001Calling to order Township High School District 113 regular action meeting Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024. It is now 7.05 p.m. Ramina, can we have a roll call, please? Mr. Heineman? Here. Ms. Newman? Here. Mr. Nieder? Here. Mr. Shapiro? Yes, please. Mr. Braza? Here. Mr. Elliott? Here. Here. Here. We'd like everyone else who is present at the table to please identify themselves. Tom Krieger, Chief Human Resources Officer. Michael Locke, Assistant Superintendent, Partial Instruction Assessment. Karen Warner, Chief Communications Officer. Superintendent, Student Services. Brian Armour, Chief Operations Officer. Ali Vahanti, Assistant School Finance. Katherine Anderson, Principal at Jarrett Field High School. Ron Casbaum, Chief Information Officer. Mira Antti, Assistant Superintendent of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Rusla, Superintendent. Our first item of business is the approval of the board meeting agenda. Is there a motion to approve the agenda as
002listed? So moved. Is there a second? All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Motion carries. Next up is board reports. And first is president's report. Excited to report that we are continuing to make progress in our search for our next superintendent. Last week we had an intensive series of interviews and we've whittled down the field from six initial candidates to three finalists. We are currently scheduling meetings by the interviews by the board as well as by committees of multiple stakeholder groups that will take place next Monday and Tuesday. And we are looking forward to hopefully reaching a decision sometime, you know, sometime after all those that round of interviews is completed. It's certainly I'm comfortable that we've reached a we have a slate that everyone we're meeting with we're considering is committed to the district's
003mission and then totally will be committed to students and to the goal of the district to provide a means for all students to achieve their unique potential. We look forward to the process continuing and that's all I have for tonight. Next up is our finance committee. That's Rick. Yes. Well we had a meeting on January 9th of the finance committee. We talked two general subjects, the external audit and the budget and five-year financial projections. I at least can be covering these later on so I won't go into detail. I would recommend though that people take a look at our comprehensive annual financial report. It's 143 pages. Don't bother to go past about 30. The first 30 pages though are great. They give you a good history of the district and tell you a lot of
004core information that's useful in thinking about what we're doing here. Thank you. Next up we have our superintendent's report. Dr. Law. Thank you Mr. Strzok. Three things in my report. First is just as a reminder we have our second and final community speaker event for this year is featuring Devorah Heitner and she's the author of Growing Up in Public, Coming of Age in a Digital World. This is the speaker series sponsored by districts 109, 112 and 113 in an effort to reach all the parents of all our students. It'll be held Tuesday, February 6th, 7 to 830 at HPHS. Unfortunately we have a board meeting that night so I won't be able to attend but I didn't want to let the board know that that's coming. The second thing I wanted to mention is today
005just felt like spring compared to the weather that we've had. It was so cold there for a couple days. Word was that there were boys no longer wearing shorts to school. I don't know if that was confirmed but when it's cold you know things break and we had a water line break near Deerfield High School. This is the water line that takes water to the school. If we don't have water we can't run school. The reason for mentioning this it's not been completely fixed but as Brian said we've put a bandaid on it. I wanted to thank Brian and his team for all the work they did to make sure that there was no disruption to school. He and others from his team are out there all day Saturday and I don't know if you
006recall Saturday but that was not a day for standing outside in six inches of water digging up dirt and all the things that they were doing on Saturday while I was comfortable at home. I just wanted to thank Brian and his team publicly for their amazing work in making sure that Deerfield High School had no disruption either to the school day or to any activities. I just want to say publicly thank you Brian. Another update, we regularly provide security updates to the board and the last one we provided was on November 28th and part of that report included a plan that would allow us to have adequate staff in order to have a weapons detection system in place at two entrances at each school each day. Remember that we said in an effort to try
007to get this done we were going to limit our doors of arrival from three to two and that we were also trying we were going to hire traffic guards the thought being hiring traffic guards allow us to bring our security staff inside our security staff can then run the weapons detection system at arrival at two doors in each school every day. So December 9th gave a quick update to the board on the progress in staffing and then I said at that time we'll come back in January with another update so I have an update on the staffing. So just to think about this for one minute, we have many layers of mitigation for security and all those layers of mitigation work together and they're trying to mitigate a specific threat. Now some of those security
008mitigations do not require staffing the film on the windows would prevent someone from being able to shoot their way into a school you know that doesn't require staffing when we have alarms on doors that alert us if a door has been propped open or that alert us if someone without authorization has opened one of our doors you know again all you know those kinds of mitigations we don't need staffing. We have cameras that are able to alert us things that we may not see that's not that doesn't require staffing. Working having a fully deployed working weapons detection system requires staffing it is staffing intensive it's not the only of our security mitigations that require staffing you know as according to the Department of Homeland Security and FBI the most important mitigation in school is making
009sure that students feel connected engaged in school that we have we have a lot of staffing working working on on that but when we talked to the board about this in November we said here's this here's the staffing we needed all these things we've tried I'm just wanting to let the board know that as of today we still do not have the staffing that we need to run weapons detection system at two doors in the schools every day now that doesn't mean weapons detection systems going away we still we do have adequate staffing for people who arrive after arrival whether that would be students or visitors to the building and so because we have staffing for that we would continue to use it in that way and they would also be available in the event
010that we had a threat that rose to the level that we thought this is an appropriate response you know to that to that threat but I just want to let the board know that you know we we're still trying well keep the posting open we haven't given up on that in fact we need to increase I think we need to increase the rate of pay the problem is it's an hour a day and so that's that makes it difficult we're competing with you know crossing guards and other entities that have people at that time but we'll we'll increase the pay we'll keep trying to fill these positions but I just want to let the board know that we're we don't have the staffing as of today to have a fully staffed weapons detection system we
011we do openings for security that were open that were unfilled when we talked earlier those are in the process of being filled we have hired one maybe two traffic guards and as we've said to the board it's worth hiring traffic guards just to bring our security staff inside so keep continue to keep the board apprised of the situation and if we are fully staffed with traffic guards allowing us to have enough security staff to have weapons detection system and arrival we'll certainly come back to the board for that discussion but just want to let the board know that it is a tremendous burden on on school staff to you know try to do this at on a rotating basis at each day and so we're we're stepping back from that for now but we're not
012completely giving up on it and we all use it in in other ways questions any questions when you say use it in other ways so if we were to get an alert or we were to get from either the police one of our students etc that there was a risk to our students would we be bringing them all up yeah that's the kind of of threat you know and it would have to be specific enough that we think we should do this but not specific enough that we would know oh we got to stop the student because we have right that we have in place the system so that we need to talk to student for whatever reason upon arrival you know we we can we know we know that we know based on what
013door they've come in in the past that we they scan in we would be able to say oh we need to talk to you but that's because we're looking for a specific student if we don't have a named student we just have that as you're describing it that would be the kind of instance where you say we need to we need to deploy these and anyone at arrival at arrival anyone entering one of the school buildings outside of the morning rush uh whether it's a parent a visitor or even a student who's entering white they're going to have to go through a weapons detection system right because we've got the yes we have the staffing for that we can and we can do it in such a way that it's done with fidelity and it's
014done well and that's that's what we i mean but we've it's it's you know we need adequate staffing when other superintendents have asked me about this the first thing i always tell them is figure out your staffing first figure out the staffing if you have interest in doing this at arrival um every day when for every student make sure you've got the staffing in place because that is the uh that's the biggest challenge and um we've tried existing staff we've tried yeah like we've already exhausted the internal using the staff that we have any reassignments any additions any of those things that have already been taken into account yeah right part of the part of the challenge for us is that as students are arriving in school there are adults who are there to you
015know bore them you know we need supervision in classrooms um and so for uh staff who are working with students you know when school starts it's very it's it's not possible for them to um serve in that capacity at the beginning of the of the day and then get to where they need to where they need to be so yes we've we've tried that we've thought about bus drivers we've tried every you know people we already have on staff because one of the challenges of course is this you know just if the solution is having traffic guards working an hour a day then you know we either find someone who can tack an hour on to their day at the beginning or hire someone for that hour and um it's it's difficult and we've been
016you know the we the posting has been up we keep you know tom knows what what they do to make sure it's at the top you know indeed all these places we're we're trying and we've not given up anything else from the any other questions or yes then we move on to foyer our foyer requests for the last two weeks yes and these are the three requests received and processed since last meeting any questions hearing none we will move on to our discussion items first up is basically your 25 budget update and five-year financial proposals i am guessing that's ali yep and since our wonderful and hard-working students are here taking copious notes just want to let them know there'll be a quiz on this tomorrow so all right they're not laughing all right so
017not going to go over all the slides you know we've talked most of it in the finance committee just a highlight of our revenues and how the sources where they come from these are expenditures 80 percent of our budget is salaries and benefits uh you know business of educating kids so uh you know um so we talked about uh financial projections we're not just looking at you know fiscal year 25 we're looking at five years out to see how our financial picture was long-run and um in our revenues uh cpi i mean that is uh what determines our poverty tax increase which is our over 90 of our revenues for fiscal year 25 the cpi was uh six and a half percent but we're tied to uh the cap which is five percent so uh
018we have that number for next year's budget fr 26 cpi was just out uh for december it was out second week of january which is 3.4 so the good news is that uh inflation is slowing down but that doesn't mean prices are going you know decreasing it's it's slowed compared to uh last year so there's still inflation but not as much as it used to be uh in december of 2022 so from 6.5 percent to 3.4 um we have to project for to do a five-year projections we have to project our future cpi increases what we're doing is we're looking at an average for 10 years which is two and a half percent even though we had two high cpi years of 24 and 25 the average is still at two and a half and
019that's a safe assumption lots of districts are using that as a conservative number uh investment rates uh you know the feds has announced some rate cuts so right now we're earning about four four and a half percent so our pma who are financial advisors have advised us to use two and a half percent investment rate um for the next five years and financial projections you know we invests on average about 80 million dollars so we're talking about one and a half 1.7 million dollars so that number can swing a lot if the rate changes um cpprt revenue which is the corporate personal property replacement tax that is uh the revenue generated from a portion of the income taxes paid by the corporations that's another high variable number so you know in fy23 we got 3.1
020million dollars we're projected to receive 2.3 million dollars this year so it's a big drop so we're being conservative and keeping the number flat for fy25 and then no increase in state and federal revenues i mean that's not a major part of our revenue so we always keep that flat please stop me is there any questions so what we're looking at in our five-year projections we're looking at structural deficit and what when structural deficit occurs when your ongoing recurring expenditures are higher than a recurring revenue so basically we're we're spending more than what we receive and when that happens we tap into our reserves okay so what are the primary drivers of future budget deficits of structural deficit you know as i said expenditures are outpacing the revenues and 90 percent of our revenue is
021driven from property taxes which is tied to a consumer price index and that consumer price index as i just told you for the future years we've been using two and a half percent and expenditures are outpacing that growth that pace of the revenues just to look at some recap we've hired about 29 and a half licensed fte since uh f1 19 yeah i mean we invest heavily in education we try to maximize the resources for our kids in the classroom so that's our number one priority we've also added 10 or more fte's and non-licensed staff primarily in special education security security staffing so that's about 40 fte's and fi 19 and you know we've had significant significant increase in our health insurance from you know i'll mention that a little bit later what our when
022you know looks like next year we've got some good news to share then our da contract which is very competitive as you know because we usually compete with steven simlake forest nutria and you know we our salaries are very competitive especially our highest in the lake county for our teachers so that increases in order to be competitive is surpassing the cpi so uh you know as i said expenditures are passing our revenues any questions before i move to the next slide all right so non-personal spending categories and they're not in order but you know as i said 80 percent of our budget is tied to salaries and benefits the remainder of the 20 percent is uh you know construction special education tuition utilities uh supplies purchase services and the supplies is just not you know
023textbooks and uh you know uh student materials has to do with custodial supplies bus supplies uh so the uh you know technology supplies and then we have uh special ed grant which funds the tuition we've got workers common property insurance special education transportation software repairs maintenance so just just to if you just pull uh special education and special education transportation apart like tuition and all that that is about 40 40 percent of this entire category of you know 20 of our budget so that's a big number that's you know so out of the 25 million dollars that's like almost 10 million dollars nine and a half 10 million dollars so there's not a lot of room in in non-personal spending to solve our deficit problems i mean you can cut food you know you know
024paper here and there you're not going to solve the deficit problem so uh so any questions on this and that's a question i had asked previously because i was interested in these items what was taking up the bulk of the expense and my thought was it was probably special ed yes okay and that's an area that continues to to grow from an expense perspective and and not always easy to project correct correct and it's all based on the incoming freshmen i mean depending on what the needs are and if they can again the business that we're in a portion of the business that we're in absolutely so yeah rmb is not rhythm and blues yeah but i like the idea of rhythm um you know the certain enrollment projections as you can see that um
025from uh fi 25 projected number to fi 20 uh 30 uh the projected drop of the students is uh 232 students uh doesn't necessarily mean that for every 25 student drop we're gonna you know reduce an fde it all depends on you know the the sectioning the course enrollments and all that so nothing it's not changing by a lot where we can say that you know we can reduce our fde's by by 10 by fy you know 30 it doesn't look like that and two points on this when you have as many courses as we have spread out over a reduction of 60 students given how many courses students select and and take in high school it you don't just you usually don't see you know changes the second point is it really depends you
026know this is obviously these are net we have people we have students moving in we have students moving out the question becomes if we have students moving in who require a lot of special education services then then that becomes a different calculation so there's you know there's some you know it's hard as ali's saying it's very difficult to say oh a reduction in students means this reduction in an fde now of course over time you will begin you should begin to see this you know um but it's hard just you over here to start to see you know this is going to correlate to that i think one of the other things that we need to look at with these um that you touched on was that it doesn't necessarily because one of the things
027that our district does exceedingly well and i think is an integral part of how we identify ourselves is the depth and breadth of the curriculum that we offer and the idea that we would look at it and say well now that we're down 25 so let's eliminate some of our classes that may be on those cusp of enrollments but are such passionate career driven or just passion classes that kids take out of passion to eliminate to eliminate an fte that doesn't net that we are not a district that typically does that type of thing as well as the fact that we increasingly realize that we're not just teaching to secure upper segments and teachers that there is a need for intervention very often that students have particular needs that require something other than one teacher
028in a class of 25 students very often which is increasingly more so the case yeah so during staffing we also look at known retirement so if there's ever a time to do make any efficiencies in staffing schools if you have retirements 24 so we're not trying to impact anyone's job i mean we're obviously going to look at ways to if there is ways to be efficient and not backfill any of the positions and you know as dr law said the staffing process has already started and the schools are working on them on staffing recommendations which will be i think discussing cabinet in the next next few weeks but if i24 is a key year to end in my projections in our projections we factor those savings you know so let's say if you have an
029allison retiring at a higher salary we look at our average hire where you know they're placed at usually at ma15 step five so we actually factor those savings i like this that my 26th graduate then she'll be teaching for a couple years in the city and then in 28 and they're allowed to plan your body out there so uh tom get ready did emma or julia struck you should be looking out julia there you go and question on the known retirements that's um not exclusive to lsms that's or is it the this is just uh lsms and this is but we don't have a lot of non you know sir uh in that queue so the bulk is going to be yeah so um the the good news about 22 retirements also is for our
030health insurance plan to good effect premiums in a positive way but we don't know we'll see those are all to be nerdy those are all tier one for retiring okay so looking at um this is we're going to spend a few a lot of time here so looking at our projected uh uh budget and this is our operating budget so our day-to-day expenditures doesn't include any like construction or you know debt service and uh all those things but if you look here uh we are uh basically uh have we have a projected deficit next year of hundred and thirty three thousand dollars now i can tell you because i've used assumptions for things that were not known uh i was using about eight percent increase in our ppo renewal and yesterday uh we had an
031insurance committee and gallagher yeah shared that news that our renewal is going to be at 0.7 percent which is unheard of yeah that's yeah it's amazing because the insurance pools like nyhap and abc they're seeing about eight percent renewals our ppo is at a loss ratio of 80 so it's performing by 20 better than you know uh uh the plan and that's because the claims have gone down compared to last few years that doesn't mean it cannot they'll continue to go down i mean hopefully those 22 retirements will help but i can safely say that when i plug in that number we will balance the budget for fiscal year 25 uh we will have some positive impact in fiscal year 26 because of compounding uh not by much maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars i'm
032still waiting for the hmo renewal because our hmo loss ratio is 120 but our hmo budget is about 25 compared to the ppo so even if let's say hmo goes up by 15 i'm projecting 5 we'll still see some savings because the most of our enrollment is in ppo so i'm waiting to get the hmo number before i plug that in the projections for an updated number but for future years i still have eight percent increase in the assumption because you know it could be double digits next year you never know i mean for fiscal year 26 so the good news is that our fiscal year 25 budget will be balanced as long as we don't add any more staffing all right so any questions on fr25 before i get to 26 so 26 as
033i said you know uh we're ali i'm sorry i have one question i just so as long as you don't add any staff but that is the assumption that the 22 that are retiring are filled in your assumptions are backfilled correct okay correct okay so in fy26 uh situation i explained before is happening if you look um at the revenues the revenues are growing by three and a half percent our expenditures are you know outpacing the revenue growth at four and a half percent and as i have explained is because assumptions and health insurance our our contracts for bargaining units we have to be competitive as you know that's starting salaries are going up everywhere it's hard to hire even you know bus drivers you know custodians and you have to be competitive so uh
034that those expenditures are outpacing uh the revenues and we're continuing to fund our construction uh we have three and a half million dollars of our revenue bonds and we also fund about two million dollars uh from our operated operations to for construction projects that you know goes to the fund balance and that helps brian does his construction projects right now we're using most of it most of the funding is going towards our revenue bonds but when that funding goes away he will obviously need those funds to do other other projects and that continues to grow at the pace of cpi so our goal we didn't used to increase that funding but uh you know when bruce law started he wanted that increase to be tied to cpi so we look at the entire six million
035dollars number or 5.7 we grow it by cpi every year so as you can see that in other financing sources it's going to continue so and our revenue bonds is a fixed payment of three and a half million dollars so we'll continue to add more money to our our capital projects so yeah so uh with with that in mind uh we don't have a lot of retirements in fr 26 so um that's why as you can see that uh our revenues in 27 28 29 you know i'm um i'm projecting two and a half percent of cpi the reason you see 2.7 is because we get some new growth because because of new property development and then our expenditures are again continuing to outpace uh our revenues i have some assumptions built in because we
036don't have uh our da contract only goes for three years so i have to have certain assumptions for certain groups of what they would look like but that can change based on negotiations so yeah as you can see that um our deficit will continue to grow because of low cpi number and our projected year on fund balance uh is projected to be at 33 by um fx 29 so our uh by fx 28 we're not going to meet our we're not going to be compliant with our board policy of fund balance of 40 to 50 so happy to answer a question any thoughts feedback so we talked about this in the finance committee the reason for bringing this to the board is tonight is that um actually you know the the work that the buildings
037do the students select courses and then we have to do sectioning and sectioning then drives staffing and that's a staffing recommendation we bring to the board in march that starts in february this is really kicking off the staffing and budgeting process so this is the reason that we wanted to put this in front of the full board and have this full discussion because as ollie said because of the ppo renewal if we were just looking at fy 25 we could say yeah good news folks we're done fy 25 and you know i write off into the sunset but then the problem is next year the superintendent first year is looking at a deficit i don't know how you work in your in your household but in mine if we know we have a big expense
038coming we don't wait until it's there and try to sort it out we will i want as much runway as possible for uh uh pay for taking care of an expenditure and i think this is analogous to that you'll notice in the revenue ollie's talking about his his uh revenue assumptions but the expenditures are what they are and and this is why we're we are in this deficit budget situation because our the rate of expenditures is outpacing the rate of revenue and so this is why i think we want to i i think we should be solving for fy 26 this year when we have 22 retirements and so that next year the first job of the new superintendent is not to have to make all these cuts um it's not just for that though
039i mean that you know that that that's me personally i mean i feel like i really want to do everything i can for the next person but that's my personal thing just from a management perspective this is i think this is good government i think this is good management but this is going to be hard you know as we were talking about the the reduction slight reduction in student enrollment it's not like we're just going to say oh student enrollment is dropping off and so there will be far much less need of ft it's not going to work like this is going to be really hard work but before we start doing that this is the conversation we want to have with the board do you agree that we should be trying to work on
040the fy 26 deficit this year meaning we're going to have a surplus this year but it's with the idea that next year when we have far fewer retirements it's going to be a lot easier to to cope and we definitely appreciate because this really does go to a core board role i mean we have a responsibility to the health of this district beyond our terms to leave it in better shape or in decent shape for those who fill our seats in the future and this is this information is central to our role in approving a budget and making ultimately being the people who have to vote on if there are ever rifts and the like yeah this is absolutely central to our role so we really do appreciate the detail that goes in and thought
041that goes into it and these assumptions you know are these projections are as good as what assumptions we're using so you know we're using two and a half percent investment if investment stays at four percent then or cpprt is three million four million dollars you will see surpluses but we don't know that we're being conservative and we're in line with what other school districts business managers are using those assumptions so we could make the projection look really good and balance it but that's just you know just just bad practice yeah absolutely and i would argue that we should not be relying on interest income and cpprt to balance the budget we should make our operating expenses match our operating revenues and and work like that so that and you know because the day is going
042to come when we're not going to have you remember the day of 10 basis points a basic rule of government finances you don't rely on one-time events the city of chicago has done that and yeah it's in super shape yeah so yeah we absolutely shouldn't and our intention you know i want to thank ali and i think i thank them at the finance committee but they worked earlier this year than previous years to make sure that we have a budget as as precise as possible for fy25 obviously the budget for fy24 is is accurate but making sure that everything going over line by line so that when we are making decisions we know that um the numbers that we're are using are right the second thing is just to remind the board you know we
043we have started bringing to the board uh licensed staff recommendation non-licensed staff recommendation the the non-personnel budget comes when the when the tentative budget comes but all those things need to come together because we got to pay for it all we love the fact that we have a dea contract that is competitive we think that's really really important and now we have to pay for it we have to you know while we are being able to compete with these school districts in a very very tight labor market for um teachers and the labor market i would suggest for really good teachers teachers is even tighter but we have a contract allows us to compete for them but now our responsibility to our taxpayers is to live within our means and pay for um pay for
044this great education we provide one of the exercises we did was josh and i looked at every single salary line to see if there's any fluff and we spent a couple of weeks doing that and just just so you all know that fy23 we did the same exercise and our budget and actuals were our actuals were by 99.87 percent of salaries so there's not a lot of fluff or contingency that we can find and obviously if you can find it that's good so we don't have to solve for that but yeah we we i mean there are assumptions too you know there's fixed costs it's very low cost but you know we're we're pretty accurate in our in our salary budgeting which is 80 percent of the cost so well to be clear they do
045this every year it's not like this is the first time thing it's just that this year yeah they did it in the fall correct yes so that when we are working on these things we know because it if you know we you know in a budget this big if we're off a couple hundred thousand dollars a day but we can't afford that we need to be very very precise because of the decisions that we're um we're going to making or recommend this is we're going to be recommending to the board i should say so solving for um fy26 at the same time does that through a waterfall effect make sure that we're solving then for 27 28 and 29 or are you really just looking at this year and the next i think right now
046five years is is a long time i mean in order to solve for five years you want to solve it then you have to cut like three three three point six million dollars there are a lot of unknown factors you know we don't know what the cpi is going to be like next year which will maybe determine the average of next few years so it's always good to at least look at when you were solving it the next couple years and then you know we we have this exercise again every year rather than just hey solving like three and a half million dollars i mean that requires i mean then you're going to be cutting a lot of you know 80 percent of your budget is salaries and benefits right you're cutting meat just looking
047at next couple years it would be a safe bet okay so i think i think your question i think was will the changes for 25 and 26 have an impact on 27 28 29 yes yes i mean it would be definitely won't solve it but it would degree it'll have a positive impact but a lower deficit a lower deficit lighter red a lighter red but it's still yeah right and you know once those cpi numbers are known maybe cpi is three percent and maybe you know insurance correct you know exactly so that's why you want to just look at fr 29 at the well let's just eliminate 3.6 million dollars and hey you'll take care of the next five weeks uh they'll just mean a lot of cuts and our board yeah our board policy
048is 40 percent for the fund 40 to 50 percent yes which is in line with a lot of north shore school districts um you know some districts in dupeche county are like 20 25 percent but you know it's a philosophy that if you lose your job would you rather have three months of pay or six months of pay and a couple of them during covid really took that down but now they're trying to get those back up and that's another big thing right so that 50 helped us because we spent a lot of money during covid or other school districts did not have any funds to rely on you know we hired multi-intervention staff and so i mean that's why you have a fund balance that's why you have high reserves so well they've been
049setting that aside though if you if your revenues don't match your expenditures you have a problem you have a problem whether you're at 25 40 doesn't matter we've got a problem if revenues and expenditures aren't matching right and districts with a low fund balance the districts that would run out of money in two years then that's like really drastic cuts so at least here we're looking at planning our fund balance is dropping so we can you know we have enough time to solve our deficit because of that fund balance and also going back to what we saw the previous slide then we don't have to look at those retirees and say we're not filling like we have that ability to do to keep those classes and keep those things and do what we need so
050before we get to work and this is you know it's always a very compressed timeline and it is it is arguably the most important thing we do because we're making decisions about the instructional program and and the resources that we're going to be providing our students and it's also the most expensive thing that we so these two things come together like boltron and this is a really really really big important task that we're about to embark on so i just want to make sure that as we're trying to do more than solve for fy 25 that that makes sense or if we're not correct then let us know now no i mean this district's job and its obligation is to do the best it can for its students and it expresses that and its desire
051to provide the means for every student to reach their potential and that means having a rich curriculum it means having support appropriate supports for students it means having extracurriculars and activities in which they can be engaged and that takes that takes that takes commitment and it takes money and we can the last thing we can ever do and hopefully that the never never the thing that we can never do is to change that that being said i perceive that you've asked a direct question which is should you try to solve for 26 and i believe that you should yeah i think it's solving for 26 also sets a direction it doesn't solve for 27 but at least sets a direction now ali thank you to you and your team you do a thorough job every
052year on this uh and i know you work your team works long hours to come up with these and take spends puts a lot of thought into the projections and the assumptions and during my time on the board it's amazing how accurate you've been all typically so thank you yeah and the next up we have the external audit for fiscal year ending 2023 after rick's preview in the finance committee report we now get more detail and i assume that's ali again right we do we do have uh ron can you go on that audit or can you give control to nick cavalieri we have nick cavalieri from uh baker tilly he's actually presenting remote uh he lives in july i didn't want to drive yourself um uh nick uh you there yes i am can
053you hear me yeah so nick is our nick is a partner uh baker tilly so nick we're gonna do a really summarized version of it uh of the audit so absolutely there are questions please for you to ask i think i believe you guys can see my presentation um i'm going to just give you an abbreviated version of what we discussed at the finance committee so i might skip through a few slides but you know towards the end if there's any questions that you'd like to ask i'm more than happy to talk as detailed as your questions are um i'm pleased to let the board know that our our audit procedures were completed and our reports on the district's financial statements were issued and dated december 1st of 2023 the scope of the district's financial
054statement audit is is fairly robust we render assurances on the annual comprehensive financial reports the illinois state board of education annual financial report form the consolidated year-end financial report it's a document that the grant accountability transparency unit requires all school districts submit there is a schedule of expenditures for federal wards referred to as a sifa it's a required schedule if you have a single audit performed we render a report on internal control over financial reporting and then we also do conduct a single audit which is a federal compliance audit over the use of federal award dollars so the results of all of our audit procedures rendered unmodified audit opinions on the annual financial report the the act for the illinois state board annual financial report the consolidated year-end financial report and the schedule of expenditures
055of federal awards an unmodified audit opinion is the highest level of assurance that you can receive from the external auditor that the financial statements are presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles you do not have any scope limitations and our ability to conduct our audit procedures and we believe that they're materially accurate i won't go into the the actual schedules in the annual comprehensive financial report i do have those in my slides i'm happy to take any questions on them but we did discuss them at great length during the finance committee meeting so i'm going to just advance through these few slides um i want to go over the results of the single audits the district expended over seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in federal awards approximately 2.9 million dollars as a result
056of that we were required to audit the special education cluster commonly referred to as the idea programs and that was about 1.4 million dollars of federal award dollars that were expended we covered about 50 percent of your federal grants which meets the criteria for your risk determination and we rendered a unmodified audit opinion as to the compliance of the use of the idea funding and we also did not identify any control control matters when we test that to ensure you have appropriate controls for the performance of compliance of the awards so a clean single audit as well the report on internal control over financial reporting is something that we have to render under an audit conducted in accordance with governmental auditing standards if we identify any risks or material adjustments during the course of the
057audit those could be matters that we would bring to management's attention or the governing body and the governing body i should say and pleased to let the board know that we did not identify any material weaknesses during the course of our audit and we also did not identify any instances of non-compliance or other matters that are required to be reported under governmental auditing standards that concludes my high level presentation of the audit process i am more than happy to take any detailed questions as to the audit itself or the financial statements this one's for ali so i assume this year we will you will again be oh be awarded a an association of school business officials international and a government finance officers association certificates of achievement for the job for the audit hopefully hopefully yep
058yeah you've done it every year and again fingers back it's very thorough the gfo is when i started that we started applying for gfoa so it's seven years is going to be the sixth year for gfoa and the as well one is going to be like 32 years you know so i was even my predecessor was getting those awards so i mean this uh oh yeah but seriously it's it's it's it's it's very important yeah this is i just want to uh uh you know uh give kudos to my our business office team i mean they work tremendously i mean when when when nick says no material weaknesses you know audit is clean it's like a six month process it's a lot of a lot of work it starts from may to like you know
059december so more than six months so it's it's just a lot of effort by our team to make sure that everything is balanced journal entries are recorded bank reconciliations are completed on time deposits are correctly coded so there's it's a lot of work so i do want to give big kudos to our business office team is this is not doing those and providing all those materials to the auditors and making sure we're meeting those timelines so also a sign of good internal controls yes yes and they do check internal controls as well so yes yes absolutely so thank you ali any questions and i thanks nick we really do appreciate all the work that goes into this thank you very much have a good evening thank you you too uh then next up we have
060for discussion the annual renewal of the agreements regarding the receipt of developer subdivision contributions and indemnifications i'm guessing this is ali again yes it's to keep it really short this is something we do every year and we do get impact fees from like new developments but this is something we have to file or adopt every year if there are any new developments in unincorporated zones we haven't had one you know a few years rick i don't know if you remember all but yes but we have to do it just in case if there are new developments in order to get the impact fees that we uh can capture so any discussion on this item and then we can move right along thank you ali for paying attention to all those little things that need to
061be done next up we have public comments per policy two dash 230 at each open school board meeting the board of education has a public comment period for a maximum of 30 minutes we are ready to listen and appreciate your comments we recognize that it takes time and work to prepare a three-minute statement public participation is not intended to be a back and forth discussion between the public and the board questions asked during public participation may be sent via email to be answered subsequent to the meeting i have the sign-up sheet that was out before the meeting started i don't have anybody signing up is there anybody in the audience who wanted to make a public comment hearing none we can move right along to our action item action agenda first up is action item
062a review of closed session minutes it is recommended to the board of education approve those closed session minutes that are to remain closed or open from june 13th 2023 through november 28th 2023 as presented is there a motion so moved is there a second second is there any discussion hearing no discussion ramina can we have a roll call please miss newman aye mr neater aye mr pierra yes please mr veraza aye dr elliot schermer aye mr heidemann aye mr strzok aye the motion carries agenda action item b is accept the external audit for fiscal year ending 2023 it is recommended that the board of education accept the annual audit for the year ending till june 20 june 30th 23 is submitted by baker tilly virchow and krauss is there a motion so moved is there
063a second second is there any discussion bearing no discussion ramina can we have a roll call please mr neater aye mr pierra yes please mr veraza aye dr elliot schermer aye mr heidemann aye miss newman aye mr strzok aye the motion carries uh action item c approval of the one-year employment contract for district arts festival euros it is recommended that the board of education approve a one-year employment contract for tamara jenkins as district arts festival director as presented is there a motion so moved is there a second second is there any discussion hearing no discussion can we have a roll call please ramina yes please mr veraza aye dr elliot schermer aye mr heidemann aye miss newman aye mr neater aye mr strzok aye the motion carries uh agenda action item d approve resolution for
064the dismissal of educational support staff employee it is recommended that the board of education approve a resolution for the dismissal of educational support staff employee joshua hinman as presented is there a motion so moved is there a second second is there any discussion hearing no discussion can we please have a roll call ramina mr veraza aye dr elliot schermer aye mr heidemann aye miss newman aye mr neater yes please i the motion carries we now move on to our consent agenda next up is the consent agenda a board member may pull any item for separate consideration does any board member wish to pull an item off the consent agenda for separate consideration hearing not hearing nothing it is recommended that the consent agenda be approved as listed it's up there on the screen i'm not
065going to try to read that tongue twister is there a motion so moved is there a second and rick uh you will be providing us with a report on the bills uh i pulled three bills to get some detail on it small wares with uh craft food food management did that primarily because i wanted to see what our contract looked like um and then several other things including hd supply everything was in order and uh thank you for that thank you very much uh is there any discussion i just had a question on the personnel side i saw i was excited to see that we had four intensive special ed paraprofessional positions filled um how are we on that then are we do we still have open positions we technically do not have any open
066positions but we do have several special education paraprofessionals out on leave for student teaching right now okay i was excited to see two at each building so okay okay uh with no further discussion can we have a roll call please hi hi mr pierra yes please raza hi mr stark aye the motion carries we are now on to agent our final agenda item uh the closing of this meeting it is now 7 59 is there a motion to adjourn the meeting is there a second second all those in favor aye opposed abstentions the motion carries everybody had to have a good evening thank you