001So, um, I'm doing Check two. [Music] 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 this meeting, the board met in executive session. During that session, the board reviewed a confidential student matter that if discussed in public would lead to the disclosure of information protected by law. The board also discussed with council information or strategy in connection with pending litigation matters and issues about which identifiable complaints may be made. Matters related to school safety that if conducted in public would be reasonably likely to impair the effectiveness of the safety or security measure were also discussed. Mrs. Anus, could you please call the role? Mrs.
002Cooper here. Miss Dad here. Miss Finley here. Mr. Frank here. Mr. Good here. Mr. Hamilton here. Dr. Hasselborn here. Mrs. Lynch here. Miss Zitch here. Nine members present. Thank you. Dr. Reljack, would you like to introduce our many wonderful guests tonight? We have many wonderful guests tonight. We're so thrilled all of you could be with us this evening. Um, I'm going to start with elementary music teacher Julie Pero, who is here to introduce three O'Hara Elementary School students who were chosen to participate in the 2025 PMEA District 1 elementary string fingfest, excuse me. I'll let you take it away. Thank you, Dr. Railjack. We had three O'Hara Elementary students like um Dr. Railjack mentioned they were chosen to participate in the 2025 Pennsylvania Music Educators Association Elementary Singfest for District 1. We had about 12
003students from O'Hara apply and we had three students to um represent O'Hara and it's Addie Coyle, Lucas Liao, and Sarah Mobley. if you three want to come up. Um they were selected and they represented O'Hara very well. We had around a total in the whole group. It was at Plum High School. Um there were 120 students from Alagany, Fyet, Green, Washington, and West Morland counties. And um it was directed by Dr. Mark Bole from Satan Hill University. Um congratulations. I'm really proud of these kiddos. Not only are they in the O'Hara Chorus, which they wake up at 8:00 on Thursday mornings to rehearse with us, but they came a second day on Tuesday mornings and rehearsed at 8:00 for all this extra music. So, um, I want to thank them. I'm really proud of them.
004And I'm sure this isn't the last time you're going to see them up here with their music achievements. So, here you go, Addie and Lucas and Sarah. Congratulations. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Thank you so much for being here. Congratulations. Next, I'd like to introduce high school swimming head coach Matt Mclair, who will be introducing members of the swimming and diving teams. Good evening to you all. Um, Superintendent Railjack and the Fox Chapel High School Board. Uh, thank you for having us and for your unwavering support throughout this exciting Fox Chapel Varsity Swim and dive season. Um, attention to detail. It's what separates the good from the great. Whether in life, your profession, being the best school board member, uh, or being a complete student athlete, the attention to detail allows the focus on being the
005best version of yourself to take center stage. This season, we saw what the attention to detail achieved through inspiring performances, the meshing of a team, and the representation of what Fox Chapo athletic embodies. our boys varsity team for the fifth consecutive year went undefeated and won the class 3A section title led by our captains and if you could please uh come to the front and uh get your certificate. Um Christian Dante and Owen [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] How you can um diver Jackson Haggler. Uh, seniors Paul Park, juniors Arman Arbory and Allan Young, sophomores Hugo Mikas and Desi Ruff, divers Finn Crest and Gosha, and an amazing freshman class that includes Nate Agents. We have [Applause] [Music] [Applause] here uh Sam [Music] [Applause] Asher. Uh, diver Henry Harrison, Will [Music] Henderson, uh, Owen Wyn, Gavin
006Patterson, David Polara, [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh, Nick Bell, Sam Reszi, and Christian [Music] [Applause] [Music] Burkner. Um, just as a side, with his razor sharp focus and hard work ethic, Owen How earned a repeat gold medal in the 200 IM at Whipold Championships held at Trees Hall on Pitts campus in February. That's pretty big time. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I'm gonna ask these guys to stay up here. Um, our girls team had no less impressive performances and showcased a strong driven mindset this season led by senior Sarah [Music] [Applause] Pasuala who is committed to the University of Michigan. uh won yeah that's that's big time won gold at WPL and state championship in the 200 free and teamed with seniors Grace Kovak come [Applause] on Josie sophomores Josie [Applause] Stanzic and Charlotte Rushi [Applause] to
007take the gold in the 400 free relay at Whipioles. [Applause] [Music] In addition, our girls WPL and state championship team consisted of Sarah and Grace, seniors Margaret Rushi, sophomores Cam Brris, Liby, uh, Charlotte Rushi, Josie, and freshman Tulie Eric. [Applause] Uh, our boys team consisted of these guys up front, Christian and Owen, Paul Park, Arman, Nate, and diver Jackson Haggler. Um, as you can see, the focus to the attention to detail, being better than we were yesterday, was definitely present throughout the season. I'd like to present you with our 202425 Fox Chapel Swim Team. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Thank you to all of our swimmers and our diving team. We appreciate you. Thank you, coach. Next, I would like to introduce high school wrestling head coach Michael Frank, who will be introducing a member of
008the wrestling team who qualified for the state champion. Thank you very much to our school directors and administrators. Thank you for your support always in the whole child and representing these student athletes as they have success in the classroom, but also uh in the field of athletics. It's wonderful to celebrate all of that. uh to the swimmers and the hockey team and our young students here. Congratulations. Uh all honors that I'm sure plenty of hours of hard work uh have gone into it. I have the pleasure of uh introducing a young man, a senior, one of 14 seniors we had on the wrestling team this year. Um over his career and he's been with our program since very very young age. Uh Michael has continued to develop not only as a wrestler but as a
009wonderful young man and a great example of what Fox Chapel Area School District can produce. Uh Michael amassed over a hundred career wins in his high school uh career and this year qualified for the PIAA championships in Hershey. So I'd like to bring up Mr. Michael Worson. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Congratulations, Michael. And I would also like to introduce Fox Chapel ice hockey coach Ryan Loig, who is here to introduce the members of the high school club hockey [Applause] team. All right. Uh first of all, thank you for having our team out here. Um these guys have worked so hard and sacrificed so much. Um that it means a lot to be able to come out and be recognized. Um we had an awesome regular season going 163 and one. Um that was good for uh
010the top class. Uh in that we had a 10game winning streak at the beginning of 2025. Uh we also have five allstars on our team in the PIHL. um the top two point scorers in class AA. Uh the top defenseman uh point scorer in class AA and uh statistically the second best uh goalender in class doubleA. Um so a lot of individual things but um as a team we really came together and did well. Uh that was evident in uh postseason um where we beat uh Canon Max 6 to3 in the quarterfinal. It was a home game. Uh we beat Pen Trapper 3-2 uh in the semis which was one of the more fun games I've been a part of. Um and then uh played one of our what I thought was one of our
011best games all year. Uh fell a little short to Erie in overtime in the uh Pens Cup final, but um you know these guys sacrificed so much this year and uh came together to um to seek something greater than uh themselves. Um, so, uh, regardless of that result, uh, I'm really proud of them and I I think they should be really proud of themselves and, uh, it's going to take them really far in life, this experience this year. Um, so I'm going to call up our guys here. You guys can stand up here and, uh, I'll start with the guys that are here now. Uh, first is Dom Cile. Uh, he led the league in goals. Uh, second in the league in points. Uh he was an all-star and uh I believe he is going
012to Mercy [Applause] some he was uh he was also chosen to the stellar six in the post gazette which is among all of western Pennsylvania hockey um the top six. So congrats to him. Uh next is Antonio Cardinoli. [Applause] Uh, Pierce Auster Holmes, senior [Applause] [Music] forward. Uh, our captain, Tyler Goldstein. [Music] Uh, senior Gus Pasarella. [Music] [Applause] Uh, and then junior Nico [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Vedic and goalender Miles [Applause] Carrey. Good. All right. Hey, thank you. [Music] [Applause] We want to congratulate our hockey team as well. And uh this evening we've had guests for our arts as well as athletics and we have a few other guests that will be talking during the superintendent lens report and lens on learning about some of our academics. So it is going to be an exciting night.
013All right. So thank you. Thank you. Um, Fox Chapel Leadership Student Representative, we have Kellen Bler and Lily [Applause] Msaro. Um, hello everyone. I hope everyone had a chance to enjoy a little time away during our spring break. Um, we thank you for all being here and congratulations to all of our athletes for their accomplishments. Um, as you said, I'm Lily Misero and I'm a senior here at the high school and I'm the chair of our student engagement team. And this is Kellen BL. He's also a senior and he's our vice president. Um, we've been working all year at planning events and coordinating a lot of events between clubs and other activities. Just a few things that we have coming up include our last blood drive of the year is next week. It has been
014a huge success in the past and has even provided opportunities for kids to win scholarships. Our opportunities fair is coming up. All students can look for a volunteer job or even a college or tech school. I know personally helped me get a job at the Pittsburgh Field Club last summer. We are also gearing up for the lots of senior events in the near future, so stay tuned. Thank you everybody. [Applause] [Music] Thank you very much. Um, next we have the superintendence report. Sure. I have uh two things to report. Uh, first I'm going to uh thank everyone in our school district. We were a host site for the League of Innovative Schools spring convening uh about two weeks ago. uh stu uh there were about 300 uh district superintendent and district leaders from across the
015country who have been accepted into the League of Innovative Schools who visited sites all across Pittsburgh. We are one of 13 school districts that participate in the League of Innovative Schools. We have been accepted and um we've been part of the League of Innovative Schools for a number of years. Uh we were pleasantly surprised to host about 110 of those people. We had one of the largest visits uh during the site convening and uh people attended Kerr Elementary School for part of the day. Uh they also attended Dorseyville Middle School and the high school and we ended the day with Foxfest at the high school. So we have for all of the board members uh the information that was provided for all of the visitors that came and you can see sort of the schedule
016but we also have these little tags and they were something that our students made. These are artwork from our students and the tags are actually a um there's inside is an RFID and it will allow you if you put it onto your phone the right way, it will allow you to open up the website that has all of the convening things in it. If you can't make it work, the QR code works just the same, but it has all of the materials and all of the visitors were provided that. I want to thank our students. I heard uh many things about our student tour guides in all of the buildings and about our student musical groups that performed in all of the buildings. Uh and we also want to thank our educators who worked very
017hard to showcase and to help support this. Our administrators who did a lot of planning for it. I also want to thank our support staff and our maintenance and custodial staff who were amazing at making sure our logistics worked. Everybody felt very welcome and we even had representatives from AW Batty who provided the desserts which were fantastic. So it was a really exciting way to showcase what we were doing in the district and to learn with and from others. Uh the next day uh five of the administrative team members actually attended the rest of uh learning sessions and uh I presented one of those sessions. Dr. Edwards presented another session. Dr. McCins and Dr. Constantine and Dr. Colette uh traded off on a third uh expo session and so we had a lot of great
018conversation and a lot of sharing that has come out of that. So I wanted to just highlight that League of Innovative Schools and publicly say thank you to everybody. My next thing is probably even more exciting. Uh today we have the fourth grade team from Kerr Elementary School here with a group of students to showcase one of their Quest experiences. and quests are a new part of the elementary social studies adoption. And the quest that will be showcased this evening is the fourth grade wax museum. At this time, I'd like to introduce Kerr Elementary School's principal, Caitlyn Toth, who will introduce some teachers and students who will talk about this exciting work. Good evening everyone. Thank you so much for this opportunity to showcase some of our amazing CUR students. Um, I'm proud to have
019with me the fourth grade team of teachers, Mrs. Tiffany Hefts, Mrs. Erica Joerger and Mrs. Aaron Wharton. Alongside of them are five of our students from our fourth grade team. Um, and I'm gonna allow them to introduce themselves for this one. So, I'm gonna hand it over to Mary. My name is Mary and I'm in fourth grade at Kerr. I want to tell you about a really fun and awesome project we did in our class. We got to dress up as historical figures and pretend to be them. I was Ruth Bader Ginsburg and I learned so much about her life, what she did, and why she's important in history. We had to research our historical figure, write a speech, and then perform it in front of students and teachers. Everyone looked amazing in their costumes,
020and it felt like history came alive. Speaking of coming alive, let's meet some historical figures now. Hello, my name is Katherine Johnson. I am famous for being a NASA mathematician. I use math to send astronauts into space. I worked on the Apollo 11 flight to the moon. I was one of the first Africanamean women to work for NASA. I passed away in 2020 at the age of 101. Hi, my name is Sally Brad. I became famous for being the first American woman astronaut to travel into outer space. My main job on the spacecraft was to operate its robotic arm. In total, I spent over 343 hours in space. I passed away in 2012. Thanks for listening. Hello, my name is Franklin Delano Roosevelt or to many of you FDR. I was the 32nd president of
021the United States. I am most famous for coming into office during the Great Depression. The people of the country were hoping for new ideas and leadership and that's what I gave them. I created a plan called the New Deal in my first 100 days as president and I signed 14 new bills into action. I was so great at being president. I served four presidential terms. I once said these wise words, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Hi, I'm Cole. I was Neil Armstrong, the first person to step foot on the moon. Doing this project helped many helped my peers and understand that history isn't just in books. It's it's about real people that made a difference. Plus, it was a lot of fun and helped us be more confident speaking in
022front of others. Thank you for supporting projects like this. Everyone in fourth grade loved [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it. I do have to add to Cole's statement. Everyone in fourth grade did love this project. We actually had the opportunity for all of our fourth grade students to share their wax museum model with the third grade students at Kurr in our cafeteria. And it was a full-fledged. They pushed a button, said their spiel, and then kind of went down back not from life. So um it was an amazing um opportunity for our students to kind of showcase themselves and see what's ahead of them in the curriculum. And the kids did a fabulous job. So we're super proud of them. [Applause] [Music] Well, we had such great historical figures in front of us and we thank
023you for helping us to have a lens into what happens every day in our classrooms. And I want to thank their educators and uh Mrs. Toth as their principal uh for helping to make this come to life, so to speak. But I also want to thank all of our families uh for for supporting your children and helping them to enjoy this learning and to uh for all of the I'm sure extra work that you did to help make them successful. So, thank you all for being here. Do our board members have any questions or anything? No, that was wonderful. Um as a former social studies teacher, I love it. It's great. Love the costumes. Everything was wonderful. Thank you for sharing this with us tonight. You're welcome. Can we see the wax poses? Yeah, let's
024see. So in front of them and then when somebody came around so the kids that were going around to learn buttons in front of them button [Laughter] very fun. And you guys did a great job. Yes. Very good. Thank you so much. Thank you all for being here. You are certainly all welcome to stay for the meeting, but we also understand that you may have other things to do or bedtimes in your future. And so we understand that too. We won't take that personally. The costumes are amazing likenesses. Hello there. How you doing? Good. Everybody's wonderful. Which one's yours? Get all quick. Don't miss it. And Miss Dad, that concludes our superintendent report this evening. All right. Thank you, Mr. Jafrey. Is there a solicitor's report? No report this evening. Thank you. Um, I will
025need a motion to approve the minutes of the regular business meeting dated March 10th, 2025. So moved. Second. Does anyone have any questions or comments about the minutes? 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. Hasselhorn, yes. Mrs. Lynch. Yes. Miss, yes. Motion carries. Thank you. Uh, it is time for our first public comment period. Looks like we have someone signed up. Um, okay. You will have three minutes to speak. The first public comment period is for items that are on the agenda to be discussed and voted on. Um, so if your item is on the agenda, you can come on up. We have Susan Hanss. You will have three minutes to speak. Mr. Frank
026will be doing the timing because I forgot my phone. Um, if you could just state your name and go ahead. It My name is Susan Hans. Um, I'm going to email everybody this report because it's definitely three longer than three minutes, but this is a public comment on the special needs program. Okay. Um, my granddaughter Bethany has been in the special needs program for 13 years with Fox Chapel. She has um, learning disabilities and I would really love someday to have her be able to stand up here and do some accomplishments like all these other great children tonight. Um, there's just some areas of concern. Again, I'll email you all this report because I would like you to take this seriously. Um, there's a number of different things. Um, everything from parent training. I've not
027received any parent training. I don't know what the school was available. Um, I IEP development. I've had to do my own research and try to find out things about the special needs program to try to make things better for my granddaughter. So again, I let me email this to you and um behavior support. I had to take Fox Chapel to mediation because I couldn't get the gap bridged between home and school. Bethany was having behavior problems because of her disability. She has impulsivities and um some personal things that happened with some AIDS that is really detrimental for her. So, I would really like you to take this report seriously, think about it, and move forward on getting all the different things that are actually out there and available. Bethany did an amazing IEP, a studentled
028IEP this year. And she made a poster board and she invited everybody and she announced their names. And I knew my granddaughter had a disability. She didn't. and the school didn't even help me find out how to tell her or how to work with that disability. Um the Fox Chapel has done an amazing job in the past two years with the umiite the unified sports and the the typical kids have been so heart and soul with all of the support that they've given us. So I we're really appreciative of them. Um, and actually the Fox Chapel Unified U track team is starting Wednesday night and we'd love to see everybody there. We've gone to different functions with different schools. They've done food trucks and they've done banners and they've done You have 30 seconds. They've
029done all kinds of spotlight announcements for them. They dismissed classes early just to have them be a part of other typical kids. So, please take this report very seriously. Again, please I will email this to you tomorrow. Um, please take this report seriously and think about outside the box, not just what the things that are are required for the school. Looking outside the box is an amazing adventure for them. So, thank you Thank you very much. All right, that's the only person we have signed up for public comment. We will move on to new business. Mrs. Lynch, facilities and transportation. Uh, no action is requested. Thank you, Mr. Hamilton. The finance report. Yes. Tonight on the finance report, we have six items to approve. Item one, general fund dispersements from fund 10 in the amount
030of 11,738,928.60. Item two, dispersements from uh capital reserve fund dispersements from fund 31 in the amount of $54,542.17. Item three, the finance for February 2025 is acknowledged and filed for audit is attached. Item four, tax collectors depositories. approve the depositories listed below for elected real estate tax collectors as recommended by the appropriate elected official. Uh this is a required we're required to approve these depositories for elected real estate collectors annually. The uh tax collectors are listed in the agenda for Ask Burough, Blanoxboro, and Indiana Township. The item five is the t deputy tax collectors approve appointment of the deputy tax collectors listed below pursuant to section 22 of the local tax collection law uh for uh Blanoxboro and Indiana Township as listed in the agenda. Item six, award of bids. Athletic administr the administration is
031authorized to award the following bids for the 2025 2026 school year athletic bids for fall and winter. BSN Sports LLC for $77820. Century Sports Incorporated for $31,355.82. Natali Sporting Goods $11,53.34. Pyramid School Products $884.96. Swimmers Network $6,319.40. I move to approve all six items. Second. Thank you. Any questions or comments on these items? I have a question about tax collectors. Um, I know in Sherpsburg last election the appointed person had I don't know the right word handed it over to an actual tax collecting agency and I think that person's going to be on the ballot this coming time too. I don't know if that's still the plan but how's that been working out because most people elect a person not an agency? Sure. Uh, I have not heard that that we have had any issues
032thus far. Um, but I'm certainly not on the on the taxpayer side either or that, but we have not been made aware to my knowledge of any issues. So, yeah, I was just Mr. Jeffrey, have you Okay, good question. Any other questions? Okay, Mrs. Anusk, will you please call the role? Miss Dad, yes. Miss Finley, yes. Mr. Frank, yes. Mr. Good, yes. Mr. Hamilton, yes. Dr. Hasselorn, yes. Mrs. Lynch, yes. Miss Sitch. Yes. Mrs. Cooper, yes. Motion carries. Thank you. Mrs. Cooper, will you read the instruction report, please? Uh, yes. I have four items here. Uh, the first one is to approve Fox Chapel Area School District K to2 special education plan as attached for the period of July 1, 2025 through June 30th, 2028. The second one is to approve the addendum as attached
033between the school district and MHY family services um for ESY extended school year 2425 for the period of June 9th uh 25 through July 11th 25. This addendum is pursuant to the agreement that was approved August 12th 2024. The third one is to ratify the agreement as attached between the school district and global wordsmiths to provide language interpretation services and language translation services at a cost as listed in the fee schedule for the period of April 1 25 through June 30th 26. This is a renewal of services and number four is a stipulated adjudication that was presented. Move on those four items. Second. Thank you. So, any questions or comments on these items? Dr. Aljac, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to the special education plan. It's my understanding as we
034discussed, well, I wasn't at the last academic committee. I was sick, but that has been discussed that this is like a state required kind of very formatted report that you could speak better to that. Sure. We we actually did discuss this at the last AC at one of the academic committees, but we also did at the last uh last month during the board meeting before it was public. And this is based on the indicators in Pennsylvania's requirements for IDEIDA. And so it is a very strict formatted um plan. It doesn't allow us much wiggle room. we really have to ex uh discuss each of the indicators and we are required to have certain indicators marked and certain things in the plan. Um the district did have the plan uh was developed in consultation. We actually
035started in January of 2024 uh when we were working on our um comprehensive plan and some other things. Uh we then also worked with our educators and through some of our parent groups to receive feedback which we incorporated. Some of the feedback is able to be incorporated into the plan. Some of the feedback isn't part of the indicators but is still being used in other ways in how we deliver services. Um this plan has been on public display for 28 days. Uh we received one uh instance of community feedback and um other feedback loops that we had from our educators were included in with some additional um training for personnel development as well as some assessment information. What was the summary of the feedback we did receive from the one individual? Uh there was some
036discussion regarding the Pennsylvania Department of Education survey to students with uh parents of students with special needs and the fact that some people didn't know that it was coming. We don't know either. We did talk about that. Yes, we did talk about that. We don't know either. In fact, we're not allowed to mention it uh because it would be looked at as um in influencing that. And so, it comes at a time when we do not know to parents through whatever method and not in a very obvious way. It does not appear to be considering we had zero respondents. Yes. Getting that. Yes. And we are actually not permitted to mention that um when it when we know it's coming in that month, you know, to look for it. It's it's part of how the
037checks and balances work. I I appreciate that extra context. Um I was excited to see that the Syrian committee included the PALS um Fox Chapel family group. Can you describe their involvement in the development of this plan? Sure. Uh Dr. Mahoney was really involved in that. So I'm going to do my best to summarize it, but I also want to be clear that I wasn't part of those meetings and uh but Dr. Dr. Mahoney had explained at the last board meeting that um we talk with the PAL's group and talk about areas that may be of interest. Um some of the things that we have done have come from those parent suggestions in past plans and that is continuing in this future plan. And so some of that was um specifically under some of the
038professional learning and um some early exposures I think to test practices was part of Pennsylvania's requirements. But then there were some other things that um the PAL's group had asked for uh in there. Um and I would have to ask him what the specific items were this time around. I know in the last one it was some specific training for students with epilepsy that we added in. Okay, great. Um and then for where there are sort of improvement in planning activities indicated I guess like what determined which indicators received an improvement in planning activity um line and what versus the ones that don't have anything? No. no indicator flagged at this time. Uh it would be through the the self- assessment as well as the special education monitoring that happens on a regular basis. These
039are highly regulated and so we are in consultation with our representatives and some of them are um through special education monitoring that we need to adjust. Some of them are changes in programming that we need to adjust and some then are things that come from our community that we need to adjust. Okay. And those are tracked then on a fouryear cycle or threeear cycle. I believe it's a threeear cycle. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? If the family still wanted to give feedback, who would the best person be to direct? Sure. We always encourage feedback and it can come to I would I would suggest if it's very specific to a student, it would go best to the educator or the building principal, uh the special educator as well. uh if it's more programmatic
040it can come to Dr. Mahoney or it can go to Dr. Constantine or Dr. Patterson at the elementary or secondary or can also come to me and I will say on academic committee we have spent I don't how many years have we been doing committees now three three three I mean each year we have tried to spend time on an aspect of special education so I think feedback to the board on on some general things because we don't know what we don't know too. So if there is community feedback to the board for us to um take that time because I do really appreciate when like Tim or Stephen or comes in and really looks at the data and we have conversations because there has been um improvements. So yes, and some of the elements
041in this plan you'll notice are very specific meaning room sizes, room locations. Those are required under IDEIDA. we cannot move special education rooms or other things without um doing an addendum to this plan and having someone from PD come out to approve it. So, a lot of this is very very um rigid in its in its uh formatting and it's very rigid in what it's looking for, but this does not entail the entire of the special education uh planning or work that we do. Right. And just as anything tied rigidly to a government process, it's it's extra hard for parents to understand as well just going through it. It's its own language, its own methods, and um parents are already in hard situations a lot. Correct. Trying to go through. Yeah. And it also uses
042a lot of um acronyms which is unfriendly especially if you're not familiar with those. So, so if there are things that anyone would read in it that they would have questions about, please ask one of the people in the schools or ask one of the administrators and we can help you with that. Yeah. And it is helpful when things are in a board context to write out those. Like I think I just read something about ESY, which I know is extended school year, but I think people who don't have a child that would qualify for it would not know what ESY necessarily stands for. Sure. We'll do our best to do that. Yeah. Any other questions or comments? Okay, thank you for the information. Mrs. Anuska, will you please call the role? Miss Finley, yes.
043Mr. Frank, yes. Mr. Good, yes. Mr. Hamilton, yes. Dr. Hasselorn, yes. Mrs. Lynch, yes. Miss Zed, yes. Mrs. Cooper, yes. Miss Dad, yes. Motion carries. Thank you. Mr. Frank, will you please read the legislation and policy report? Yes. I would like to move to approve the second reading and adoption of the following revised policies as attached. Number 610, purchases subject to bid quotation. Number 611, purchases budgeted. 626, federal fiscal compliance procurement attachment only. Number 800.1, electronic signatures records. 802 school organization. 803 school calendar. 804 school day. 807 Opening exercises moment of silence flag displays. Number 8, 10.1 school bus drivers and school commercial motor vehicle drivers. Number 810.3 school vehicle drivers. Number 811 bonding. Number 812 property insurance. Number 813 other insurance. Number 814 copyright material. Number 8:16, use of live stream video on school
044district property. Number 818, contracted services personnel. Number 822, automated external defiill AED cardio cardio pulmonary resuscitation CPR. Number 8.24, maintaining professional adult student boundaries. I would also like to move the revised policies for their first reading number eight. I'm sorry. Number 222, tobacco and vaping products. Number 709, building security surveillance. Number 808, food services. Number 808.1, free reduced lunch reduced price meals and free milk. Number 810.2, transportation, video, audio recording. 8.27 conflict of interest. 828 fraud. 901 public relations objectives. 902, Publications Program. Number 9006, Public Contain Complaint Procedures. Number 9008, Relations with Parents/Guardians. Number 909, Municipal Government Relations. Number 910, Community Engagement. Number 912, Relations with Educational Institutions. And number three, uh, a new policy for the first reading. Number 815.2, Two, use of generative artificial intelligence in education. I would move all three items.
045Would it be possible to break out number 222 as a separate motion? Excuse me. Huh? I didn't hear which number. Oh, I'm sorry. Would it be possible to break out for the um item two, number 222, tobacco and vaping products as a separate motion or do I need to wait until this one? I think we have to wait, right? Do we We haven't we haven't had a second yet, but Okay. You need to second though, right? Okay. Do we need a second before we do that or just There's no motion until there's a second. No. Okay. Okay. Uh, Miss Zitch, could you make your motion again, please? Yes. Could I I'd like to motion to amend um to remove item number 222 um from policy two from the second number two policies revised first reading
046to move number 222 um to its own motion. We need a second second. Thank you. And um do we have any discussion on Miss Zitch's motion? and we vote. Right. Okay. Mrs. Anus, could you please call the role? We're voting on if we're moving it to a separate one. Right. Okay. On Miss Sitch's motion. Yes. Just making sure. Mr. Frank, no. Mr. Good. Yes. Mr. Hamilton, yes. Dr. Hasselhorn, yes. Mrs. Lynch, yes. Miss, yes. Mrs. Cooper, yes. Miss Dad, yes. Miss Finley, yes. Motion carries to move policy separately with eight in favor and one voting no, Mr. Frank. Okay. Now, which do we vote on? Okay. Mr. Frank, could you restate your motion? I will move all the items in one, two, and three with the exception of number 222. Second. Thank you. Any comments
047or questions on that on those items? Um I just wanted to say thank you to the committee for your work on um on these. I know it takes a lot of work. I was wondering if somebody could give us a little bit of info about the AI generation one since that's a new policy that we've haven't seen before. Sure, I'd be happy to. Um, the district has been working behind the scenes to determine what kinds of information should be in uh a policy for generative AI and the use of generative AI. Uh, Dr. Hower, the lead principal at the high school and I participated in um actually a group with the uh office of educational technology from the US Department of Education and digital promise specifically looking at policies for acceptable use surrounding AI. That
048was during the 2324 school year and we got a lot of great information from that. It was during our work with that that we realized we needed a little more groundwork in the district before we were ready to propose something. That groundwork that happened in the district included some empathy interviews where we talked with people at uh students, parents, um educators about their understanding of AI and what they felt was important for us to consider as a community. We worked collaboratively with local districts as well as with national districts to understand what they were learning from their communities. Uh we did some exploration in our schools. So, our high school has had an AI leadership team that is peer-to-peer education, meaning our educators are learning things and explaining them to others. Our middle school is
049doing something similar, and our elementary has done that occasionally. It's more prevalent obviously in secondary than it is in elementary right now. Um, also administrators have been educating themselves on generative AI. What we've learned from that work was uh is what's culminating in this policy is some opportunities to be able to set some belief statements, some guidelines and guard rails, but also um be very clear about what AI should be used for and that humans need to stay in the loop. So it it's not the final discriminator for many things. For instance, student grading, the student uh and an educator still needs to stay in the loop. hiring processes. We still will be doing those with people in the loop. And so we would anticipate that this will be edited in the future as this
050emerging technology, it's emerging in the education field. It's not emerging in the world. Uh it's been around for quite some time, but its use is much more ubiquitous and so we would expect this to continue to move forward. This policy captures some things that we uh learned from our tech council and uh that we we pay for some uh additional services regarding edtech and policy uh development as well as some things from PSBA as well as some things that we learned from our national partners. And so it really talks about some guidelines for ethics for furpa compliance which is the family educational rights and privacy act the responsibilities of students and staff for copyright AI generated um materials. And what we would plan to do then is if this policy is approved by the board
051incorporate this into handbooks for next year uh as well as roll out some additional professional learning for our staff. It's been basic learning right now. Uh and some of it has also been exploratory learning for adult purposes meaning productivity purposes not necessarily in a learning context. Uh we have done some in learning context to uh see what it could do in some things in very um minimal ways here and there but we believe very strongly that we need to um provide more articulated professional learning for our students and or for our staff and learning for our students. We have this year piloted some uh modules on artificial intelligence and generative AI in our computer science strands for students. We've increased some of the media literacy modules that we do for students because there is a
052literacy component to understanding the content that's uh comes out of AI and make sure that it's accurate and not synthetic content. And we have also worked with our staff members to talk about great cases where it may be a great use of a tool and cases where it may not be a great use of our tool. And so all of this is kind of generating into this policy for artificial intelligence and generative AI. And um we hope to that that that will help give some some real context. We heard very clearly from our educators. They wanted to make sure that they were being responsible and that they were acting in ways that we would expect them to and I appreciate that from our educators. And at the same time, our middle school student cabinet, Dr.
053Dr. McCins and I recently met with our middle school student cabinet and they added an agenda item for the next meeting on generative AI because they want to talk about what they think they should be learning about generative AI again. They spoke about it to us last year. They want to follow up because they have some new ideas and so this is going to continue to evolve and develop, but we feel very strongly that we need to make sure that we set some guidelines and guardrails in policy as well so that we can build upon that as we move forward in practice. So, does this cover both staff and students? Because I feel like typically we have sort of like a student version of something and a staff version. Sure. Very. Sometimes we do and
054sometimes we do not. For instance, uh most of our technology use policies are generic and they cover both groups because uh acceptable use is acceptable use. The guidelines for some of the federal laws or the guidelines for the federal laws and everybody's responsible for those. So, this would cover both. That's why you see uh some more broad statements in there. Uh there may be a time in the future where it needs to be more specific, but some of the things that I think would be very specific for educators or staff or very specific for students may be in processes and in administrative regulations as we continue to work through some of the the educating part. Have we given any consideration to helping the community learn and understand? We have actually. Interestingly, our empathy interviews last
055year indicated lack of interest in having community forums for it. that doesn't mean that it wouldn't change. Uh but we have and uh actually I was um speaking with some people about the potential of doing some all-encompassing technology um literacy for educ for our families and uh building to on a few things that we've been involved in as a school district through the League of Innovative Schools as well as through some other things and then some things personally that I've been involved in through the Center for Digital Education. And so we have a the format of a beginnings of a plan that we would think uh we may be able to bring to fruition in the upcoming school year. Well, I would encourage community members to or at least parents of children who are going
056through these things to be interested because we definitely need to know just as much as our kids. We do. We did recently host the uh FBI to do a parent presentation at Dorseyville Middle School on online safety and on AI and deep fakes and things like that. It didn't have great attendance, but it was an opportunity to try and bring that to um our community. We also have hosted some things in conjunction with high school open house, and we will continue to look for opportunities to do that in the ways that make sense and that that families would wish. And um if I'm correct in having uh read through this, this does not stipulate what the sort of graduation of consequences might be for anyone violating any of these policies presumably because it's different because
057some of these involve furpa violations, some of these involve privacy violations or basic plagiarism. So um where or when might our student body learn about sort of the nature of those consequences? Sure. We actually have consequences for all of those things now and those are in our student code of conduct. They're also an expectations in handbooks as well as for um staff members in in their handbooks. And so we actually talked about that at the national level as well as with our local partner groups. Uh we've been working with five or six school districts and working in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh and the Alageney Intermediate Unit on some boots on the ground kind of um processes. And all of us came to the determination right now that our codes of conduct and our
058other processes already illuminate what could be consequences if we need this. If those may need to change or there may need to be consequences embedded specifically in this um policy. But at this time when we thought of the different things that could happen, we already have other policies uh at the board level and other procedures that would be able to address those things that we've imagined at this moment in time. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you. Sure. Are there external organizations that we looked towards um when constructing the language for this policy? There were so some of the language from this policy came from a Pennsylvania school boards association. Some of it came from our uh edtech council pool uh which is Sweet Stevens and Cats which is a law firm that consults for the
059county uh intermediate unit on technology issues specifically. Some of the uh information came from the digital promise work that we did for the office of educational technology in the US department of education. And then a lot of this is backed by other groups um and and some of the things that we've learned through Kosen which is a a technology group for school districts through AIEDU and through some other things uh that are emerging. And so we've been working with all of those. This is sort of um a conglomeration of a few people's work based on what we learned from our community and what we learned from our educators that we needed to incorporate. There was no one policy that we felt we could just take and that it would meet our needs. Thank you. Any
060more questions, comments? Okay. Um reminder, we're voting on Mr. Frank's uh motion. Mrs. Anusk, could you please call the role? Mr. Good. Yes. Mr. Hamilton, yes. Dr. Hasselhorn, yes. Mrs. Lynch, yes. Miss Zitch, yes. Mrs. Cooper, yes. Miss Dad, yes. Miss Finley, yes. Mr. Frank, yes. Motion carries. Thank you. Excuse me. Oh, okay. Um, so we will need a motion. I will make a motion that we approve policy for the first reading of policy 222 tobacco and vaping products. Second. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions or comments on this policy? I just want to thank everybody for the addition of the board authorizing the use of tobacco and vaping surveillance equipment language. Um I appreciate that that was included and I think it's very important. Thank you. I'm not confident that what is described and
061what's been added is going to be effective in reducing tobacco or vaping product use on campuses here or anywhere. We don't have evidence to support it. Okay. Any other comments or questions? Okay. Mrs. Anus, will you please call the role? Mr. Hamilton, yes. Dr. Hasselhorn, yes. Mrs. Lynch, yes. Miss Sitch, no. Mrs. Cooper, yes. Miss Dad, yes. Miss Finley, yes. Mr. Frank, yes. Mr. Good. Yes. Motion carries uh to approve policy 22, first reading with eight in favor and one voting no. Miss Zitch, thank you. Um, Miss Zitch, will you please read the personnel report? Yes, I will be I am moving on the following items. Um, item one, resignations, educational support. The resignation of Mary Helen Ryan, library media clerk at Fox Chapel area high school due to retirement. The resignation of Michelle C.
062will hear, secretary to the director of athletics at Fox Chapel Area High School due to retirement. For custodial maintenance, the resignation of Amy S. Butler, 10month, 8 hour per day custodian at Fox Chapelia High School due to retirement. For food services, the resignation of Carrie A. Mellet, food services employee at Ker Elementary School due to personal reasons. for supplemental contracts athletic. The resignation of Adam Centuro, wrestling middle school head, due to personal reasons. The resignation of Scott E. Venel, wrestling middle school assistant, due to personal reasons for supplemental contracts non-athletic, the resignation of Stephanie A. Abriatis, special education elementary department head, due to personal reasons. The resignation of Stephanie A. Abriatis, Kerr, overnight camp counselor due to personal reasons. The resignation of Katherine A. Frederick, grade level three chairperson due to personal reasons. The resignation
063of Christopher Studebaker, middle school student activities treasurer due to personal reasons. The resignation of Jodi El Travaglia, physical education elementary department head due to personal reasons. And the resignation of Jod El Travaglia Hartwood Safety Patrol sponsor due to personal reasons. For appointments, educational support, Christine M. Harper is approved as a 12-month building secretary at O'Hara Elementary School. Um, uh, for food services, Michelle L. Condis is approved as a permanent part-time food services employee at the Fox Chapel area high school cafeteria for item three leaves professional Tiffany M. Hes elementary teacher at Kurt Elementary School is approved for an educational sobatical. Melissa M. Oburst, math teacher at Fox Chapel Area High School is approved for an educational satical. Changes of status a educational support. Sandra R. Shank 12-month building secretary at O'Hara Elementary School is approved
064as a 12-month building secretary at Kerr Elementary School. Supplemental contract non-athletic. Katherine P. Gilner, middle school student activities treasurer, is ratified as middle school student activities treasurer. For item five, employment agreements. The following employment agreements are approved as presented. Behavior behavior specialist Ava M. Kilgore, information management specialist and testing facilitator. Brenda El Panza. Item six, homebound instruction teacher. Leslie A. Cowell's ED is ratified as a homebound instruction teacher for the 2024 2025 school year. Excuse me. Item seven, steam programs 2025 steam camp. The individuals listed below are approved for as instructors for the steam camp at Fairview Elementary School. Michelle Beck, Mary Cheer, Isabella Donaldson, Caitlyn Ellsworth, Cara Finkele, Martha Freeze, Alyssa Gavin, Grace Lim Clark, Jean Natowski, Tracy Plans, Sarah Padansk Vasnik, excuse me, um Evan Rumble, um and Jennifer S. Jones is approved
065as a nurse for the steam camp at Fairview Elementary School this summer. uh middle school. Todd Ashbaw is approved as the Dorsyville Middle School Summer Learning Academy program facilitator. The individuals listed below are approved as instructors for the Dorsyville Middle School Summer Learning Academy. Richard Deidio, Craig Frell, Kevin Gre, Emily Kowski, Alexis Herbbit, and Emily Janosco. Ethan Wagner is approved as an instructor for the Dorsyville Middle School Summer Learning Academy. And item eight, advanced placement exam proctors. The individuals listed below is approved as advanced placement exam proctors at Fox Chapel Area High School. Taylor Clawson, Connor Forin, Martha Freeze, and Gregory Schubert. Nine, volunteer athletic following athletic volunteer is ratified. Adam Oren for baseball middle school. All the effective dates, relevant contracts, and pay skills or compensation are as indicated here in the agenda. I
066move on these nine items. Second. Thank you. Any questions or comments on these items? Dr. Jackman is our steam camp this year. It is. I can tell you. Um, it is June 16th, uh, the week of June 16th at Fairview Elementary. Thank you. Sure. Any other questions or comments? Yes. The summer uh, learning program is at Dorsyville. It will be at Dorsyville uh, middle school, both the elementary and the middle school program because of the Hartwood uh, HBAC replacement project. And we actually did that last year in anticipation of doing the Hartwood project. It worked out wonderfully. So, we're going to continue that at least for this year. And then we'll go back to going to different schools again for hopefully it had it before. Uh last year it was always at Dorsyville and Hartwood.
067So, it's only on that campus. Um if uh not the one year it was at O'Hara. It may have been based on construction. It's usually moves only when we have a facility project going on. So, normally it is in the middle school. It's just that it was unable to correct. Yes. Okay. Any other questions or comments? Mrs. Anus, will you please call the role? Dr. Hasselhorn? Yes. Mrs. Lynch? Yes. Miss Edge? Yes. Mrs. Cooper? Yes. Miss Dad? Yes. Miss Finley? Yes. Mr. Frank? Yes. Mr. Good? Yes. Mr. Hamilton? Yes. Motion carries. Thank you. Mr. Good. Would you please read the operations and cooperative service services report? Yes. I have three items. The first is to approve the agreement as a task between the Fox Shepalier School District and Precision HR Solutions Incorporated to F to
068furnish substitute instructional aids, PCAs, nurses, secretaries, food service workers, and custodians to the district for the period July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2027. This is a renewal of re of services Number two, approve to extend the agreement between the Fox Chapel Area School District and Interstate Studio to furnish individual portraits and provide other photography services to the district for students in pre kindergarten through grade 8 for the 2025 2026 school year with the option to extend for the 2026 2027 school year pursuant to the agreement that was approved June 10, 2024. This is a renewal of services. The terms remain the same. There is no cost to the district. And number three, approve to extend the agreement between the Fox Chapel School District and Interstate Studio to furnish individual portraits and provide other photography
069services to the high school for the 2025 2026 school year with the option to extend for the 2026 2027 school year pursuant to the agreement that was approved June 10, 2024. This is a renewal of services. The terms remain the same and there is no cost to the district. I move on those three items. Second. Thank you. Any questions or comments for the precision HR solutions? I know that um this is a hard job um and so I'm happy that we're that that's a thing that we contract to do. Um did do we solicit or resolicit um HR solutions like vendors on a every two-year cycle or is this are we automatically renewing just because we're satisfied with our existing? So we are satisfied but we have I think this was a newer um provider.
070I'll let Dr. from a common give a little more history maybe for it. Uh yes, I believe it was two years ago uh we had a different company and uh we had uh several reports that uh that company was not meeting expectations. So we did go through the process of uh essentially soliciting bids or people proposals uh to provide the service and we actually brought in a team of teachers and administrators to go through the process to hear each one of the companies provide what and excuse me also parents were also included in that process of the the services that they could provide and this was the company that we went to two years ago. uh the the feedback has been very positive. Uh so that's why we're continuing to to move them forward. Okay,
071great. Thank you. And is that feedback soft feedback or do we also collect information about like turnaround times or the retention or return rates of some of these individuals? Like I guess are there other ways that we evaluate that or is it mostly it's mostly just soft feedback. That was the feedback we were getting prior which is you know moved us to uh look to make those changes. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions? Okay. Mrs. Anusk, will you please call the role? Mrs. Lynch, yes. Miss Zitch, yes. Mrs. Cooper, yes. Miss Dad, yes. Miss Finley, yes. Mr. Frank, yes. Mr. Good, yes. Mr. Hamilton, yes. Dr. Hasselhorn, yes. Motion carries. Thank you. It is now time for our second public comment period. Again, you will have three minutes to speak. Mr. Frank will be timing
072you and if you could state your name when you uh begin. We will start with Dr. Grant Gibb. All right. I try to time this for to three minutes. So, keep me honest, Mr. Frank. All right. I will. My name is Grant Gibb. Uh, since 2022, we have identified issues with the elementary ELELA curriculum that have required us to teach our children separately than what the district offers. This is something we did not have to do in other districts for them to achieve their potential. Prominent thirdparty reviews of the district's chosen curriculum indicate that these resources do not meet expectations or only partially meet expectations in every subcategory it was reviewed in. Evidence was provided that children in this district are struggling in the same ways that these reviews indicate. When this was brought before
073the executive director and superintendent, there was no accountability for these results. They disregarded objective third-party reviews and the experience of residents. They state how well the district is doing overall, but they have not accounted for children such as mine. Children who are doing well because they are learning elsewhere. I myself have been using resources that have more favorable thirdparty evaluations with great success. The superintendent even went as far as to suggest a psychology evaluation for children who don't do well in their chosen course but do exceptionally well in a different curriculum. It should be alarming to every resident to see that the district administration will first look to find fault with the children before self-reflection. This is a culture that has been fully supported and encouraged by Dr. Recheek. She has been insistent on using
074resources that have not been able to help these children reach their maximum potential. This does go against the board's mission of teaching children to their maximum potential and having accountability for one's own work. The board has been informed of this since January. The district has known about this since 2022. At that time, Mr. Frank had said, quote, I must confess that my personal experience with the elementary reading curriculum is limited. When I have a question, I asked the district administrators you have corresponded with. End quote. This represents quite a large conflict of interest for accountability. We can see public approval from the board and have that have provided raises for the district administration. Yet prominent authors from Stanford research have advocated for limiting administrative decision-making because of the poor trends they saw during the pandemic.
075We are witnessing the same level of poor financial decision-making in our district. Even with just the example of the elementary ELA curriculum, will the board continue to provide a 1.5% raise for performances that do not meet expectations or follow the board's mission plan? Will they support raising taxes to approve a budget that accommodates this? Or will they redistribute funding away from a poorly performing administration to improve efficiency of our tax dollars and our children's education? I strongly encourage the residents who are who are watching maybe abroad to see if there continues to be a misappropriation of our taxes and to vote those responsible out of their position. We can do so much better than what you are witnessing here. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Um, next on the
076list we have Jill McConnell. However, to my knowledge, Jill McConnell is not a district resident or a taxpayer. Um, the board could vote to wave these rules um if we choose to. Um Jill is speaking on behalf of the library. We do have two other people who are residents signed up to speak on behalf of the library. Do we have any precedent for doing this before? I I believe the policy says when there are multiple people speaking about the same thing, we they they one person is chosen by that group to speak for all of them. What? That's correct. I think sounds we can wave that as well of non-residents you mean no in general if multiple people are going to be speaking about the same topic my question is more about the non-resident because
077it would be setting a precedent so that's that's why yeah I would I mean given if we had done it before yeah gi given that we have that existing policy um I I think we should follow that and not uh raise the issue of there being a non-resident or or make an exception because there's another way to to uh handle that. If I'm remembering the policy correct, Mr. Drey has the policy here, so he's been you're correct referring to it. Uh groups shall be limited to one presentation on a given topic. Each speaker shall be limited to one threeminut comment or there's multiple speakers on the same issue, the presiding officer may indicate the board's desire that the speakers designate two people to speak for the group. Yeah, we've generally never I don't think we've
078ever enforced that and I'm concerned. Not unless there being the small number of people I don't need to limit I don't feel the need feel the need to limit. My question is just on setting a precedent. Not that this wouldn't be a worthy topic but again it's setting to my knowledge that the board has not intentionally permitted a resident or non-resident or non taxpayer. I think there was once in the Someone gave a false address in order to speak. Well, yeah, we're certainly not. There are a number of organizations within the boundaries of the Fox Chapel Area School District who have representatives or agents on behalf of those organizations who are not residents of Fox Chapel, right? So, I I could any um of our many of our fine organizations including educational institutions in the
079area that certainly have a bearing or have a sort of a are impacted by the decisions of this district. So I think uh for that reason I think having the executive director of our local library system certainly like falls within a defensible exception where that person is functionally a member of our community and should be allowed to speak. So I would I would move to allow it. I I do move to allow it. I second that motion. Thank you. Any other comments on the motion? Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable uh ex reason to ex make an exception when somebody represents an institution that's functioning within our school district boundaries. That's makes a lot of sense. So perhaps noting the reason for the like as part of the motion. Okay. So Miss Zitch, could
080you restate your motion and include that in it with the grounds for it? Yeah. Yes. So, I move that we allow this speaker to speak on the grounds that she is functionally a member of this community and provides a direct service to this community within the boundaries of the Fox Chapel Area School District. Second. Okay. She seconded it. Vanessa did. Yes. Any other comments? Can Can we say that it's within the district instead of just providing services to the district? Yeah. I thought I said that she was within the bounds of the district, but yes. Okay. Okay. I just want to make sure located with don't want to open up things. No, that's fair. That's fair. And I think I'm happy to clarify that perspective should it arise again. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Are we ready
081to vote? All right. Mrs. Anusk, will you please call the role? Miss, yes. Mrs. Cooper, yes. Miss Dad, yes. Miss Finley, yes. Mr. Friend, yes. Mr. Good. Yes. Mr. Hamilton. Yes. Dr. Hasselorn. Yes. Mrs. Lynch. Yes. Motion carries. Thank you. All right. Joe McConnell, come on up. You will have three minutes to speak. Of course. Yes. So, yes, I am Joe McConnell. I'm the executive director for Cooper Seagull Community Library and thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk to you just about some of the ways that we support students in the district. Um, since 2022, we have provided all students with the public library card. And as of the end of 2024, 1,250 students had used their library card to borrow materials or access our online resources. Our summer reading program
082keeps students engaged with reading and learning throughout the summer. And participation in this program increases year-over-year for students all the way from preschool through high school. Every month, one of our library staff presents an interactive story time to KUR's prek class that supports those students emergent reading skills. We partnered with teachers involved with the creative connections capstone pro project by displaying and highlighting the students books um that they write and illustrate in that program at both of our libraries. We also provide access to online copies of those books on our website. Um and during COVID when people couldn't come to the library to see those kinds of things, we actually had recorded versions of the books that the students read um on our website as well that people could access. We provide multiple volunteer opportunities
083to help students fulfill their graduation and honor society requirements and gain project management and leadership skills. We work with students to develop certain programs and services that support their interests such as the um gay straight alliance, the writing club, society of women engineers next club, and the technology trained by teens group. We support the student orchestra by providing event space and promotion for performances at Cooper Seagull several times throughout the year. We host the Hartwood Elementary's kindergarten and first grade classes at Cooper Seagull every year as part of their annual field trip to the symphony. These students are introduced to library staff. They tour the building, learn about some of the libraries resources and participate in art activities during that visit. These are just a few of the ways that we support the students in
084our community and we would love to partner with you on other ways we can help the students learn, achieve, and develop. Thank you again for your time this evening. Thank you. Thank you. Next, Dave Bennett, superintendent, board members. Uh, good evening. I'm I'm not Jill McConnell. I'm I'm Dave Bennett. Uh, I'm an O'Hara resident and I'm treasurer of the Community Library Association. And with me is not only Jill, but also Heidi Breer, a fellow board member and a Sharpsburg resident. Uh the Cooper Seagull and Sharpsburg libraries are chartered to serve the residents of the Fox Chapel Area School District. Though we share books with the Carnegi Library system, we are independent organized actually in the former Boyd Elementary School, which I attended as a nonprofit 501c3. We are asking the Fox Chapel Area School District
085to provide regular modest funding because we are faced with an unsustainable financial model. In hospital terms, the library budget is in the critical care unit. Cooper Seagull and Sharpsburg libraries present essential services to inform and engage school district residents. We circulate printed, audio, and digital assets at no cost. and we elevate the community property values that generate our school taxes. Our four principal funding sources are private donors, the state, the county through the regional asset district and significantly the six municipalities of the Fox Chapel Area School District. When we moved to our current facilities back in 2011, these sources were sufficient to balance our budget. Since then, our municipal partners have faced inflationary challenges that have left their support for the library largely unchanged. Under similar inflationary pressure and despite stringent expense control, the library
086now faces an unsustainable financial model of increasing costs and flat funding. Uh unlike the uh the community center, the services of the library are free. We have no way to raise our price. We are offering services of a common good for our residents and to our community. They're uh so we do not enjoy the generous public funding of the CargI library system. though we exchanged materials with them. Uh if we were actually part of Carnegie Library, our support from the regional asset district association would be 10 times what we get. You have 30 seconds. I'm close to the end. As an asset to the school district elevating the residential tax base and founded in a Fox Chapel school, we appeal for regular subsidy funding of onetenth of 1 mil to keep our doors open. Our
087financial and operational data are available on request for your consideration. Heidi Breer, likewise a resident, has asked to say a few words to describe the importance of our community libraries to our school district residents. Thank you. Thank you. Heidi Brayer, you're next up. Okay. Good evening. Uh, my name is Heidi Breer. I'm a resident of Sharpsburg Burough, a proud resident and a member proud member of the Cooper Seagull Library Community Library Board. Um, first to the entire school board in administration, I just want to say thank you. Um, I have two daughters attending Fox Chapel schools and both are thriving academically. Thanks in a very large part to the amazing teachers and leaderships here at Fox Chapel. I'm here tonight to ask the school board to partner with us and provide financial support to Cooper
088Seagull Community Library, which shares your mission. For the last 18 months, my foster daughter, Kamaya, has attended art and reading programs on Monday and Wednesdays after school at the Sharpsburg branch of Cooper Seagull. One reason that Kamaya came into our care is because at nearly seven years old, she had not been enrolled in any school at all and received no education. The substantial education support she receives at Kerr Elementary, assisted by the art and literacy programs offered by the library, have helped her overcome a sizable educational deficit. She's now an avid reader. She recently attended the schoolastic book fair and bought only books, like no erasers or stuffies like that. My other daughter came home with just books and I was blown away. Uh my oldest daughter Adelaide has attended cooking classes, art classes, meditation
089at the library, and continues to attend the occasional art program for teens. And she is a voracious reader. And as I'm sure you know, Sharpsburg and Fox Chapel branches of the library serve two very different demographics. I'm sure you experience that in the district as well. Sometimes I work remotely at Sharpsburg while my daughters attend programs. I've seen families with school age pro with school age children come in to receive food donations. I've observed Sarah, the head librarian there, work with a family to complete a utility assistance application. I've seen Miss Allison, who leads programming, respectfully and privately address hygiene and family support issues with a young girl who attends Kerr. Recently, after reading about the architect, Zaha Hadid, at Sharpsburg, our foster daughter worked with Miss Allison to build a school library inspired by
090Hadid's signature curved designs. She even had a parking spot for Mrs. Hoff. Um, for I'll be really quick. From 1996 through 2007, I was an education reporter covering public school districts throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania. And every year it wasn't if they were going to support their local school boards, it was how much. That was just it was a given. They all did it. And this trend continues. According to the Alageney County Library Assoc Association, Canon Mack allocated 169,000 to their municipal library. I'll just skip to the end. Quaker Valley allocated 540,000 to Swickley. Um I have some other uh stats in here and I'm going to pass it out. Thank you so much for your consideration. Um and thank you again for the educational support. Just today I received an email from Samantha Connley trying to
091help me find therapy services for my my foster daughter. I mean just the support's amazing and I'm I'm really grateful. So I have a handout and that way you don't have to remember everything we just said. So, if you don't mind passing it out. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, that's everyone we have signed up for public comment. Dr. Rejuk, if we the board wanted um one of our committees to formally consider and make a recommendation on the library presentation. I think they've gone to every committee now. They're here. They've been here to the school board. Um would that be something that we would consider? And which would it which committee would it be that we would send it to? Sure. If the board wishes to do that, it would come from
092any committee to be honest with you or really from the committee of the whole. We were actually going to talk about it tonight during the committee of the whole uh since we would be talking about the budget. I had planned to bring up uh the library funding issue since they have visited two of our uh committees and present it. Sounds good. And also just for clarification, our elementary ELA program is one that we are currently um changing the curriculum for. Correct. Yes. The current elementary ELA curriculum isn't as written. We have supplemented it and adjusted it to meet the Pennsylvania state standards as well as what we know students needed. um the there's a group of educators that have have been in process and in fact I believe it was last week they met and
093had um 100% recommendation to pilot a new resource for that. We knew that was coming. Uh but the one that we have isn't as designed either because we have supplemented with writing with some phonics and other things because um there's no one uh program by itself that seems to meet all students needs. And where would be a place for parents or community members who are interested in knowing more about the new program, being involved in the decision- making about that? Where would be the place to sort of plug in? Uh they are always welcome to speak at their school level at the principal level. Uh who who every school in the district has educators who are part of that English language arts committee. They're also welcome to talk to either Dr. Constantine if it's elementary
094or Dr. Patterson if it's secondary who manage those processes. they're always welcome to talk to me as well. And as we pilot the materials, we send parent communications just like we did for our um social studies curriculum. We send out parent communication. We get gathered feedback from parents. Sometimes it's formal, sometimes it's informal depending on what we're looking at. And um certainly we'll we'll look at all of those things as well as how our students are doing. And can I just ask a little bit about the timeline on that? So I know that we've been yes we've been discussing and reviewing um and at some point it will come before the academic committee for review. When is that likely to happen for this particular cycle of curriculum updating? So the pilot uh comes through superintendent
095approval and I understand last week they had 100% recommendation to pilot some materials. So uh I am yet to receive all of that feedback. I just saw the overarching memo and we had some dialogue about it this morning. So once I see their work uh and then approve the pilot, if if that's the case, which I would anticipate it being, I've been part of their work throughout um and it's been a great dialogue and and very rigorous uh look at English language arts, then we would look to pilot that next year uh in different parts and then it would come through the academic committee of the school board for report and for uh their uh recommendation to move it forward to the full board for approval. Okay. So thank you. That's very helpful. So 2025
0962026 would be the pilot year. 2627 would be a full implementation if it passes muster in the pilot. Yes, that is our plan for it. Okay. And there will be a presentation in the academic committee for gaining more information about the program. There have been actually multiple presentations already about the process. It's two years in uh because this is a massive this is probably the largest curricula that you uh adopt in a school district. And um we're also very cognizant of the fact that we are adopting science curricula uh and changing standards for next year. And so it's the same group of educators that need to be ready to teach in multiple subject areas. And we have been so pleased that so many people have stepped up to uh be part of that process and
097lend their voices. Right? There's new science and new social studies. So there I mean that was all part of the conversation and the academic committee is timing that and the groups of people working on it. But we have talked about it in academic committee and we will look at the materials when they're ready to be um adopted for a pilot. And also usually after a few months of it being piloted, several teachers come to the academic committee and uh present to us and talk to us about the curriculum. Okay. And that's at the upfront adoption. boat. I I love that there's supplements that we sort of build and create on top of an existing curriculum. Are those supplements kind of rolled out continuously in response to student needs or are they adopted separately through a
098formal approval process? Both. Okay. Uh so some of the supplemental materials have been adopted through formal approval processes such as the Spire curriculum that the board adopted. Uh others are additions that we have done for for instance a writing sequence uh to make sure that students are having uh exposure and instruction in certain writing components at different age groups that it makes logical sense. Uh there are committees of educators that come together both in English language arts at the elementary level as well as in mathematics periodically throughout the year to provide feedback that they have gathered from their colleagues at their grade levels and to make adjustments to scope and sequence to materials to um approaches and things like that. Uh Dr. Constantine at the elementary level uh will help to coordinate that along with
099Dr. Similey our director of literacy. And so it's it's a yes and um yes sometimes they are formal adoptions and sometimes it's uh that we've edited. We're going to use a different selection that's available in the in in the variety of texts that we have or we're going to we've talked at the academic committee about different novels that we have uh substituted and changed and put into or different options of novels uh for students at different levels. And so it's a in this district it is a constant process and it includes voices that are throughout the system and data I see it includes a significant amount of data and we look at at what is working and what isn't working and it's guided by the National Reading Panel information as well as by um other
100research that we know on uh reading development. There's been a lot of research on reading development which helps us to make sure that we're doing uh things that are we know by science will work but also there's um there's more than just that. You can't just read a report and expect that to be everything. You have to also um look at that holistic picture which we really put as many minds together as we can in order to to review that. For example, we saw after our co after COVID that we had certain strands in curricula that were a little bit weaker that we didn't see before and we anticipated that some of those were the result of a change in instructional mode meaning some virtual mode and also the lack of student interactions. And so
101we um added additional resources in to specifically bolster instruction uh both in English language arts and mathematics for those areas that we saw slightly depressed and uh those have risen back up. And then you know that's an ongoing thing because children change and their experiences change uh and also what we know about education changes. Some of the stories that were wonderful uh years ago don't make sense to today's audience of children because they don't have the same context and the same life story and there are other more appropriate texts then that we can substitute in. There are actually approved uh resources for all educators that the educators develop. Thank you. Thank you. Ask process questions. I can't take questions from the audience that are not from public comment. Sorry. It might be helpful to discuss
102um what will happen in the committee of the whole meeting. Yes. Next. Yes. Um we won't ask questions. Yeah. We won't be asking any questions. Um, we will be discussing the budget which is a public meeting. So, you're welcome to stay. Okay. Uh, Fox Chapel Educators Association rep. No comment. Okay. Um, any board comments tonight? Okay. Um before I adjourn this meeting, I will remind if there's anyone watching us on online um after I adjourn this meeting, I will be opening up a committee of the whole meeting to discuss the 2025 2026 preliminary budget. After we take a fivem minute break to allow ourselves normal human functions. Okay. Yes. Thank you. They're asking for a fivem minute break. Okay. All right. Could I have a motion to adjurnn? So moved. Second. All in favor? Meeting
103adjourned. order. This is the committee of the whole meeting on the 2025 2026 preliminary budget. Mrs. Paul Shek, do you have anything do you want to say first? No, I I I we're ready to to be able to share uh the budget information. So, all right. All right. Good evening, everyone. Evening. All right. So, before we get into the 202526 budget figures, it is important to know where we anticipate the 2425 fiscal year to end. Um so to do this we're going to estimate both the revenue side and the expenditure side. And while the next slide shows where the estimated actuals are currently projected please understand these are based as of figures excuse me these are based on figures as of March 25th. So they are subject to change. All right. This slide shows both
104the original budget totals as of the June 2024 board meeting as well as the current estimated projections. Um, but it's also important to note the expenditure line item for the original budget omits budgetary reserves. So that is just the true budgeted expenditures so that we can get a a true comparison of budget to actual in terms of expenses since budgetary reserve is more of a placeholder line item. So while the estimates are made up of many different assumptions, um they are made up of budgeted figures, they are made up of known revenue allocations, known expenditures. So that would include any budgeted contracts, known dollar amounts, um as well as incumbrances expected to be paid through the end of the year. And they're also based on calculations comparing prior year trends. Um we're going to touch
105on revenues and expenditures separately, but overall as you can see the figures um result in a positive ending balance. So this slide here shows the budget to actual breakdown for revenues. The estimated revenues are projected at $1.4 million over the original budget, which is a variance of 1.23%. That's actually the closest budget to actual um variance projection that the district has seen in recent years. Yeah. Um you can see each category laid out here. Um you can also see that there isn't one category that shows any large variance. There's actually just some slight variances in each category. Uh which is actually very good to see. It means that the district is budgeting properly and that there's no miscalculation in any single revenue stream. There are however some reverence or some revenue variances of note to
106mention. The first is with real estate revenues. Um so the original budget is based on the May 2024 certified values and compared to that the district is actually seeing a 0.65% 65% decrease in real estate tax revenues which equates to almost half a million dollars. Um that is due to a reduction in property tax assessments resulting from assessment appeals and the declining common level ratio. This is actually the second year in a row in which the district had a negative budget to actual variance in real estate tax revenue relating to those property assessment appeals. Um, state revenues, we're actually seeing an increase of 3.7% over the original budget, which is approximately $800,000. Um, it's not uncommon to see a variance for state revenues from budget to actual, and that's largely because of the timing of
107when the state budget is passed. Um, so in this 3.7% variance, that's actually made up of the appropriations to Fox Chapel from the state budget, which resulted in an increase in basic education subsidy. It also included an addition appro additional appropriation for charter school reimbursement that was included under the basic ed subsidy line item as well. And then there were additional grants that were provided by the state um in regards to both student teachers as well as some safety and security grants. And then also federal revenues. There is a larger increase on budget to actual of 39% which is about $390,000. This is tied to the ESSER funds there. We had to spend the final esser funds by September 30th of 2024. And there was some overlap um of planned 23 24SER expenses that were
108shifted into 2425 which resulted in the increase in budget actuals for revenues. So in total the district is projected to receive at this time approximately $118.8 million in revenue uh for the 202425 fiscal year. Again that's that 1.23% to 3% variance which at this point in the budget process has been the closest budget actual variance um that we have seen. Um and visually you can actually see this on the next slide. Can I ask one quick question? I'm assuming we're going to see probably the federal money decrease. So we'll actually get to that a little bit later. Okay. Um when I get to the um actual 2526 budget, I'll there's actually some extra slides in there to specifically speak to the federal revenues. Okay. Thank you. And then can I ask one more question? Just
109I know it's a tiny bit of the pie. Have we actually uh like dollars in account received the ESSER fund reimbursements for the ones that are accounted here in this budget? So we currently only have outstanding about $200,000 left to receive in regards to all of our ESSER funding. Okay. But we do that is all that's currently outstanding. Okay. Thank you. That may be coming. have spent everything. We just are waiting for that reimbursement. Okay. Thank you. All right. So, this chart shows the historic budget to actual revenues over the past few years, also showing and accounting for the estimated actual comparisons as well as the actual revenue received. So, if you're looking at this chart, the light blue represents the original budget. The dark blue column represents the estimated actual figures and these are
110actually the estimated actual figures that were presented at the time of the proposed final budget. So for example, the 2122 estimated actual is what would have been presented along with the 2223 proposed final budget. We're not at that point yet for the 20 for the 2526 budget. So that dark blue line dark blue column for 2425 is still subject to change between now and our next meeting. And then finally the orange column represents the actual revenues as reported on the annual financial reports. So I wanted to share this slide for two specific reasons. Um the first is the budget to actual comparison. So that's looking from light blue to orange. Um you can see the orange has continually been higher uh come in higher than the original budget. Again that is where you what you
111want to see. You do want your revenues to be coming in higher. But what I want to point out is if you follow this through you can actually see that that gap from light blue to orange. It's narrowing. And so that's why when I mentioned the 1.23% is the closest budget to actual variance we've seen. That's where you can actually see it on that chart. that gap is narrowing as the years continue. Is that a reflection of our budgeting prowess or of the the change in revenue each year as anticipated? So that's actually twofold. It's um representative of both the ESRE funds because we know over the past few years that's caused a a fluctuation in budget to actual just because of when the funding was spent and where we would attribute those revenues. But
112it's also reflective of the district's goals of actually budgeting closer to the actuals. So to make sure that there's no major flip one like flip one way over the other. So we really strive to budget closer to those actuals and to be more reflective of what we actually expect. Excellent. Thank you. So the other important item to look at with this chart is the is the comparison of estimated actual to actual. Um, so that is the dark blue to the orange. This is much smaller than the light blue to the orange. Um, which you know is it's it's actually representative of the actuals coming in far closer to what we're estimating. So when we are at the point of the proposed final budget and we have an estimated actual of revenue, you can see that
113that very narrow gap shows that we are actually projecting pretty close to what actually does then come in when the fiscal year closes. Um and in fact the average variance over the past two years of estimated actual to actual revenues was less than 0.3%. Which equals in terms of the 24 25 year about $300,000. this act and and again this just means that our projection estimates are as close to actual as one could you know reasonably expect at this point in the budget process and in the budget year barring any major changes. So now to move over to the expenditure side, this chart shows just like with revenues, it shows the budget to actual breakdown but for expenditures. And it's important to note that these figures do not include budgetary reserve. Again, we wanted to
114be as true to ex pure expenditures as possible. So this omits the budgetary reserve line. Expenditures for 2425 are projected at this time to come in at about $700,000 over the original budget. That is an increase of 0.6%. Um, again, showing the district is striving to be budgeting closer to the actual. And again, just like revenues, as you can see, there's no one category driving this variance. There's slight variances in every single um expenditure category, but of those some of the again major variances to note, personnel is projected to come in at about at less than 1% decrease over original budget. Um which is actually kind of related to why on mandated and contractual costs. That's projected to come in slightly higher than original budget figures of about 3.9%. And I say those are tied
115together because there was actually a cost shift when we had increased substitute staffing costs for this year. Um that substitute staffing that was covering some of those vacancies that we had. So while we had budgeted them under the personnel side, they remained vacant for a period of the year and were covered by substitutes. Those costs then shift over into the um professional services side which falls under mandated and contractual costs. There was also an increase in professional services under mandated and contractual costs relating to just increased student needs. Um so that specifically falls under we had a large increase in our ESL enrollment for the current year which resulted in some increased um services for those students as well as additional student needs in the area of special education services. So that contributed to that
116increase in the mandated line item. So for non-mandated costs um which again non-mandated includes um just as a refresher it includes all operating costs um that are involved with the school district that are more of the district's control. So this is books, this is supplies, this is your equipment. These are kind of those costs and expenses every year that really can fluctuate and the district can kind of control and maybe maybe um delay and adjust as needed. Um but non-mandated costs we're seeing at an estimated 7% increase over the original budgeted figures. And this is largely equipment um tied to both safety and security grants that the district received as well as those 23 24 er purchases that were shifted into 2425. So matching that increase on the federal revenue side is the result of
117some of those increases in the non-mandated costs that we'll see at the 2425 estimated actuals. Facilities also has a variance. Um so the facility estimates are about 20% higher than originally budgeted for and that is a relation of a in relation to a couple of of items. So there were some 232 24 budgeted items that were actually shifted into 2425. Um so the completion of the DMS windows for example, those were originally a 2324 and kind of the completion fell after July 1st. So we had to account for that on the 2425 um financial statements. There were also a number of unplanned um and emergent items that needed addressed throughout the year. Here are some examples. We've water lines, sewer lines, all of those kinds of projects that occurred um that were unforeseen for the
11824-25 year. Um but then also I do want to point out that there are a number of 2425 budgeted facilities items or facilities projects that are actually going to be shifted into 2526. Um, so while facilities on here we're seeing at an increase relating to some of those other items I just mentioned, there's actually going to be about $900,000 that were planned that's not going to be spent in 2425. Instead, they're going to be shifted into 2526. Um, so those projects that quote unquote savings that you would we would see for 2425, we're actually going to account for that savings through fund balance and use it to balance 2526 once we get to that portion of tonight's presentation. Um, so I did want to point that out um, while we're at this line item. So
119just to make sure I understand that 900,000 is sitting in that capital budget essentially waiting where is it? There's the equivalent of 900,000 for specific facility projects for this year. And those aren't all under the facilities category, I should explain. Some were actually budgeted. Some were supplies or equipment that were under the non-mandated side, just depending on how they were budgeted at this time last year, but they're related to the facilities projects that will be completed after July 1. So, we're going to actually take that and allocate it into fund balance to use it for next year's budget. Okay, thank you. So, in total, the district is projected to expend approximately 118.3 million in total expenditures for the 2425 fiscal year. And just like for the revenue side, the next slide will show the how
120that looks um visually with the historic budget to actual. So again just like the revenue side uh lighter blue represents the original budget although for the expenditures this is omitting budgetary reserve dark blue represents the estimated actuals as of that proposed final budget presentation. So again for 2425 those numbers those figures are projected to change and then orange represents the actual expenditures as reported on the annual financial reports. So just to quickly point out with the expenditure side looking at budget to estimated actuals. So that's looking at light blue to dark blue um you can see that the dark blue estimated actuals do tend to come in higher than the original budget. Um this is due to just those normal changes that occur after the budgets proc after the budgets approved. Um and a lot
121of again over the recent years is related to those federal esser related projects that if they weren't completed by June 30th or invoiced by June 30th just how school district budgets work those had to shift to the next fiscal year. So that is a a reason for some of those variances that you'll see from original budget to estimated actual. Um but again worth it's worth pointing out you can see that that gap is narrowing. So that that gap from original budget to estimated is is narrowing as the years progress again with the district's efforts to budget closer to actual. And then in regards to estimated actual to actual expenditures. So again dark blue to orange. Um there is again that's a more narrow gap just like we saw with the revenue side which shows that
122at this point when we are projecting our estimated actuals at the proposed final budget between the proposed final and then when the year closes we're we're budgeting we're estimating as close to we could reasonably um expect as you know at this point in the year the average variance over the past few years just in that estimated actual equal to actual is less than.6% um which calculates to approximately700,000 difference between estimated actuals to the actual comparison. So just to kind of put put it out there as I just said you know our expenditures are coming in about $700,000 you know projected over original budget. If this were to fall true and say that maybe between estimated actual to actual we get that negative we actually come in lower than 700,000. That basically is saying that we
123would be coming in for the 2425 year exactly at what we budgeted for. So at a 0% variance. So to summarize the estimated actuals together, we have estimated actual revenues currently projected as $118,87,469 and expenditures at $118,380,466 with a current projected positive ending balance of $427,3. So that positive net change will be allocated into the fund balance and will be used in connection with balancing the 2526 budget. So you can see where that breakdown is. Again, there's that 900,000 um from those saving quote unquote savings for facilities that were budgeted in 2425 that will be completed in 2526. So we're taking that 900,000 and allocating it into a signed fund balance for um balancing next year's budget. And then there is a $200,000 draw down from PER's committed fund balance which was what was originally
124budgeted for. And then the difference um which is currently -272,000 would then be drawn down from unassigned fund balance. And again these are figures as of May March 25th. So they are subject to change. will have revisions for where we're expecting our estimated actuals at the next proposed at the proposed final budget in May. So, are there questions on estimated actuals before we move into act 2526 preliminary? Any additional questions I should say that weren't already answered? I would just like to make a comment um which is that cost control is hard. Um controlling costs is incredibly difficult and it's incredibly difficult right now. Um and our district should be incredibly proud of itself for the the the absolute the management of expenditures um in the last fiscal year. This is a real achievement. Why
125is there a draw down of 272 from unassigned if we have a net change that's positive? That's because that is the difference of making because 900,000 is being allocated into the assigned relating to facilities projects. So that unassigned is the net difference with the 900 allocating into for if you didn't for example unassign or it's going into assigned. Okay. Okay. For example, if we if if the a decision was to make it so that nothing touched nothing came out of unassigned fund balance, that could be a route to go and that would just reduce how much is being put into assigned fund balance, which would then reduce what would be drawn down for the from 2526 when we get to that point of the budget comparison. All right. Well, then let's turn our attention to
126the 2526 preliminary budget figures. And again, these are um as of March well as of March 25th. So, we will have adjustments to be made, but this is where the preliminary budget sits as of that point at this point in time. So starting with revenues, we are going to break out the major revenue categories as you can see listed here. And we will actually start with real estate. So the largest percentage of the district's revenues do come from local sources with actually almost 63% as you can see there coming from the real estate tax revenues. And the real estate tax revenue category is actually made up of four subcategories. So you have the current real estate taxes and those are the current year taxes that are payable every year from July through December. Then you
127have interim taxes which would include any real estate taxes on either new properties or some building additions or changes that occur throughout the year. Currently Indiana Township is the only one of the district's municipalities that collects those interim school district taxes. Uh then you have the public utility taxes which are commonly called PETA taxes. Um those are taxes levied on utility companies in place of real estate taxes and you'll have the payments in lie of taxes or commonly called pilot taxes which are payments made in lie of real estate taxes for some um certain nonprofit organizations. So typical examples of those would be universities or hospitals. Um for our district we have there is a high-rise in Sharpsburg that actually submits pilot taxes. Um but you can see interim PETA and pilot taxes are are
128are very small numbers compared to the current real estate taxes. So the 2526 preliminary budget is currently on par with what we are expected to receive in 2425 those estimated actuals. But just as we discussed a few slides beforehand, that's actually a reduction of the May 2024 certified values. So this does reflect a decrease in the assessment values. Um, and as it does stay on there, this is the first time in 10 years in which the district has seen a decrease in assessment values year-over-year. So just to be clear, that 443 is it is the change in revenue from that change. That is the change in revenue. Correct. So that is the change in in real estate revenue relating to the assessment reductions. And can you remind us how far through this process we are
129as we have been hearing update periodically at the board level of some of these larger properties being reassessed. Are we close to the end? Nowhere close to the end. I would defer to Mr. Jafrey for that pred prediction. We currently have I believe it was 128 pending board of views. Some are significant commercial properties. I would be guessing if I try to tell you the number, but every year a new window opens up for for appeals. So, it's kind of it's it's a never- ending um cycle. And as the CLR, the common level ratio adjusts every year, that opens up additional. Um, but in terms of comparing for May of to our estimated predictions or projections, which are from our January 2025 certified values, we don't re we won't receive our next ones until May
130of 2025. We are seeing that decrease of, as you can see, the revenue loss of 443,000. The silver lining is that now we're no longer in danger of experiencing those retroactively. Is that correct? And for for prior years, there was a brief period of time in which the window the appeals process could apply to taxes that were in a prior I believe some of those 120 that those would include correct. Oh goodness. Okay. Okay. So just kidding. That's good news. Um the the new window is uh starts on July 1. starts a new period of additional appeals could be filed. Thank you. I believe they widened it. Didn't they widen Didn't they widen the window or they or shifted it? They shifted the window. Um so if on the next slide actually I think this
131you know really shows that ch year change in assessment values. Um, and it shows that, you know, since 2015, this is the first time that the district has seen a reduction or a decrease in assessment values since 20 the 2015 2016 fiscal year. Um, previously, as you can see, the district could anticipate approximately a 1% increase in assessment values, which equated to about half a million dollars of new revenue added into the base revenue every year. Um so there was an outlier in 22 23 um that related to one specific commercial property. Um but so in terms of going over the past it was really a 1% assessment value increase that the district could anticipate before even having conversations about any potential tax increase that would be needed. Um that also having that half a
132million increase that was automatic basically with every new year. That's actually what kept those tax increases in those years relatively low from about a 1% increase to maybe as high as 1.5. What this slide really shows is that we the district can't really rely on that increase anymore and additional discussions need to be held when we're when we're balancing our budgets. So, sorry Katie, you can just a quick question in regards to properties within our area. Shady Side Academy. Are they exempt because they are a school or is it because it's a private school that would they are they taxed for this area? I'm just curious. I wasn't sure if they actually they are not one of our tax listed as a taxable property. I don't believe unless they're unless they're listed under a different
133name. I'm just trying to think of looking at the tax roles. I just wasn't sure. I was curious if they were I'd have to get back to you though because I'm not sure if they might be just listed under something different. I didn't hear if Shady Side Academy they're they're an exempt property I believe. Are they considered a um I I believe I might have to get I'll I can get back to you on that. I'm just We have 14,000 properties so I'm just trying to think of where that one falls. Um but yeah, we'll definitely I think I believe they're they're listed as a taxable exempt property, not a government. Well, they wouldn't be a government. I'll get back to you. Just a quick question to make sure I'm interpreting this chart correctly. Yes.
134Um, each of these changes is with respect to the prior year or is with respect to the baseline tax? It's with respect to the prior year. So, it's property valued. It's it's the property value increase from the prior year. Perfect. As we're seeing now, decrease from the prior year. Right. So, just to be clear, everyone on the board, this is property values. This Yeah. This isn't a reduction since 2016. This is a reduction since last year that's indicated by these bar charts. Yeah. What you what you see in 2526 that decrease that's compared to the 2425 here. Yep. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Just and all of that is outside of our control, right? We Yes. Yes. We cannot control the appeal process that's been decided in the courts outside of our control. Correct. The decrease
135in our real estate values are outside of our control. We do appeal some of the um conversations, but for the most part, those decisions have been made outside of us. Correct. Okay. Go ahead. Moving ahead. Sorry. It's okay. So, the next section of revenues, again, that we're still under the local revenue um tax, the local revenue stream, um but we have act 511 taxes. Um these make up almost 10.5% of our total revenues. Um at least of the 2526 preliminary budgeted revenues. And act 511 taxes are made up of three separate taxes. So, it includes the earned income tax or the local tax. Um this is a shared tax with each municipality. The slide actually I break out uh for most of our municipalities is the 1% local tax that you will see on your
136that residents would see on their paychecks. 0.5 goes to the school district.5 to the municipality. The only difference there is O'Hara Township is is a little different. They have a 1.5% local tax. Five still goes to the school district. the 1% goes to the municipality for another one of the act 511 taxes is the local services tax. So that's the LST tax. Um it is also shared with each municipality. You can see of the it's a $52 a year tax. Of that $5 goes to the school district, $47 goes to each municipality. And then the realy transfer tax is a 1% tax on when a on the purchase price of a home that is sold. This is again a shared tax. It's a 5050 split. So it's a 1% of the purchase price. Half of
137the proceeds go to the school district, half go to the municipality. So in terms of the budget, both LST and realy transfer tax are budgeted at flat. They're budgeted at the same rate as 2425. We really don't see much of a variance there from year to year. Um earned income tax however is budgeted at an increase over the 2425 estimated actual. You can see it's about 2.3% increase and that is on trend with what we have more recently been seeing in terms of our collections. Um but it is um to point out our earned income tax collections. We are only slightly over halfway through of our collections for the current year. So as more collections come in those EIT figures may adjust and may change. Delinquent taxes make up less than 2% of the total
138revenues. Again, this is included under a local revenue stream. And they are made up of both delinquent real estate taxes as well as delinquent earned income taxes. So the current figures for the 2526 delinquent taxes is at a decrease over the 2425 estimated actuals, but it's it's budgeted flat with 2425. We're only more only more recently seeing a larger collection of delinquent taxes than we had seen at this point last year. So there is definite room for adjustment on these as we receive more of those delinquent taxes throughout the year. But the current figures as of March 25th, um it's at that slight decrease over the 24 25 actuals, but we'll be getting more information as we receive more collections um over the next few months. And then the last part of local revenues is
139quote unquote other local income. Um this includes earnings on investments which are the interest earnings for any of our investment accounts that we have outstanding as well as the other local income which includes donations received. It includes any funds passed through to the district from the intermediate unit. It includes rental income. It includes admissions for sporting events as well as some of those fees payable by students. So it would be for parking permits, technology fees, that's all kind of included in this other local income section. And you can see the for 2526 while other local income makes up 3% of the total revenues, it's actually budgeted at a slight decrease over the 2425 estimated actuals. And that decrease is largely related to anticipated reductions in interest rates as well as um some budgeting reduced pass
140through fund allocations from the IU. All right. Are there any questions on local revenues at all? We'll move on to state. just the has the resource planning committee advised on whether it's a good time to be particularly conservative on our earned interest um for our earnings on investment income. No. Okay. I just didn't know if like we discussed it if it should be like nobody knows how to predict interest rates. So yeah, I know that's fine. I just seem like of all the times we might want to like play a card closer to our test. It's not that much of the total budget, but I was just curious. Thank you. I think we all wish we could predict where those interest rates really are going. All right, so state revenues. Um the first part of
141state revenues include the subsidies for basic ed and special education. So those subsidies actually make up less than 7.5% of our total revenues. Um you can see it's about 8.7 million comes from state subsidies related to basic and special education. Um those subsidies for the budget are actually calculated from the current 2526 proposed Pennsylvania state budget appropriations and the calculations themselves are actually provided by the PA department of education. They're they have multiple spreadsheets on their on their website and that's where these numbers uh come from. The basic education subsidy is actually budgeted at a decrease over the current year's estimated actuals and that is largely because the 2425 basic ed subsidy included there was that appropriation for charter school reimbursement that is not in the current 2526 proposed budget at least under the basic
142education subsidy piece. So that that um makes up that slight decrease for the basic education subsidy is the removal of that charter school subsidy. And then the special education subsidy is budgeted at a slight increase over the 2425 estimated actuals. And again those are all just based on the calculations currently provided by PTE and they are definitely subject to change and are all dependent on the PA state budget. Other state revenues uh make up less than 13.5% of the total revenues and those include transportation subsidies which are actually it's a subsidy but it's actually based on the prior year transportation expenses. So the 2526 transportation subsidy line item is an estimate of what we would expect to receive based on the 2425 transportation expenses. Um there's also some reimbursements from on the state level. So
143those reimbursements are for prior year health services. Uh there's reimbursements for our plan con debt payments. Um and as well as payroll reimbursements for the employer piecers contributions and the employer FICA taxes which are 50% reimbursement from the state. Other state revenues include the property tax reduction allocation. Um this is the allocation provided by the state. It's based on state gaming revenues. Um and it is used to offset current real estate taxes for those properties that have submitted their homestead exempt forms. So it's for all those homestead exempt properties. Um and again we won't receive this information until May. So we're still we budget based off of the previous year's numbers. And then finally, the other state revenues include state grants. So for Fox Chapel, we have the ready tolearn block grant that is received
144and that's actually currently used to offset personnel costs in both the kindergarten, excuse me, the kindergarten programs as well as the prek program um for the district. We receive safety and security grants that are used towards safety and mental health programs. And then new for 2526 is the state facility grant which will be used for the Fairview window project for the transportation subsidy since it's based on the prior year and next year we've got our new contract. It's going to be lower than normal because the contract is higher. Not necessarily. Okay. So, the state the the transportation subsidy, it's based on the prior year actual expenses. Um, but it's also still based on appropriations in the state budget. So, there's a there's a whole calculation that goes on based on what your expenses were compared
145to what is appropriated in the PA state budget towards that. So, it it's really a combination of the two. I will it the transportation subsidy has decreased as the years have gone on. You one used to be able to rely on, you know, if you would look at your transportation expenses, approximately maybe 35% being received the following year as a revenue in that subsidy. It's been slowly decreasing and now the calculations around 30%. Um, but again, it's still then based on if if no additional funds are appropriated for transportation, then that might go even lower. Okay. Thank you. related policy question for the the basic education subsidy and special education subsidy. Are those appropriated funds or are those mandatory for the state budget? Does anybody know like do every year they decide what the full
146allocation is and they approve it as part of the full budget package? Is that right? Well, there are formulas that uh the state uses and the state has to put money into the basic education subsidy. So the state would have the choice. State legislature has in the last few years increased that basic education subsidy, but they could do the exact, you know, make the decision to decrease it as well. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm just trying to capture there. There is a set base funding for subsidies that states are I don't know if it was written into how how it was necessarily written in, but there is a base revenue amount that every district would definitely receive. And then if the governor or or how the budget ends up being finalized, if additional funds are
147appropriated, it's usually appropriated into a secondary um calculation. So you have your base and then you have the additional and it would be budgeted into that and that that can vary based on a number of factors um and actually based on how it's written in the in the state budget. Sure. But there is always a base subsidy amount. Um I believe ours is about, don't quote me on this, I believe ours is a little over four million is our base. Um and then the rest is a is an additional calculation, but I can definitely get back on I can definitely give you the exact numbers what the base is. I just don't super helpful. I think what I'm really trying to get at is that the sort of the size of the state pie is
148may very well like may change this year. And so if it's if it's a pie that gets that's appropriated which which is to say decided on annually um like I think there are reasons to believe that that state pie will be a different size this year than in past years. And so it's something I think the board should consider um as it's looking like that is about 20%. Yes. About 20%. Yes. Yeah. Cool. You jumped ahead of Sorry. That's okay. Doing great. All right. So, um, moving on to federal, if there's no other state questions. All right. So, our federal revenues, you can see for 2526 account for less than 1% of the total revenues. Um, and that's an it's a decrease of 25.15% over the current year. That's an expected decrease. Again, this is
149the this is the first budget year where we don't have any Hesser funding included under our federal revenue line items. So, we expected that decrease. Um, and actually the one less than 1% is typically where this district's federal revenue stream fell in the years prior to ESSER. So, that is we're we're getting back to those pre-ESSER numbers, pre-assesser figures on here. So, in terms of the federal revenues for the line items on the budget, federal revenues in this category, they're actually made up of our title programs and our access programs. Um, both which support varying um varying um needs which are listed actually on the next slide. Um so those are included in the federal revenue streams but we have in total four revenue sources that are included in other other areas. Um, thank you.
150U, so this page, um, this slide actually lists the four funding sources, four areas that will see federal funding in our budget. Um, and I wanted to include these slides because obviously federal funding is a nationwide topic right now. Um, as and and so I wanted to make sure that we touched upon it in this presentation. um and elaborate a little bit more where you would see federal funding in our budgets. So, as I said, the district receives federal funding in these four ways, the title programs and the access programs. Those revenues are actually provided to the state and then the state sets its own requirements for how the districts are to receive them. These revenues are included under the federal line item of the budget. But we receive two additional federal funding sources. Um,
151IDEIDA funding and those support special education expenses. Um, those are actually allocated to intermediate units and the intermediate units then set their own requirements for how the districts will receive the funds. Um, so for Fox Chapel, the Alagany Intermediate Unit passes those funds on and you'll see these funds, these revenues included under the local revenue as a pass through fund. And then finally, we have the federal program. This is a uh program that provides discounted services for certain eligible items. It's a 50% reimbursement program and then you'll receive that discount basically in two ways. The first is through a um it's a it's a straight reimbursement. The district actually will receive the discounted invoice. So it's a already forgot the name of it a serviceoriented invoicing program. Um so 50% of the cost is actually
152paid directly to the service provider and the district only is responsible for paying the 50%. So that is going to be reflected on the expenditure side. And then the other funding program for -ate is where the district will pay 100% of the cost of an eligible program which as is listed on there that would include firewalls, broadband services, um our our fiber project which will be um coming up shortly. um it would include all of that, but the district would have to pay 100% upfront and then submit for reimbursement of the 50%. So again, those discounts that this, you know, the district may receive aren't included on the revenue side. They're actually accounted for on the expenditure side of the budgets. Isn't um part of the federal program up in the air with a court
153case right now? It is. And we could lose that reimbursement. Well, there have been a few cases and uh but right now there is one in front of the Supreme Court and so once we hear that decision, we'll know if it impacts our school district or not and if it impacts the program, not only for school districts, for public libraries, for all kinds of organizations. Also, under the title programs, haven't they already cut the staff development and training program or is that a different one? I thought I heard this on the news. We have we receive in this district title one which is for the enrichment and um intervention. Title two is the staff development. Title three is the English language supports and I believe it's title four that we receive here. Uh title five
154hasn't been funded in years. They could choose to not fund any of those title programs in any budget year. So there are years that there's title four funding and there have been years there isn't title four funding. Title two is the one that is primarily used for professional learning and professional development, staff development. And um there have been um there has been discussion at the federal level about decreasing that or eliminating that, but we have not yet received any of our federal allocations. We usually don't get those until like April, May. It's usually more May. It's more May. uh and so we don't know what the end result will be if that's a 2526 budget impact or not. Okay, thank you. And actually the next slide will show the financial impact of each of those
155funding sources. So, this chart shows the five-year history of each of those federal funding sources. And it also it shows where the bulk of the federal funding um is made up of in our budget. And you can see that's really title programs and IDEIDA. Um access falls a little bit behind. It's about half of what we may receive in any year in in the title um funding stream. And then rate is the smallest of the of the sources. Um and it's really it's variable as well. You can see it's very it's variable um because it's based on any eligible projects that the district may be undertaking in any given year. So it's also very possible that the discounted service um which is for our our our fiber service might be the only or you know
156might be the only discount we see. So it could be very small for any given year. But and we have that project that we we need to do soon, the fiber optic, and we could we're in danger of losing that 50% reimbursement. We could be. Yeah. Okay. Because I think most people aren't familiar with what Title One especially looks like in a school building. Can you just say a few things about what that looks like in our district? Sure. in our district. First of all, you you qualify as a building for title one based on a number of factors, including your free and reduced lunch population. But the students that receive services for title one are students who have academic need in the buildings that have qualified. So, it's extra um uh financial support to
157help students who may need academic support in areas that are servicing uh a population that has a lower socioeconomic status. So the formula is created by one way, the service is provided a different way based on need. And what that looks like in our district specifically, it can look different in different districts, but in our districts and districts similar to us, it usually is supporting our reading support teachers. In some districts, they're even called title one teachers and others they are not, but they may be supported with federal funds. It may support intervention services. It may support afterchool programming or summer programming. And that can change every year. Uh in our district we work at Kerr Elementary is identified as a title one school that we are servicing and there is um work that is
158done to uh get feedback from families to gain feedback from the staff from look at student achievement data to determine where the how the program dollars would are used every year. Uh and so in ours it it it helps our students who may have extra need. It helps to support those reading and math support teachers that we have that will pull groups of students who have need out for a double dose of something an extra intervention or it may have the teachers pushing into the classroom to be able to provide small groups. That's the primary thing that we see in our district. There are some other things materials and some parent materials and things like that that also are spent. Uh but we do not have any full-time title one funded positions. Ours are all
159partially funded uh and partially not funded by title one, partially funded by local sources. And some of that is just because of the requirements of federal reporting. It it makes it a little bit more uh easy if they're fully funded by f by federal programs. They can do nothing outside of a federal program and they have to f they have to track their time differently. And so it's um in a district like ours that has differing needs, it doesn't make as much sense to fully fund them. Does that help? You have that So the last thing on this specific slide I would want to point out is just in regards to the 2526 budget. As Dr. RJ said, we don't receive our allocations for title for IDEIDA until until later. We might not even receive
160it until we have to pass until this budget needs to be passed. Um so we actually budget conservatively and you can see for 2526 um for both title as well as IDEIDA those are currently budgeted at a at a reduction over the current year um because we do not know what those appropriations are just or those allocations are just as of yet and there were increases last year in those federal dollars that we would not anticipate to see this year. Why did you budget access? So access is actually budgeted slightly higher because um in the previous years we reduced those because we had the esser funding. So we were able to hold off on the access um allocations in our budget. Um just how the access program works. a a a set calculation on reimbursements
161for specific Medicare, Medicaid um students with IEPs and those specific calculation costs that we were able to um reduce how much we were requesting the reimbursement for from our basically pot um because we were being offset with ESSER funding. So now that the ESR funding is gone, we can slightly bring up that access funding back to previous levels um that more accurately reflect our reimbursement levels for each year. Um because we're outside of the ESSER funding, we're trying to be as responsible with that pot of our ESSER funds as we can be for future needs. On an earlier slide, it mentioned mandated versus non-mandated um expenditures. Yes. What part of the federal funding covers mandated? So, a large part of our federal funding actually goes towards personnel. The the larger portion of it um goes
162towards personnel. I want to say it's about 88% of our total federal funding goes towards personnel costs. Um trying to find the here it is the print out that I had previously given to the board. So we have about 88% and go 88% goes to personnel costs. Um and then the remaining which is less than 200,000 a year might be split between other mandated costs non-mandated. Um it really depends on the need of any given year and where we would put that. So then the final slide of my federal funding um this reflects really those three major um federal programs that you see on the revenue side. So it reflects the title programs, the access program and the idea. Um and omits the rate program. Um so on average you can see over the past
163five years uh the district receives approximately $1.6 million in federal funding revenues. Now I will say and as Dr. Rja kind of mentioned the past few years there have been some increases in allocations um related again to ESSER funding. There were some areas where ESSER funding may have been available to increase those say IDEIDA allocations to a district. Uh so if we would kind of omit or edit out those ESSER fundings I would actually stay say that the average five-year average would be approximately 1.4 four million a year in federal revenues to offset our programs. Um and then again the guidance moving forward for the 2526 budget guidance regarding federal funding at this time is that at least in terms of our major projects as we see federal funding at our district that the funding
164will remain. However, it may look different. It may be funded different. There may be different requirements that are set into it. The amounts may change. But at this point, guidance that we've received in terms of budgeting is to that you can, you know, proceed forward with the federal funding still in your 2526 budget. guidance from the federal department of education, the federal funding part guidance. Well, guidance from um PSBA, from my um uh PASBO, which is Pennsylvania School Business Officials, um which works directly with the Department of Education in Pennsylvania, and they they kind they work with all of that, their guidance at this time. Um and actually other areas outside of Pennsylvania, they're still it's the same especially there's support for title programs to remain. There's support still for IDA, but it may look
165different. Um but at this point for the 2526 budget, we can proceed forward with it still in our budget. Could change by next week. At this point in these figures, the guidance is that it still be there, but again could change by next week. And there may not be people working in the department to say it's okay. And and you had asked about mandated and I think what you mean is like programmatically that we're required of other law like IDA and access. It's about a million of that 1.6. Theoretically we are mandated under title one as well but the federal government could choose not to fund that and uh we would still obviously have a moral and ethical obligation to help children but we may not have funding for it. an e- rate would not
166necessarily be a mandated. So it's about a million out of that if that might answer that question. Yes. Thank you. I'm sorry. I thought you meant the expenditure breakdown. So sorry. It's okay. I understood. I understood that you were thinking in in your world. I was thinking in mine. Yes. All right. Um and then finally the last part of the revenues is the quote unquote other revenues. You can see this is a very small percentage of our budget. It's 0.5% of the total revenues. It's actually made up of anticipated sales of fixed assets. So that would be anything that the district owns, say technology, um any equipment that we would be able to sell and then record those revenues on our on our balance sheets. Um yep. All right, we can move forward and summarize.
167Um so to summarize uh the 2526 preliminary budget revenues um you can see oh nope you can okay thank you um you can see this summarizes all of those previous slides and gets us to a total uh 2526 preliminary budget for revenues of $118,769,942. This is actually a slight decrease over our 2425 estimated actuals by less than $40,000. It's like 0.03%. Um so we're basically on honestly more on par with the 2425 estimated actuals and again that is due to those assessment decreases. Those are really what's driving um these revenue numbers from what we would previously have seen as a year-to-year increase. So then this slide shows those revenues historically. Um it compares the budgeted revenues to all prior year actuals and then the current year's estimated actuals broken down by source. Uh the slide
168itself it shows that it shows the normal increase year-toear that you have seen. It also shows that those increases have been getting kind of smaller. And then for the 2526 budget, it looks where where it looks about on par with the current year um tied to those assessment decreases. Um you can also see on here the five-year average of what makes up our budget of local versus state versus federal. Um so local revenues make up an average of 77.8% of our total revenues. States is about 20.2. Federal is 1.8%. However, that is because the past few years have had the ESSER funding. If you would omit those ESSER funds out, the typical 5-year average should be more around 1% or less than 1% for federal. So, we are predominantly local funded um followed by state
169and then federal and other make up a very small port smaller portion of our budget. So again, there's room for adjustments in these numbers um in these figures. As we receive more delinquent tax collections, there may be again room for adjustments there. As we receive more earned income tax collections um and just anywhere else as as more information comes out, these figures um may change. So do we have any questions on revenues before moving on to expenditures? Any additional revenue questions? Okay. I feel like you wanted to ask one. Well, and it's probably I think it's for the like it's for the balance part of it. Okay. How we're going to balance this out with and hedge for like 20% decrease in state and federal funding. So that's all but that's for later and we'll
170get to that later. All right. So then moving on to the expenditures. Um for this presentation, expenditures are broken out by those major budget categories of personnel, mandated and contractual costs, non-mandated other costs, then debt service and facilities. And then we will start with personnel. Personnel does make up the largest portion of our budget. Um it accounts for approximately 70% of the total expenditures, reflecting an increase of about 2.03% over the current year's estimated actuals. That's about a $1.7 million increase. Um, but of that, wages actually increased by less than 1%. So, wages increased by less than $500,000. Um, and I want to point that out because that is actually a direct result of the directive that the board um had given for, you know, really the directive of slowing the growth um as the
171district has gone forward with negotiations of its collective bargaining agreements. So that is really reflective of that um directive right here as you can see in the budget. But now on the flip side of wages 18 but on the benefit side u benefits are actually increasing by 3.8%. So that's about 1.2 million added into the budget just for the benefits. Um which again if we didn't slow the growth those could that could be would be larger than that. So, um, but it it's important to know because the benefit costs are largely outside of the district's control. Um, the piecers rates, so the PERS employer contribution rate that's actually set by the PERS trustees. Um, and it's increasing for 2526 to 34% over the current year's 33.9%. Um, so it's a small percentage increase. It equates
172to about $250,000 added into the budget. Um, but it's it's worth noting still the projections forward. While it's going only at10% of increase for next year, it's still projected to be over 37% within the next 3 to four years. Um, so we do still have to be mindful of those everinccreasing piecers employer contribution rates. Um, and piecers costs themselves do make up about 14% of our total budget. So while 70% of the total expenditures is in personnel, 14% of the total expenditures is purely piecers. And then another one of the benefits is our insurance premiums. Um those are not set by the district. Those are actually set by the Alageney County Schools Health Ins Health Insurance Consortium. And for 2526, we're actually going to see a medical premium increase of 5.7% and then dental and
173vision will each be increasing by 3%. And I would also like to add this is the first year that at this point of the budget process I'm able to give you the actual premium increases. Usually that's a that's an unknown that we address either at the proposed final or between the proposed final and the final budget. Um but those increases actually add approximately $550,000 into the budget. Are those in line with previous years? So actually for the medical increase that's lower than we've seen in more recent previous in more recent years. Um we had a 14% increase the one year we were projected to in a 9% increase for 25 26 and it was actually brought down to 5.7. As we project forward though, 9% is where we're kind of giving guidance for future year
174projections just to kind of anticipate those increased costs for health insurance. And that's that's just largely related to how the what what the consortium is paying out in terms of claims. All right, moving on to mandated costs. Um uh mandated costs are increasing by a little over 6% from the current year. They make up 14.3 14.34% of the total expenditures. Um that increase over 2425 is actually about $1 million which is directly tied to the student transportation costs. Um, so those student transportation costs relating to the renewed ABC transit contract are the it's a 20% increase over the current year, which does equal that $1 million increase that we're seeing in mandated costs. Um, that is a recurring cost. It is added into the base expenditures and so we need to account for it as
175a man as a recurring cost. um it is it is in the budget until and will continually compound as the future years go. Another man other mandated costs um include tuition. So that's tuition that the district pays for our special education private placements. It's also where the charter school payment uh tuition would be placed. That's increasing by approximately 7% which is actually on par with previous years. That tends to be what we see our our tuition costs currently increase by year-to-year professional services which um we've I spoke on previously when we're talking about the current year estimated actuals. So that includes the cost for substitute staffing. That includes the cost for um professional services that um the district enters into for ESL services for other special education services such as occupational and physical therapy for
176vision for um speech hearing. It includes counseling services payable um which includes the MAPS program that's provided by PIT as well as any tax services legal and it's also where our school dentist and our school physician are are coded just to round that out. But we're looking at professional services actually being budgeted at a decrease over the current year's estimated actuals. And again, that's largely because we had that increase related to the substitute staffing shift for the current year and we had a that much larger um enrollment issue for needing specialized services for either ESL or for some special education. The anticipated increase for those for the next year does not equate to a a larger increase over what we're currently seeing in 2425. And then the last piece of mandated costs um the last
177subcategory is utilities. Oh yes, sorry. Transportation. Uh student transportation. Does that cover our students or and that also covers private and and correct? This this is the transportation the district is required to provide for students in the district to get to and from. So it's and it's also transportation in the other category that would be for those students not attending our school. Correct. And then utilities is the final subcategory. Um and that's actually only at a it's at a slightly larger increase over than we normally see year-toear and that is due to that fiber project. We're anticipating a slightly larger annual service fees or service cost um just because of the new and enhanced fiber that we will be receiving. Non-mandated costs. Um they make up 6.6% of our total expenditures. And we're also in
178this category seeing a decrease of about 5.5% over the current year's estimated actuals. That equates to a decrease of about $475,000. just round it up to half a million um in the budget um over the current year's estimated actuals. Um it's also worth noting that this is the one area of the budget that the district really has the most control over. Um it includes supplies, books, equipment. This includes field trip transportation. Um as well as the daily building maintenance that you would see. And then while non-mandated costs are at a decrease over the current year, I do did still want to point out there's a few items um few expenses of note that are included in the budget. So that includes some costs for um supplies and equipment relating to Pennsylvania's new online testing requirements.
179Um so there's some additional technology or software and supplies in order to accommodate the needs of the students to accomplish those that online testing. And then it also includes new science curriculum um for the new PA science standards that is actually coming at an anticipated cost of approximately $350,000. Um now there is the potential for it to be offset with grants. Um those were grants that should have already been awarded. The award should have already been announced. So while there's potential, we're it's still an unknown. We're not sure where that is at this given time. Next we have debt service. So debt service is actually at a decrease of about 3% over the current year's estimated actual. So that's less than $200,000 difference. Um, and that's largely related. There was a cost shift and a
180savings relating to that copy center or I'm sorry, the copy or lease RFP that was just awarded a a few months back that we're seeing and that is directly reflected in in this budget here. Um, the debt service section also includes those prior year tax refunds um that are paid as a result of assessment appeals for previous year's collected taxes. And actually, if you can I just the one thing to point out with that is about three budgets ago, those prior year refunds were budgeted around $50,000. So, we are still seeing those increased prior year refunds and that is reflected in this budget where we are anticipating about 800,000 in the budget again while we are finishing out all of those 120. you I believe you said right and then facilities. So facilities we are
181showing an increase over the current year's estimated actuals of about 3.2% which equates to about $1 million. So this facility section it includes all building and grounds updates um and upgrades. It includes construction services and the supplies to accomplish those. This does not include daily building maintenance. So it doesn't include anything that might be an operation and maintenance. It this is really those larger larger projects. Um it also includes any fund transfers into our capital reserves funds. So those are funds 31 and funds 32 which are used for funding our larger facilities projects that are on the board's multi-phase capital projects plan. So some of the specific expenses that are listed on this slide are the ones anticipated to be completed within the 2526 budget. So you can see that includes some normal landscaping, normal
182tree services. Uh it includes updates to panel systems, some um cutting andor ceiling of gym floors. I've learned a lot about gym floors over the past uh budget. Um it includes some security updates. It also includes the Fair View window project which is partially funded by state grant funds. Um there's the continuation of the stadium light project. There's also some playground upgrades for two of the elementary schools included. And then finally, it does include a transfer to the reserves funds, the funds 31 and funds 32 um for some of those projects on the multi-phase plan. So for 2526 some of the new uh there's the continuation of the Hartwood HVAC um project which is on that multi-phase plan and then the new plan new project coming on is the tennis court project. So some of
183these projects listed are on the multi-phase plan. Some are just normal improvements. Um but we do have to keep the full all the future capital u multi-phase capital projects plans in our mind. Um and those there's kind of a brief summary on the next slide. Can I ask a question before we get to future ones? Yes. The um fiber optic isn't under facilities. Is it in a different category? Fiber optic is actually um anticipated as a 20 in the 2425 year. Okay. So that was included in those estimated actual figures. Okay. Yep. The only part of that that's in 2526 is the increase to the services to the utility services. Right. As soon as we knew that we needed to replace it, uh we did uh work with our provider to do the request for
184proposals. I think those have come in. We're looking at those right now with the idea that maybe we can get the project put in place before there would be any changes. Okay. And the high school, the water line, that's also in this current year's budget. So that is partially in 2425 estimated actuals um as I believe we're in the beginning processes of that. Um but then yes it would be include it's included in the 2526. Okay so it's in the plan it's a little bit in both. It's a little bit in both. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Yep. So this slide um really focuses on that multi-phase plan. Um we have had some projects more recently completed from where it is under current from the plan. Um so the DMS window project has been completed Fairview
185boilers as well as the athletic turf at the baseball and softball fields. Those are completed projects from the more recent iteration of the multi-phase capital projects plan. Um, the district is in various stages of those current projects listed, the Hartwood HVAC, high school water and sewer projects, the stadium lights, and then for 2526, the district will continue with those projects as well as beginning the Fairview window project, and then the tennis court project. Those I'd like to point out that the stadium lights and the tennis courts are coming in. They're much more involved than we originally anticipated. So the costreact be considerably higher than we first thought. Correct. And the and some of the earlier and the the multi-phase project is a living breathing document. So those are continually changing. But the previous versions of
186the tennis court project alone was an anticipated cost of about $300,000. And then as that has progressed and as we are moving forward with it, it is currently looking around $800,000. But that also can still change as more information is is um discovered. But yes, that's why it's it is an ever living breathing document that is continually changing and evolving. Um which is actually important to point out for those upcoming phases. So all those items listed there, that's just a sample. That's not everything remaining on the multi-phase plan. That's just kind of a sample of what's what's um coming up. Those phases are scheduled to start in the 27 28 fiscal year and beyond. Um, and they're all they're spread over multiple years, but there is always the risk of a project needing to be
187rearranged and to be moved to have to occur earlier. Um, a perfect example of that is the Fairview Boilers. So, those were completed two years ago, but they were actually originally on for 2829. um emerging circumstances happened and we had to move that up in need and then it also resulted in a liability insurance claim. So we need to continually keep in mind these phases that while they're currently projected to be in the future and spread over multiple years at any given time there could be priority changes and shifts. Um, but what we do know is that as it's listed on there, over $30 million worth of ant of outstanding projects will need to be completed over the next one to 10 years. Um, we do have funds already available for the current projects as
188well as the immediate next phase of f of projects, but future phases do need to be funded. Um, there are many opportunities the district can take um to fund them. Some of them may include borrowing as was start there was a discussion last year at this time with that as well. But I do want to point out it's very important to point out that borrowing funds won't necessarily reduce the budget impact because instead it would really just kind of transfer what is budgeted for say a transfer to the capital reserves. It would instead shift to a debt service payment. So there won't necessarily be a savings to the budget. It'll just shift where those expenses lie. Um and then also those debt service payments are potentially likely to live far beyond the actual length of
189or the life expectancy of the projects that they would be funding. So those are all being taken into account. That's not to sway in in any way. Um, that's just a fact of one of the areas to to look into when we're going and looking at at funding options. And the district, we are looking into all of those options. Um, but we still have to move forward with the budgeting of the projects as they are regardless of how the funding occurs. So, we are moving forward with with those as they are listed. All right. And then the last part of expenditures includes that budgetary reserve. That's 1.5 million that's actually held from the unassigned fund balance. And again, budgetary reserve is not a true budgetary line item. You can't code an expense to budgetary reserve.
190It's really an it's really a placeholder of funds that are held for any unforeseen or emergency expenses to be used as a transfer um throughout the year where you can transfer from budgetary reserve into the actual expenditure line item in which you need it. Um and in terms of the Fox Chapel budget, we allocate 1.5 million of our unassigned fund balance to be used and held for budgetary reserve. So then to summarize the expenditures preliminary figures um you can see there's actual there's total expenditures of $121,495,27. When you add in budgetary reserve you we have total expenditures of $122,95,27. That's the number when you add in budgetary reserve that will be on the resolution for the budget that the board would pass as well as what's reported to PTE. But in true terms of kind
191of comparing year-to-year expenditures, we omit that budgetary reserve out. So we'd really be discussing that $121 million figure. Um so looking at that, we're actually seeing an increase over the current year's estimated actuals of about 2.6 63% which is approximately $3 million over the current year's estimated actuals. And I do want to point out that it's 2.63% which is actually below the cost of living uh the cola percentage right now. It's below the what was the March core inflation rate was 2.8%. So we're below that and then it's also below the act one index which is 4%. um for the 25 26 year. So, it's really showing some efficiency in the budget management um that that year-to-year increase is below some of those other financial guidelines that are out there. And then you can see
192that increase visually on this slide. Um so, comparing it to those previous years. Um and again, it's also broken out by category with personnel, mandated, non-mandated. Um, and it's really showing just, you know, it's this the trend of increase. There's nothing I could really point out. I just kind of this is where the expenditures are currently projected to look. It shows the five-year averages. You can see with personnel averaging about 71.8% of the budget um mandated followed by non-mandated costs. um and just kind of where the five-year averages are of of those major budget categories. Um but the 2526 budget itself, like I said, those are projected at an increase of about $3 million over the current year. And really what makes up that $3 million, we have a $ 1.7 million increase in personnel,
193uh a $1 million increase in mandated costs for that student transportation contract, and we have a $1 million increase in facilities. And then between debt service and non-mandated, there's actually a decrease there of $700,000. So it's really within those where you can almost directly add up to get that $3 million increase from over the current years. And that's really um that you take that coupled with the revenues and that'll project forward where we are for looking to balance. Um so really before we move on to the summary of the whole, I just want to make sure that there's no additional questions just specifically related to expenditures. You said a million for personnel, 1.7 million for personnel, one for transportation, then what was the third one? 1 million for facilities. Facilities. Okay. Thank you. And then
194that $700,000 decrease between debt service and non-mandated costs. Can we go back to the non-mandated line for a bit? That decrease of seven and a half%. What maybe some more specifics on what that looks like? Especially instruction. I think that students and families may notice. So, well, one important um item with the non-mandated cost is that the current year did include a larger portion for that ELA um for for the curriculum. So, this 2425 included a onetime cost increase. So, it really kind of takes that back out of the equation um and kind of gets setting back to more of a base expenditure. removes that onetime cost increase we saw in 2526. Any other? Right. So then looking at the budget as a whole, we have revenues at $118,769,942 and then the expenditures again omitting
195budgetary reserve are at 121,495,27 which gives us a net change of negative2,725,265. We do have a planned fund balance utilization of 1.1 million that it has 200,000 coming from committed fund balance for piecers costs and then that $900,000 related to capital projects that were allocated from our 2425 estimated actuals. So that brings our adjusted net change remaining to be balanced to about a negative 1.6 million. And then of that I do want you to remember and I want to point out so 1 million of that 1.6 is that student transportation cost increase. That is an increase to the base expenditures and it's a recurring expense. So you really cannot balance a recurring expense with fund balance. You cannot balance it with a one-time expenditure reduction. All that does is plug in one year. it's going
196to continue in all future years. And then a half million dollars of that is related to the base revenue loss from the property value reductions. Um so that also is a recurring revenue loss which cannot be balanced with a one-time cut or through fund balance because it will compound future years. So really 1.5 million of that 1.6 6 million needing to be balanced needs to be balanced with either an increase to base revenues or a decrease to recurring expenses which would likely re mean some programmatic adjustments or a combination of the two. Um but we're looking at that number now. These figures are as of May 25th. We also know there's still a number of variables that could adjust that 1.6 6 million negative net change. But even with whatever's reduct reduced, I still want
197to just keep in mind that 1.5 million needs to be accounted for. So here is our current listing of unknowns or variables at this point of the budget process. Some of these are typically unknowns at this point of the budget process. So that includes obviously our May certified values, the property tax reduction allocations, we won't receive those until May. State budget appropriations are still variable and unknown. And then any of the emergent or unexpected costs that may occur between now and the end of the year. Some of these though are specific to the 2526 budget or the current state of education. Um, so that includes the additional grant opportunities and that's more specifically relating to that outstanding grant award potential for the new science curriculum. Um, the delinquent tax collections are an unknown variable. Um,
198as I had stated for 2425, those collections are currently coming in higher than we originally budgeted for. So there is a potential based on how collections continue for the year that the budgeted amount for 2526 delinquent taxes may adjust as well. Um expenditure reductions. There may still be some areas of the budget that can either be trimmed or some projects that might be able to be pushed off to future years. Um but again, even pushing them off to a future year, they will still need to be funded. It's just a it would just be a temporary adjustment at this point. and then federal funding. Um, still those many unknowns. As I said previously, the guidance at this point in time that has been provided is that the those revenue streams that the district typically receives
199will remain. They might look different. Um, that's why we did budget at conservatively at a reduced amount over the current year. Um but again that's going to exist throughout this entire budget process as a as an unknown or a variable. Um but at this point in time we are keeping them in the budget. And then finally the 2526 millage rates. Um those are unknown. Typically at this point in the process um we don't have a specific tax increase to recommend tonight. We still have additional work to do um numbers to look at. Um, and that tax increase is typically recommended at the proposed final budget presentation in May. Um, but I will say given the um continued reductions we're seeing in assessment values, which equate to $1 million over the past two years lost out
200of that revenue stream. Um given the increase to base expenditures for that student transportation cost and given the other unknowns with federal and state funding streams, I do recommend that there be a tax increase to the military. Um the amount might be mitigated um with any delays in projects or expenditures, but I do recommend that there will that there will be a tax increase or that there should be a tax increase. Um but we'll continue to work over the next few weeks to um get to that point for presentation of the May proposed final. And to be clear, the million dollars in transportation costs that you mentioned for the sake of any community members that might be listening were because of the end of a five-year contract. Correct. And so an adjustment occurred as that
201process went and we actually took the lowest bid that we received which still had that. Yes, that is that is um and I apologize. I should have I actually had that noted. I should have mentioned that that yes, that was an increase. However, okay, it it was a a financially, you know, it it made I'm trying to think of now how I worded it. It was actually a sevenyear contract. It was a 5year plus two and it was um a price that was under market value the last few years. So we benefited from that but this you're exactly right it was the lowest proposal that we received but it is still a large increase because it's resetting to the going rate and it was it was still competitive rate. Thank you for what does the
2021.6 equate to in terms of a millillage 1.6 million. So let [Music] me chart. So a 1.6% or 1.6 million would be approximately a 2.25% tax increase. And then if we were to increase another one10enth which is where this conversation I'm sure is going to pay for the to support the library onetenth of a mill would be well that would be needing to add in another $370,000. So then instead of balancing for 1.6 we'd be looking to balance about I would say 2 million. So that would be about 2.75 in terms of revenues to to bring in additional 2 million. Great. Okay. Thanks. What is I know that there's a planned budget reserve draw down as a part of this budget. Where does where would that leave our budget reserve? So we have the plan
203draw downs from various parts of the fund balance. So really in terms of the unassigned fund balance is which is what the is available for any expense um that we would need to balance other parts of the fund balance are really reserved for specific expenses. This would bring unassigned fund balance to about 8.1 million which is still within the board policy of 5% to 8%. I believe it leaves it approximately 6% of the budgeted expenditure. So it would start to be at the lower end of that uh board policy spread. Okay. in May when you give us all the updated budget documents, could we also have um a document with each of the um the fund balances so that we could see all of them. Thank you. I'm wondering if we've um I know it
204hasn't entered too much into this discussion yet, but um what sort of external measures we might use for tax effort for our region. And I know that that's something that's a factor in the act one index like how how much we're taxing people relative to their income. Um or what proportion individuals are taxed in our community as a result of school taxes. I know that's something that it doesn't need to be checked in on all the time, but it might be a helpful litmus as we move forward. Um particularly as we look at sort of the spectre of um potential decreases in state and federal funding. So that's something that um I'd be happy to like sort of email more about between this meeting and our next meeting. It's not something you need to have
205now, but um I know such measures kind of exist. Um and so it'd be helpful to I wouldn't mind sort of a an objective measure of how much we're taxing um people. I know that you get what you pay for and I'm not gonna I'm not going to set like a litmus on that, but it would be helpful to understand um where we sit with respect to other communities in our region. So that that is are you looking at like millage rate from community to community? Is that what you're looking for? I think it's a a millage rate from community to community doesn't necessarily tell you correct. Yeah. Right. Like what what sort of the household tax burden is. Does that make sense? Um and I think that that is part of what um yeah
206part of what I'm after. And I sure I don't know that I've ever seen that come through any of our school resources. is we certainly can look to see if it exists as to what a tax burden is relative to income in a particular community and in ours we really need multiple tax burdens because we have different makeups of communities as many other places do but there may be a measure that we're unaware of that we can look for. Yeah, it seems like it's all publicly available, right? Because we know what the tax base is both for property value and for income tax and we know what we're taxing um or what our total revenue is. So even a simple ratio might be helpful. Um, but that's something I'll look into. Thank you. Do we
207have other questions for Miss Polish or um are we ready to discuss the library proposal? So, she may have to do the math for us on the percents, but I'm going Yes. So, one10enth of a mill is about 300,000. about it's about 370 370,000 the value of one mil currently is about 3.7 okay million thank you um and I believe the request is annually to um give that amount anyone have thoughts on this this year it amounts to about a half% say that again this year it amounts to about a half a% % in more than what we do without it. Sure. Assuming Yeah. what we based on the number we saw tonight. I'll say that I think that the that our friends from the library made a compelling case about sort of the extent
208of the service that they provide directly to students. Um I appreciate that they came with numbers um both for the sort of the circulation as it relates to like actual students in our district but also um with respect to sort of the extent and nature of the services they provide. Um, so I'm I'm convinced that they are valuable um and that they are specifically valuable to our school community. I 100% agree that libraries are super valuable. I think I want to point out my first discontent with our municipalities choosing not to increase their support. I think uh it's particularly problematic to come to the school board when we are seeing huge decreases in our revenue streams from changes in real estate tax which only really impacts us in this serious way and does not impact
209our municipalities in the same way. So um I'm going to I'm going to say that for the good of the order because I think that's disappointing in the extreme. Mhm. Um, and I'm also supportive of our libraries. Uh, I don't think I would be supportive of $370,000 a year, but I think there's plenty of conversation to be had about what would be reasonable for us to look at. Yeah, I do wish there were a way to work more closely with the municipalities, and it is tricky in our area because there's several of them, but it's my understanding that the support is is even uneven across the different municipalities. So, it's just a very complex situation and and I'm just trying to sort through my head how we fit into it. Um, I think our intent
210is there, but I'm not sure on the logistics. Yeah, I have concerns with the amount of capital projects that we have and every year having so many unforeseen projects that come up that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that um finding this extra money is very difficult. Um I also think the library is extremely important. I use it myself. Um, and I just am not sure how we are able to come up with this money um, for the library. I I think it's a incredible resource to the community. Uh, and my wife and I use the library. My question would be for the uh the the board members who represent the farthest area from the library, geographic area from the library. H how can we how can we know how many of uh residents from
211Indiana Township, etc. actually use that facility? And I know the high school kids do, I know, etc. But is there a way that we can we can when we're asked back in our communities validate well x amount use this library all the time use the resources of this library. So I I I would like to hear that or see that um before it actually would come up for a vote if that makes did my point make sense? I understand what you you're saying. I have a probably a Paul question or a logistical question. And I know the Carnegi Library system was funded through a ballot measure. I believe they're not set up as a 501c3 nonprofit though, but would something like that work in our general municipalities with like the residents being able to vote
212to agree to a percentage or a millillage going directly to libraries? I I don't know that this board has that as an option to but in general would like Sharpsburg Aspen Mall uh municipalities are able to petition so for a referendum how does one get that kind of question on a ballot or something I'd be happy to talk with you offline I've looked into this every day I mean I think that would be a better way I think we're called steward our tax dollars in a very specific way. There's certainly a lot of value in Sharpsburg with our other library um as well. And I think our community deserves for them to be funded, but I don't know that it's the school board's responsibility to do that with what we've been kind of called to
213use our money for. So my question would be how would we support that kind of initiative within our communities to for the residents to say yes, we agree to this level of funding because in fairness, the residents are paying taxes to their municipalities and to us. So like it's the same pull of money that would be going. I would get behind a ballot initiative. I would help with that. Adam, you look it just it doesn't answer the immediate question. The immediative of funding this in any way from a school district, but I would be very supportive in using whatever community ability that we have to get our municipalities to seriously consider these resources and how we how we should fund them. I don't think it's the school's board's place. I tend to agree with you,
214Amy. Um that it's it's it's an aligned mission, but it's a different mission. Um and as soon as we assume that responsibility, we're taking it on for a long term. And I don't know that we were really elected to do that, to take on greater responsibilities than what we're currently facing, which are huge ones. Uh especially with the Uh well, even aside from the the current pressing issues of lower tax revenue and uh high capital needs, uh our mission is to provide a public education. Yeah. And it's our government mandate, too. And with the more ELS learn over after 10 o'clock at night with more students coming in with increased needs um English language learners, special education and with the thought of we could be getting less federal funding for federallymandated systems. I mean I
215I think I think we need to know our lane and what we need to do with with our for our kids. I guess I would just encourage that um one of the things that I always think about is a whole child conversation. I think libraries fill a whole child conversation that is still very important to our children and their success. I think there's a such a huge conversation to be had in between 370,000 and zero. There's no I mean like 50,000 I you know like you can make your that is a drop in our budget bucket to be clear honest like that is like pennies in what we're spending. So I think I think there is a conversation that we should be having around okay I think it's clear that the board does not have
216the appetite for $370,000 annually which is a.5% tax increase but what's the conversation around a $50,000 a year annual but when they come here for support for a sustainable way to go forward that's not going to sustain well 50 I mean 50,000 as it relates to millillage that's what I how I should say it so like whatever the equivalent millage is for 50,000 and then that will increase over time because millage right so should Sure but I'm also suggesting that we use our own political capital community knowledge engagement to move forward with our communities just as people come here we can go to our townships burrows whatever else we have maybe that's it we can have that conversation about a smaller number it just still opens the door to something that's outside our mission and
217where is that line. What other worthy causes in the community that support kids could we be looking at receiving requests for in the future? Uh would that as the inflation grows, would that amount have to go up? Uh we have then crossed the Rubicon in principle from our core mission to supporting another mission. And Sherpsburg Library has been the recipient of the um that fundraising thing we do. Tell us. Thank you. But this is part of the the Sharpsburg library is part of this, right? Yes. Yes. Right. So I was saying like the district does have other means to watch out. But I think sustainable help would come from our municipalities. Yeah. Yeah, I think I do have the concern that in hard years this would be the first thing to go. Um, so that
218and as far as you're concerned about the sustainability of that. Um, and starting in a hard year and starting in a hard year. I was just going to say I think it is a hard year. I think it's I think that yeah, the level of risk I see in this budget is extraordinary compared to prior years that we've looked at it. Um, and so that uncertainty is not a good feeling when considering as a sort of maximally discretionary support decision. So if you were if you were looking at like 50,000 in the terms of millage increase for this year, what would that number be? Are you talking to Kim? I'm talking to Kim. Okay, Kim. Everyone's zoning out. It's 10:30. Sorry. So to just at like literally $50,000 that um I mean that's going to
219be a point zero 05% maybe um I don't I don't think I actually have the calculation going down to like 50,000. Um but yeah, it would probably be the equivalent about like 05% 2.0. So if we were looking for 225 to balance then we would be looking then a 2.3% would like it' be that kind of equivalency or if it was 10,000 it would be just a 2 sure sure 26. Yes. I mean like I think there's just so much it's just such a small portion of our budget. That's all I'm saying. I look I am the I am the first person to say that our budgets should be taken very seriously. I have said it for years and years and years. But what I will encourage is when there's a time when there's something
220worth the spending, we should be willing to do that. And this seems like something that's worth the spending to me. I would point out past years we've had including last year we had an extensive discussion over an amount less significantly less than.5. We sat here for I'd say over an hour uh and the value was significantly less than 0.05. 5 and there were things that were important to us to keep that caused us to go towards the the higher number any other So we're hearing no well yeah I I mean it feels a little bit like like brinksmanship with the municipalities which I don't love um whatmanship brinksmanship like game of chicken That's yeah, well I mean you go we go which it maybe it is but I mean I don't I or like quit
221passing the book to other people. This is a community library. Our community should fund it. Yeah, it's calling them out. Maybe it's not chicken. It's slightly I mean it I mean the issues that I see is we're there are six municipalities which is fair. Um I we're sort of a c we're we're we're sort of a single we're we're a single point um that has a large budget. So it's you know very easy for us to discuss this thing and um I I I do feel like we are aligned but it the it feels like the municipalities um should should be the ones to do it. I don't know how to get them to do that though. It's my understanding that when it was established, Fox Chapel had agreed to kind of fund it and
222then was like, "Never mind." Yeah. The mayor of Fox Chapel was that that was not Mr. uh Scott presently, but the gentleman before him was the one who wanted the library, pushed for the library, got the funds for the library, said, "Let's do this." And now I'm not sure why the ball was dropped or Right. But I'm saying put finding a way to get it on the ballot, let the community speak, would be a sustainable measure for the next person elected, not to change it. Yeah. And I I think that's a more sustainable way to go than to bury it in our budget. It almost feels like a pass through tax for the library because we're just raising, right? And because it's so uneven across what the municipalities already pay, that just feels any other
223budget topics you would like to discuss? I will just put in a good plug for whenever we're looking at what to do with our December funds we should be considering the libraries for our when we're raising funds. Yes. Well, I'm committing to personally reaching out to my council representatives with a very late night email because I think they need to know this is a communitywide sure. There was one here in the room earlier from Sheriffsburg and one from and one from Fox Chapel earlier. So, yes. Anything else? Does administration need any other direction from us on this or is this I think this is a community dialogue and and uh you know our job is to follow what our board says in this respect. I mean on the budget planning process on the budget process
224like you have what you need. We have what we need I think we I mean well from us anyway. So from you yes we have a lot of unmet needs but uh that that is just life in general whenever you're talking budgets. Uh what what we have talked about is as these numbers become a little bit sharper and we're hoping to get a little bit of guidance from a resource planning advisory in some of the things that are the unknowns like the federal uh like the inflation and um and interest rates and borrowing things and um all kinds of of different things. But there as as Mr. Hamilton eloquently said there is no crystal ball. So we're going to do the best we can. The thing I am pleased about, I think this is the
225best budget that we've brought at in in April uh that in my time here because it was it's the has the most knowns completed in the budget and it's the closest we have to almost flat spending outside of two uncontrollable things and I think that is um with flat revenue. So it's flat revenue and the expenditures are primarily the the overreaching of expenditures is primarily due to transportation and real estate tax. And so I think that does show that we have done our best to keep everything we have a lot as much control over as possible um as steady as we can. Which that doesn't mean it's okay. We still would we would love to come back and say we've got it all figured out. No need for any more conversation. And maybe we will
226uh if we think optimistically, but it's unlikely that we'll we'll have a we won't hold our breath. We we we well there there are always unknowns. Unfortunately, our budget is due June 30th whether or not we get these this information. So we I if if we have the information, we'll add it in and account for it. If we don't, we'll make our best guess for it and be conservative uh to be safe. So, I I would appreciate some contingency planning um because the way that federal funding is changing right now, it's extremely sudden um and complete in the way it changes all or nothing. Um and so it would be helpful or at least reassuring to me even as we approach a final budget if we don't budget for the loss having a vision for
227how we'll absorb the loss of funding. um particularly because the state reli 40% of the state budget I'm told is federal money which means that even as we sort of unroll the layers of vulnerability we could be looking at a very sizable portion of the budget. Um and so I that that's sort of a not knowing exactly what I'm asking for but saying like I would like to see where some where we'll make those sacrifices if within a fiscal year that money drops away. So, we already have had begun to have those discussions. Um, they would includes increasing class sizes in some levels and in some uh classrooms by not filling positions. Uh, it would include putting some of our project as unmet needs this year such as playgrounds uh moving them to other years.
228They still need to be done. There's not nothing unsafe about them. It's it's just a matter of it's time to upgrade them. Um, we have already those are that those are all one-time expenses, mind you. the the the the playgrounds, the you know, holding off on positions is a possibility for some recurring expenses, but we do have enrollment projections that show us going up in the next few years. So, that may only be a few years. It may be 10 years. We don't know, you know, until students are actually enrolled, we don't know what our enrollment will be. Um, we've looked at different ways to finance projects. uh our resource planning has been reaching out to us. Our our members have been reaching out to us with various ideas that they want to try and
229they're really thinking about how can they support this in a more feasible way in the uncertainty that we have by giving some advice. Um we may or may not have much advice yet, but that's an ongoing conversation throughout the year. Uh and we've looked at uh other programmatic things that we can put off or adjust. Um, but really the main way that you save in a budget year-toear is either facility projects, which I am not recommending that we put off the facility projects for things that are likely to break. Um, because as you see in regular weekly notifications of the new things that have broken that week that are unanticipated and that's not unusual. I don't want that to come across as if we've not maintained our facilities. Our facilities are just older. Um, you
230know, the water line we're replacing at the high school has been here since the building was built. I think we have gotten some great money off of it and probably a little bit longer. So, uh, a lot of these things, we just learned today that we have a a generator that is, uh, going to need to be replaced sooner rather than later. But it it was put in in 1958. So, we are not talking about a a lack of of of maintenance. These are just really old facilities that have been kept going successfully with good maintenance. And now we have to look at those things. So what we would look at are the other things that we would like to do that are, you know, uh some new carpet here or some new paint here.
231You can put those off a year or two, but those don't necessarily make up a bulk of the budget. Those are tiny figures. So we've had uh Dr. McCins and Miss Palishach and I have those conversations probably starting the day after you approve the budget as to what we would do in lots of case scenarios just in case like we did during COVID. Um, and we're happy to to talk about those, but some of those too can elicit a lot of. Um, there there's so many unknowns that, you know, you almost have to to to think about those. Those are just some that we've talked about off the top of our head. Some are desirable, some almost none of them are desirable, but some of them are more tolerable than others. So, yes, we are
232thinking that way. Yeah. Okay. Anything else? I I think it's remarkable that, you know, I think year after year the budget's gotten sharper even with the unknown. So, absolutely. You know, I think we've been I think there's been a lot of consistency there and we've been we've been consistently asking and you all have been consistently delivering on that. Well, I appreciate that. One of the things that we did uh when you know I I I came here in in the middle of a pandemic with a lot of unknowns as all of you did and what we did know we could control was it we could project what we needed and try and keep it as flat as possible. So our administrators have put together multi-year budget plans that are as flat as they can possibly
233be so that we're only dealing with those unexpected things as opposed to expected things. And we have had lots of conversations and those are constantly moving targets and they change as our needs change. But I think that has really helped us to have more predictability which then allows us to have better conversations about where we're going to make adjustments. Um it's not perfect but it's it's a start. And uh I will also say the only reason that we could be that close in budget, it almost gives me anxiety to know that we are that close in budget every year except we have a fund balance in an unassigned fund balance that we know um can cover those slight overages. If we didn't have that, our budget managers would budget and round up a little bit
234higher because there are unexpected costs. And we've we've assured our budget managers that we will find a way at the district level, which Miss Polish has done, to handle those unexpected costs so that we can be as accurate as possible and be a better picture of what the real needs are of the district. So, we appreciate having if we didn't have that, then we would have to think of different strategies. Um, and there's no neither way is right or wrong. It's just this year's strategy and this this board's strategy. Yeah. Thank you, Kim. I feel like um I have a little more breathing room this year. and for the board as a whole so we have the time and space to think about priorities in the budget and talk about how these things are aligned
235with our vision as a district and not be stressed about okay we've got to meet this deadline and I'm still just trying to understand what I'm looking at so I appreciate the work that I know went in to getting clear for that early all right if there's nothing else meeting ajourned We don't need a motion for that.