partnership but before we get started with that I'd like to go around the room and have some introductions. It's a small group today and we're meeting in a different place. It's nice and cozy so why don't we start with our superintendent? Yep so Jackie Capuchin, superintendent. Carrie McDermott, chief of staff and strategic priorities. Tim O'Neill, general counsel. Laura Hess, assistant superintendent of special ed and oversea preschool and

002community school. Eddie Healy, chief of staff and leadership director of early childhood education. Tim Waters, with a degree of childhood learnings. Matt Hildreth, with a degree of childhood learnings. Tony Whiteley, chief financial officer. Jocelyn Gilligan, board of education and district chief. Neil Shubat, school director. Tim Berthold, board of education vice president. Gina Lechuga, board of education. Sarah Granick, board of education secretary. And Jackie Weiss, board of education assistant secretary. That's it. That's all right. Paris Nolwood, president of the St. Brink Valley Education Association. Marty Fischer, retired preschool teacher, ECA and AAC. This is the area of jewelry, absolutely. And one just request, first of all, Dr. Haddad is on the line with us. He began some of this work last year with you, I believe, Tim, and has some good insights that he'll share with

003us. But I'll also ask that everybody please speak up so that he gets the gist of the conversation. We're also recording by law this meeting, and so we'll need to have everybody just speak up as you're sharing your thoughts. And, Don, can you hear everybody okay? Yes. Okay, perfect. Welcome, Don. We're so glad that you can join us. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I would turn it over to Laura Harris to begin with. Great, thank you. So tonight we are going to present our St. Brink Valley Schools Birth to Three pilot program. We want to thank the Board of Education for this opportunity to share with you our plans for our Birth to Three child care as it comes up. And so with me, I have Sheila, who introduced herself earlier, who oversees our early

004childhood programming for the district as well. So as a district, we recognize the growing need for additional child care options within the boundaries of St. Brink Valley Schools. Families are faced limited availability and rising costs, especially for care serving children for birth to age three. Expanding access to high quality early childhood care is not just a service to our community. It's a direct investment in our education, educators and staff by increasing child care availability. We are creating meaningful support to our district employees, helping them stay focused and present in their roles, knowing their children are safe and cared for. This initiative is about strengthening our workforce, supporting our families and ensuring that St. Brink remains a place where people want to work and grow. And in both Boulder and Weld counties, access to affordable child

005care is a significant challenge. Not only are resources limited, but the cost of care exceeds what is considered affordable. The seven percent income benchmark recommended for child care spending is simply out of reach for many families. In Boulder County, the average monthly cost is one thousand six hundred and sixty eight and in Weld County, it's one thousand two hundred and thirty nine. These rates create a barrier for working families and especially impact those with young children, often forcing parents, particularly mothers, to reduce hours or leave the workforce altogether. Expanding accessible, affordable child care isn't just a family issue, it's an economic issue. By addressing these gaps, we can help stabilize families, support our workforce and build stronger communities. So you notice Sheila mentioned in Boulder County, the sixteen hundred dollar range. We took that and

006actually just looked at infant. And so the infant range for child care is that eighteen fifty that you see on the screen. What we are proposing in our pilot and what our plan is, is to focus on two locations. So pilot location one will be Spark Discovery Preschool out in the Tri-Town areas. It is a whole school devoted to preschool students and currently has three child care rooms that support our families whose children attend preschool there as well. So parents can receive full daycare even through that half day model of preschool delivery. I am a former parent of Spark child care as well as preschool. And so I know the value that it has brought. We would propose that what we're thinking is that we're going to do birth to 18 months at Spark. So

007we're really going to focus on infant only at Spark at first. We've run our hours seven to five in that room. We're going to do a capacity of 10 children just to start for our pilot. And we're going to follow the St. Green Valley School District calendar. And we feel like that's an anomaly in the child care world because most child care centers require you to sign up for the full year, even though most educators want to be home with their children in the summers. And so we're hoping that this calendar provides an opportunity for our teachers and our staff that work that school year calendar to provide child care. And they're only paying for that child care when they need it, which is when they need to go to work. Our second location is

008Mountain View Elementary. Mountain View, we would focus on toddlers. So that's about 18 months to three years. Same hours and same capacity of children and same calendar that we would follow. This project timeline is very rough. We have started the process as of last June. We started looking as we divide between two counties. We have two different entities we have to work with in the area of licensing. And so our rooms are not licensed currently to meet the requirements of this birth to three program. However, we feel very confident that with some construct small construction tasks that we're able to get there, as well as the purchase of materials. So we know where we're headed and we know the requirements. We've had licensing walk through our buildings as a preliminary overview to help us see

009what maybe we have missed from their lens and those specialists already, which has been, which has given us some great insight as to what we've done. So you can see up on the timeline, we're going to continue to work with those kind of agencies that does not go away through this entire process and continue to identify those budget needs. Our plan is in September to send out an interest survey to all employees, letting them know about this opportunity that will start in August of twenty twenty six and gain some interest to see what type of families we're serving. We have the ability to say if there are only toddler families reaching out, we can change Sparks focus to toddler only at that point in time based on the feedback that we're getting in that survey.

010And then from there, we will send out an initial list of registration and open it up through a lottery system. So you kind of see where we're headed, it will be run through our community schools, which is our child care program that we offer everywhere else. And so they will oversee it. And we have directors in both locations that will be qualified to serve this additional population of students because they have to also have different qualifications through this process. And so we're working to make sure they have to write all applications. And that really is our plan for our pilot. We're going to see how it goes and we're going to see how many families spark that interest. There will be a cost associated for our employees, but we believe it will be lower than

011the market rate of what's available out there. And then we'll work with our employees. Our child care system already allows for a discount to employees that put their students or their children into our before and after care and our rep programming. And so we would offer that same discount to our employees then. So we would look at the overall cost of the market and what we're seeing right now. Those trends tend to rise. We think we can do it much less than that, but we still have to we are still going to have to charge for child care because it is a business that we have to run through community schools. And then we'll work with individual families and start the hiring process in the spring. We've already started to identify what materials we need

012to order. And then we'll work with the superintendent's cabinet to make sure we have all of our ducks in a row to answer any questions that. We'd like to open it up to the group to see if there's any questions before we hand it over to our partners to talk about kind of the larger scope of what it means for child care across both of our counties that we serve. So can you explain a little bit more about how the funding structure works and how it works within like own normally get funding. So this is totally separate, like be charged individuals to be charged for something funded through like our standard, you know, district funding, right? Because community schools is like a business, it's a child care business. And so while it's under our umbrella,

013because we want to continue to provide that service, we do charge families right now for child care. And so it would operate under that same umbrella to make sure that we're able to stay as community schools as a whole in the black. However, we do know that running an infant program and a toddler program is expensive because of the number of staff that you have to have to ensure safety. And so we're able to offset that increased costs with the cost of our overall programming. We use that funding that we receive to provide scholarships, like through our business model, we provide scholarships to families that can't afford child care. So we've been taking away at the overall issues within our area because CCAP, which is traditionally been the funding stream to help parents in need

014has not has been on hold for over two years. So our families in need have not been able to tap into child care. So we've offered scholarships, we've offered for free and reduced families, opportunities for McKinney and Pinto families, opportunities. And we do that all through paying tuition for the families in need through our other business model. I'm wondering, your question, this is initially sort of being offered to our teachers, can we expand it eventually to the greater community or is it intended to just stay with- Yeah, if there is a wider initiative, which you'll hear about here in a little bit, likely it would expand in St. Brain. If there is not a wider partnership and initiative, we will watch how this pilot takes off and we'll bring data and information back to the

015board and we'll make some decisions at a later date. So part of the reason we pilot is because it just really allows us to know what we don't know. And, you know, how much are the renovations? How much does it cost to outfit a zero to three with furniture and all of those things? Can we stay in the black? Can we offer a discounted quality service and run it like a business where we stay in the black? And those are all questions. And will we have have the interest? I believe we'll have the interest. I believe it'll be a great employee benefit. So we'll expand if we can. And if our numbers allow us, you know, to to do that and we'll just we'll know more after we get started. The figures on the first

016slide, 1850 and 1239 monthly charges. Yeah, so that's so the 1239, that's for an income as well or is it more than that? Child care is really expensive, so we are trying to, especially in our counties. And so our approach has been to serve our families that come to work and serve other families each and every day. So that is why we wanted to do this as a value add for our employees and future employees. And we also believe that if we open up slots in St. Brane, that opens up slots for the community and other child care centers. And there's just right now a shortage of slots across the board. And so that's also a way that we can, even though we're we're focused right now on our employees, it really helps the greater

017community if we can take on some additional slots and open up slots and other facilities. Thank you for your information. Um, currently, correct me if I'm wrong, my understanding of community schools is it runs outside the hours of the school being, the education being provided at that particular site, correct? It does. Okay. For RAS care, it offers it what would traditionally be a school day for K-5, though, we offer it during the full day, a full day of care as well. So that's seven to five is for our preschool students as well. So K through five, let's take that as an example. They're not being offered any care while they're in school through community schools. No, it's before and after care. Do you see any potential conflict in a building where you now have a

018room, because it will be a different experience for all the staff in the building that are currently. Like, do you see any potential issues with a room during that education day, during the school day, being run by community schools and a principal who's here to manage the K-5? So at every site, we have a community schools director every site all day long. Right. And so that person supports our childcare programming, no matter what time of day it is. So at Spark, we run seven to five, even though there's an a.m. and a p.m. session of preschool. So that childcare center or that childcare classroom walks the children to their preschool teacher in the a.m. in the p.m. or walks it first thing in the morning, because we have about an eight, twenty, twenty five start

019at Spark for our students. But kids get dropped off at seven. And so we take care of all of those pieces for parents while during a traditional workday for families. Let's take Mountain Dew as an example, the other site, because I think Spark is a different example, given that it really doesn't have that K-5. So if you take Mountain Dew as an example, and I understand this is all hypothetical. So I think it's going to look a lot different having something one room run by community schools during that day and a principal running the K-5. We already had preschool care at Mountain Dew, too. All of our element for the most part are are other than out in the Frederick feeder, Sarah, our elementary schools all have preschool classrooms run. Separately from the K-5 programming

020and also run under the umbrella of the whole school. And so there's a really good partnership between the preschool programming and the K-5 programming. I don't question that relationship. I've seen it work myself from the outside. I'll think of a different way to phrase it. Another question, though, is along the C-CAP lines, I know that's been a mess for a while. Is there still taxpayer dollars going towards that? Towards C-CAP in each of the counties? I'm going to look at you guys, because I'm not exactly sure how less funding there is, right? Even though there's now a waiting list, 700 plus in whatever we saw, 300 in Boulder County, plus in another list in well care. There's there is public funds to support who is currently beneficiaries of the C-CAP program. So they receive when

021a family qualifies for C-CAP, they are eligible for that funding until they age up. So they can be on at birth to 12. They're still taxed. I want to make it clear in the room that there's still taxpayer money going towards C-CAP. The current funding for preschool or for C-CAP is already coming from taxpayer dollars, right? But the problem is it's not enough to add any new students. And that's where the waitlist has even siblings. There's waitlist in almost every angle of care for children. No, 100 percent. I just want to make sure I understand that there's still money going into that. And I do want to reassure you, because I have the opportunity of kind of overseeing the umbrella between our preschool programming, high quality and our child care, high quality care, is that

022they really interacted every one of our school sites very much together. Our community schools, while it is a separate entity, is a same brain employee. And we do that on purpose. We want everybody to feel like they're in the fold. They are given the same salary increases that we offer. We look for that as a pipeline to teaching. And so we have our P-Teach students working in our community school programs. We have a lot of our transition age students with disabilities entering into their first job into our community schools programs. And so that while it seems like two separate entities, when you see it work all together inside of a school, that community school director is really the conduit for the principal to go to and say, hey, I got a phone call from a

023parent. Great. That community school director is the person that calls the parent back first because it's a child care concern at that point. And so it really is a great partnership because we all fall under the same brain umbrella. And so that's what it looks like on a day-to-day basis. I don't know a different way to explain it until you kind of see it in action of how it works. I have a question for Tim. What kind of exposure and kind of risk would this kind of program pose to this drug? You know, there's always going to be there's always liabilities that come from taking care of people's children, but they're not unmanageable. And there's certainly going to be ones that we are familiar with and that we deal with. We still have the same

024kind of protections that we have under state law as a governmental agency, local government. But yeah, those are things that we can certainly work through. But we would be remiss to say that there's not going to be potential liabilities when you're taking care of infants and young children. And a lot of the licensing is adjusted, of course, to accommodate the different needs of that developmental age. It's why the adult to child ratio is so low and why the classrooms have to be outfitted a particular way. And just going back to Sarah, you know, with the logistical question that you had about the way it would work in your school. What's kind of your underlying concern? Do you know that? Not yet. I'm getting there. Okay. Back to the, if you don't mind, the pilot involving

025zero to 18 months at one location and the 18 to three and another. Will your survey to staff include whether they have full permit? Like one, and then do you have a pilot example that would accommodate those at one site? Not yet. Because I heard you talk about if everyone has like 18 months to three years, you could, you know, do both sites as that. But what happens if, you know, a large majority have one of each? I think that's why we're going to do our survey early on in September so that we can kind of get a feel for what we're really talking about. Because, you know, in my position, I have a lot of people that have gone on maternity leave that work for me. And so off the top of my head,

026I'm like, oh, I have like four people that probably would want. But I don't know how that translates outside of my area. And so that's why we're doing this piece, because I've now heard as we as we have talked with people is that, oh, our registrar is having a baby. This sounds like a great idea. Or, oh, this person is this sounds like a great idea. And so that's why the survey is going to help inform if we need to switch the licensing at Spark for any reason that we have only toddlers or we need this much interest, gaining licensing for a room 18 to 36 months is much easier to do on a short term basis versus the birth to 18 months. And so that's why we're doing that one first at Spark, because

027we know that that takes a little bit longer. And those requirements mean construction, like a half wall. I'm going to make a half wall to do the changing and all of those pieces. So that's why we started with that, because we knew that that would be the most significant. And I think the other thing to hear as well is that Spark obviously is set up since it's all early childhood and it has rooms that we can access. Right. We can access that like little to the full cost. Same thing at Mountain View. We already had that as a their early childhood site. So we had classes that we could utilize rooms that we could utilize again at minimal cost to access. I know that there is a space differential between the two. But again, with

028it being a pilot, we feel that this is a really great option for our staff. And if we need to shift, we'll bring it back and we'll talk with our cabinet first and look at the survey results. And, you know, that's an interest level versus the people that will actually sign up. And so, Wayne, what that looks like, we hope to actually have a sign up list out before winter break so we can have some opportunity to make some definite decisions on where we need to head. So we're not spending money that we don't need to spend either. I wonder if we could also just pull anonymously from HR like data on maternity leaves and those who haven't returned after giving birth, like if we have any stats, that would be really interesting as well.

029I know. I don't know, Tim, if we can. Yeah, Amanda has started looking at some of the just aggregate numbers from the. Yeah, community schools have their own money to do this since they have their own business under the umbrella of the district. They have some in our mill, and we talked about our general fund because we want to commit to this for our employees. So we're still working out what our totals are. Um, toddler playground structures are quite expensive, and so we might stagger what that looks like versus putting some smaller items in that we know we need will meet their requirements and then we'll work towards that. So it really a lot of this is hinging on our total number of interest level to figure out what direction we need to go sooner

030than later. But we wanted to bring this to let everybody know on the board kind of where we were headed early on before doing some of these steps. Don, I'm going to see if there's anything at this point that you want to add to what St. Brain's plan is, and if not, we'll move on to Tim. I'll turn it over to Tim Waters. Yeah, you know, the thing I would encourage people to think about is this is going to be done on a much larger scale statewide and nationally. And the key is to who gets out of the gates first, so to speak. When you think about this in terms of nature, that's one aspect. Another way to think about it is how do you advance a pre-k through 14 system to capture even more

031students for graduation rates, for dropout rates, for achievement levels, for success, for efficacy. And starting at zero three is that really critical time of brain development and vocabulary development. And the stronger a student or a child comes out of those three years, the stronger they're going to be throughout the rest of their lives. So it's really more than a daycare option. The other thing that I would share with you from a school speaker point, as systems begin to develop, if you don't have this type of pipeline, you're going to lose millions of dollars across the board as kids migrate to privatization where this opportunity is available. And then they will stay, whether it's in a charter environment or private school environment or a voucher agreement environment. And so the cost of doing it is going

032to be minimal in terms of the loss of revenue if you don't do it. And so it's really important to begin to see it as part of a larger system pre-k through 14, zero through 14 versus an isolated daycare. Opportunity. The other thing that, you know, I think you have this declining enrollment that you're seeing in Boulder Valley and you're watching Boulder Valley lose thousands of students, you're watching St. Bray's growth, so a little bit too bad, but if these students don't have that zero to three experience in a system, you're likely to see continued loss of enrollment throughout the entire system. And it's one of those things where you really begin to understand that if daycare back to the daycare issue is unaffordable, young families will not move into the area. And if young

033families choose not to live in Boulder County, the next thing that happens, businesses begin to lose revenue. Income tax, because parents can't work because they can't afford daycare, income tax revenues, sales tax, specific use tax, all of those things that fund the public school system, those things will begin to dwindle. And so it's kind of like that blue ocean theory where you start to think about how do we increase your customer base, how do we increase your constituency. And so I look at it as an opportunity to get out front and to begin to develop this system before the productization movement kicks in and starts funding it, and then you'll see, again, a loss of enrollment in your pre-K through 12 system that will cost a significant amount. And right now, you know, with Laura

034and Sheila and Jackie, everybody on the team's experience, you can do this really, really well because facilities are already built facility-wise, so you're not going to have a huge cost there in terms of restructuring the facility aspect. So those are just a couple of things that I would share with you, and I don't know what, you know, the outcome. I know working with Tim and Matt and the rest of the task force, it's one of those things where I think it's probably, it's not the most pressing, it's certainly one of the most pressing needs in Boulder County because if the right things are going, you are going to outpace young families, and that's going to hurt on a multitude of measures. So just food for thought. We've been working on this now for, you know,

035for a while, and it would be interesting to see what the public thinks. Somebody made the comment in one of our last task force meetings that, you know, the crowd is aging out, but I think you're going to get a lot of support from senior citizens who have adult children, and the senior citizens are hearing directly from them that their adult children are having a hard time making ends meet because of the massive amounts of life that they're going to have to go through. They either have to stay home with their children, or they have to try to find the money to cook them in day care. Either way, it's a lose-lose. I think you're going to get the senior citizens behind this. I think you're going to get the business community behind it because

036we certainly don't want to see a good-luck population because that's going to affect their businesses. And I think you're going to see advocates around public safety and a whole host of other groups that are going to be really excited about this, and there's an opportunity for St. Ray to be able to kind of carve out the pathway versus being on the path, you know, looking from the outside in, while others eventually are going to take advantage of this. Anyways, I won't go on and offer an offer about it, but I do think it's a wonderful opportunity. Yeah, thank you, Don, for that, and I'm going to just add to those comments one additional thought, and that is that teaching also, we are not experiencing it in St. Vrain, but teaching is also experiencing a shortage.

037And we know that about 70 to 80 percent of most school districts teaching workforce are female, and they often have to make a choice and a decision as to whether to work or to stay home. And as Don used the phrase, kind of a lose-lose proposition, those that can't afford to do either work and pay the exorbitant amount of daycare or stay home. And miss out on the income, and so we see it also as a very, very big employee benefit if we are able to build it out and to meet the need within St. Vrain. And if we can meet the need within St. Vrain with 2,500 teachers, 5,000 employees, we would open up then that number of slots where teachers currently have some of their children in private daycares. We could open those

038slots up to the to the community. So we also see it as a very strong employee benefit as well. All right. So, Tim, we'll turn it over to you. There could not be a better set for the next part of this conversation than what you just went through. I'm Tim Waters. I have had the chance much of my professional life to sit with school boards because I reported to them for a number of years. That's 44 and a half years in business education. I'm joined tonight by Matt Elbrick. And as we talk about child care and criminal learning opportunities, Matt is the director of TLC. And if you know TLC's history for 70 years, I don't know, I would say the best because we have colleagues who would take offense to that. But he is

039a top tier operator in an exceptional early childhood center. I want to say to the school board members, just thanks for what you do that you would give us this time. I'm very grateful for what you do all the other nights and days when I had some phone calls and doing what school board members do. I know what that's like. So personally, I'm grateful for you all. We are we are here off the top. I promise, darling, I would say this and I'll reiterate it. What we're what we're going to talk about for the next few minutes is an initiative that has grown out of a whole series of it. So half a dozen years ago in a coalition of the willing that came together as the early childhood alliance. Now, it's how we refer

040to ourselves, just a group of volunteers. We are not a nonprofit. We have no interest in in the agenda. We're advancing other than to see more children school ready when they get to kindergarten. That is it. We've had providers who have been part of this effort because of what they can contribute to our thinking and help us with strategy and building constituency. But it is it is straight up an attempt. If you look at our mission on the second slide up here, the mission really is to ensure the likelihood that every five year old will not rise to kindergarten or school ready. And we believe the only way to do that is through more robust public funding. There is public funding that supports child care right now. And while we're counting, we're talking about seek

041care. But in two thousand and twenty three, in our first attempt to do what we're going to talk about today, our first attempt to get to the place where we could get a question on the ballot. We'll talk about that question. And we're trying to get it out this year. In two thousand and twenty three, we paid to do cost model, right? Well, I can take every dollar philanthropic and public dollar that you aggregate that for child care and early education in Boulder County. What's the gap between that funding and the actual cost? And that number was seventy two million dollars in two thousand and twenty three. It's way north of that today. That seventy two million dollars is what's coming out of the pockets of the moms and dads of the kids who are

042fortunate enough to be enrolled because a bunch of them aren't. They're waiting lists, as you mentioned, in a lot of different places. There was no waiting list in two thousand and twenty three for seek care. Today, there's seven hundred north of seven hundred families, all who qualify financially, who can't enroll their kids and get the benefit that the law suggests that they're entitled to because there's not enough money to do. So our mission is to do something about that. We believe that our children ages zero to five are at least as important to us as sewer systems, highways, traffic lights, fire protection, you name it, whatever we think libraries. You think about what we support with public dollars as a public good, K-12 education, what's been left out of that is that recognizing it funny

043as a public good, our children ages zero to five or at least zero to four. Just one more quote, no, Jackie, just to build on your comments about moms not being able to get back in the workforce. I think the estimated impact in Boulder County, my colleague Tom Drake's back there could probably correct this two point two billion dollars a year that lost economic activity in Boulder County right now because of women who cannot get back into the workplace. So whatever we're talking about in terms of dollars, it costs the benefit to society to this county economically far exceeds what the cost would be to get this right. They had homelessness and incarceration and all the things we know that show up in the lives of kids who didn't have access to high quality early

044childhood experiences. And it just becomes more extraordinary. What we can do here, if we can get all the kind of ducks lined up, what we're proposing is an initiative of this volunteer group. We're not proposing an initiative for the Seaford Valley School District to take on. So whoever listens to the recording or reports on this, this week, we are not talking about a St. Green Valley School District tax issue. We are going to talk about potential about question that would create a tax initiative, but not one that's proposed by the sacred valley schools. But we're here to you. We're here for you tonight because we have we know we have no chance to accomplish our mission. It is not in partnership with you, right? If you're not supporting what we're doing and I'll talk in

045a few minutes about what we're going to learn and how we're going to learn it going forward. But we just have no place to go with this. If you say we're not interested, we will say thank you for your time and we're going to figure out what else to do with our lives. But if you do say we're going to give you a thumbs up on this concept, we're not asking you to endorse proposals. If you give us a thumbs up on a concept, then we've got a real chance to get this across the finish line and ask the public if they're willing to support what we're going to propose here. And we'll describe it to you as we go along. So I did read from the slides until we are as a coalition, we're

046a bunch of volunteers who care deeply about the work you do and how we get kids ready to come into your system. Our vision is that every kid can be school ready and we know what that would mean in terms of continuing to raise the bar in this system, which is also already raised pretty doggone high. And then to secure reliable, stable public funding for K-12, for pre-K, child care and pre-K education. So Matt's going to talk to you about how we're going at this and then I'll talk about kind of the timeline and the groups we have to jump through. And when we might come back to you, if we learn enough to get back in front of people, it's probably a big proposal. Yeah, thank you again, Matt. Matt Elgert from TLC Learning

047Center, my 13th year there as the CTO. If you've been around Longmont, you may know us as the Tiny Tent Learning Center. We've been TLC for 12 years now, so I realize that's still fairly new for some native Longmont folks. We have been calling a preschool community partner of St. Mary Valley School District before Universal Preschool was here and love what St. Brand does in the community in terms of really partnering with the community. And so I just I do want to applaud what you're looking at for employer based child care. I am not a line reader, but your employees will need more than 20 slots. That's my forecast. You will you will exceed the 20 slots that you need to build for next year. We are doing most coincidentally, the city of Longmont is

048doing this right now. We just finished a survey with the city of Longmont and their employees to do employer based child care because they're struggling to find quality city employees. And they recognize child care as one of the major factors of why they can't afford to be in this community. So the city of Longmont has put in over three hundred thousand dollars a year starting in August of twenty twenty six to place city of Longmont employees, children at TLC Learning Center. They're paying 50 percent of 38 slots at TLC. And when we did the survey, it was 85 children who said they would need slots today and they wanted to know if this program was going to start tomorrow. And it's not starting until August of next year. And we're proposing 36 slots, 36 to

04938 slots with the city of Longmont. So good on you. Say brain forward thinking about your employees and about the needs of children. And you will find more school ready children by doing this. So I'm going to talk about the issues and the challenges. I don't need to go through all of this with you, but you know that brain development happens early and often with children. I often tell people at TLC that everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten is not true. Everything I needed to know I learned before I got to kindergarten. You know, the 90 percent of brain development happens by age five. And so we know kids are often coming to school ready or not. And as Dr. Dad often says, and I've taken to heart what St. Brain did

050in 2008, 1910 when you started these preschool programs, you're finding your graduation rates and the 90 percentile plus is a direct impact on what you did 10, 12, 15 years ago. And so you know that this works because you've been a leader in it three years. So we know the early early intervention and early services are the most successful. We know that children who do not have access to those fall further behind before they even start. Those are the things that we know. And yet we know the quality early childhood education services are not accessible for many families. Laura and Sheila showed you the data and I would say that those are what you call average numbers, which means that there are many above average numbers. The cost in Boulder County is between 16 and

05119 hundred dollars a month for an infant. And if you have two under five, good luck. It's more than your mortgage. So we know that many families can't access it. We know that there are gaps between populations of families who can't access and can't even for those who can afford. There's still not enough slots for them to access the early childhood programs that they need. There are no providers. And again, St. Brain, you're pumping in 20 slots to that number this next year. I think that's great. And yet it's it's still not enough. We know that when care is available, it's not affordable. And we know that our early childhood workforce outside of our school district is woefully under compensated. Many of our early childhood employees are either on assistance programs or just 10 cents

052over being eligible for assistance programs. And that is a real challenge in providing high quality care for children when you don't have a workforce. So that's what we know is driving our issues and our challenges. So we're coming with you tonight of a proposal, a potential proposal. And as Tim said, we're not asking for an endorsement tonight, a stamp of approval. We don't have a service plan for you to take through and pick apart, but we will. And we want that. And that's what we are here tonight is to gather. What are the things that we should be thinking of? Where are the pitfalls and the holes? What do we need to make sure that it covers? So we just want to share with you tonight some of our thoughts and ideas about what we're

053proposing. And then I ask for your support in creating what the need is in the service plan. So there are a few you may be hearing over the next weeks and months. There are a few solutions to this in both the St. Mary Valley footprint, Boulder County, the state of Colorado. I would even think nationally there are going to be some possible valid initiatives around early childhood. All of them, I think, do similar things. And we're going to talk about that. What we're proposing tonight is a creation of an early childhood special service district. And Tim can tell you all the details of how that's created when the early childhood became a part of that in 2019. But that is what we are asking or thinking about for, like Tim said, the geographic boundary of

054the St. Mary Valley School District. This isn't a St. Mary Valley initiative, but the footprint would serve those families within the St. Green Valley footprint. So that's what we are proposing, the geographic boundary of St. Green. And our goal is to be on that in November 26, which means we need to do a lot between now and then. We need to go to a minimum of two counties, Boulder and Weld, as Laura and Sheila were saying, with licensing, we work between the two different counties. We will have to go to two different counties commissioners to get approval to be on the ballot for this geographic footprint. And Tim will tell you more about how we're going to do that. But that is our goal, is to get to the commissioners, get the approval that we

055met the sufficient to be on ballot with the service plan of exactly what the funds are going to do and then to be on the ballot in November 26. So that's our proposal and that's our plan. What would this money do? We've talked a lot about what the need is. And so we have had we have two great early childhood councils in the St. Mary Valley School District, both the Council of Weld County and the Early Childhood Council of Boulder County. Casey Hedrick is the CEO of the council back there. She leads our early childhood council, which is really at the advocacy in the community of what do we need, what are providers saying, including what we would call friends and families and neighbors, which is unlicensed providers, which, by the way, there are more

056families accessing that than licensed care. Some of that is by choice. If you've got grandparents or neighbors, you're fortunate and lucky. Sometimes it's by sheer need of I just need somebody to watch my kid so I can go to the doctor. So sometimes it's by choice. Many times it's by need. But the early childhood councils have created surveys of what would what are the big pitfalls and the challenges. And the priorities are straight from those surveys. And they are these three buckets. It's expensive. There's a C-cap wait list. So families need support financially. We know that wages are low. We need a better workforce or we need a higher compensated workforce as well as benefits. Some of those benefits might include child care discounts or subsidies like business and employers might choose to do, like

057for the city of Longmont, where they add this as an employee benefit, similar to gym memberships and cell phones and health insurance and other things that employees provide or employers provide to employees. But we need better benefits for the early childhood workforce. And finally, we need a workforce that is high quality. Again, I will shout out St. Brain's P-Teach program. You are creating a pipeline of early childhood teachers. And selfishly, I love it because St. Brain P-Teach students need infant and toddler practicum. We're getting a lot of those at TLS and Learning Center. And if they have a good experience, often they stick with us. Now that you're doing this, you're going to put them in your infant and toddler classrooms to get that experience. And they're not going to want to leave. They're going

058to become your preschool teachers and your pre-k teachers in St. Brain because they had that experience as juniors and seniors. And so, again, you're leveraging what you're already doing well in the P-Teach program to be able to increase your workforce. But we need funding to do that system-wide, whether that's the St. Brain Valley footprint, Boulder County and beyond. So we're talking about the St. Brain footprint. I want to keep our focus on that tonight because that's what we're proposing today. So those are the things that we find as funding priorities. That is where the money would go. Again, as Tim said, the Early Childhood Alliance is not here to create a nonprofit and have 20 percent administrative overhead costs. Our sole goal is to get money into the community in these buckets. Financial assistance, increased

059wages and benefits, and to recruit a top quality workforce. I see St. Brain calling as a benefit in all three of these buckets. You will benefit with subsidy programs in your program. You will benefit from wages that supplement some of the wages of your early childhood workforce. You talked about how are we going to fund this in community schools? Community schools would be a benefactor of this. And then obviously, the recruitment and retention of the workforce. I would love to see P-Teach multiply by four. We need more. So we would like to help fund that in the community. So that's what the funding would go to in the next slide. We'll talk about what the proposal will do. It will provide high quality services. It will offer equitable access for all. Again, we know that

060some families can afford a nanny at home, but not all can. And every child should be able to have access to a high quality early childhood experience. We want it to be affordable for families. We want families to have the choice of where they are able to send their children, which means we need more capacity. We need to increase the capacity of the options. We need to build a workforce by continuing to build on existing partners, and that's Saint Rain. And then we need to make sure that this is accountable, that we know when money is going and that everybody is getting the funding. It's going where it's supposed to go. And so in this system, we will build in the accountability. So that's what the proposal will do. And again, this early childhood special

061service district would be the footprint of the Saint Rain Valley School District. Not a Saint Rain initiative, but a Saint Rain footprint is what we're proposing. And Tim's going to talk about all the nuts and bolts of a special district and how we're going to get there. Matt, can you just talk briefly about why Boulder Valley School District has not? Well, I can't because I think it's a really bad idea. I'm not interested. No, I and Don mentioned it earlier. I think every district has their priorities and there are some districts that are struggling to survive with buildings that are half full, enrollments that are declining. And this just may not be the priority when there are other competing priorities. I don't want to say it's not a priority for Boulder Valley. We've met with

062them and I don't want to say it's not a priority, but it doesn't seem to be that they are as enthusiastic about jumping on board with this because they probably have other initiatives. And Dr. Haddad, you probably talked better than I can about how often you can go to the voters and where your mill levies are. Boulder Valley is pretty capped of what they can do to ask the voters to do more. They've got their own challenges. Jackie, I want to build on that bit. OK. Some of you know that in 2023, we had a fully-baked service plan. We presented to Weld County Commissioners and then after a relatively brief hearing, they approved our plan, checked all the boxes for legal sufficiency, which is one of the legal requirements codified in the statute. The next

063day, we were in front of Boulder County Commissioners. And after a four and a half hour hearing, they chose not to approve our service plan for reasons that I personally don't want later because we're being recorded. I will share later when we're not recording my views on that decision. I'll just hold my fire right then. But I will say that we included Boulder Valley in that proposal. And I don't know if it was a mistake. We just never got the kind of support we needed to move this forward. So back in December, as a group, we looked at one another and said, is it time to fold our tent? We know it's going to be a tough sell to the county commissioners. And I'll talk about that. Should we just fold our tent and go

064home and give up on this? And I said to the group, you know, I'm not ready to fold my tent. I want to take one more shot at this. I want to touch base with Donna to see whether or not the St. Bruce Valley School District would be interested in putting together something that creates a zero to grade 14 initiative for every child and family that needs the support gets it to enhance what you already do. It'd be the only school district in America literally that has that kind of a continuum from age from birth to grade 14. And Don's response was enthusiastic. And I won't speak for him. He's in the call and I know he's supportive. Yeah. So with that, we decided we're going to we're going to move forward in anticipation of

065an approach that really comports to the St. Bray Valley boundary, not a school district initiative, an initiative of volunteer group that if we're successful, we create a special service district that has one mission. That is to collect taxes to more generously or adequately fund pre-K and child care and get that out to providers. You are part of the solution. Thank you. The St. Bray Valley district is a big time provider. And what they're doing with this project would be awesome in terms of what there is to learn and how to take that to scale. We would like to help provide the funding to get to scale. I appreciate that. And, Sarah, I knew that was one of your questions as well was related to to Boulder Valley. Did you have anything to add to that?

066Yeah, I mean, I was more interested in why they don't offer it anymore versus not. I think it's not the whole picture to label it as not as a non-interest. Like, if you went to the commissioners, you weren't meeting with the Valley Board, correct? Well, before President Boland, there was a test fight against us when we went to Boulder County Commissioners. But I was more curious, separate from you all, why they stopped offering. I couldn't speak to that. Did they? I mean, because they offered. Are you talking about zero to three where they were offering? I think it's gone. But that's not something I have current data on. I just did heard something and they closed down that program. But mostly that was a teen parent program. There were there was some specialty programs for

067that zero to three, and they did close down that program. But I just want to say about the Boulder County School District in St. Brain, what I learned in twenty twenty three was is that the larger the footprint, the harder it is to get everybody on the same page. If we can do something that's successful in a St. Brain footprint, it can be expanded. If this is done well, the infant taught their classroom, you will expand it. And the same is true for a special service district. If this is done well, that may be something that's a little bit more palatable for a group that we could implement it. And it's done well and it's accountable and it shows progress. More people will want to be a part of this. And we've already talked to

068the folks in Weld County that are interested in this being a county wide initiative in Weld County, which is the biggest county in the state. We're just taking a piece of Weld County right now, the St. Brain part of that. But what I've learned is, is that as much as I hate it, whatever the boundary is that you set, somebody is going to be on the other side of that and not be able to get these services, whether that's the St. Brain footprint, Boulder County, a two school district jurisdiction, whatever the boundary is, somebody is going to be on the other side of it. And the larger the footprint, the harder this is to get off the ground, the smaller the footprint, the easier this is going to be. And if we can do this

069well, others will want to come alongside. It's easier to, just to reiterate, I guess, it's easier to expand special district, I guess, to create one. So we were successful with this effort and somebody wanted to join. Way easier for them to join as part of the initial creation of the district. And I'll talk you through the hoops we have to jump through real quick if you're interested in those. Just in 2019, the state legislature amended Title 32 and added three reasons to the state of Colorado for creating special service districts. One of the three reasons was to do more and better for our youngest residents in the early childhood space. So we seized on that and spent a couple of years trying to figure out who should be in the mix and what it looks

070like. And our own learning curve about what it takes to get on the ballot with this kind of approach. And in 2023, as I mentioned, we developed a service plan. We got a chance to present it, but we were unsuccessful in persuading Boulder County commissioners to approve it. This time around, we expect to have, I'll show you, there's going to be a slide here that shows some of the steps. But we are right now. Well, we will very soon be cost monitoring, identifying what does it cost for the services or the buckets that Matt just shared. Those buckets are a result of having the councils having collected in the school district, having collected data for providers. So the priorities within the buckets, we are we are commissioning the data scientists, Amy Brosby, if you know

071them, to do some cost modeling to identify not just a high end number like 72 million, which we had, but in each of those buckets, what's the gap between actual available funding and the costs for for what we've heard from the field to be the best and highest use of the dollar? I'm certain we're going to learn some more as we go along, because we're also going to do some polling. I mentioned earlier how important your interest in this is because it makes no sense for us to pay for cost modeling and polling if you say to us we're not interested. But the second data collection would be polling in a format. I suspect we'll learn more about priorities. One of the things we didn't have a lot of input from our parents in terms

072of the data we collected for providers, you may have done that. I don't know that everybody did. So there may be we may see some other other opportunities or some other needs that parents identified that we had to address if we're successful with the proposal. But by 2015, if what we learned from our polling suggests the public will support what we're proposing, we would like to come back to you with a fully-baked proposal and service plan. If we don't come back in front of this board and ask for that, you'll know maybe we'll just share it with what Sheila's part of the episode. You'll know that the public said we are unwilling to support or tax ourselves for these priorities for this audience. In order for us to get on the ballot, we have to

073present a service plan that includes a budget and the priorities funded by that budget. We also have to take to the county commissioners a slate of candidates who are willing to govern a new unit of government called a special district. In the bullet in the bullet here talks about director candidates. Those would be governing board individuals serving on a governing board, and we still need to recruit who those people would be. But not unlike you, they would be elected. They would be elected to govern a special district. In this case, the challenge would be from the beginning, there is no government unit to step into government. You'd have to help stand it up, and we are committed to helping if we're successful, helping that board stand up a new unit of government. We intend if

074we get it, if the polling suggests the public would support what we're proposing and we come back to you in December and you say, we're going to we are going to formally endorse this addition, then we would want to be in front of county commissioners by the end of March. It may have to go back to both sets of county commissioners, both Weld and Wolbert. And I will say if we get in front of all the county commissioners, you're going to be invited to be in the room for that hearing. We hope that we could enjoy some other elected officials in the room at the time of that hearing to express yourselves and your interest in this. When we get to county commissioners, there are three questions we have to or three three questions that

075end up being on the ballot. One is, would the public support by both creating a special district number two, would the public support the form of revenue generation, sales tax and property tax? And when they support X in terms of whether it's a mill levy or sales tax, we have to specify what that number is. And then with the public elect this way of candidates to govern this new unit of government. So that's how this plays out. If the county commissioners vote to approve our service plan, the next step for us is to go to the public and collect signatures. And then we appear in front of a court or attorney with file a motion to have a hearing with the Bolger County Court. We would have to present those petitions and see what the

076county commissioners decided. And it's the court that directs the county clerk to put these questions on the ballot. We're trying to get on the ballot in November of twenty six. Let me just pause their questions. All right. So I mentioned the cost modeling we're doing now to what they were doing now or will based on what we learned from you today to identify the gaps in funding in those priority areas. We we hope to have our polling. We've got a pollster lined up who does this work across the country. We hope to have our polling done by the end of November. I'll spend or by the end of October, I'll spend the month of November with my colleague back there Tom Briggs and others offering a service plan that we would bring back to you

077and for others to get public. Our intent, then, if we get that far, we'd be able to do a second round of polling in April. Once we get past county commissioners, if we do get past county commissioners to do another poll. But in that case, it would be a poll to inform what we need to do in terms of a campaign strategy, less about the education on this particular initiative or drafting a service plan or the politics of winning, you know, being successful with questions on the ballot. Which you own something about. So, yeah, here's what we need to know from you. We've talked way too much. What do you want us to know that would strengthen what we're ultimately going to propose? You saw three buckets with priorities. What would you say to us,

078you know, go back and make certain you've you've answered this question or you've attended to this potential priority? What do we missed from your perspective? So we ought to look at some more data. You've been through deliberations on how ambitious to be with your ask of the public in terms of knowledge. This last one wasn't quite so difficult because there was no tax increase for the brilliant campaign that you organized. When I was at my city council, I would point to the city folks and say, can we learn something from this approach to the public with things like questions or from the override elections? But we would like to know from you if you have guidance on, you know, don't go north of X in terms of a sales tax or a property tax. I

079want to say that Tony, as I appreciate a couple of months ago, in a very quick turnaround time, he got me some information on what what one mill generates in the school district. And I've got from municipalities what what additions to sale tax generate. That's part of the polling will do on what the public would be most likely to support as a form of taxation. And then in all of that, you're going to have an interest in how does this thing be governed? And what are those interests and what should we learn from you about folks who you know, either you would recommend we talk to or as you rotate, rotate off this board here? And I know you're how interested would you be? I know you're laughing. I'm probably going to come back and

080ask you that. Anyway, that's where we are. So the last slide here is, you know, this one else we want to know is if you go to the last slide, if you give us a thumbs up, we're going to keep pushing forward. If you don't, we're going to go ahead here, cry a little bit and figure out how to go back to the other aspects of our lives. What what what? So what questions? I think one of the things you asked was, are we talking about the right strategies of what needs to be funded? So I'm not going to go back to those three buckets, but I would love your input on that. And this is data that we got from our early childhood council in Boulder and Welk County from providers saying these are

081our biggest gain points. But what would you say are the biggest challenges or the biggest needs that we need to be thinking about in terms of what needs to be in a service plan? I would love to hear a discussion of where tuition comes into play with what you're asking the public for. I know to go straight to asking to the asking the public for I mean, we have to be great, excellent stewards of taxpayer dollars. It's like the top of the list. So to hear that they're going to be asked for more money and we haven't brought in the discussion of where tuition comes in. I don't mean necessarily amounts, but have you played around with can tuition cover instead of asking the public for more money? Well, the seventy two million dollars in

0822023, a bunch of that is tuition. And the way it's covered now is to your parents. We're our position is we ought to close that gap. We're not suggesting that every every child's expense is going to be covered there. We couldn't generate enough weight for special insurance without an extraordinary ass. But to close at least some of the gap. Well, we proposed in 2023 would have closed 60 million of the seventy two million dollar gap, knowing that still 12 million dollars would be covered by the pockets of parents. We also proposed and we'll propose it again that there be a sliding scale for subsidizing parents based on a means test based on their it's an is that answer the question? So you can't do it without phones in the pocket. We can't publicly fund child

083care or childhood education without public funds. And that's the only way. Yeah, that the gaps in funding what the gap is a result of taking every public dollar and every philanthropic dollar and adding it up and see what the actual costs are. And by the way, those that gap and that seventy two million dollar gap was with participation rates in 2023. If you had more kids in the system, which we'd like to see, the gap is big and in 2023, there was no free. This was a fully funded program with no waitlist. Now we have over 700 kids on waitlist. And just to clarify, the license will go from zero, not six weeks. It's six weeks. You're saying as I did know something changed. No, because I think that some of what's in the first

084bucket is essential services. Sometimes that's not child care. That may be a nurse family partnership visit. It may be a navigator to help somebody access services. There may be other essential services that could be included in that. We think child care, we child care is expensive, but there may be other essential services that could be lumped into that first bucket. Again, that would have to be in a service plan and spelled out how much goes there. But that could be for birth to six weeks. Is the seven hundred and fifty on the waitlist in the Saint Vrain footprint or statewide? No, Boulder County, seven hundred in Boulder County. I don't know if we know the Saint Vrain number. No, but we've asked Andy Grotsky, the guy who's doing the cost and we've asked him specifically

085to answer that question. How many of the kids on the Western Saint Mary Valley and how many are zero five? Because there are some that will be six and twelve. Right. But yeah, we'll have an answer for you on that question. And where does child find and identification of special needs play into the zero to three space? So school districts are responsible from two and a half years to three years to do that early intervention hand up. So Matt and I, our offices work really well together. Tiny TLC. Interim? No. TLC does that heads up for us. Right. We've identified these needs. They are the early intervention group or one of the groups that we work with. However, at two and a half, he calls and says, I have these four families. You have to

086see if they also will qualify for school age services. OK. And then we do that at that point. And that's what C2B is. So there's already a good systemic great system and a great partnership. Thank you. To that point, will the cost of providing those services for special needs have to be included in the service plan as well? I think so. I mean, there are you can talk to the funding better than I can about child find and IEP and special funding where that comes from. But I can tell you it's it's underfunded. So you know that. But I'm asking if that's going to have to be inclusive of the service plan as well. So will we have to include that those special needs pieces in this this model that we're looking at for early

087childhood care? So basically how it works with early childhood care for children that have more intensive needs and have to try to get there. But what we do is that family actually qualifies for a different level of funding through Medicaid. And so Medicaid helps reimburse those services back to the providers. And you have to be a Medicaid provider. So DLC is a provider. So they provide services all day, every day to kids with disabilities, age zero or six weeks to three years old right now. So and that would be embedded in that service plan, because that's what we're already doing as part of that, just ensuring that they are still a provider. So let me ask this question to continue what you were just saying. What if the family doesn't meet the Medicaid number? They

088just outside that by a dollar or whatever the number is, they don't meet that. So they don't have Medicaid, but this title still has special needs services that they need. How is that? I think that that's a good suggestion if you're making it to put in a service plan that children with special needs that don't qualify for other funding sources. There needs to be a slice of this funding that addresses that need. The other thing is insurance does cover those needs when Medicaid does not. So those wait lists are also like your private insurance for early intervention actually covers a lot more for parents than as their children get older. And so I get phone calls all the time from doctors offices that they also recognize, hey, this is coming to you. Please make sure

089you get them on your evaluation list for school age to see if they qualify for school services. So outside private insurance for one family member to cover the family actually exists as well. So I think what's critical is to leverage every available funding source, private insurance, Medicaid, special ed funding. All of it is good. None of it funds what the need is. And so I do think that there's a piece in the service plan that could be carved out for children with special needs who don't qualify for. That's where you're talking about the sliding scale. There will be some families who need less and should get less. There will be some who need more and will get more. And there needs to be a mechanism that's accountable to get those dollars out in an appropriate

090way. I think you all made a pretty good point. Perfect. I need to put something like that in the program so we can evaluate. So if we have a child like through our system that ends up needing those services, we'll look at it typically what we do around like all of our community care through community schools right now is outside providers sometimes come into our school. Sometimes families actually make doctor's appointments to go outside of our schools. And so for us, what we're envisioning just from a therapy standpoint is probably not direct services, but more identification for families to say we are the experts, we are recognizing this need. And typically my next phone call then would be to a person like Matt to say, I have this family in the area, help me navigate

091where I should guide them to because we're recognizing they need services. And we as a school district actually can't provide those services until they become ours at school age. And that's where I think these I call them warm handouts are critical that these families have access to whatever they're eligible for at the time that they're eligible. There are school district services that they're not only eligible, they're they are required. They have the right to those services, but there are some times where they don't qualify for AIDS, they don't qualify for a variety of reasons, and maybe they qualify for something else. And so that's where I feel like this, again, this community collaboration partnership is great because the school district does a great job of the things that they do well and the things that

092are funded. But there's things that are outside of that that maybe some of these Medicaid, private insurance, other places, service district could fund better. And then again, these kiddos, these handoffs are done better so that these kids are more ready for kindergarten, which ultimately then saves money and special education for the next 10 or 12 years because they got those services from zero three. So that's where I see this part of what else we'll add in those buckets and we'll create another bucket, but we'll we will add something in this that addresses specifically the question you've asked about children with special needs. You know, I think we have a lot to learn, too, and we're fortunate to be able to watch what happens in Eagle County this fall because I saw that they just had

093a special Disney event in November. So, you know, like, what are you expecting or are you working with those folks at CEC? You're talking about the confluence? Yeah, it's five counties, actually. Yeah, we've been in communication from within almost from day one of their work and hours. They've had the benefit, by the way, of a benefactor and asked them to write a check for like a million and a half dollars to support them. All of our work has been funded out of our own pockets or a couple of grants we want. We wish we had that kind of financial support. They've got five, they're going to be on about five counties. And I believe it's a sales tax. It's sales. And it's going to generate substantially less than what we would propose to do here.

094And it would be like just in addition to what parents have paid in tuition and the sliding sale. Yeah, just let me just spend one more moment to say what we are proposing, what we proposed in 2023 and it won't be different in 2026 for 2026. We put together a service plan that doesn't spend a dollar on capital needs. There's no buildings we're going to build or services we're going to build. We will look for opportunities either to lease space from providers or if there's an opportunity through an I.G.A. to work with the school district in space. But there's no intent to spend a dollar on building new buildings or doing capital stuff. You're going to have to have a competent staff to manage the collection and distribution of money. So that's a pretty great.

095Yeah. And in your relationship with the service district would be through an I.G.A. or like you have contracts with any non-profit organization. So money would not flow through the district flow to the district. That's exactly right. You are part of a broader solution that includes TLC, Aspen Center, Wild Plum and the other licensed providers. And hopefully we've got a we've got a scheme for involving unlicensed providers if they meet quality standards and are willing to volunteer in an accountability. The other thing I think this this funds is this system system development system. Our Early Childhood Council has a lot of really good systems and direct connections to our state systems. Our Early Childhood Council is the L.C. of the local coordinating organization for U.P.K. So there's already a good organization and infrastructure that is better

096funded could help build up these systems of accountability and reporting, maybe even a contracted grant provider that then gets this out into the community. There's lots of opportunities, I think, for us to leverage partnerships that are already existing and we do well, you know, in St. That's a good question. We certainly see facilities. Is that for child care or just for the operation for the operation? Yeah. And then the other question has to provide direct support for families. Are you talking about sending funds to individual families or just directly to the service? Well, here's what we proposed in 2023. I assume we will do the same thing. We work with Metrics IQ, which is the organization that stood up the Denver Preschool Program. That automated their system and makes it easy for parents to find

097out who the providers are, where the eligibility is, what they qualify for as a subsidy. And then the money goes right to the provider as opposed to the parents. So I know the checks. Right. But the money follows the child and it's by parent choice. But the money goes to the provider. So, well, this is not a, well, it's a valid initiative that you're thinking about and that's something that's going to be in the legislature. Still have, I guess my question is, what blockers have you come up with the answer with at the legislative level of what our legislators in response to this? I know it's not one that they're pushing, but there's still money that's going to go to the state. So I haven't encountered any, I agree with legislature legislator, I think, but

098from Judy Joseph Saturday morning and Katie Wallace and her town law, every every conversation I've had has been supported. I wish I wish they would step into that conversation with county commissioners more vigorously, but that's a bridge for us to cross as we get in. Tim, what's the resistance from county commissioners? Well, I'm going to answer that question. There are other people in the room who heard the discussion, and so they can correct me if I'm wrong. There was just a philosophical opposition to the concept of a special district, creating another unit of government. In that case, it was Boulder and part of Welk County. The language was, we just don't need another unit of government, words to that effect. But a special tax district requires that by state law. Yes, we can't get on

099this on the ballot without going through county commissioners. And just so here's for what it's worth, since this is being recorded and maybe somebody listens to it, I'm not certain county commissioners understand that the Mountain View Fire District keeps the county from having to create a fire department. It's a special district. Boulder just created a library district. There are library districts all over the state. Those are special districts. Right. There are water districts, recreation districts, fire districts, sanitation districts that are solutions, not problems. There are certainly special districts that have not been governed well, that haven't been conceived properly. It's more metro districts than special districts. Those are different statutes. This is under the special district statute. We're not talking about a metro district. We're talking about a special services district. But all across the

100state, there are hundreds of special districts that solve problems for other units of government. And we just couldn't persuade county commissioners. I just think there's this bias about special districts. Now, I will say, we've had this conversation. People have said to me, Tim, you really want to go through all this? And he told no again. And my answer has been, here's what I'd love to do. I'd love to be in front of county commissioners and have a presentation made and have some combination of you, Jackie and board members. And we're going to reach out to other electeds in the footprint. And we're going to have polling data that we didn't have in 2023 and have if there is public support, provide evidence of the public support through polling results and have a chance for them

101to hear from constituents for whom this matters. Rather than just looking at me and John Camillo, our attorney, and saying, no, I think that would be a look. And frankly, this is not the whole county if this is this means we have this proposal. It isn't the whole county. It's that part of Boulder County that really is in the area of Mark Deloachman, who was supportive. And I think remains. Okay. Thank you. In 2023, we just had a property tax evaluation. We were proposing a five mill levy property tax and the county commissioners just didn't know if the community could withstand that, which, again, I don't know that that was their job to decide for the community. I think the community would have said we're not raising our taxes if it would have gotten to

102the ballot if that was true. We didn't have the polling data to show if that was or not. But that was one of the comments we got was this community can't afford to put something like this on ballot. And the other comment we got was the the governing body. We will do a better job of making sure we recruit those folks early and they should be there to be seen and heard at the hearing of here's the governing body. It's former city council members, former school board members, former county commissioners, whoever the slate is. I think that because there are some folks who is this new layer of government and in the absence of not knowing who it is, you can come up with some pretty crazy ideas of who it could be. So I

103think we could do that better. And some of those are generated by county commissioners during the year. Well, what about what about a white supremacist? What about what about what about turns out we didn't have three of the people who had agreed to serve on the board in the room and it was it was my mistake to not introduce them by name at that moment. But we'd like to not make that mistake again. Thank you. We learned a lot, right? But those were the major opposition. I think the other piece that I'm hearing in the learning as we work through this is a really high quality, inclusive service that would be accepted and understood by our commissioners and people that would be able to successfully. By the way, that list of kind of organizing principles

104that you're making is a slide after this one. Our intent is to is to if you think about those as those buckets as as funding priorities, this list of principles is what you would see reflected in the narrative of a service plan that kind of guides the work of an elected board to stand up this year. We will end that in terms of policy options and expectations in the narrative. So you would know that it's not just a random effort of people get together. It is going to be based on that set of organizing principles and funding the priorities that we will end up writing the plan that you've seen most of it already. So I also have a question when we're running a pilot program that is going to be a part of the

105district, I feel like you were talking about kind of running it like a business and showing that it's going to be in the black, like I think at the end of that pilot program, it would be really nice to have some kind of report that's really showing it's in the black. I also think it's really important that we include in like, I don't know how we run our community's school program and how I think that's like, as it's one set of books and how that's managed separately, but like, from a budget perspective, I know there's going to be some overhead, like, who is probably going to have to be involved in managing some of the finances. And maybe there's some legal work that's going to be done by 10, like, I think, knowing how that

106all is going to be provided by the district for this purpose and really having that be very clear and show that this is a viable business. I just want to clarify, so we do that now, but I was just wondering, like, what would be our district operations? So HR, right, our fingerprinting, our finances, all of that, there is a set rate that we actually, through community schools, and Tony might not use the right phrase, but essentially pay for. Yeah, okay. We already do that. We have community schools. So that's already a part of the budget. Yes, and what we're already doing, but I just wanted to make sure. Yeah, no, thanks. I just figured at the end of it, having that be really clear and really separated out so you can see it as a

107viable business. So your question is if you request for a report. Yeah, what we didn't propose in 2023, what we that we will this time around is a sunset clause or date. And I don't know if it'd be seven years or 10 years, but we should have done that in 2023. One of the things we learned is that we will do that this time. And the whole intent of that will be to go back to the public with the evidence that we did what we said we were going to do. And it's had the impact we said it would have. If we can't do that, then we would have no chance in seven or 10 years from now. But not unlike any other tax that gets sunset, we have to go back and make the

108case. Could you put the slide on that have your asks? No, he won't. He's going to this one because. Yeah, there you go. I mean, if we can speak to this a little bit more, you know, I would be in full support of this going forth. And I really appreciate your re energization if that's even a word of this whole project. And it's great to see given the crucial time in human life of brain development, you know, it's it it's just seems like a win win. I think handling all the logistics and business and all of her things around running this and funneling money and all of that, you know, will again see what they're doing in evil in those Chinese counties. And I will be in support of it, especially knowing that Laura is

109in support of it. Jackie will support it. And and we already have a running relationship with you and and everyone else that's playing. I think we have to we're going about this if we are to go about it, not just throwing it into the wind, but, you know, with so much knowledge and expertise and education always matters. And with some already working systems and then to your point, the data that we get from running our own pilot program separate. But in seeing where we can fortify that and other programs like that, it's really a secondary direction. And it's board thinking, obviously, coming from, you know, the work that you've done with Doug, knowing that the incredible amount of thought that's going into this. And our initial survey to our employees will give us an idea

110of a basic footprint of need of our just our system, which won't be the whole footprint of everybody that lives in the same group. But I do think it'll give us another data point that we don't have today. And without making promises, I think that, you know, the role of the board, I think would be really important for those two boards of those two districts to have to have congruency and alignment and possibly former board members on St. Graham would serve on that board. Well, that's we agree. Right. Yeah. I said to that one in 2023 that we wouldn't come back to you and ask for an endorsement of what we were proposing there. If we didn't have a fully-baked proposal and the decision then was to try to get it passed to the county

111commissioners because we didn't think that was going to be we thought that would be the easy part. Turns out that was a terrible mistake. So we will be back with a fully-baked proposal and names of candidates, we hope, somewhere, you know, if not the middle of December early in 2026. And in your interest in what governance looks like, I would tell you in the statute, the statute allows for for a slight occurrence of either five or seven. We're proposing five because a governing board that that governing board can decide to expand itself to seven but once do. Less is more with governance. Well, but it but it can't if there are seven, you can't reduce to them. Number one, number two, we talked about elector districts and those kinds of things. Well, let's if the

112board was to create those, let the board do it rather than us, especially if we get into this and learn that there are parts of Weld County or other parts of Boulder County that would like to join the special district. Because once those are set, it's going to be really difficult to unset them. Right. So to leave some of that to those who serve on the board. But your interest in who those people are and in a tight relationship is going to be really important to the to the effort. Yeah, I'm really interested in your plan results. We will be back. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like we got a chance. I know. But, you know, we have a lot of very well educated people in an education mecca in our state. Well, what I'm selfishly

113interested in is St. Rain. You've done a really good job of pulling you. You have carried determined who's a genius. And I think that this group could learn from the school district success in ballot initiatives, mill levies, marketing, education. I think there's no question that everybody agreed they want every child to be successful and every child needs to come to kindergarten. It's the how it's the how much. So who's paying? Those are the things that I think we could really benefit from the school district and your success of what you've been able to do. And I will tell you, consult with Don Haddad on all of that. Did you offer him? I did. And he has a brain for that work. He knows how to communicate a vision. I mean, you heard him talk about

114the vision for this when we started. And so he and St. Rain really has a track record around preschool. And so we're communicating a history of success already. And so that also is a resource you should continue to tap into. Frankly, it would be such an awesome addition to the great work you're already doing. So one request, though, for sure would be, you know, that it's made very clear to voters that the district is not. And my fear would be around voters conflating our two separate organizations because ultimately, Wow, wow, of course, as educators, we recognize how important zero to three is. We also have to protect what we have in place. That's right. I think you're spot on. When we say the footprint of the St. Rain Valley School District, that sounds like the

115St. Rain Valley School District. So I think we've got to be really clear of how we will probably never use those words. Yeah, once we get into it, if we get past the county commission, we're going to have to be really clear. If we get past county commissioners, I suspect we won't talk about what would there be a boundary and people will want to know what side of the boundary they're on. Right. But we won't lose the language of the St. Rain Valley School District in terms of the footprint. I think that's really good. So part of what I'm hearing in that last, those last couple of statements is, you know, thinking about the first point out there, our recommendations to strengthen the public proposal. You did this in 2020. You know, how easy it

116was. And what I think I heard was we didn't get past the commissioners because they didn't want another. I think we can find a way to communicate the government in such a way that it doesn't sound so government like building more government. I think that's going to have to strengthen that proposal again, similar to what we're talking about here. You're not saying St. Rain because then it makes it seem like there, but it is what you're saying is within this area. So, you know, I like to see those ways, as you stated here, ways that you can strengthen the proposal so that what we found, what we've learned from 2023, we've expanded on over the research in for 2026. Part of that, I think you said you didn't do before the public survey. And this

117time you will just incorporate some of the boxes you heard in here tonight on that. And particularly where you mentioned and I don't know how they do all this polling or whatever, but particularly you mentioned on the districts. You know, some people feel like when they have something like that and they're not represented, you know, what does that sound like? Oh, they're going for five because they're going to only have these certain people and they're going to hand pick and cherry pickers. That's all. I think the best thing, too, is that you have like this isn't the first time it's being done. There are experts all the way down the line, you know, in every in every kind of aspect of this. And we don't we're not voting on this at all. You know, I

118expressed my my full support and and I would be excited to see it go forward. And I think we've we've learned that like that high level of information that you gave us tonight. And we don't need to get into the leads with you on like all of the logistics and everything else. But but, you know, this is a really, really cool starting point. And I'm glad you were able to join us. I think I would like to finish what I was saying here, though. What I heard from my discarboned and just people in the public and where I am, what they really liked about the way it was communicated is that they felt like they were part of they really had a transparent way of understanding what was presented to them. And so the reason

119I brought that statement was that, you know, making sure that we go from lessons learned. And this is what I do as a job every day. And so that's just some of the things that I was thinking about. That's why we're here tonight rather than waiting to have a public public proposal, because we should have had these conversations. And honestly, that is a lesson. We thought that there's really nothing to come talk to school boards about until we get from the commissioners that run out. And that was a mistake. We should have engaged stakeholders earlier. So you're exactly right. We're not asking anybody to vote on anything. No, no. Yet. But we should we would sure benefit to know if if you think we ought to continue with this. I mean, fight the good fight.

120I'll partake. Yes. Yeah. Thumbs up. OK. All right. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. All right. Well, I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Second. All right.