Fox Chapel Area School Board Combined Regular Business Meeting & Agenda Study Session (8/11/25)

001Order. Please stand for the pledge of allegiance. >> I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Prior to tonight's public meeting, the board met in executive session to discuss personnel matters and information that if discussed in public would lead to disclosure of confidential information or information protected by law. The board also discussed with council information and strategy related to pending tax assessment litigation matters. Mrs. Anusk, will you please call the role? >> Mrs. Cooper >> here. >> Miss Dad >> here. >> Miss Finley >> here. >> Mr. Frank >> here. >> Mr. Good >> here. >> Mr. Hamilton >> here. >> Dr. Hasselborn >> here. >> Mrs. Lynch. >> Miss Zitch >>

002here. >> Eight members present. Mrs. Lynch absent. >> Thank you. Dr. Railjack. Do we have any guests this evening? >> We do have some guests this evening. Um my first I'd like to introduce Deputy Superintendent Dr. Dr. David Mccommens who's here to present a leading now honor and to introduce also our award-winning communications team. So Dr. McCins. >> Thank you Dr. Railjack. Good evening everyone. Uh it's my honor this this evening to uh recognize our superintendent Dr. Mary Katherryn Rejack. Uh the Fox Chapel area school district Dr. Mary Katherine Meljack has been named the recipient of the first ever refle reflective leadership award from leading now a nationwide organization that s supports superintendence in navigating political complexity and strengthening public trust. The award is given to a school leader who leads with clarity, purpose and

003courage to pause and go deeper. The ref reflective leadership award is one of three inaugural public trust awards. Leading now believes that high impact superintendent draw from three dimensions of leadership of the three leadership triangle. Responsive, proactive, and reflective. These leaders exemplify each trait while also modeling strengths across the full spectrum. The goal of leading now is to provide superintendent with a diverse community, access to experts, and practical resources to enable them to focus on what really matters most, student opportunities and outcomes. The award was presented during the leading now professional learning summer gathering in July of 2025. Congratulations, Dr. Rejack. >> Thank you. [Music] And before we move on to our our next uh recognition, uh I'd also like to say hello to Mr. and Mrs. Ranken. Dr. Railjack's mom and dad tune in

004to almost every board meeting. And I would just like to say to them, uh I I've known Mary Katherine as a colleague for about 20 years now. And I've been fortunate enough to work with her for the last six years. And to her parents, I would say you should be very proud of who she is as a leader, but be even more proud of who she is as a person. So, you've done a wonderful job raising this wonderful young lady. >> Thank you. >> And my last little note, I would also say it is a big month in the Railjack Ranken family. This month of August, Dr. For real Jack will be celebrating a birthday as well as her mom and dad will be celebrating in about two weeks their birthday. So happy birthday to

005them also. >> All right. And now first of all >> Oh, thank you. >> She get up and shake all of our hands. And I'd also like to recognize this evening uh our communications team. Uh when this board of directors came on about six years ago, one of the things that they challenged Dr. Railjack was to move communication across the district. And uh Dr. Railjack in turn charged the communications team which is Dr. Colette Bonnie Bzansski and Jill Leonard to make an impact. And tonight, I'm honored to recognize two communication team members, Miss Bonnie Bzansski and Jill Leonard, to celebrate the dozens, yes, dozens of awards they won this year, not only at a state level, but also at a national level. What's remarkable about these recognitions that they encompass nearly every aspect of communications

006from writing to magazine work, graphic design, and photography. They are We are incredibly fortunate at Fox Chapel Area to have this team supporting our students, staff, and families. Their skill set complement one another perfectly, and we are better at Fox Chapel Area because of them. Thank you, Bonnie, for your attention to detail, superior organization, and vast institutional knowledge. Jill, thank you for your ten tenacious problem solving, never saying no, and for the invaluable role you play as our technology team, assisting our middle school students, and supporting our families, especially at this time of year. I want to close by saying thank you. At Fox Chapel area, we often say we're better together, and that's certainly applicical sentiment for you to be part of our team. Kani and Jill, could you come on up? [Music] [Applause]

007>> Thank you, Dr. Elj. >> Thank you, Dr. Mccommens. And congratulations to Miss Bzanski and Miss Leonard. We do know that they are uh integral to our success and to getting our story out. And uh I think the thing that I should say is that they never say no, but they do use red pens. Well, so um they they never say no though. Uh next, I would like to invite some of our staff members and administrator to uh talk about our lens on learning. Um I guess that's actually in the next section. So maybe I will wait until you're ready to go there unless you would like me to continue. I think we're ready. All right. I I don't think we have the student uh council ready yet because school hasn't started yet. So, >>

008we do not. I didn't mean to jump start that, but we'll move on. >> Keep on going. >> So, our lens on learning is uh today is we have a number of staff members. We have uh Becky Grisbick, the program facilitator of the elementary summer learning academy, along with our district's executive director of secondary education and instruction, Dr. Matthew Patterson. and they are both here to showcase our summer learning academy which took place during the month of July. They are also joined by one of our summer learning academy teachers, Miss Monica Graooski, who will share some reflections about her experience working with our students this summer. So, I'm going to turn it over to our team. >> Hi everyone. As Dr. Dr. Railjack said, "My name is Becky Gresbeck and I served as the summer

009learning academy program coordinator for the elementary level this summer. Our program took place from July 1st to July 31st and our program's theme was a sense of place. The goals and philosophies of our summer learning academy program are mirrored by a typical goals and philosophies of an elementary classroom during the school year. They are to support our students with academic support in ELA and math. To provide direct instruction and guided practice aligned to PA core ELA and math standards, to provide small groupoup instruction and individualized tasks, to boost student confidence and motivation levels through personalized experiences, to enhance learning through community partnerships, and to show growth through pre and post assessment. Our program ran on a very tight schedule. From July 1st to 31st, students engaged in two instructional blocks daily with a focus in

010reading and mathematics instruction. At the end of each day, the students were provided a graband-go lunch. We also partnered with the Backpack for Hunger organization to send food home to families in need for the weekends as well. We were very fortunate to have an amazing lineup of staff during our summer program this year and we had about 140 students participate with us. We were also able to partner with the University of Pittsburgh this year in their MAT program. Those students were able to come into classrooms and observe what the function of a room is like during a session. There were also some supports for our students social and emotional learning. We did this by utilizing a weekly theme and instructing that theme using mindful morning quick checks, daily mindfulness quotes, and also little brain breaks

011that the students loved. So, as I said earlier, our program theme was a sense of place. We engaged in this by partnering with the Ottabon Society who this year provided and put an emphasis on community and sustainability. Each week had a theme. The elementary folks love a theme as you can see there's a pattern there. Um and we had four different themes each week. The first theme was where we are a sense of place. So the students were engaging with maps and learning about the world around them. Week 2's theme was beneath our feet, soil and forest floor investigations. So students were going outside and doing those investigations with their group leaders. Week three's theme was we all need trees. Students got to study and investigate the different types of trees that are in our

012community. And finally, week four, which was my personal favorite, our theme was helping our community grow. We took our students on a field trip to Hardy Valley Park where they engaged in planting trees in our community. Now I'm going to turn it over to Monica and she's going to talk about instruction. Hello everyone. In our primary grades, students continue their phonics work using Foundations Ready to Rise, a program specifically designed for summer review and reinforcement. As shown in the photos, students engage in hands-on activities such as building words, manipulating letter tiles, marking up words to demonstrate understanding, and applying their knowledge through decodable text. These activities help solidify foundational literacy skills in an engaging and interactive way. Upper elementary students focus on word study through syllable work, comprehension exercises, and written responses to text. The

013photos highlight students participating in silos search and using evidence-based strategies to site textual evidence, an essential skill for developing deeper reading comprehension and analytical thinking. Our math instruction was guided by summer impact, a curriculum specifically designed for summer learning. During the math block, students engaged with manipulatives to build conceptual understanding, solved problems using a variety of visual models, and regularly communicated their mathematical thinking with peers and educators. These activities supported both skill development and mathematical reasoning in a collaborative environment. On behalf of the elementary team, we just wanted to thank you for providing us the opportunity to run this program this summer. It's very special for our students, staff, and community. >> Thank you. >> All right. Good evening, everybody. Uh, I'd like to just speak um on the secondary program that or unless I'm

014being told to exit. She did tell me we'd have a signal. But so our emphasis this year for our secondary program was to expand the opportunities for additional students to participate and we were able to do that. So our program goals were to provide students in need of support in ELA, math, and English language development. We also wanted to have a program that creates academic value both ELA and math. Um, a program that promotes skill application through engineering and a program that supports the ESL students both kinder elementary and secondary. So this year we were really focused on u not only teacher recommendation for the program but also looking at available data that we had data from our star assessments data from PSSA assessments and projection data for students going forward. So we identified four

015different priorities for students to try to capture as many students that were potentially in need or would benefit from support over the summer. So for example, our priority one students were invited first. These were students who met the data criteria for math and reading were recommended by their teacher and um they would receive the invitation first. A period of time would pass. We'd remind them and then open up for the next priority. And we did that for about a month and a half to try to capture the most needy students first before we opened it up to students who still could benefit from the program but not as much as uh in need as our priority one students. So we sent out altogether 269 invitations to students over about a month and a half period.

016We registered 62 students just in the SLA piece of this. Another 16 or so students registered for the secondary uh ESL program and about the same number for the elementary program. And for the most part, we were able to capture priority one and two students who attended on a regular basis. We had an excellent team this year. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of joy to work with this experience team. Many of these educators are with us throughout the school year. We uh were able to add a health and fizzed component this year. So students had opportunities for movement and exercise. Um but we were really pleased with the staff participation we had. Very appreciative of their efforts. They came to came to work every day. They made it fun for

017students and was very enjoyable to be with them. So the programming piece of this was a little different than what's been done in the past. So, as I mentioned earlier, the the emphasis was on identifying the right students for the program, making sure that we had data that said these students needed the support. But then we also used data from NWE MAP, which was a pre and post assessment that provided personalized learning pathways for each student in programs that were using in the district on a regular basis, both read 180 and math 180. So, we had professional development for those folks, and the students were familiar with those programs as well because they are also used on a day-to-day basis. And we know they work for students. The English as an elementary uh elementary English

018as a second language program. This was taught by Amy Meyer, one of our elementary teachers. Did a phenomenal job with students. We had 17 students invited, 16 students registered and many of those students came every day. Um their focus was on language acquisition, just experiences with the English language, but also those early literacy skills needed to lift words off of the page. They worked on math and science and had small groupoup instruction every day. Our secondary English language program was new this year. Through our ESL symposium that we had back in February, we met the folks from Arise who offered the Pittsburgh Refugee Youth Summer Enrichment Program, which is prize, and held 10 seats for Fox Chapel area students. We took 14 seats and sent students there every day um to their program. And this

019program is five weeks hosted on the University of Pitts Oakland campus. Serves about 80 to 100 or 120 students from all across our region who are immigrant and refugee students. And these are opportunities for students to develop literacy skills, but a lot of social emotional uh development skill skills as well, but also fun and being able to connect with other students who are in the same situation. And I actually had an opportunity to spend some time with those students and it was absolute joy. There were students from all over the world there and our students were uh shining very brightly. A lot of good smiles that day. So that is it for us. Again, thank you for your support. Um >> we are very happy with where we are. We'll continue to expand our recruitment

020efforts and revi refine the program to try to as many students as we can and making sure what we're offering them is meaningful and worthwhile. So, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay. Okay. Do any of our board members have questions about our summer learning? >> I I do. >> Yes. Um, so the I I I like that your recruitment strategy is tiered and responsive to student achievement. Um, how how does that doesn't I assume that narrows the window for recruitment considerably because you're probably waiting for assessment data towards the end of the year. Like what is the window of recruitment? >> We actually had plenty of data on hand already. So we started collecting data >> um in early as early in January. We had good averages of where students were bit had been.

021We'd already looked at their past state assessment performance. We already knew what their projected state assessment performance was. So, we really were able to make those decisions in January and then start to recruit. We we I want to say we started recruiting in March, April, somewhere in that area. We'll start even earlier this this next year. >> Yeah. Great. Thank you. >> Those elementary curriculums, ones that have been used in the past, I don't think I've heard them mentioned before. The elementary curriculums like foundations for summer were those ones used in previous years. >> Yes, foundations has been around for >> well it was a particular summertime pack not just you said >> summer impact was implemented two years ago. >> Okay. Okay. And what was the math one >> at the secondary? >> No

022at elementary. >> It was also summer impact. >> Okay. >> August. I'm very excited about the um English language learners program that you implemented and I I commend you. I think that's great and hope that we will continue on that path. >> Thank you. We're really pleased to be able to do that and provide that. Want to thank Mr. Breitrights and his team. They arranged transportation. We know that that was a barrier even though our families had access through the prize academy to public transportation. >> We wanted them on our buses with our drivers, make sure they got there safely and back and that helped uh remove a barrier for a lot of our students and there was a Saturday event that we bust our families to as well. >> Oh, great. >> So, we've

023explored opportunities throughout the future with prize and the University of Pit into talking about students that may not be seeing themselves at this moment in time as collegebound or career bound. >> Right. >> So, some really good things came out of that. >> Yeah, you're you're giving them so many opportunities just with this one program. So, thank you so much. >> Pleasure. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> All right. Thank you. Have a good evening. Have a great >> Thank you. >> Have a great week. >> Okay, so that concludes our lens of on learning. But next we uh I would like to introduce Mr. Ben Skelton. Benjamin A. Skelton is the president of Cyclone Energy Group and Cyclone Energy Group completed a facility condition assessment and a master plan for our district and Mr.

024Skelton is here to present that to the board and answer any questions. So I will turn it over to you. >> Great. Thank you, doctor. >> Uh, it's a real honor to be here. Thank you to the board for, uh, selecting our firm to perform this. We really enjoyed, uh, getting to learn the district and all the history of all the buildings. Especially like to thank Mr. Brickeritz for all his support, uh, over the last year as we collected volumes and volumes of data and sifted through uh, uh, nearly a hundred years worth of facility information on lots of different things here. So, it's been great to learn it and a great team to work with. And uh, I do want to commend the staff here. my my background. I started working in school design.

025I'm a mechanical engineer and uh I've been to hundreds of schools and worked with lots and lots of districts in my career and by far this is the best district I've ever seen as far as the quality of the maintenance and the upkeep on facilities and just the care for the job that they're doing on it. So, I commend everybody on your team for a great job. So, I'm excited to present what we uh what we discovered here. Don't don't mind those. I was wondering the marching band. >> Yeah, it's band camp. >> It's okay. It's good. >> We're getting some accompanying >> you have to speak into the mic. >> Yeah, let me put that up a little higher higher for you. Is that better? >> Uh just briefly introduce you. This is the

026team from my team that worked on the the project here. We have a very talented group of architects and engineers that go through data all the time, run lots of models and analysis and spend a lot of time working on this project. Uh so just a brief overview of the scope for those of you that aren't familiar with it. We looked at four schools in the fieldhouse. We did the high school to middle school, Fairview, and O'Hara. We uh excluded Kerr and we excluded Hartwood be because Hartwood was having a major renovation done and Kerr was more or less recently built. So those were excluded from the detailed analysis. Um I will say I did tour and work with Kerr back in April of this last year uh helping diagnose some issues that the the

027building had some persistence persistent issues with the chiller plant since it got built. So I I did get some eyes on that system and uh things look good there now. Uh again, some of you may not know the whole history of the district, but we spent hours and hours going through drawings and and plans and details and wanted to just kind of put up there like each year that the schools were built. So, a lot of was built in the 60s uh even the 50s and have been renovated and renovated since Kerr obviously being new in in 2019 kind of the outlier there. So I'm I'm gonna give just a kind of an overview example of how schools typically come together. And the high school here is a great example of that, how things come

028together over time. So that long period of since 1961 to 63 when the building was designed and built. Uh this was the original structure and this may not mean a whole lot to you, but this this will you kind of see it come together here. Um in late 1960s there's a classroom addition that got added at the top right. The cafeteria is kind of the expanded in the middle there. Um work go and then uh 1986 to89 they added the the courtyard feature here and uh some more little little parts and pieces but it wasn't as substantial. Uh mostly it was a renovation. So I I found these drawings when we were going through and I thought it was really cool to kind of show you just how the artist rendered this for people like

029yourself. They were sitting in a board meeting in uh 1986 presenting this to you saying this is what your school's going to look like. So this at the time was what the commons was. This is what they called the art node. Uh this is the library. I thought that was pretty pretty pretty artistic. I'm an engineer. I can't draw. I I can do numbers and spreadsheets. I can't do that. I think that's amazing. Um and this is the auxiliary building or the fieldhouse. So that was all done right there in the 19 late 1980s. And then 20201 was a real substantial addition to it. There was auxiliary gym, there was arts, there was math and music uh places. I believe there's some laboratory work that was done there as well. And then 2016 to 2017

030was the high school's most recent substantial renovation where there was a lot of classroom work, major infrastructure to the heating and cooling systems of the building were done. Um, the point of all of this is that since the 1960s till now, some of that stuff still exists from the 1960s. Some of it still exists from the 1970s, the 80s, 90s, and the 2000s. So, the facilities team here has to work with a variety of equipment. Not everything's new. Not everything's perfect, and even the new stuff doesn't work necessarily as good as some of the old stuff does. And that's typical with any type of construction. One other point to make here is like when we look at the 201617 renovation when this happened in some of the other schools uh the heating plant for example

031was updated but they left the boilers that were you know 20 years old and so the while the main infrastructure for the building was updated the main physical plant for it is still really old and antiquated and so you end up with this kind of mixture like I said of really old and really new. So what we looked at as far as trying to digest all this information and make it something actionable was to try to put kind of a a a roadmap together of how this could be improved over time by not just replacing things in parts and pieces for like for like but actually looking at it more holistically. How can we improve the district as a whole going forward? How we can we build it for success with future renovations so it's

032not a big a big deal to change things up? And that kind of starts with understanding where we are today and what we think things are going to look like in the future. So we built this around decarbonization which is uh a a good way to look at things because it's not only just looking at how you use energy but it's also looking at u you know how you use energy on your site and how you purchase energy from electric providers but it also provides a good roadmap and it can be done with u cost as a basis as well as environmental impact long term. The first step in any kind of evaluation, no matter what it is, we we design net zero buildings and everybody says go put solar panels on it and you're

033done. Now, the first thing we do is let's make the building as efficient as possible. When we have an existing building, that can be challenging because we're again dealing with existing equipment, new equipment, mixed equipment. Uh we want to take what you have and make it as efficient as possible. Replace what you have with something that's as efficient as possible and set the groundwork for it. That could be making windows more energy efficient, making insulation properties in the building better. Uh so that when we do renovations, the equipment that we're putting in is more rights sized. It's not oversized. It it can be more energy efficient. And if it's more uh if we're addressing the load by putting more insulation on, we're we're actually going to be putting in smaller equipment, less costly equipment. Uh

034the next part of this is going to be looking at how do we look for the future? uh you know if we're going to look at trying to decarbonize that means getting rid of fossil fuel burning sources on the campuses uh throughout the facilities. So how do we look at electrification? And then the the final part after we do that is how do we generate energy on site or how do we at least purchase that or have a means for offsetting what we're using. This is all in the report that we we sent to the to the board here. But the the plan comes in three phases. Uh it's a continuous plan by the way the the phase one phase two phase three you're constantly kind of reinventing and repeating that but this is just

035some framework for helping uh the previous folks could help with some of the metrics and the math and the engineering their curriculum I think because we want to establish like a baseline for the buildings first that's the first step is to understand where we're at so we don't we can't manage what we don't know so uh we looked at this from energy and emissions how do you get your building energy supplied u how efficient are your buildings And then we'd like to also look at engagement in policy. Uh we don't want this to be I I actually hate doing audit reports because they go on a shelf and they gather dust and nobody ever does anything. I'm really proud of what our firm does because we do actionable things and we help people follow through

036with those actions. But you have to have some commitment on your side to do that. So we put some engagement and policy uh parts there. We listed some actions, the goals that go with that and then the metrics you can use to maintain these goals over time. The first step was to benchmark the properties and that is to understand how you use energy today. And so we looked at each facility. Um this is just a combination of all the different schools. I know it's a little bit hard to read in the eye chart, but there's the different schools, but you can't guess which one uses the most energy. This is electricity. Uh this is the high school here that we're in. And then everything else is a much smaller facility for the most part and

037they use relatively similar energy. This is from the calendar year 2024. And same thing for natural gas. As we look at this, if the months here at the bottom, this is winter, summer, winter. When we're looking at data like this as engineers, we're saying, well, what's an anomaly here? What doesn't make sense? What shouldn't be there? And you know, we say, well, why is there a lot of natural gas consumption in the summer? you we see it goes down, but it's still about a third of what it was last winter. What why is that there? And we look at that and try to identify what inefficiencies are causing that. And in this case, it's mostly because we're using reheat coils in buildings that are partially occupied, but they're occupied in the summer. And then we're

038making domestic hot water that nobody's really using. So there's some waste streams that we're trying to identify through this process. Uh what we did is normalize your gas and electric utilities in common units or a common metric to kind of show what you're using more of. By and large, the top is your natural gas consumption and the orange oops giving away the punch line. Um the orange top is the natural gas. Electricity is the bottom line. So you're about 67% on average natural gas consuming. So when we look at decarbonization, there's things called scope one, scope two, and scope three is how we classify it. Scope one are things where you're looking at your site where your facility is and what kind of carbon emissions do you have there. That's from direct firing or burning

039of fossil fuels, natural gas with some diesel and some gasoline is are your three major scope one emissions. Scope two emissions are things that come from the grid. So the electricity source that you're sourcing your energy from, what's its mix of renewable versus carbonri? Um, so we put these in common metrics because your your scope one is going to be in orange there. We want to try to reduce that as much as possible. Plus, it's going to save you money. Now, when we put this in cost metrics, you see why you have natural gas on site. Natural gas is much less expensive. And this is this is just it's market based things, right? your electricity you you purchase through a consortium. Your natural gas you're purchasing from the utility. The uh the units that I

040just showed before by cost one unit of electricity is 1/4 of the cost of one unit of natural gas. So you can use four times as much natural gas as far as a unit per energy to by cost to get to the electric number. So electric's going to win out and be uh you know or natural gas is going to win out as your heat source because it's going to cost a lot less. At least right now it is. When we benchmark the buildings, we put everything into a platform called Energy Star portfolio portfolio manager which is administered by the United States EPA. And this is a thing that allows us to compare your schools to other schools of similar size, use, and function in the same climate area. It doesn't say that it's uh

041you know the Catholic school down the street. It doesn't give you that kind of level of detail, but that information gets kind of baked in into the the data. And it gives you a bell curve of zero to 100 where you know 100 is your best, zero is your worst, and anywhere 25 to 75 is a pretty happy place to be. Uh you can see here the energy star scores rank pretty low. Uh I want to make sure this is pointed out that this is not a representation of how the equipment here is operated. It's not a representation of maintenance or lack of maintenance or lack of care. This is very much a sign that this facilities team is handcuffed and does not have the ability to control the energy consumption of this these buildings.

042And that's what we saw predominantly through our evaluation is that there's a combination of old obsolete equipment that is very wasteful that didn't get replaced in previous renovations as well as the control systems that control that equipment are very limited. just control main plant systems, but not the ancillary things downstream that actually control the main systems. So, they don't have a lot of visibility to see when something's not working. They don't have the ability to to to make a lot of changes to control things uh to be more efficient and save energy or set things back without causing comfort issues. So what we did to try to give you some sense of like what what could happen if we could make some improvements on these scores, what would it take to get to a a

043score of 50 or a score of 75 on this? Score 75 is certifiable as like a high performance building. Uh it it actually doesn't take that much in most of the schools. It was no more than you know 30% energy savings, which I know sounds like a lot, but it's really not. when we look at the systems that you have in the the different buildings uh and then we put some cost to that of what you would actually get in a cost reduction in today dollars based on what you're paying in bills um in this column. So for instance if we were to save 20% at Fox Chapel High School, it's going to save this school $170,000 per year. That's pretty real money. And then across all of these other ones, it's it gets more.

044Even though it's a 40% savings in energy, gas and electric only, is $265,000 a year. These are very attainable percentage savings. Uh so this is kind of looking at the phasing plan that we're presenting right now and what you know that looks like. So in the phase one that I'm presenting where we're just looking at some of the upgrades, 20% is a very reasonable savings target based on what we found. 40% with some more major renovation stuff. And then once you kind of get past that, you're looking at how do we make big future changes? How do we electrify? How do we u generate power on site? Things of that nature. We put things into a carbon footprint to to to help evaluate it. These numbers don't mean a lot. So we put an equivalency

045column here to kind of give you some kind of scale of how much carbon is actually being used on site and purchased through the utility grid. Um, and so the high school is a great example because it's a big number, but you know, this is equivalency is the same as driving a car. 7.5 million miles per year is what just this school uses in carbon emissions. It's big number. So the the carbon accounting is phase one. We got to know what you have. Same with the energy benchmarking. They're all really the same thing. They're they're actually calculated the same. We're not talking necessarily about embodied carbon. So that's the carbon that goes into the bu materials, the products and actually physically building the building. Uh in the life cycle of a building that the embodied

046carbon is actually the most carbon the building will ever use to build that building and tear it down is the most. The operational carbon which is the electricity and gas use doesn't compare to that. It's it's much smaller number. So the longer you can keep a school in service and run it effectively and efficiently and keep your operational carbon down, you're actually helping with your decarbonization uh plan. And then transportation does count into that. The district doesn't have a lot of uh uh owned uh vehicles or anything like that, but we did put that in the report some recommendations. But once you've kind of done that, like I said, you reduce get energy efficient. The positive impacts are on-site renewable energy or some kind of carbon offset, which is something that will not happen here.

047It's something that's usually purchased. And if you want to get to to zero, you have to have to have that offset. So key findings across the district. Uh I talked about the facilities team being handcuffed and they really are. The building automation system here is obsolete. Uh it's poorly functional. Um uh has failed many times just since I've been here in July. Uh there's been serious issues with it. U so they really can't do anything other than try to just let it do its thing so things don't fail. And that's not the way it should be. and they have a lack of visibility of approximately 90% of the equipment in this building alone. So, that's that's a big big deficit. It's really hard to operate something when you can't see it. Um, and again, the

048little things, the little devices that control each individual room are the ones that we don't see. And that's telling what the main systems are supposed to be doing. So, one of those goes bad, we're never going to know it's a problem until a teacher complains or someone says there's no air conditioning and it's going to make the equipment wasteful. Uh, so our our primary recommendation, this is a place to get huge savings right away because once you take control of your building, the the equipment's functional, it works. We just can't tell it what to do. Uh, there's obvious things like lighting. Uh, everybody's kind of familiar with LED lighting. This is not LED. This is T8 and most classrooms that we went through were T8 lighting. There's some T12 lighting and even some incandescent lighting

049left. Um there there is some LED lighting in quite a few places, especially corridors and places that have been renovated um recently, but overall renovating to an LED source is less maintenance. They don't fail as quick. You don't get the buzzing noise in the classrooms. There's a lot of positive qualitative benefits to it as well. It's a better general light source on your eyes. There's quite a few areas for envelope improvement. I do commend the district for going and changing windows out in Fair View and and other places, but uh you know, O'Hara is a glass tunnel. You know, this is uninsulated building, virtually no insulation on the roof. Uh very poor performing glass, very drafty building, and uh you know, something like that, you're just fighting against nature with your equipment. It's doing the

050best it can to keep people comfortable, but you're you're really kind of just wasting a lot of energy to do so. So making envelope improvements to a place like this can make a big difference. And I talked one of the the clear things we first saw was a lot of obsolete boilers, stuff that that's over 25 years old that they don't make parts for. They're if something fails, you're going to be down a boiler for a while because a lot of times they're going to have to custom make the parts to get them to you. Uh they're heavy maintenance. And this example here on the right, this boiler on the right is from 2016 renovation of the high school. It has lots of failures. It's hard to get parts for. They have to go directly

051to the manufacturer to get parts. It's it not all boilers are that way, but unfortunately this one turned out that way. Um, and so while you have kind of a new and an old, as I mentioned, sometimes just don't work well together. Uh, this plant is very inefficiently designed. It was actually redesigned in 2016 to be efficient, but the way it got laid out and imple implemented ended up not being energy efficient. this could be much simplified into a much more reliable and very in very efficient system. Uh there's similar systems at Dorsyville and O'Hara to this where there's obsolete equipment. These are very straightforward projects that will result in pretty immediate savings and very large large portions of what you saw in our um towards our 20%. Same with the domestic hot water heating

052systems. This is an antiquated way of designing boilers uh for heating water. You don't use that much domestic hot water. You have lowflow fixtures in bathrooms. Hand washings virtually no hot water. You've got your kitchen. They have booster pumps and booster heaters. Dishwashers have their own. You don't need a giant tank full of hot water today. And you have it all year. And you're constantly heating that 24 hours a day to keep from getting bacterial growth and Legionella. Across the district, our recommendation was to look at getting rid of tank style water heating and putting in point of use or instantaneous electric hot water heating. And there's also life safety systems like these generators here that are ones original to the building. These these are things that if there's a problem, you want the lights

053to come on for people to safely evacuate and elevators to respond. And if the generators aren't working, that's a problem. So there's a few examples of this. I know it's been on the on the agenda here, but um we did see quite a few things that are just at the end of the life. they need to go. When we looked at phase two of the plan, now we're looking at m more systemic issues changes. So for we're talking about boiler plant, that's not a whole system change. We're talking about just simplifying what you have there to get very real energy savings and set the the building up for a good future. When we look at this now, we're looking at more uh technology changes. How do we prepare for future electrification of systems? Uh, you

054know, some some people might say, "Well, hey, you're you're recommending decarbonization, but you're putting boilers back in." Uh, good question. Yes, because those boilers are going to last you 15 to 20 years. They're going to make an immediate impact on your carbon footprint, and the technology isn't there for efficient electric uh my champion moment. There's the technology is not there right now for efficient electric heating. Uh, but so, but it's coming and I'll show you that. Uh, one thing I wanted to point out, there's aircooled chillers here and uh, most most of the schools have the same model of aircooled chiller. This particular model's been not even 10 years old and it's got problems. It's I call it a lemon. Um, they've had over $100,000 of repairs just at this school in the last nine

055years. Uh, with most of that coming recently. So, it's the same make, model, vintage at the other schools. Uh, I expect that to happen there. This is something that we don't say replace today, but it's not something to wait for the end of the useful life at 30 years. Do it before then because it's going to be a real cost to the school district. And then the final phase is really um the most complex part of it is like looking at how do we generate energy? How do we look at next phase technologies on site? And uh again, decarbonization is getting rid of this pipe. You don't want this big old yellow natural gas pipe coming into your schools. U so when we look at kind of that scope two emissions like where you're getting

056your power from and what how dirty it is with carbon uh this is from the energy information administration from last a report last year u showing what the projections are by 2015 for growth. Renewables outpace any other source of generation on the on the grid which is promising. Uh you know natural gas shrinks a little bit stays where where it is. It's a relatively carbon uh less compared to the bottom coal which we see almost eliminated by 2050. So your scope two are going to go down naturally just through grid emissions going down. But you using less electricity also helps. So we did look at the challenge of putting renewable sources in your buildings here. We looked at every single school, not just the four that we had in our scope. We looked at all

057six and we did some detailed modeling to determine where solar panels could go. And we looked at three different types, putting them on the roof of the building. I'm just going to show you the high school. The rest are in the report. Uh putting them in carports out on the parking lot and then also ground mount systems which we couldn't find any areas that were suitable that weren't being used for playing fields, parking or anything like that where we could put it on any of the schools that could generate meaningful electricity. So really we came down to carports and roof mounted solar. Um, a lot of detail goes into this because there's investment tax credits, there's solar credits. I think I got that on one of the slides here coming up. Um, but when we

058looked at it, the the cost here is a million. So, for instance, the high school, if you did everything I just showed you, it'd be about $3.2 million to install that. The question is, is it feasible? We're not structural engineers and we did our best to kind of an analyze what the feasibility of generation is and how much you can produce. Um, but roof mounted is tricky. We've got to be able to put five to seven pounds of additional weight on these existing roofs that were put in those different hodgepodgees of additions and renovations over time. Um, and it's likely that most of the roofs can't support that additional weight. U, generally what we suggest is when you're doing a major renovation, have that evaluation done and if there's upgrades that can be done, that's

059the time to do it. So, if there's structural work that needs to happen to a roof, that's going to be the time to do it. your best bet is to do solar uh on the roof. It's going to be the least cost um method of getting generation on your buildings. The problem with the carports is the um economics on them don't pay back very well because you have to get the structure to support it. It has to support snow and ice and all of that. So you're you're actually building structure like you would have to do on the roof. So, if we a good comparison on the roof mount is if we did have to do structural work to the roof, it would actually come in economically more like what we see in the car

060ports, which um back here, I know it's hard to see from from your vantage point here, but like the rooftop without any structural work was 14-year payback after incentives and after tax credits. And the carports were 22 years, which solar panels designed for about 25 years before it starts losing its uh ability. degradates. It doesn't generate as well anymore. So once you get those paybacks over 15 years, it's kind of hard to justify the project from a economic standpoint. And this is with some pretty heavy incentives. the included uh these these were the tax credits, the federal clean energy investment tax credit, um solar alternative credits or SREx, which is a fairly new thing that can get a little bit bookkeepy, but it the math on it is pretty easy. And then the Pennsylvania solar

061for schools program is a very nice uh method. We have a lot more detail on the economics of these. Um, for example, I put this in the presentation. We'll skip over it now for math's sake, but and then just wanted us to to point out the reason the economics don't turn out well is you don't really pay much for electricity. Um, your blended rate is right around 10 cents a kilowatt hour, which is absolutely about as low as it gets out outside of being in Utah where it's 4 cents a kilowatt because they make it all out of hydro power. It's really low power rate. you're not gonna have a lot of payback and you can't sell that power back to the grid for much and that's where a lot of the benefit goes away

062from a economic standpoint. Environmental standpoint obviously it makes a big impact but if you're trying to make a business case for it economically it's not going to have a great attractive payback. Also it it's not as sunny as Denver here. Don't know if you knew that but it's it's not one of the hot hot spots for for generations. So that did degradate some of the generation C capabilities. We use a pretty powerful modeling software. It's extremely accurate um to do that. So that's kind of where the sun hours came in here. We also looked at geothermal systems. They're technically called geo exchange systems, but they're in practice known as geothermal systems. So this is ground coupling your HVAC system with with subsurface uh pipes wells is what we call them. They go down here in

063this neighborhood where they're they're they're done in a few instances. I know Carnegie Melon has at least two buildings with geo exchange geothermal. Uh there they drilled the about 600 feet deep for each bore and they could use that to uh try to generate or reject heat. So think of the earth as like a battery. It's charged discharge charge discharge. So we're we're going to put the heat into it in the summer and we're going to take the heat out of it in the winter. So when we size these systems, we got to take that in account. It has to be even. If you have a battery charging that's ineven, what happens over time is your battery just doesn't work. And believe me, it happens all the time. These things get designed that way. And

064we have to figure out how to make it work. Um, so the way we looked at this was let's size it for your cooling load because you saw earlier your heating loads way higher. You use a lot more heat, two/3s versus one/ird. So we sized it for the peak cooling plant and then we said let's make it the geothermal even to that and then we'll trim everything else with some kind of either electric or gas boiler. And so that's where the statistics came in here um as far as how many wells we could do. It doesn't mean it's feasible. Uh you know we need to be able to drill 500 feet deep in this analysis. We need to be able to drill in these potential areas like the ballpark parking lot there. There's general genuine

065cost to doing that. You've got to redo your baseball field. You got to redo your parking lot. You got to redo your soccer fields. These can be very expensive places to do it. In most of the cases where we found eight areas to do it, it was with a field. U the other part is we don't know what's under the the earth. We need to do a test bore to one determine the thermal conductivity to see how much energy we can put in the battery and take out of the battery, but also to see if there's something down there we don't know about. Is there a mine underneath the surface? Do we know that happens in this area? So it it it's generally feasible as far as the area exists to manage the peak cooling

066load of each facility. So every school we had the land to do it. It's just whether it can support it. The other part of that is the economics. It's going to save some energy, but again your electric rates are very low. So you're going to have a hard time making just a payback simple payback kind of analysis on it. um even with the 40% potential tax credit if you use qualifying labor um you know that's going down 4% next year. So it'll be you know 36% and then 3033 that goes down again. And there's always with tax any tax credit there's always potential politics that it could go away. It could be unfunded at some point. So there's risk to to taking these things because these projects take years to develop. And kind of finally

067here to wrap up, um, future technologies, there's two that I recommended, uh, in the report. As you're looking at renovating, a lot of the buildings have lifttop units. They're not off the boiler plant. They're not off the chiller plant. They're standalone equipment that heat and cool themselves. Um, a lot of them have natural gas supply to them. This building has over 35, I think 40 rooftop units alone. Uh, it's a lot. And I know you guys just did Heartwood and you know how many units there are there. There's a lot of rooftop units on this campus. um looking at uh air source heat pump technology which would eliminate the natural gas is a much more efficient uh you know question got earlier when I presented this and I thought it was a good point uh

068you know the the electric source heat pump heats at 400% efficiency compared to a natural gas burner on the same equipment that heats at 90% efficiency. So it offsets that cost delta that electricity has over natural gas and makes it essentially in economics almost even. Uh so it it's a there's a little cost premium but it's very minor. This is a very common piece of equipment and it works in cold climates. There's no concerns of that. The second piece of equipment here is this air to water heat pump. This is an emerging technology. Very few manufacturers make this right now. Uh it originated in Europe. It's not originally intended for cold climates because it loses capacity below uh 10 degrees Fahrenheit and it kind of falls off a cliff around 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

069Um so this technology is emerging. We've been looking at it in New York, Chicago here. Um, it it it it works it, but it it's not yet something I consider a proven or reliable technology. And I don't think I'd recommend it until I've seen it work for at least a couple years in a cold climate. So, but this is coming. This is where the setup comes in that phase two. Like, let's think about let's put that boiler plan in in phase one. Let's get that simplified. Let's, you know, replace the chillers. when both those things die in 20 years then it's this technology be there and you'll have everything in the infrastructure to support that. So last point is where do you start with all of this? Uh let's let's go for 20%. Let's hit

070this phase one target and where do we look first? I I say I see 20% at Fox Chapel High School. Uh these projects are very straightforward. They're very real. The building automation system, the boilers can be done if you had to prioritize over any other school. This is the biggest one. It's going to make the biggest impact to uh the district. And uh again, you're going to see faster economic banking on the project. >> Had an automation on that. >> That's it. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Does anyone have any questions for Mr. Scout? >> Any questions? >> So, I feel like someone else should start. >> Okay, I'll start. Um so what what did you see any um physical barriers that would prevent us from making these upgrades? It sounded

071like you you the fac the the core facilities the space the other than the rooftop like you mentioned that but any other barriers to implementing these high efficiency systems in the in the buildings >> like we don't want to do other construction projects to enable this one. Right. >> No, that's that's a that's a great point. I mean the the ideal thing would be on and the buildings that could use it is the envelope improvements and that's a physical barrier to get to the O'Hara for example to get installation on the walls is hard like you're going to have to tear all your walls out and you know by the time you do that is there actually a net benefit to the building to get to the roof is a little easier to get to

072the walls above the ceilings the walls are really high above the ceilings there that's a place where in the report we recommended like let's try to cut the barriers down on this one and focus there. Um, one barrier to electrification is power capacity. So, as you're designing for the future, the buildings don't have exceedingly exceeding amounts of electricity ready to go put this future technology chiller in. That has to start happening now when you're doing these retrofits is understanding if you're going to bring a new power service in because your your gear that you have is antiquated, which you do have some of that throughout the campuses. some old gear like Fairview, for example, has some very old electric gear in it. Uh if you're going to go replace that, think about that. Think about

073like bringing something in that doesn't have to have all the infrastructure for it, but it can have the supply for it. But that's been those are the two major things I saw. >> And it sounds like you're strongly recommending focus on building um efficiency before source management. Source management is going to be a bigger challenge economically doesn't work out as clearly as the building efficiency. Yeah, bu building efficiency if you can drop that as little and then your source management becomes easier. It's much easier to plan when you don't have as much to source. >> You don't have to get as much. And then what are you seeing in terms of trends in terms of the costs of these the the cost and availability of the equipment like in terms of planning and inflation. Um

074we're going to be talking about funding so soon. So funding sooner versus later. Are we seeing high inflation on in cost escalation in >> inflation? Not as much. seems to be pretty steady. Most mechanical equipment goes up about 5% per year and it it stayed that way last year. Uh despite higher interest rates and all that, it it financing is different than than inflation costs on equipment. Uh the main thing we've been asked about is like lead times on equipment. They've dropped substantially. Now tariff things can always change that, but uh right now we're not hearing too much in the near-term immediate concern with that. Most equipment we recommend is American assembled at least, but we do run into parts of it coming from overseas that can be subject to that. >> And then along

075those lines, what about energy costs? Are there trends that we should be aware of in the next 5 to 10 years? >> Um, I wouldn't expect in the next five years that you'll see really any difference in natural gas pricing. In fact, in the next 10 years, I'd be surprised if it's substantially higher. electric is going to continue to stay really low where you have it. Uh you're you work with a consortium, they're always looking at your economic cost. What they're not looking at is your source. So they're not taking the the mix into account necessarily. They're generally they're trying to get you the best deal for, you know, lock you in for as long as you can with the the rate that they can get you. Um so that would be going in that

076the scope two area where we're looking at where the generation sources are. or if you wanted to have start looking at carbon versus cost that that argument could happen, but I I don't see or forecast and haven't seen any forecasts where electric rates or natural gas are going to change. There's there's no regulations coming out for either of those. >> There are there are policy initiatives that have targeted the region for data center development um which have locally elevated energy costs. Would you be able to provide or maybe is this a part of your deliverable um a payback schedule that accounts that that would give us sort of that that grid view of as our kilowatt hour costs increase how does our payback schedule change for some of these technologies? >> Your escalation schedule. I

077could I could get you something on that. I again >> I imagine the math isn't too complicated. >> It's not complicated at all. It's it's it's for the forecast is the complicated part. Like do do we trust that? You know, my personal opinion on the data center boom is it's a boom. >> Yeah. >> It's not going to be here for forever. And by the time we by the time people start considering generation sources, they're going to move to a different site because they move too fast. So, I think there's maybe a little scare there in my opinion, but we'll see. >> That's helpful. Yeah. >> The system that we use right now for the automation to control all the chillers. Do you have an idea or someone as to how old the system is

078at this point and if it's a freestanding system where anyone can come in and fix it or control it or if it is a um proprietary >> uh it's a it's varying ages and I'm sure Dan Dan can elaborate on the different ages if you'd like but it's >> 25 years or so asent have protocol or proprietary system, but we're working to integrate that in every building as we move forward. So the head end shut it off and ironically today. 69. >> Um, so do all six schools at this point. Are they all on the same automation system? No. >> We are moving to ancri Okay. >> Ultimately, Benny had mentioned that the idea of fixation, but it's sort of like there's a bunch of other things we need to fix with that rooftop unit.

079So we don't want to fix that today. So it's kind of like >> I think things aren't always adaptable in that case and as I mentioned like Dan saying the end use things that really drive the whole building just right now that that visibility that control doesn't exist. So out of curiosity, how long was it before we realized there was an issue in July that things had gone wrong before we actually knew? >> The issue is I mean we knew that there was something wrong. [Music] The bigger issue is over the years we wanted to migrate away from system and it is incredibly cost prohibitive and you need to do it when you're doing comprehensive renovation that's the need to do that would not make sense I use the analogy putting new tires on car

080My main curiosity was just the fact that if like we were away for like a week or two and no one was actually in the building like in the summer monitoring such systems like unfortunately last summer we had the issue at one of the elementary schools where the water the water went the wrong way. Um, and it filled up the basement. Was that >> fair? Fair view. >> Um, I was just looking at overall just we we unfortunately seem to be having these issues. >> That's the reality. >> Okay. >> So, to answer your question, could we go a week and not know? >> No. Because we have checks and balances in place. We don't need the building. We ask our staff to come in check on things like this. >> Okay. you know whether

081there's a leak or you know that's how we found our issue over >> you know I I was curious so essentially the chillers and heating is what we have to look at first is updating those in all the schools in order to I mean where are those in their lifespans? I mean the high school for instance >> so so the boilers in the high school the boilers in every school with the exception of um >> Fairview are obsolete. They're not in good I mean they they're in great condition operating condition for what they're at. I mean, honestly, they a picture doesn't do it justice. It looks great. You think it's great. It's wellmaintained, but it's obsolete. You can't get parts for it. >> Hardwood's being replaced right now, right? >> I'm sorry. >> Heartwood was

082is being replaced with new boilers. Yeah. >> Yeah. Correct. That's correct. >> Yeah. I do I really I want to say I really appreciated the um equipment condition assessment schedule on the back of this. That was really rad. Um because it allows us to quickly like you can quickly the color coding um was really nice. Um, but I do think it it also has a public communication value in so far as how we communicate the prioritization of systems moving forward. One of my concerns um that I that was that was addressed here to some extent but I think is going to be the real challenge for our team um is the whack-a-ole problem where if you're if you do whack that mole now if it's a boiler or an RTU or whatever it is right

083do you close the door for subsequent solutions that are more comprehensive and more effective right you mentioned geo exchange right is a perfect example where you start to eat away at that payback period if you don't have systems you can tie into it if you don't have systems that can benefit from this this source of ground energy, right? Um can you talk a little bit about maybe how you have seen districts succeed in nesting that roll out to maximize the long-term benefit? Like is does this phase plan account for those sort of codependencies of um of improvements? >> Yeah, that's a that's a great point. So yes, that's kind of the the idea of having it go in and do like the boiler plant isn't to do a like forl like replacement. That's what's happened

084in the past. Like like for like replacements, someone takes whatever piece of equipment you got, throws it in exactly the same size, no thoughts put to it. That's not what we're suggesting at all. We're saying look at this from the phase plan and where we want to go as a district and where we can be. So, when I'm proposing a boiler plant retrofit for the high school, having the two small boilers from uh 2017 and the three boilers from 2001, getting rid of that whole system and setting it up so it's just one single boiler system that is reliable, high efficiency boilers. But when you do that, we're repiping it. We're piping it into a place where in 15 years, if we wanted to put that air source water air source uh heat pump in,

085you can do that. All we have to do is connect the pipes to it. >> It's a much smaller project and the boilers go away or if you want to do geothermal like you said, boilers can stay and we'll just run the new pipe to the field. But we can't do that without changing the infrastructure. If we tried to just use what you had here today, it is going to be a mess. You're going to have to kind of redo everything. So doing that now isn't really a big stretch for a project um compared to trying to do that infrastructure later. >> Thank you. So yeah, so paraphrase, we can use this as a recipe essentially for building a more complete efficient completely efficient system over a long term. It is incremental and intended to

086roll out in that way. I appreciate that. Thank you. >> I think that was a point that we discussed with the Hartwood discussions as well. >> Yeah. >> Trying to make sure we weren't building ourselves into >> Yeah. natural gas boilers permanently. >> Yeah. Or Yeah. or natural gas rooftop units permanently, which we sort of did, but at least those are modular and we can swap them out as they fail. >> Can put air source heat pumps in, >> right? Yeah. >> But yeah, just run that. >> I was interested that um I've seen some school projects that that that use battery backup alternatives to generators. That did not that was not elevated in your report. Can you talk about why? >> Uh you don't pay much for electricity. Um it just economics would never

087never make sense. Yeah, we we see that too. Uh in places where there's high demand charges and it can be used to offset that. Uh you don't pay high demand charges. >> There's a few things that didn't make sense to put in there. Uh you know, we looked at even like battery storage with solar. We we had some information on that um that we studied and it just it's part of the final phase, the phase three. It might make sense later when costs do escalate, but right now it's not critical for your infrastructure and you don't use battery backup here or I mean emergency power backup here in a way where it's anything beyond life safety. If you used it for something like like when you have data centers or something where it has to

088stay online, that's when we start looking at that type of technology as well. >> Okay. >> It's usually it's usually driven by demand charges. >> Okay. Yeah. And in that way, this seems tailored to our region. This is a Pennsylvania special, which I appreciate. >> Yeah, Boston. Yeah, we probably went there. >> Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or Texas. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Um All right. And then, um but one of my other questions I I appreciate also the future technologies nod. Um can you talk about how we would vet or determine when air to water heat pumps are ready for deployment? Like when would that when is that how do we know when it's time to look at something like that? >> Ask your trusted consultants. >> Yeah. Right. Honestly, I mean it right now

089everything is in study phase. We've seen a we did a couple installations for Amazon in New York State which was two years ago. So we're just kind of watching it was you know it's for a warehouse but we're watching to see how they perform. you know, they work really well at Dallas Fort Worth airport because it's cooling all the time and it heats every now and then, but it's when it gets minus, you know, we did a design for a high-rise 40s story building in Chicago and uh trying to get it to be reliable to where the investors of the building would buy off on it was impossible. We just couldn't get them to trust in it yet because it just hadn't there's no track record of it running. It runs in parts of Norway

090just fine. Runs in other places, but it's not places where we're getting minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit on a regular basis. >> Yeah. >> Because at that point it if you go down it loses all its capacity and the only way you can do that is design a boiler plant with 100% capacity. So now you're building two separate plants. The the carbon infrastructure that's just not worth it >> at this time. But that technology it will be heat pump technology is here to stay. It is the next generation. Every house, every business is going to have some sort of heat pump in it in the next 10 years. >> Yeah. But airsource heat pumps are viable now. >> Airsource are they're they're viable because they have kind of a little electric resistance coil in it. So

091when it gets really co cold, it runs. It's not efficient when it's really cold. Put it that way. So it runs a little >> supplement. It turns into >> Yeah. It turns into like an electric heater, right? >> That's that's it. What happens on the big units though when you're trying to make 500 tons of cooling or 500 tons of heating is that electric coil is going to burn the equipment to piece you it's going to melt it. It's just too too much heat. So try to supplement. >> So you supplement with some of the boilers. Is that like a hybrid system so that you're a little bit >> Yeah. In that in that case yeah we do more of a hybrid approach of we look at what the capacity is on the equipment what

092it can turn down to and what we need to offset it when it's peak situation. It's complicated in cold climates like this. >> Yeah, >> it is. >> For that two weeks a year when it's >> Well, that's the that's the crazy thing. 99% of your year, you're not ever going to touch one of those temperatures, but we have to design for it because it's going to happen >> and then you're freezing pipes. >> I I know you said this in your presentation. I just want to make sure I caught it. um the cost estimates here and the payback periods as well as the annual cost savings all the money side um are you making the assumption that um current federal incentives are in place and are deescalating at the rate that you had indicated

093I mean like or are we ignoring sort of federal incentives that could exist in those cost estimates >> in the in the estimates I have noted where it's applicable okay >> I listed that as applicable and we had it in a table so that would have been the solar and geothermal options the >> as available but that wasn't necessarily a part of the core the value that you had indicated or quoted >> it it would have been in the t it's in the tables for those for those particular examples when it comes to boiler plant there's not federal tax incentives for changing a boiler plant so those basic projects that we had as kind of phase one didn't really have that applicable there are rebates that we did not consider for those that come through

094the utility and that's because they're really small >> and we don't want you to take that into account that's kind of I always call it the cherry on top at the end of the So >> they're not deciders. They're >> it's not a decider. It's not going to move the needle. >> Okay, great. >> But those so those numbers include they do include the federal current federal incentives which you know if there's uncertainty there there's uncertainty in those numbers >> were they're applicable. They're there and they're in table form so you can cross it out. >> I see. I got Okay. I see what you mean. Okay. >> Yeah. We tried to break that out for that very purpose. >> Yeah. Great. >> Yeah. Thank you. Well, I had as someone who was not on

095the board when when you were contracted to do this, I so much appreciate this report. I think it makes it really easy for someone to enter the conversation later and I I hope that it will be available in some form to the public. We can talk about what that looks like >> and we would just verify with Mr. Jeffrey there's nothing that has to remove. >> My question then and maybe maybe projects and planning wants to chime in what this looks like next. So, how do we make sure we're leveraging this invaluable piece of information and resource um incorporating it into a revised capital improvement plan and what that looks like next? >> That's the question. >> Well, I can share with you what our plan is and and this is the plan no matter

096what. Uh Mr. Bright Crates and I have already spoken over the summer. Uh he and Mr. Perkins revised our Maltoy based capital projects plan as they do on a regular basis because of different projects that have been completed or not completed or need to move around. Um I know that we shared some of that information with Mr. Scoutton who gave his recommendation for that. Um but his report is only the mechanicals of our district. It is not every project in our district. That's not what it was it was designed for. So um Mr. Mr. Bright and I spoke this week and um he's working on editing our multi-phase capital projects plan for the board that includes the holistic picture of all the projects and what our first steps would be and based on what what

097um Mr. Skelton has said as well as it's the same project that that Mr. Bright Crates and Mr. Perkins identified two years ago. The high school is the first project. Um it needs to be done and the cost savings could help fund future projects. Um the other two would be at Dorsyville and O'Hara. And so we will have some kind of a a an additional you know updated multifaith capital projects plan that includes this information that will constantly be changing as we keep moving forward. And then um as to the timing that will be what the projects and planning committee speaks about and as to the funding of it um because after the Hartwood project there won't be there is not enough funding left in our capital projects plan probably for a high school project.

098So the timing will just have to be a combination of of when to do that and and how to fund. So >> yeah, and we look forward to working with Dan and team. I think it'll be fun. And this is a this is really uh this is incredible ammunition for that discussion. I think that's really powerful. Thank you. >> Very nice. I'll pass that on to my team. Happy >> any other questions? I one more thing I just want to say I appreciate um the engagement and policy ingredient. I hadn't expected that as a part of this proposal or this output. Um and I I loved the suggestion to form a district green team. That's something I've seen a lot of other districts do. We have really meaningful discussions about finance, about um infrastructure. We

099have really meaningful discussions in in this board space and in our curriculum meetings, right? But I don't know that we connect the dots together in a separate convening around sustainability. And I think um I've seen again I've seen other districts take that step with a resolution that that sort of calls to action this this formation of something like that. And I would love to see our board consider that in a coming month because I think that's a way that we can really substantively take action um and support the sort of continued commitment to what's laid out here. Um so I'd be interested in in chatting with all of you about that. >> Love that idea in >> the coming months. >> The also to to offer it's more on the engineering and math side of

100it. We did set this building up for benchmarking and that could be maintained by this green team and our team loves to help mentor students. So anytime that comes up, you know, we love to participate and help show how to navigate it. We've got a great team that does that. >> Yeah, our students have already shown incredible enthusiasm for this area. Um I think at multiple build across multiple buildings. I think they're probably one of the most contig continuously enthusiastic groups. So yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. I appreciate it. >> And we have one more person under our superintendent report. It's a busy superintendent report today. Uh this is what happens when you have a busy school district. Um next we have uh Chris Brewer. Christopher Brewer is a partner

101at Dinsour and Schaw and he's going to discuss our bond resolution and timeline and do a presentation on that. So I'll turn that over to you. Thank you, >> Dr. Railjack. Thank you very much. It's good to see you all this evening. Um, thank you also, Mr. Hamilton, Dr. Railjack, for prefacing my presentation, which is now that you heard about all that needs to get done, I can help you get some money to get that done. Um, as you'll recall, I was here back in June before you together with Alicia Henry from PNC, at which time we laid out the idea that it was thought to be a recommended path for you to start to plan the next financing. uh we used the summer months to uh work on the documentation this resolution that I

102have in front of you. More even importantly is the official statement that led us through a ratings process. Miss Polish did a great job as always in representing the district in front of the rating agencies. You have a double A plus rating. Uh and to my knowledge, I don't know that Pennsylvania school districts get AAA's. I think you have about as high as you're going to get. One of the reasons for that is simply that you don't get to control all your finances. Uh you're limited by some of the state laws by of course act one and all those sorts of limitations on your ability to run your own affairs entirely. Even with that said, the number of municipalities that have dripa is extremely limited in this commonwealth perhaps a dozen. So you're up among

103the highest ranks for sure. Uh with that said, the the resolution that we drafted u been reviewed by the administration by Mr. Jeffrey is a standard document. And I think I mentioned this at the last meeting. It does several things all at once and it it has a certain length for those reasons. It authorizes the incurrence of indebtedness. It touches all the bases that the debt act requires you as a governmental body to to you know provide for authorization direction to officers things like that. Certainly a covenant to budget and appropriate and pay back the debt. Um much of the middle of the document is really the mechanics of a bond issue. uh things that day-to-day you don't need to be concerned about but are important to to buyers and sellers of the bonds and

104to your paying agent that handles the payments and administration of the bond issue. And then finally, we have federal tax and federal securities law covenants because these are tax bonds that go out in the public marketplace and will be sold and traded by investors. So you have certain responsibilities regarding your use of the money and certain responsibilities regarding your ongoing financial reporting. All of which is consistent with the debt that you have on the books. There's nothing new or different or extraordinary here. Uh it's just you know borrowing a little more money to move forward. The resolution authorizes a maximum 12 million. I think as we also probably explained last time that is because under the debt act and under DCD's interpretation of it the schedules for debt service that are in here have maximums

105not only in the total aggregate but per year. So that PNC and generating these schedules and providing them to our office needs to leave a little extra space for principal amortization each and every year during the term. Um for that reason we say up to 12 million but there is language in the resolution that indicates that that you're only going to authorize and sell for this transaction the 10 million or under issue that PNC's recommended. For that reason it will it will meet some of the best of the federal tax law characteristics. uh it will not allow banks to uh invest to their tax advantage because of the way they account for their cost of funds but it also uh in the market as a matter of how the bonds typically sell and trade will

106bring you the shortest period for an optional redemption a five-year. So that just keeps you light on your feet if you will in terms of your debt management. So, um, you know, if you like, I can try to emulate the other presentation for about an hour here or so, but I think that absent the band, I'm not going to be able to keep you interested. Um, questions for me on the bond resolution, what it accomplishes. Uh, if you do move forward with this tonight, uh, which we would recommend, uh, I think that PNC believes we should get to the market here promptly. I think it has no one has the crystal ball, but it has been a pattern of some sorts that that Labor Day is a funny kind of time. Uh markets kind of

107shift and move and of course we have a Federal Reserve meeting coming up. So I think they're feeling we're seeing a nice clear path here and they would probably like to move forward. >> And sorry, when is the Federal Reserve issue coming up? You said >> meeting? No, >> they have they I think they're doing their Jackson Hole meeting before the end of the month, but then the the actual quart open market meeting is in September, midepptember. >> Okay. >> So, by and large, staying away from those kind of flash points is sort of what you like to try to do. For example, this week, at least for my eyes and reading, stock market is down a bit. CPI is coming out soon. So, traders tend to pull back and hedge their positions and things

108like that. So your expectation right now is that if uh once we could pass this resolution the bonds will be issued like within days >> uh within the week or so they would market the bonds and sell them. That would lock in your barring rate and costs and debt service. Closing though doesn't happen for another month. That's necessary for us to get the documents down to Harrisburg, get the approvals back and bring it to a closing. >> Any other questions? Um, I guess my questions maybe aren't for you. So maybe that would be something we would discuss at the time that we deliberate in terms of the some of the rational coming from our resource planning committee, other members of the board, long-term financial plan of the district, right? So we can save this time

109for later. Is that accurate? >> Yeah. Okay, >> think I'm good. >> Okay. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. All right, Dr. Rolljack, >> that concludes the superintendent. Actually, it does not conclude the superintendent part. I just want to say uh it's been a joy to get the 2526 school year already underway. We had new teachers uh who joined us for induction last week. They've completed three days. Uh as you heard, the band has been practicing. Uh so we have been graced with band camp and hearing that. We also have senior pictures happening the next few days. Uh, our fall sports are underway and uh, our staff comes back on Wednesday. All of our educators, I shouldn't say staff, we have a lot of people that have worked a lot of hours over the

110summer, but our educators will come back for the year on Wednesday and our students next week. So, I am thrilled to see everybody. A school really isn't a school unless it's filled with activities. So, um, welcome back. And that does conclude my report, Miss De. >> Okay. Thank you, Mr. Jafrey. Is there a solicitor's report? No report this evening. >> Okay. Could I have a motion to approve the minutes for the regular business meeting dated June 9th, 2025? >> So moved. >> Second. >> Thank you. Any questions or comments on the minutes? Corrections. Okay. Mrs. Anus, will you please call the role? >> Mrs. Cooper? >> Yes. >> Miss Dad? >> Yes. >> Miss Finley? >> Yes. >> Mr. Frank? >> Yes. >> Mr. Good. Yes, >> Mr. Hamilton. >> Yes, >> Dr. Hasselorn. >>

111Yes, >> Miss Sitch. >> Yes. >> Motion carries. >> Thank you. Um, facilities and transportation. Sorry to put you on the spot, but Dr. Hasselorn, since >> Oh, I'm sorry. I skipped public comment. I'm out of practice. >> No public comment. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for reminding me. Um, Dr. Hasselorn, since Mrs. Lynch is not here, could you read facilities and transportation? >> Sure. Okay. >> Thank you. Um, oh, here it is. Okay. So, three items. First, school bus driver approval 2526 school year. approve the hiring of the ABC Transit Incorporated drivers from the attached list subject to verification of all required licensing clearances and all other essential employment requirements for school bus operators under the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The administration shall complete the verification prior to the first day of

112school for the 2526 school year. Second, change order number one, Fox Chapel Area High School Domestic Water Line and Service Replacement Project. Approved change order number one as attached for the Fox Chapel Area High School domestic water line and service replacement project in the amount of $24,164. And number three, acceptance of the bid for general construction contract Fairview Elementary School window replacement project. accept the bid of the bidder listed below for the Fair View Elementary School window replacement project conditioned upon the contractor completing their post bid award documents and final draft of the AIA agreement to Moret Construction Company for the general construction contract with a base bid amount of $729,000 and accepting alternate bid number two in the amount of 72,000 for a total contract award of 657,000. Oh, I see. Okay. Total contract

113award of $657,000. Do I have a motion? >> Second. >> Thank you. Um, any questions or comments? I have a question. How are we doing on our bus drivers and how many We're We've been short every year for a few years. So, I'm wondering how >> we're better than we ended last year, but we still are short six drivers and some other staff down at the transportation at ABC Transit, but I know Mr. Bryce has been working with uh the bus company again to get that remedy. >> Okay, thank you. >> What is the what is the retention rate typically like a ballpark like year over year? >> You know, I'd be a wild guess to be honest. I can try and find out for you though. >> I was just curious because I I

114think retention is always the other hand of recruitment, right? you want to. It's a little little a little of both. So, let's maybe worth looking at in the future. >> Any other questions? >> Just a a point of information. Is the base bid supposed to be the 657 with the alternate for the total of 729 or am I >> No, the alternate base alternate bid 2 is actually a negative 72,000. >> Oh, now I understand. That's >> it was a it was a deduction. Uh and and that is really a result of uh taking it from nine panels of glass to four panels of glass. So it's a little bit cheaper. There's less metal. >> They're lovely windows. I'll miss the blue. >> I looked at it twice as well, so I understand. >> Thank

115you. >> Any other questions? >> Mrs. Anus, will you please call the role? >> Miss Dad, >> yes. >> Miss Finley, >> yes. >> Mr. Frank, >> yes. >> Mr. Good, >> yes. >> Mr. Hamilton, >> yes. >> Dr. Mr. Hasselorn. >> Yes. >> Miss Zitch. >> Yes. >> Mrs. Cooper. >> Yes. >> Motion carries. >> Thank you. Mr. Hamilton, will you read the finance report, please? >> Yes. Um, I'd like to move on the uh items 1 through seven in the finance report. Um, and then move on item eight separately. Uh, item one is dispersements from fund 10 for June 2025. fund disp general fund dispersements from fund 10 in the amount of 14,230,245.70. Item two is the dispersements from fund 10 for July 2025 fund dispersements from fund 10 in the amount of

1167,700,000 $728,283.37. Item four is June dispersements capital reserve fund dispersements from fund 31 in the amount of $830,99.96. Item four is dispersements from fund 31 for July 2025. Capital reserve fund dispersements from fund 31 in the amount of 1,999,255. Item five is the finance report from May 2025. Finance report from May 2525 is acknowledged and filed for audit as attached. Item six is the finance report for June 2025. that June 2025 uh report finance report is acknowledged and filed for audit is attached. And item seven is the student activity finance reports for quarter 202425 middle school and high school student activity finance reports are acknowledged filed for audits as attached. I move on items 1 through seven. >> Second. >> Any questions or comments on those seven items? None. Okay. Mrs. Anus, will you please

117call the role? >> Miss Finley? >> Yes. >> Mr. Frank? >> Yes. >> Mr. Good? >> Yes. >> Mr. Hamilton? >> Yes. >> Dr. Hasselhorn? >> Yes. >> Miss Zitch? >> Yes. >> Mrs. Cooper? >> Yes. >> Miss Dad? >> Yes. >> Motion carries. >> Thank you. >> All right. And I'd also like to move to approve resolution 2025-8 bond issuance. Approve resolution 2025-8 as attached as prepared by the district bonds council authorizing the issuance of s of series of 2025 bonds in order to secure funds for capital projects. I move on item eight. >> Second. >> Thank you. Any questions or comments? Mrs. Zitch, you I think this is your time that you wanted to ask them. >> I think it's Mr. Hamilton's time. Um, >> start out. >> If you want to kick

118us off just to I guess maybe like if you could frame the sort of the need for this bond, that would be helpful. >> This is the not the culmination, but the fruition of um a few years of work that we've done as a board on capital projects. uh setting up the cap the projects and planning committee first of all setting up a capital plan reviewing that plan. Uh multiple years of um putting aside money for our capital projects into our reserve funds so that we could fund as we go as much as we possibly could. I think what we've seen over the last year and what inspired from both capital plan uh resource planning and um the projects planning committees were uh both an increasing amount of repairs that we're having to see we're

119seeing in our buildings and with as we heard from the cyclone report a real acute awareness of the state of our facilities while we have invested in Kerr Elementary and other renovations much of the under um under the hood uh workings of the school district are quite old and um at the point of close to failure. We heard in the cyclone report the term obsolete used multiple times. We've heard that we are having to um obtain parts uh or have them made for us for equipment that uh is no longer manufactured. And we're uh we're also seeing um hundreds of thousands of dollars going out the door in inefficient systems. water boiler that's uh keeping water hot all through the year that we could have much more efficiently. We have uh heating and air air

120conditioning systems that are and windows that are not uh keeping the buildings um as efficient nearly as efficient as they could. So in if we kept going on a pay as you go basis, I just think it's it became clear to us that we would have to raise taxes substantially to keep up with these costs or we would seriously risk having to close buildings or at the point of failure because you we just can't run that close to failure when you have these older systems. So, uh, and to fund on a pay as you go basis, even though we've done a we've got a substantial amount that we are getting to put into Hartwood, um, and other projects. Um, but some of them are not energy efficient. They're just keeping buildings, uh, roof roofs on

121and and keeping buildings warm and facilities working. But the efficiency projects are the ones that really we need to accelerate in order to get those savings. This bond will net us approximately or close to two when we're all done $10 million which will significantly accelerate and allow us to move in parallel on multiple energy efficiency projects. That will result in about $600,000 $660,000 um of per year in additional bond bond debt service. We as a district currently have a very very low and we heard this in our previous uh report from bond council a very very low rate of indebtedness. Uh we have I was calculating over the last few years we've been at about three and a half% of our expenditures which is an extremely low rate compared to other districts and are spent

122on debt service. So we have capacity to borrow. We have a double double A plus credit rating just renewed. So we have the capacity. So we also know that there that we've been seeing the inflation and we just heard some comments about inflation running at least 5% on uh equipment if we wait uh we will pay more and we will um also continue to pay the costs of the inefficient systems which also amounts to a few hundred,000 a year. So when you offset the cost 660 and from year one when you implement some of these systems you're going to get $170,000 a year probably at least out in energy savings. You're you're already offsetting a significant portion of the cost of of the new equipment that we absolutely need. I mean we're talking about systems

123that are from, you know, a couple decades ago that are um that we need that are going to need replaced regardless. We might as well get it done soon and start reaping those savings and also have much better building controls, much better, more comfortable buildings. So I think financially for the project I'm planning resource planning um also given the relatively favorable um uh bond climate right now rate climate that it makes sense for us to move faster we really have explored the pay as you go process we're going to have to continue to invest and I think that's an important thing for if I could write a note to future boards whoever was here three five years ago we got to keep making those investments that we have been if we do that plus this

124bond we'll be able keep up and at least until we need a new building somewhere or if that becomes in then we're certainly going to be looking at you know that's a huge cost right but uh but we're setting a path that we can sustain I think so that's my overall summary of where we are >> thank you that was a very good summary >> could I just add one additional point uh in terms of of efficiency and cost savings that came up at the uh authority board meeting this morning which was a significant amount of time of the maintenance staff is used basically just keeping the systems running and uh upgrading would free up a huge amount of labor time to work on other projects um that currently is just uh their their time

125is booked uh maintaining these old systems. So, that's something that we don't necessarily have a a dollar amount to put against it, but in terms of the um the time it frees up for project work internally, I think is very significant. >> Yeah. And I'll add to that, instructional days, like one instructional day in this district is expensive >> because we serve a lot of students. Um and it certainly um it also has implications for health and safety. Um and that's that's something that I take very seriously. So time out of building is something that I'd like to avoid. >> But by instructional day, you mean if there's a failure? >> I mean if there's a failure. Yeah. If we if we flood a basement, if we lose power, if we lose a system that's

126a critical safety system like a like an emergency system, then we're we can't put kids in the building. Um and that >> many has many costs. >> Has many costs, right? Not just direct costs, pocketbook costs as costs to families who can't work that day um because their kids are home. So, um I'm interested um you know because we're talking about long-term planning. One of my concerns um for the why now um problem, right? I appreciate that the market is is favorable right now and that I like that we have a group of people who are experts in understanding when that's when it's time when it's a good time to do this. Um my concern was was okay, we have these big projects like the high school on the horizon. um does sort of soaking

127up some of our debt capacity now tie our hands later should we need to incur debt for a major project? You know, you mentioned major build like whole buildings. Can you speak a little bit about um our long-term debt capacity as it relates to this choice? Are we closing doors by by taking on this debt at this time? >> I I'll let Miss Pellish out. I'll start and then she may be able to give better commentary on that. When we looked at uh the bond resolution and we looked at what the debt would be adding to the debt service um as Miss Polish exchanged right now it would really be more instead of moving things into the capital projects plan for as Mr. Hamilton said the pay as you go we would be moving money

128into the debt service. So it it certainly works within our forecasting that we've been doing over the last few years. It just changes how we're sourcing those funds. But I'll let Miss Polish explain in in any more depth or maybe in a better way than I did. >> Um, no, actually I think that that's really right along the lines when we started over the past I shouldn't say start over the past few years when we've really been looking into this multi-phase plan and knowing the amount of funds that we needed. we had kind of reached a a funding scenario of that kind of you know every year we're going to transfer funds into the capital reserves and then depending on how the priorities were of the projects pay them off when that project comes into

129place and it was really looking to be consistent. It was going to be anywhere from 1.5 million to 2.5 million a year that needs to be transferred into these capital reserves funds and that every year was going to be balanced through the budget on top of anything we were already paying for debt service. what we were looking at when going through this process for these this new bond issuance and then subsequently we could we also have refunding of a bond coming up and any other future bond issuance because this doesn't this won't tie our hands for future additions to debt service because what we were actually looking at is what we're able to possibly accomplish with this bond issuance now is it's a smaller bond it's a bond that we can also refinance in five

130years so while it's taking on 660,000 a year in debt. It's actually lessening that need of 1.5 to 2.5 million every year that we're tr we would have to transfer into reserves just to accomplish these projects because that that cost also included the 5% escalation every year and cost the longer we delay a project. This would actually put funds in our pockets in in in the in the account in the bank accounts, whatever terminology you want to use now that we could really look at to say, let's get it done now where we maybe can eliminate some of that 5% every year cost escalations. get the projects done now and reallocate into debt service what we were thinking we needed to transfer to capital reserves and then probably, you know, maybe still keep transferring to

131capital reserves, but we're not going to have to be looking at that $2.5 million a year transfer to capital reserves. We're going to allocate some of it to debt service to pay down this bond issuance, but then still maybe only have half a million that we transfer. So we're really when we were projecting oh some of those projects we were going to need 2.5 million every year find it through the budget this actually lessens our projections and that we maybe only 1 million each year to cover this this bond and then maintenance for capital reserves fund um transfers. I will say too when the resource planning advisory um approached us to look into this, so this was really an idea that came from our resource planning advisory for a bank qualified 10 million uh loan

132bond, excuse me. The bank qualified allows that refinancing in five years. So we know it won't ever get any more and it's likely going to be refinanced. But the reason that they recommended this because we had we had had really not been considering that um was as part of a multi-year a potential and and all of that's subject to change but part of potentially a setting up a multi-year process to be able to maximize uh on our bonds and our debt service as well as complete capital projects to reap savings with energy efficiency and less maintenance. So, what they were looking at is if before the end of 2025, uh, the board would choose to do the $10 million bank qualified loan. If the board approves that, that would be done before the end of

1332025 calendar year, because in 2026, we are eligible to refinance our next, the 2017 debt. You cannot do both in the same year. So, they can't both be done in a calendar year. So we could do this um bond issuance if the board would approve it and then in the 2026 year perhaps even as early as January. It would it would be yet to be seen but you when is the November? >> So the we would be able to accomplish these bonds by you know the end of 2025. the 2017 aren't eligible until until I believe November of 2026 is the earliest, but the timeline that it allows us to capture is we could as soon as we're able to accomplish that, assuming that there's room for savings and the financials do make sense, we

134could refinance those 2017 bonds towards the end of 2026. And then effectively, if we still wanted to continue trajectory, there was the ability that starting January of 2027, we could look for another smaller $10 million bond issue as well to get us along the lines of that that total, you know, 30 million outstanding we're looking at for the multi-phase plan >> in kind of smaller segments and taking smaller hits against towards our debt service. Also with bankqualified bonds which are calable so they are you can refinance them refund them every five years as opposed to having to wait the 10 years that we did for the 2017 bond. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I I do appreciate and I think this maybe for those listening at home like the analogy is like as you shop for

135debt as a consumer >> you should look carefully at the terms of the debt you're requiring. Right? you read the and there's there's now federal law that requires they give you these nutrition facts about your APR and your payoff rate and all that and what it sounds like you've done really is shop for really smart debt right it's debt that as you said it's a fixed rate but it could go down right it has a it has a narrower refinance period so we don't have to wait 20 years to refinance it right we're waiting a much shorter period of time so what we're seeing is our debt burden right what we pay the checks that we write to pay off our debt as a district are being managed actively so that it's stable over time.

136And I think what I'm hearing Mr. Hamilton saying as it relates to the the capital plan, right, is that we don't ever want to be in a position where we have to get a payday loan, which is the absolute most expensive type of debt you could possibly acquire as a consumer. And obviously, we would never do that as a district, but there are versions of that where we have emergency debt that isn't that isn't as favorable. Um, and I, you know, I think again that that's the sort of rationale that needs to come out of that committee. I think the resource planning committee is valuable. I would love to see a little bit more um continuous like I know this has been a six-month process at least, right? But like I I want to see

137that that leave the meeting because it's smart. >> Sure. And it really has actually been about a two-year process on the resource planning because two years ago they did not recommend debt >> um because we it wasn't the right time and it wasn't the right position for the district. And now when they came back they said this act in fact even our most staunch advocates to not take out debt said this act this made sense to them because it was a smaller chunk. It it allowed the district more control over when it chose to take out debt and also have the ability to refinance it instead of being forced in I loved your analogy of a payday loan. Um, and that's not exactly we don't need a loan for a payday, but but if we

138would have a major system fail right now, we would need to borrow immediately. Um, if it depending on the size of the failure and then you're just you're in whatever moment you're in as opposed to being able to choose your moment. >> No discretion. Yeah. >> Yeah. And the the initial I believe hesitation or trying to veer away from the bond issue two years ago was that we were looking at would it be a you know $25 million bond issue like a large bond issue that we'd still be paying off when the items were being replaced again. And that's why then the discussion kind of veered to this looking at the smaller chunks um because what it potentially could do issue the 10 million is then do the refinancing or the refunding and and we'd

139actually could be dipping it our total debt service back down and then allowing maybe an additional 10 million and and we're basically going to end up keeping our debt level >> with what we're potentially looking at now just with those multiple steps. But this is just the first step that could potentially be the the pathway forward to getting the bulk of these projects done so we can begin to maybe recoup those energy efficiency savings. >> Well, that's the point I wanted to really emphasize is in terms of keeping our debt level and in terms of future capacity is we're at a very low level. This really doesn't as a percentage of our expenditures which is how everybody will look at it. They'll look at how much revenue expenditure how how big is this district and

140how much weight is the debt putting on us. And three years ago, 2022 23, it was about 3 and a.5% of our budget. This will take us up. We were down now, this the year that we're in now, we're down to three point just a little over 3% because that debt has stayed flat. Debt stays flat and our budget grows because of inflation over time. So, we're now down 3%. With this issuance, we'll go up to about 3.6%. But over a couple next couple years, that percentage will come down because it stays flat again. will refinance probably next year if interest rates go favorably, which it looks like they probably will. Um, and that'll come down even further and then if we need to. So, basically the bottom line is as a percentage of our

141we're staying very low as a percentage of our expenditure. >> What's a reasonable range >> question >> of debt? >> High debt. From what I've seen, high debt districts are over eight. Five is a is a pretty good number in the threes as I've seen. It's is we're at the very tail. Very few districts are in >> the lower end of the spectrum for districts in Pennsylvania for our debt ratio. >> I think some of the large urban school districts are in the 10% range. >> Now, there's different pieces that go into that though because you do have to figure it's your amount of your dollars of debt and your dollars of budget. So it's it's not necessarily apples to apples comparison um because >> but of >> somebody could have a very small budget

142and >> it's just >> it gets right if you have a small >> there's additional pieces in there. It's not a straight comparison but we are in terms like comparing like to the the state the other districts in the state we are very low in >> in our debt service. >> Yeah. I think I'm trying to um hold in my mind a perspective that I've seen persist in our community um so that I can help reconcile it with this decision which is that we have raised taxes consecutively for a number of years associated with increasing costs, >> right? And we we use those increasing costs that extended budget, right? which has been very well justified in the past, but we we we use that as a rationale for raising a tax or military, right? Which

143it increases revenue. How come that doesn't alleviate the need for debt, right? And I I I know that because the the debt's always been in there, right? Every one of those budgets, debt has been a very thin slice of our overall expenses, right? It's been this and it is truly minuscule compared to what we spend on personnel which is our strongest and most meaningful asset. Right? But uh you know to my way of thinking it's it's it's not the question of like why you know why are we adding debt. It's actually why are we maintaining it? Why are we maintaining that thin slice? Does that seem how would you explain that? >> So I think there's a couple different areas there. It really depends on a how your debt is structured. >> Sure. Um because

144you know we utilize the wraparound structure right now. That's been what's presented with for ours and it's really to keep that debt level. Um not every district might utilize that. So some might see a very low year of debt service. Some the next year they might have to be they might have to find $6 million to cover a jump in in debt service. you're going to have debt mostly because if you have a project that's coming and you have an $8 million project, a school district cannot increase revenues in one year to cover that project. So, you have to take on the debt to be able to pay for the project and then you pay off the debt. You can't fund a project through the budget. That that's large, but you can fund the debt

145through your budgets. So, that's why you're going to have debt. And and that's really the the the simplest and easiest way to explain it is we're not going to be able to raise the the next phase. I believe in my current iteration of the multi-phase plan is over $8 million. You can't raise that in one year with um with how school districts are constrained. So, you have to take on debt or you have to plan push off that project and plan years in advance to slowly piece those funds in while also being able to take care of all of your other daily operations that go into a school district budget. So, you're going to have debt. You need to have it's actually fiscally more responsible to have that debt as long as it's managed >>

146to maintain. Yes. Correct. Responsible. I think it's also fair because you really are taxing today's taxpayers if you try to if you tried to pay your 101 12 million major capital projects which are very difficult to plan 10 years out in advance and you're but you're going to reap the benefits over that over 10 to 20 years which is we're we're trying to fund projects here that are going to last 20 years but that's how long the bond is. So certain projects that might will that maybe won't last that long, we're going to pay out of our own we are going to pay out of our the the money that we have uh that we have put away. But the longer term projects, you really want to spread out that cost as long as you

147can get a good financing terms and good interest rates you and and especially when you're looking at the this inflation rate of 5% and our interest rate is going to be less than that on our bond on our on our bonds. um it only makes sense to share spread that over so you don't have this big hit to the taxpayer. The taxpayers and the kids who are going to benefit for over the next 20 years will also those budgets will carry it over that period of time and that's much fairer than trying to lump it all at one time or trying to make past taxpayers save up. Then you're doing the projects really slowly and you're only doing them when you're sure that something's broken. And when you do that, this is the other thing

148I think people don't get. It's like, yeah, you and I can wait till our car actually breaks and if it we can't get to work tomorrow, we'll find another way to get there. But if a school breaks, there's 4,000 kids who aren't going to school, right? That is not tolerable. And the systems that broke won't necessarily be able to be replaced tomorrow or next week or even six months from now. It could take a year or to get some of the equipment that we're talking about and the plans and the design. So you can't wait to fix the the boilers at the high school that are over 25 30 years old. You know that you know you can't wait till they're dead and dead and unfixable because then you won't be in school. >> I

149I think moreover it's good to remember that we already pushed things out three years three four years. We we decided to >> we already scaled back the plan and the more you do it I mean which makes sense. origally a fiveyear plan then it became a fivephase plan starting it out and yeah >> it made perfect sense and it and it and it it was it was the right decision and it gave us some more we we re reorganized things and it it was you know a little bit it it introduced a little bit of risk but not I think it was manageable uh and we you know we paid some of those things uh with the like equipment failure and that kind of thing but we've already sort of exhausted that it gave us

150some breathing room and now we have the opportunity to jumpst start that and get back back on track with that kind of uh cost uh that we have to pay to upgrade. >> Yeah, I think like bullet points that should be empathize said louder um for like that we just said like these aren't give us fancier things. These are projects that our facilities would need to shut down for. I think the community needs >> to hear that >> this isn't like this is just coming up now. We've been talking about this at least since 2021 >> maybe and we did push things back >> for the reasons that you just stated. Um and this so this has been a multi-year >> planning thing. This isn't something that's just coming up. This isn't to make us

151prettier. This is to keep kids in school. So, I think some of the conversation has been um otherwise in the community, but I think like, you know, that's the headline. We're keeping kids in school. This has been a multi-year. We've taken the community into consideration. Um pushing back some of these expenses, going well beyond the lifetime of some of the things that we should have, and we have had to pay a premium for some of those. Um but this is the time now that we we need to put more of that plan in action so we can keep our school district running. >> Well, and the level of um thoughtfulness and strategy that is going into what that replacement will be, you know, we're not just going to >> like like Mr. said, put in

152another boiler for the sake of saying we replace the boiler. >> Right. That's a good point, too. trying to make this >> and that's another reason to try to get started now is because we we want to get the the these projects rolling so we can get the planning done. >> Um we can we know when we know and this is both financially prudent and organizationally a necessity is like you need to know the money's going to be there to really get the planning going and uh we want to get this going. Um, and I just I want to thank the Cyclone team again for their great report because that really shown a lot light and very technical details and some dollars on what little things were cost, but also the savings which are significant.

153>> And I I think that's what we what we were hoping we would get when we commissioned the report. And I as far as I can tell, I mean, we'll find out in a few years when we have things built that makes sense. But I mean, it looks it looks great in my opinion. gives us a lot of uh decision support here to um >> to put this into action and um I think the the opportunity is is here as well. The opportunity is also fairly uh it's a timely opportunity like we didn't have the opportunity to do this kind of bond two years ago where it wasn't recommended to do it. So the fact that it's we we've basically been thinking about this and planning around this for years >> now the opportunity is

154here to to execute this particular financial mechanism >> and it makes sense. Yeah. >> Yeah. We had a full conversation on bonds two budgets ago and if it was a way to go or not. So this is something that has been >> and it made considered. It didn't make sense. It makes sense at the time >> and it's this is a different type of bond that we wasn't in the conversation then. So I mean this has been >> we've talked about this at length and people smart people have written reports and looked at things >> and it doesn't stop right like it doesn't stop there. I think that's the other thing is like what we do in our in our committees right and and in public and here and um >> our committees are public

155>> and our committees are public please come to committee um >> but like we this isn't a replacement for the critical evaluation of expenditures >> like every part of the cycle energy group report >> is a is a is a lot about money >> stops with us >> yes and it and we are interested in saving money and that is something we are trying to to deliver value we're not trying to deliver the fanciest things that money can buy. We're trying to deliver a very good value. Um, and that >> and maybe cool this room a little >> and Oh my gosh, it's hot. Yeah, for real. It's really hot in here. >> Way to emphasize the point, guys. >> For those of you out here, >> so I just want to um ask a

156question in regards to emergency expenditures that we've spent over the last two to three years where stuff broke that we put off doing. What kind of money are we looking at? I would I I mean I I would have to go back and look, but I do know in one month alone uh I was listing it for the board and I think in one month alone when we moved from heat to air conditioning, if I'm not mistaken, we had emergency repairs at all six buildings, mostly some of the equipment that you saw pictures of. And I know in that one month alone, we went from 15,000 and then by the end of the month, it was like 96,000 in one month um of and that was the last few weeks of school. So um we

157could go back through and look at how much those emergency repairs are, but some of the emergency repairs are no longer $5,000 or $8,000. They're $100,000, $50,000 at a time. >> But what I'm what I'm getting to the point is is that we set our budget to the dollar. >> Yes. So then we magically have to come up with this money as these breakages occur. >> Yes. >> And with the lifespan being overdone at this point, it's better to stop putting stuff off because we don't really have a choice anymore. So the debt, even though it is a debt, in the word debt, is going to be more beneficial for us in the long run than having to come up with >> 10 million right off the bat when needed in order to fix an

158entire school. Yeah. Anything else? Great points made by everybody. So, thank you so much for this discussion. Thank you, Mrs. Polish. >> And we need to vote on uh number eight. So, Mrs. Anus, could you please call the role? >> Mr. Frank, >> yes. >> Mr. Good. >> Yes. >> Mr. Hamilton, >> yes. >> Dr. Hasselhorn, >> yes. Miss Zitch, >> yes. >> Mrs. Cooper, >> yes. >> Miss Dad, >> yes. >> Miss Finley, >> yes. >> Motion carries. >> Thank you. Mrs. Cooper, could you please read the instruction report? >> Yes, I have a lot. I'll be moving on 16. Yes, all my should have taken a drink. >> All right. Number one um is to ratify the subgrant agreement as attached for the implementation of the individuals with disabilities education act section 619

159between the school district and the alagini intermediate unit number three for the period of July 1 25 through June 3026 and authorize um the execution by the superintendent. This is a renewal of services. Number two is to ratify the education master services agreement as attached between the school district and emerges healthc care staffing inc to provide supplemental healthcare staff to the district effective June 25th 25. This is a renewal of services. Number three is to ratify the agreement between the school district and learn well for tutoring services effective July 125 through June 30 26. Um the cost is stated in exhibit A. This is a renewal of services. Number four is to ratify the school district letter of agreement as attached between the school district and um the alliance for refugee youth support and education

160to collaborate through information and data sharing in relation to students from the district who are enrolled in the refugee school impact grant program. This is a new le letter of agreement and there is no cost to the district. Number five, approve the agreement as attached between the district and Wesley family services for child adolescent partial hospitalization program services for the 2526 school year. This is a renewal of services. Number six, to approve addendum number eight as attached um pursuant to the contractual agreement approved August 14th, 2017 between the school district and Presley Ridge Autism for services to students for the 2526 school year. I'll say a renewal. Uh number seven, approve the day student education agreement as attached between the school district and Glade Run Lutheran Services um St. Stevens Lutheran Academy and St. Stevens

161Academy UDICA for services to students for 2526. This is a renewal of services. Number eight, agree approve the agreement as attached between the school district and phase 4 Learning Center, Inc. for alternate alternative education services for students for the 2526 school year. This is a renewal of services. Number nine, approve the outreach services contract agreement as attached between the school district and the Western Pennsylvania School for the Blind for services to students effective August 30th um 25 through August 2926. This is a renewal of services. Number 10, approve the software license agreement as attached between the school district and link. There's an exclamation point for the district to continue the pilot of the instructional management system that link uh provides effective for the 2526 school year. This is a renewal of services. Number 11, approve

162resolution 2025-9 as attached in support of military connected students and their families. Number 12, approve the agreement as attached between the school district and the Bradley Center for Educational Services for students for the 2526 school year. This is a renewal of services. Number 13. Approve the letter of agreement as attached between the school district and the Watson Institute for Students Enrolled in the Education Center Swickley for the 2526 school year be beginning August 21-25 and authorize the superintendent to execute the agreement. Also a renewal of services. Number 14 is to approve a letter of agreement between the district and the Watson Institute for students enrolled in the Watson Institute Social Center for Academic Achievement in Sharpsburg for the 2526 school year which begins August 21st. This is a renewal. Number 15, uh, approve the service

163agreement as attached between the school district and Alageney Adult and Pediatric Therapy LLC for staff professional development, classroom planning, observation, and direct consultation services um, effective August 21st, 25 through July 3126. This is also a renewal. And finally, number 16, approve the letter of agreement as attached between the school district and the human services administration organization to provide student assistant program services for the 2526 school year. This is a renewal of services and and is funded by the Alageney County Office of Behavioral Health. I move on 16 items. >> Second. >> Thank you. Any questions or comments on these items >> for our software license agreements? Do we um sort of review those to make sure that the privacy protections for students in the original contract still uphold in the renewal? >> Yes. >> Okay,

164great. Thank you. >> Yes, we do review. >> Okay, Mrs. Anus, could you please call the role? >> Mr. Good. >> Yes. >> Mr. Hamilton, >> yes. >> Dr. Hasselhorn, >> yes. >> Miss Zitch, >> yes. >> Mrs. Cooper, >> yes. >> Miss Dad, >> yes. >> Miss Finley, >> yes. >> Mr. Mr. Frank. >> Yes. >> Motion carries. Thank you. Mr. Frank, legislation and policy. >> No actions requested tonight. Thank you. >> Thank you. Uh, Miss, would you please read the personnel report? >> Yes, I will be I am moving on the following eight items. Item one, resignations ancillary services. The resignation of George J. Cavish, physically shift supervisor at the Fox Chapel area high school due to personal reasons. For educational support, the resignation of St. Clare O. Oliver, instructional assistant at Dorseyville

165Middle School due to personal reasons. Resignation of Grace E. Shel, personal care assistant at Hartwood Elementary School, due to personal reasons. Custodial maintenance, the resignation of Rosemary Dres Dreslinsky, 12-month 8 hour per day custodian at O'Hara Elementary School. The resignation of Thomas F. Hartman, 12month 8our per day custodian at Dorsyville Middle School. Food services. The resignation of Sandra M. No, food services worker at O'Hara Elementary School for supplemental contracts athletic. The resignation of Emily Graowski, uh, soccer boys high school assistant due to personal re reasons. Resignation of Amanda Kalin, basketball girls high school first assistant due to personal reasons. Matthew M. Matthew R. Mclar, swimming high school head due to personal reasons. Rachel Reinei, basketball girls program development assistant at Dorsyville Middle School due to personal reasons. The recognation of Bruce Valinsky, basketball boys freshman

166head due to personal reasons. For supplemental contracts non-athletic, the resignation of Jessica L reek reseek best monitor number five at O'Hara due to personal reasons. For the extended school year program, the resignation of Grace E. Shelley halfday pair professional for the Fox Chapel Area School District ESY program due to personal reasons. Uh item number two, appointments professional. Anthony M. DeMarco is approved as a physical education teacher at Fox Chapel Area High School available due to the retirement of Todd Massik. Educational support. Cassandra M. Carlick is approved as a personal care assistant at Fairview Elementary School. Um for ancillary service services, Daniel M. Anthony is approved as a facility shift supervisor for Fox Chapel Area School District. Custodial maintenance, Caesar A. Fabrero is approved as a 10-month 8 hour per day custodial employee for Fox Chapel

167Area School District for probationary period food services. Amber Eddie is approved as a permanent part-time food service employee at Dorseyville Middle School Cafeteria. Amanda L. Ramirez is approved as a permanent part-time food services employee at the Fairview at Fairview Elementary Cafeteria. Supplemental contracts athletic. The following athletic supplemental contracts um are ratified. Jeremy Bennett, basketball boys freshman head. Kevin McCarnney, soccer boys high school assistant. Brad Lewis, golf girls. JB Head. The following athletic supplemental contract is approved. Also, Katie Alier Alieri at Intramural Basketball Girls at Hartwood and um athletic supplemental contracts for the spring season and the high school faculty manager for 2025 2026 school year are ratified and approved as attached. Item three, replacement professional Samantha M. Diamond Elementary teacher at O'Hara Elementary School is approved for a child and adoption leave extension. Heather R.

168Fontana, elementary teacher at Fairview Elementary School, is approved for a first semester medical sabatical for leave replacements professional. Um, Julia G. Arlia is approved as a leave replacement elementary teacher at O'Hara Elementary School due to the retire due to increased enrollment. Excuse me. U Maria Elsma is approved as a leave replacement elementary teacher at Fairview Elementary School. Available due to increased enrollment. Joshua Da Mariana is approved as a leave replacement elementary teacher at Ker Elementary School. This position is available due to the childbear and adoption leave of Carla Leados. Megan E. Sulliva is approved as a first semester leave replacement elementary teacher at O'Hara Elementary School due to due to the child and adoption leave extension for Samantha Diamond. Taylor R. Trasad is approved as a first semester leave replacement elementary teacher at Fairview Elementary

169School due to the medical sobatical of Heather Fontana. Kayla M. Whis um is approved as a leave replacement elementary teacher at her elementary school due to the educational sobatical of Tiffany Hes. I believe that's wise. Sorry. Um item five services agreement middle school athletic trainer. The service agreement for middle school athletic trainer between Foxt area school district and Keith course is ratified and approved as attached. U professional employee assignments. A professional employee assignments for the 2025 2026 school term are approved as attached. Item seven program summer programs 2025 middle school. Anthony M. Demarco is ratified as an instructor for the DMS summer learning academy for steam camp. Clara Barnes is ratified as an instructional assistant for the steam camp at Fairview Elementary School. A Audrey Irving is ratified as an instructor for the steam camp

170at Fairview Elementary School. Dell Steiner is ratified as instructor for the steam camp at Fairview Elementary School. Volunteer athletic item eight. The following athletic volunteers ratified. Emily Kowski for Bowie Soccer High School. The following athletic volunteers also ratified. Um, Jeannie Kirk for field hockey and high school. I move on these eight items. >> Second. >> Thank you. Any questions or comments on these items? >> Just like to welcome so many new teachers. I'm excited that our enrollment is up. I'm um I'm even more excited that we're staffed for it. >> Yes. Thank you. Any other questions? >> Are there any um I saw there, you know, resignations and and and also hires. I I just wanted to know are are there any open positions still that need to be filled? >> There are some open

171positions. I'll let Mr. or I'll let Dr. Marcom talk because we have a couple in a couple of different places. So, >> okay. Uh yes, all of our elementary uh positions. We uh will have one more name we'll be bringing to the board to be ratified in September to fill that position. Um, we did have an unexpected leave at Dorseyville Middle School for mathematics that uh a contracted position that we are in the process of trying to find uh just going through the screening and site process. And then also at the high school uh we have several leave replacements in mathematics. Uh we're still working on filling those. As far as that's professional staff, support staff, we are still looking for uh to support secretarial staff. Uh we have been we've had that posted and

172been going through the process of interviewing and and uh and so forth. Um mentioned the bus drivers. Uh we are still six short and uh custodians. We are actually fully staffed with custodians at this moment in time. >> Yay. Wow. >> Um, athletics. >> Athletics. As far as the open coaching positions, uh, well, we have a number here this evening that, you know, Mr. O'Brien has start has posted and started going through the process. So, uh, none of those have been filled that that we've had the most recent resignations at this time. >> How approximately how many open positions are those? >> Um, I'm guessing that I put you on the spot. >> That's okay. No problem. Any other questions? Mrs. Anusk, will you please call the role? >> Mr. Hamilton, >> yes. >> Dr.

173Hasselhorn, >> yes. >> Miss Zitch, >> yes. >> Mrs. Cooper, >> yes. >> Miss Dad, >> yes. >> Miss Finley, >> yes. >> Mr. Frank, >> yes. >> Mr. Good, >> yes. >> Motion carries. >> Also, um, I also have one more personal personnel information item. Not a personal information, personnel information item. Um, it requires no action for tenure information. The following employees are eligible for a professional employees contract or tenure effective August 15th. That's Michaela Deesca, Rebecca Grisbeck, Lindseay Norman, Sarah Petro, and Julia Propic. Um, so congratulations to all of those. Thank you for staying with us. >> Thank you, Mr. Good. Operations and Cooperative Services. >> No action is requested at this time. >> Okay, it's time for our second public comment. Nobody is signed up. Our Fox Chapel Educators Association, Mrs. Mackin,

174>> I was trying to come up quickly. This was a nice long back to school meeting. Um, sorry, but very important, >> but we have music. >> That was that was a highlight. Um, first off, uh, we just wanted uh on behalf of the educators and the association, we're really excited to welcome our students back. We are also very hopeful that everyone will be able to get into Hartwood to prepare um to welcome the students. We also are very appreciative of Dr. Rejack um in addition to being the recipient of the reflective leadership award. I think in working with you closely through co through the contract process I think it's inspiring for educators to know that you're always asking what's next and how are we going to continue to move the district forward. So that's

175exciting as we move forward. With that being said, also want to thank Dan Break rights and all of our ancillary staff, our custodial staff, our maintenance staff because they work so hard year round as you can tell also with just the maintenance of those boilers, but also in getting the schools ready for us to return and making sure that they are safe and uh ready for all of our students. And with that being said, while it was a long presentation or two between the facility assessment plan and the bond resolution, we are really appreciative of all the work that you are all doing uh to plan for the future to plan for not only safe buildings but uh to plan for a future that's feasible for all the residents of our district. And finally, oh

176yeah, and one more thing. Uh we also are really appreciative of all the efforts especially that Matt Ashley and all the teachers made with the summer programs, but it's really exciting to see the work that the district is doing to support uh our refugee population. and having uh our district actively partner with Arise is so exciting because those needs are you know really uh a lot and it's all hands-on in the district to support the kids but really appreciate uh all of the support that you guys give as well. So with that have a good night. Thank you. >> Okay, it is time for board comments. Um, I first would like to say that our hearts go out to those in the Mon Valley and what's happened today in Claron and uh we our thoughts

177and prayers are with everyone at uh the US Steel Plant there. I'd like to congratulate Dr. Rejack on her award. It is welld deserved. Um, and I'm glad we got to talk about it tonight. And I look forward to the new school year. And, uh, good luck to all the teachers and staff and administrators and our facilities people to keep it all going. We hope you have a great year. I look forward to being at opening day on Friday. >> All right, Mr. Frank. >> I echo the same thing. Welcome back to the students. Welcome back to the staff, especially the new teachers. And thank you to the custodial staff who I've seen working hard all summer. >> Thank you, Miss Finley. >> Uh, congratulations, Dr. Rejac. Congratulations, Bonnie and Jill in back as always.

178You work very hard, ladies. Thank you so much for all you do. And you get a clap for all that. Thank you so much. We appreciate you. Um, students, welcome back. New teachers, teachers who have been with us, thank you so much for staying. Thank you for coming, all of you. and enjoy the next 10 days. >> All right, Dr. Hassel Corn. >> Yes, there's nothing like the first day of school. It's my favorite day of the year as a former educator. So, I hope everyone enjoys that and has a great school year. >> Thank you, Mr. Hamilton. >> I'd just like to congratulate the uh facilities maintenance and building teams on the glowing review you got from Cyclone. Uh that was um very notable obviously um welld deserved. Uh over the years of being

179on project and planning and being um on this board, I've grown an a great appreciation for what it takes to keep all of our buildings running and all the crises that have been managed and averted or narrowly averted or just handled that make it possible for us to be here making this decision about bonds and capital planning now without being completely in a crisis mode. because a lot of those systems really do are past their their prime by far and it's only you guys who keep keep keep it going, keep being in a crisis every day. So, thank you and congratulations on that praise because that was independent and not solicited. >> Thank you. Uh Mrs. Cooper. >> Um, I was thinking during this whole discussion that a lot of the community doesn't understand our

180real facility needs is a testament to the work of Mr. Brick Rates and his staff and the administration really like keeping it completely behind the scenes on the down low pretty much and just uh, you know, MacGyvering things together or whatever you do, duct tape. um but that most of the community wouldn't realize like the real needs we have to replace some big things. So I think that's a big testimony in itself. Um as a parent and non-educator, it is also the most wonderful time of the year and thank you for all your preparation. I look forward to sending my children back to you. >> Thank you, Miss Zitch. >> Yes, I'm also arriving here at the in a place of gratitude. I just want to say um I appreciate that we talk nitty-gritty about

181finance and building infrastructure and that not all boards have that capacity. So, thank you all. Um and thanks also to the admin who put up with our endless questions um and our contractors, etc. So, um that really meant that really means a lot. And I will note that I was at a 5-year-old's birthday party this weekend with a bunch of pre-K kids and all these moms who were getting enrolled and learning how to do stuff. And one of them was like, "How does Jill respond to emails so quickly? What does she do?" And someone was like, "I don't know." And I keep getting all of these like fancy mailings, like newsletters now from this lady, Bonnie. And it's like, and I was like, "Yeah, you guys are doing it. You're the talk of the town."

182And the families that are coming into our district feel that like that's really incredible. And that was totally again totally unsolicited, but like great work. Um, and congratulations, Dr. >> Award. Thank you, Mr. Good. >> It's great to start a new school year. Um, I just re reflect on all of the efforts that happen in front and behind the scenes to uh put all the kids first and do everything uh that we need to uh for them. So, appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you. Could I have a motion to adjurnn? >> Second. >> All in favor? >> I. >> Meeting adjourned. >> That's a good one. with me. >> I will.