Let's --------- try to jump in. Um I don't want to throw the timeline off. I know there's a lot of information tonight. Um but again, um I'm Paul Durban, finance director here at the school district. Um we uh have been
having some conversations in our finance committee um with the school board um about some foreseeable pressure points that we're going to run into as a school district as um we're seeing some trends with enrollment and finances that um that's kind of what brought us together.
Um, we know we're going to have to be making some, I'd say, difficult decisions as a school school district and, um, the community voice is important and it's going to help guide us as we, um, move forward. And the longer we delay these types of
conversations and the longer we delay these task forces, the bigger the problem is going to get. And I'll try to highlight some of that for us this evening. And hopefully, um, you know, one thing that we hear is that we we're in a good place right now, but It's tough. We got to start talking about
what's what's going on here. So um so three kind of things that we're going to look at um from the district side part of this data dump today. Um one we'll talk a little bit about budget, not really deep. Um and then we'll talk um about forecasting what that looks like from the school's perspective. How how
are we coming up with these predictions or looking at the enrollment? Um and then just maybe a little bit more about some facilities um that is just important information to maybe think about. Um, and we're not going to reach some solutions or ideas. I mean, generate ideas, but we're not going to come to conclusions tonight. We're going
to probably send you some homework. Um, generate some survey questions here as we move forward. Um, start thinking as a group here of, um, some things that are going to help us with these topics and then, um, we'll build as we go. So, um, I think it's really fitting that we
landed in this room tonight. The original plan was to be at the fieldhouse. Um, as you can see, this used to be a special services classroom that had a century swing mounted in it. And as we talked about the capacity study when we moved the ALC over to this building last year, that completely
changed our capacities. How we use the space is different. This is no longer a classroom that would count for a certain number of students. Now it's used as a um a cafeteria. Our LC students will eat lunch and breakfast in this room. Um, and I think it's turned out quite a nice
space actually for meetings like this and community classes and kind of a multi-use space. But just um, a good little reminder of as we change and evolve as a district. These studies change too, right? So, um, so first
topic, budget. Um this is uh something that I've presented uh to a school board in the past and typically when we talk about anything budget related um this concept comes up just like most public entities or nonprofits or people that
serve others. We are mostly people based. Our expenditures um are mostly salaries salaries and benefits. So, as a school district, um, you know, we we've got about 80% of all of our expenditures are going to our staff. And, you know,
if we talk reductions, and it's kind of a scary concept, the bulk of those reductions are made with staffing. And that's really hard. And everybody in here's invested in this school system and this community. And so, when we talk about cuts, it's a really serious topic, right? When we look at supplies, uh,
materials, really small part. So when we cut back on supplies and materials, it doesn't have as much of an impact, right? We can really trim back there. And then the other part with that is that a lot of that burden then shifts to our community in other ways. Booster clubs, the people that make donations,
our education foundation, right? So um the next biggest piece of the pilot is purchase services. That might be stuff like transportation. Um it might be our um our property insurance, things like that. So, um, this slide, um, I to be honest,
I just off top my head threw out some, uh, formulas that I knew were driven by enrollment. And one thing that S had mentioned as she was talking was, um, you know, as we think about capacities, it's important to think about student count, egg count, how many belly buttons are in seats, right? When we're talking
about finances, it's really important to think that enrollment is different. Our revenue calculations are based on APUs, which is adjusted pupil units, which is based off of an ADM. Okay? So, a lot of enrollment um acronyms there, but an adjusted pupil unit is they're going to
take your average daily membership, your ADM for every student in your buildings. So, if a student's here for let's say um if we had I'm just going to use a round number, 180 student contact days in the school year. I know we don't, but they're here for 90, we're going to get a 0.5 ADM for that student. Okay? If
they're here for 75% of the school year, we're going to get a 75 ADM for that student. So, ADMs are different than seat count. Seat count is more of a snapshot. Today, how many students do we have? That fluctuates through the year. Typically, what we see school year
starts, we see students enrolling, especially as we get past Labor Day, then we get to October one, and then we see that enrollment decline through the end of the year. So, we kind of ride that wave every year with enrollment. And that's what makes those projections tricky, right? that we kind of see some trends there. Um, a big benchmark for us
with enrollment is our October one MARS number, which is basically we're enrolling every student here in the school. They're on file with our our MARS coordinator. That's who we send all our enrollment data to at the state. And then we get an official report in January of what our fall enrollment was
on October 1st. So they take all the calculations how how we're serving these students. They tell us what our ADM was in October and then we try to make a projection for the end of year what our enrollment will be based on prior trends. So right now we're kind of in
this awkward time where we don't have that October one back from the state. We'll get that this winter during this study. So it'll be fitting when that's official. We can probably um firm up some projections as we talked a little bit too. So with all that, here's some ideas about revenue. Most of our revenue
is driven by student enrollment. So um our basic revenue formula has a formula allowance. Every year that changes based on statute. Um a lot of times they try to follow inflation with how they determine the next uh formula on how much we get per student. And then
they'll multiply it by our APU and then it'll generate revenue. And then we'll receive that through either aid or levy. levy meaning from our tax base. Operating capital, same thing. It's based off an APU. Local optional revenue off of an APU. We could go on and on and
on. Education funding is based off of APUs. It's based on enrollment. So, um I think the biggest thing that we're seeing and we saw a case of it with Sal's presentation, our enrollment trends are declining. We're seeing less
student, and this is not an Albertly problem. This is a statewide problem. Less children are being born, right? Birth rates are gone. So, I want to kind of dispel a couple myths or rumors or however you want to phrase it. There's kind of misnomers here about revenue with school
districts. And just to help the group kind of um think about um enrollment and and funding a little bit. So, one is um you know, we're seeing property values increase in our community. Okay. I personally think that's a good thing. Um but it can be a pretty heavy impact to people on their tax right on their
taxes. So when property taxes increase um yes our levy tends to increase but what's truly happening is our revenue splat. It's based on the students we have. What's happening is it's shifting the burden to our taxpayers locally. So
if you own a property in our community in our dependence area, your property values go up, your taxes go up. What's happening is you're taking on, if we go back to these formulas, you're taking on more of that burden than state and then we
get the rest in state. If our property values go down, state a contributes more, our tax base contributes less. So, I think one thing that people think is my taxes are going up, we're paying more for the schools. Why aren't they using that money, all this extra money they're getting? Well, we're not getting any
extra, right? It's it's pretty stable based on those APUs. So, um, and I'll tell you those, uh, formulas, they're not keeping up with our increased expenditures in inflation. And I can try to hit that a little bit, too. The other one is why can't we just set the levy
then to meet our needs? And in a school system, um, if we want to increase our levy, that would mean we would go out, uh, the board would approve for us to go out and have the community vote to increase our levy beyond what's allowed by statute already. So, let's go out for
an operating referendum, a bond for a new athletic facility, we ask the community to approve that increase. So, it's not just simple as having our school board raise that levy. And um we don't like to do it if we don't have to, right? We want to make sure we're respecting the money we have and we're
using the best we can. And that's why we're here today, right? Trying to review that and look at it a little deeper. So these were the enrollment projections that S had from July. And um David, it was a good question where these come from. Um our financial adviserss have a
model. This is from Ellers, one of our financial adviserss. and they'll take our enrollment history um using um prior year data um that that MARS data that we talked about with ADMs
and then they're taking a birth rate for our county and there's a really good correlation to the number of births in the county to how many kindergarters we get five years later. >> It's really solid connection. So >> you get the birth rate from >> just from the count the staff. So,
>> but we don't have birds here anymore. Is that going to affect that? >> That's a good question. >> Not in our county anymore. >> It's it's their residence area. So, where are they where they're they're home? Okay. >> Right. So, I can um if it's helpful in later conversations, if we're going to really want to look at our birth rates,
that's a good thing maybe I can bring in. Um and then these actually take like either a fouryear average or a six-year average. There's different averages we can use that can change these models. And so this is just how Ellers does it. Um we also have a a a nice uh trend
between I I mentioned our fall um enrollment number to end of year enrollment number and some really nice trend lines that we can pull from all that data. So the enrollment trends I don't want it to be the focus but the big underlying theme here is that there's two things here. These change
year to year they change during the year and we mentioned the seat count changes every day right? Um and then um we're in a slow decline and we know the next 5 years we're going to have fewer students unless there's some sort of um you know
change, right? So what's the what would maybe change our enrollment? Maybe new business um maybe uh housing. There's things that could spark that. But truly in five years, we're probably pretty safe knowing that we're going to see um this slight decline. And it's probably
better safe than sorry. Um now I think everybody here would also say we'd be part of some initiative to try and reverse that course too. Right? So this is the data itself presented and what I want you to kind of look at um 2425 this was in July our end of year projection
for our APU that's the blue line at the bottom was looking like 3650. Okay. And then as we got our um end of year Mars data back it came out at 3566. is a little disappointing.
>> Okay, so we were riding that wave through the year having trouble pinpointing exactly where this is. And what's important to note here is that then this new data will completely shift that trend line on what we think their enrollment might be. So the point isn't to scare everybody. The point is to say
that this this does fluctuate. And so if we see like okay in 2030 we're looking at 3310 here on the data that we had in July, but then after our end of year enrollment now we're looking at a 3173 So we're we're there's a pretty good variance in that. But in either case, we
see a slow decline based on those. Okay. So less enrollment is going to mean less revenue for the school district, right? >> Yeah. Where do the people go that your numbers decreasing? They have to go somewhere. >> It's a good question. Those people,
>> so nobody else is getting either. It seems like they're all going down. >> Yeah. So it's a good question. So, um I think we had some conversation at a board meeting not too long ago about our open enrollment. We're losing that fight. We always really have. Um
in this case, I think we were um just moveins, move outs a lot last year that was really tough to follow. Some different trends that we weren't really sure what was happening. We had um the reason I think we came in high in the July number is because during the middle
of the school year we were seeing a lot of really good enrollment especially at the secondary and then it just fell off at the end of the year. So it was something that was not really predictable. Um one thing we've done to try to help understand the dynamics and I think maybe it would be a good report to share with this group too. We had a a
state demographer come in. Her name's Hazel Reinard. um she's well known for doing these studies and just kind of tried to predict how many new families will be coming to our community. That that sort of data um and she basically concurred we're going to see a slight decline in enrollment over the next 10
years, right? Um but in that report there's kind of more I think analysis about our community in general terms too of what's happening uh ages of families you know what how many retirement um uh families how many are young families um
she analyze how many single family houses or multif family houses that sort of thing so it's good good information and maybe we can send out so to answer your question long answer I don't really know the answer to that so we'll keep >> I have a question. >> Um, you guys do a nice job of breaking
down like grade levels and all those kinds of things, but are you guys also tracking what our special education population looks like at all like across the board like? >> Yeah. Anything? Yeah. >> Yeah. So, enrollment might be declining in g and this is a big challenge for us and I think it's really nice that we have some people with that perspective
in this room. Um, we're seeing enrollment decline across the board, but we're seeing student talent special services. So then how do you also account being able to build third party billing and getting MA reimbursements for all those students into this? >> Um that's a good question. I'll say in
the large scheme of things it's a really small bucket of funding that we're receiving. Um third party billing is our ability to use it going to grow a little bit. Um for those that are curious, third party billing would be like medical assistance
funding that we can get if we're serving students that have need like maybe toiletrying or or changing or what other >> speech OTP >> speech is a good example. Yeah. And so um there's some revenue that can come in um when we serve that but it takes um
required professionals here in our on our team to help us generate some of that revenue too. So um good question. I think as we look at our student demographics that'll be a big part of our conversation.
Okay. So, I said I would look at it by school. This is a weekly report that our Mars coordinator will send out to our staff. Um, what this and I don't remember what day I grabbed this on. Um, I'm going to It's probably hard to see. I will send this out. Oh,
>> 113. >> 113. Got it on the slide. All right. So um at Halverson so for example at Halverson we see two sections of kindergarten, two sections of first grade, two of second, we have three in third grade, two in fourth grade and two
in fifth grade. So it's almost down to a two section school. So we know as we we talked revenue is going to be declining, right? We we see that happening. We know reductions are probably going to keep continuing. I'll explain that here in a moment.
Same at sibly. We're down to two section building there. But at Hawthorne and Lake View, we still have some three section classes. So at Hawthorne, there's kindergarten, first and third grade. And then at Lake View, there's three sections of every level.
So I put this slide up here for two reasons. One, from our capacity study, it looks like we're our classrooms are in. They're not. What's happening is we're really inefficient. So, um,
let's pick a class for example, fourth grade at H. There's two sections, 30 students in the class, right? So, that's probably in that wheelhouse. But if we go across the board to the rest of the schools, we don't have nearly that many students per class in
fourth grade. It's about those attendance boundaries, right? But next year could be completely different. So, we don't want to just go changing attendance boundaries year to year. The other thing that's really important about this is that we're down to two sections of each building. We can't go
down to one. That's really tough. We're going to be 40 plus kids in a class when we go on the one one section. So, this is one of the first signs that we've had that we need to do something. We're getting really inefficient with staffing is creating like inequities
across the board, right? where we might have um some uh students and teachers that have smaller class sizes compared to much larger class sizes in other elementary schools and it's really challenging. We don't want that but it's hard for us to adapt year to year and so
we're trying to stick within kind of an acceptable range for class sizes. Um and when we have to make reductions it's really hard. It's really hard. Um anybody have questions on this breakdown here? If you
can That's probably a bad slide, but is there anything about specific class sizes or sections in the district at all questions about? >> I have a quick question about recommended um cap sizes like minimum maximum we have our numbers. Is there an
MD recommended number like we say like 32 >> for a class size? Yeah, >> I'm not aware of any department of education minimums or maximums on class sizes. I think they generally leave that to the discretion of the school district
>> and it's a touchy subject, right? Like there's a lot of different beliefs on it and and it's um it's hard to say we should just I mean that's the easy answer, right? Just increase class size. But when you're in that classroom and you all probably have your own experiences here, um that creates a lot
of tension and pressure and um we we do have um I I think some challenges here where um boundaries is one of the the things we need to be talking about. Um but we probably want to start looking at projections with boundaries so that we
don't have to do this again in a year or two years, that sort of thing. I'm not saying that's the answer, but it's truly creating some uh unique situations. The other piece is that we have special uh so our special services uh level three programs or discovery programs at Halerson. So we've got a list of how
many highly structured students that aren't maybe calculated into um that could be I suppose to be removed from your student count per class. And then at Sibi um that as well. So that's a good um thing to look at is as S
presented those capacities. We got um we subtracted 96 students maybe from each of the buildings in that. So >> yeah, >> how do you place open enrollment students that are coming into you want to answer that one for me? >> Sure. Uh so as open enrollments come in,
we kind of hold them um until we get all of our enrollments in um and then Danny and I meet after the first of the year. When an open enrollment or first of the year, July one is what I should say. Um when an open enrollment comes in, a family can indicate a school of
preference, but then we look at these numbers to see um is there room so that we're not pushing those class sizes too high. Um, so we try to fill the school of preference when possible. Um, and if we're not able to fill the school of
preference, then we look at where our lower class sizes are and start there. >> All right. So, just to keep things moving along tonight and and I know we're going to have a lot of discussion about these topics as we go forward. And um, just just a quick reminder, if you have questions or followup and and I
know we're recording this and some people aren't comfortable asking questions, email, call us um, or bring it up. you know, sometime before our next meeting. Um certainly open to more conversation on any of that. So, um just to be transparent, the last two um
school years, we've made pretty significant reductions as a school district. And um if you look at our budget reports, our revenue has actually been fairly stable because what's happening is that we're getting a little bit more um federal funds in title.
We've seen a little increase in the general education uh formula. uh went from four or $7,280 per APU to uh $7,481 something like that this year. So that revenue is ticking up a little bit. Um
and I'd say if anything it's stable, slight decline in revenue, but what we're seeing is there's a lot of costs um that are maybe out of our control that are increasing at a higher rate than that revenue. So our expenditures are just naturally increasing. So, for example, um
transportation costs, um property insurance, um you know, most of our contracted services that we have with special services, um there's costs like that that are are just built into your system, right? And they're going to exceed any uh they're in the driver's
seat. We don't have a whole lot of control of what those costs look like. And um you know, another big one is substitute costs. We're seeing labor laws change, which is encouraging people will be out of the the the school or out of work longer and then we have naturally going to have to bring in
subs. We can't leave our students unattended, right? So substitutes costs are skyrocketing. Um there's all sorts of factors impacting us that are a little bit out of our control. Okay? Not saying they're completely out of our control, but a little bit. So what's happened? We could maintain our budget
expenditures and revenues completely, you know, balanced and we still need to reduce expenditures because we're seeing expenditures that are out of our controls increase a little bit in the next fiscal year. So two years ago we reduced about 1.3 million. Last year we reduced just over
two million. So the the 1 point uh 3.3 million that Dr. Hy mentioned is kicking things off. That's real money that's impacted our students and our staff and our district, right? So, here's some things that we've done just to kind of throw it out there so we're not kind of
getting the same things over and over. We moved the ALC to the Brookside. So, now we don't have a lease payment to Riverland. There was some slight costs in that move, but overall a savings. Reduced physical mailings. It ended up being like $20,000. Pretty big chunk when you think about
it. An easy one. Um but when we think about the big bucket of money, it's not as much, right? Um realign business office staffing. So we changed some positions there. Um which reduced costs, reduced safety position, reduced communications position, reduced an energy position, we realigned special
services, we reduced the administrator unit, we reduced seven FTE. So from fiscal 24 to 25, there was seven. Most of those were I don't want to say them like not as painful, but most were like retiring and moving on. and we didn't
have to cut, right? Um, but that impacts scheduling and class sizes and everything we talked about. Um, and then we reduced the targeted services. This last year we reduced an executive director. We reduced our uh our maintenance and facility staff just uh I
think uh two positions. The the electrician, master electrician, we're having trouble finding one. So, it was a natural, you know, let that go. Uh and then we had a floating custodian position that just served in in multiple buildings or as a sub and um didn't refill that. Reduced a facilities
director position to a coordinator position. We reduced administration reduce building non-instructional supply by 10% media center supply by 10%. And the big one we reduced a lot of teacher fees down. And if we remember staffing
is the biggest mover budget, right? So it's 80%. We've got to find some staff that really move the needle. So, mostly in non-classroom positions. And if you look at our strategy here, we've been trying to keep away from the classroom. Really been trying. Um Sean Gasson, our
principal at the high school, um will have a message for us tonight on a video, but at the high school, it was mostly reducing overloads. So, we tried to maintain as many employees as we could in the district as we made these decisions. Um and that's kind of been at the spirit of these reductions. The fear
is how long can we keep that up when we're down to two section schools, right? And so as we see this trend combined with running six, seven schools, how do we how do we manage this? So
these are way too I don't want anybody to think that these are real projections right now. This is way too early. But I want to use this as an exercise to demonstrate what happens. So I talked about if we maintain our expenditures and revenues, we balance it evenly, right? If we do that, but we don't make
any budget adjustments, and this is just for demonstration purposes only. I don't want you to hang on to these fund balance numbers, but it's pretty close, but we we have a lot of work to do yet before we can put a number out there for anybody. And that's going to be part of this group tool. Make sure we're transparent about this. But if we don't make it, so this yellow line would be
budget reductions. So if we don't plan for any next year, the year after, the year after, and the revenue stays the same, basically we just go about our business without any reductions, we're looking at being in the deficit in two years in a major hole in three. So with that
said, we have a strong fund balance. We've been balanced. We're doing a good job as a school district. If you look at comparative data between schools, Albert Lee Schools is in a good place financially. But if we don't do our part, that's where we get in trouble.
Okay, so same message example. This is not audited information. This is just grabbing a snapshot in time. Not intended to freak people out. Way too early right now. So big disclaimer there. Don't think this is like official data, okay? But just for practice and
demonstration purposes. So if we took the same idea, we plug in some reductions. There's some pretty heavy numbers here. 2.965 million, 2.24 million, 2.157 million. That's kind of in trend with those
reductions that we determined as a district the last couple years. It wouldn't be abnormal if this is where we landed for a point that we need to make reductions for next year. It's based off of some some numbers, but I again not audited, not final data for last fiscal year. We won't want to go there until
these things have taken place. So the goal here is to remain in our schoolboard policy is to try to strive for a 12% fund balance. So these numbers would keep us at 12. That's how these were just calc in our projection model.
But again the data is not finally. So here's what needs to happen. First audit's going to be completed because of the school board in December. We settle our contracts for this current year and next year. Those are open right now with four units and then we have what six more, five more after that.
>> So we got a lot of contracts that still need to be settled. We need to pinpoint that enrollment, update those projections. So we'll get that October one number in the middle of the winter comes out in January. And then we'll take all this information from the audit, the enrollment, the contracts.
Then we go to our finance committee, review all that together, and then the school board, and we'll we'll go to the school board with this and this group, and we establish what these targets will be. So, there's a really detailed process to get there. A little bit of a scare to see something like this, but
there's other levers we can pull before we get there, and there's a lot of work to be done by finance committee and and uh myself before we even start talking about. Just so you all know before July 1 when I officially started and Paul and I started meeting at the
end of April, May and June, this is the stuff we were coming to and I tell him this all the time. You cannot cut your way out of this. It's 80% of our budget. So you can quote me on that. You cannot
cut your way out of this. And that's when we decided to call Wolver and we said I said I've worked with them before in other districts. They do a great job. We're going to call them. We'll do the capacity study. We're going to get a task force together. You haven't heard
me speak a whole lot because what I also told Solid and I told them all even the board is I'm going to be very quiet because I want this group to come up with some answers and then the board and I Right? We'll take what it is. I don't
want to be in here doing neither neither does anybody. But >> we want to be your source of information. >> Right? We want to get you the information. If you say, "I want more information. I need this. I need that." That's what we're here for. >> But bottom line is, and granted, these numbers are somewhat made up and over
inflated, but you cannot cut your way out of this. So, I think um I don't want to say it's meant to kind of scare us all, but it's just a >> it's it's a serious topic. That's why we're here. We know we've made millions
of dollars of cuts the last two years. The trend's not changing. Our buildings are getting really inefficient. That's why we're here, right? And um schools, luckily, we're in a good place financially, right? And I think we hear it at the board level and through some strategic plan conversation. We want to
be good stewards of the funds that we have, right? We're just talking about taxpayer dollar. It's why we're doing this. So, couple things for you to think about and then I'll turn it back over to Sal to wrap this up today. Um, just some when we talk about buildings and I think
a lot of people immediately think we're going to close a building when we talk about this task force. Sure, that might be an idea that you might come up with. Um, it might not be the resolve. It might not be our final answer. We've done some kind of preliminary costing of what a building costs to run. Uh just tinkering with ideas in the past and I'd
say it's about $550,000 at each elementary school. Um and fixed costs and being utilities, you know, electrical, natural gas, sewer, water, um garbage, our administrative costs, a secretary, so maintenance, those come along with a building to have it open,
right? Um then there's things like health and safety. We have to maintain fire code, ADA compliance, um indoor air quality, lead and water. There's expenses that school districts have that just we have to make sure we're taking care of those things to best serve um our staff, students, and the community.
We currently have eight buildings. Um so we t take the the six schools, Brookside, and uh Hammer. And um typically you you staff one custodian. This is kind of just a general rule of thumb, one custodian per 30,000 square feet. And we're right on on pace. Like
if you took this 810,377 divided by 30,000 um what do you get like 28 and change your thing? Is that about right? So um right now we have 28 custodians on that. So we're we're trying to follow that norm. Um and you
wouldn't want to see what the recommended cleanliness level of your buildings would be with that. It's unckempt. They kind of a tiered system. So they think if we staff it at that rate, the building shouldn't be as clean as we want them. But our staff does a tremendous job. If you walk through our
elementary schools, our high school, secondary, uh, middle school, shiny floors, garbages are dumped, or floors are swept. I mean, they they do a great job. Bathrooms are clean. Um, and so really makes us appreciate what we're doing custodial wise. I think we've got the
right amount of staff there. Um, long-term, uh, facility maintenance. So wanted to just quick real briefly talk about what LTFM is. So there's a separate funding pool from the state. It's just called long-term facility maintenance. Used to be called the bird
maintenance, maybe health and safety before that. Um it is its intent is for repairing and maintaining buildings um in the condition that they are. It's not for new construction, new buildings, um upgrades, anything like that. We get
about $1.2 2 million in a levy combination for um LTFM. And the reason I got to bring this up is that most roofs um parking lots um eat up all of your
LTFM costs. So, we have very little funding that we can set aside for all those health and safety pieces, fire code, um, you know, just the general maintenance and upkeep of your building. Um, you know, I I think our our original plan to replace
the roof at the high school was a six-year plan and we got about three years into it and now we got I think eight more years in the plan. The costs just are just increasing tremendously. So, if you think about it, um the the roof at Elderly High School alone, um
this year I think we did a I think it was like 30,000 foot chunk of it. It wasn't that big and it was 600,000 plus. >> It's just expensive. Like we we don't have that type of revenue. And so when we see communities around us struggling
with keeping the roofs from leaking, I get it. It's really challenging to maintain those plants. So, one other thing that we did um recently and we didn't really talk about them in our recent upgrades or construction um but in 23
school board approved us selling uh deferred maintenance bonds which are basically we're taking out we're selling bonds against our LPFM funding that comes in. So, we're actually taking about $350,000 of that LPFM money every year and paying uh for those bonds.
What it did is it allowed us to upgrade the HVAC at Lake View Elementary, Southwest Middle School, um which also feeds Sibly, which is an important thing to think about. Um and then the pool, dehumidification unit at the high
school, and um what am I missing from that project? So, it went to some pretty hefty costs uh maintenance um HVAC maintenance that we needed to complete. So, um, the other project I wanted to
mention recently, so we had the HVAC project in 24. We actually started in 24. We're just wrapping it up now. Um, and then we had a 2022 uh project. I think the board approved in 21. Um, we had some excess bonds from the Hammer project, about a million dollars. They
improved the use of those to go towards uh capital facilities to upgrade welcoming and safe entryways. So, we really up the security of our schools. There should be a secure checkpoint to enter every building. Um, we're upgrading locks and doors, um, some cameras, stuff like that. But that
that's that's all wrapped up now. So, um, so those are probably the two most recent project. Um, so here's some little tidbits. Um, it's been since the 1940s since enrollment has been where it currently is in elderly.
It's as far back as I could get. So, I've been since the 40s since we've seen a moment like today. Newest building is a high school. Um, I wanted to reference that high school was the result of a facilities committee that got together. Thank you. Right. Um,
Hawthorne and you walk that building, it doesn't feel that old. It really doesn't. So, um, it's a testament again to our maintenance and custo. Um, Haworn is our oldest building, 1951. Um, lake views are in and that building
at Hawthorne is a tank. That thing it just it holds up to everything and uh those tazzle floors and I I like the older buildings. Um, interesting enough, Lake View three floors. It's our smallest building. It doesn't feel like
it, but it is the smallest Brookside houses. And we counted this the other day and it's it's really important to realize this building is challenging and S mentioned all the different revisions and changes and it's just we've adapted and adapted and adapted over and over and over houses 13 different programs
currently. So ECSE early learning so ECSE is early childhood special education uh early learning tiger club child care well at work clinic that was one of the recent upgrades here as well. I think it was like 2014 or 15. We
remodeled the clinic. Um, community ad, our technology department centered here, our maintenance team is centered here, our district offices. Um, on that map that showed district offices, the tech and maintenance I think are included in that >> green shadowing. Um, business office,
special services. Um, so our special ed department is centrally located here. Um, and then adult ed, our 18 to 22 transitions program is here. They just did a remodel to one of the classrooms and put a commercial kitchen in upstairs. This building is just really
unique. Um, and then our area learning center. Um, and then it's also got an annex here uh with some centralized storage for the district. We have a truck. We can run things around the district that soon had an addition in 2018 that was a new gym. I think you mentioned another
project that was before that might have been LED lighting and some HVAC stuff there. Um, new HVAC installed. I mentioned Oh, Hawthorne got a new boiler this year. uh Lake View Southwest Middle School and the high school all got new boilers um or HVAC install. The high
school HVAC system is geothermal and it's the biggest pain. We sink so much money into that every year, every year, every year. It's really efficient, but it's a pain. We put um I think six to eight new heat pumps in every year. There's 296 heat pumps around the
building. So, it's just constantly chasing our tail to keep that building. We added solar uh for part of solar for schools program to uh Southwest Middle School, Calverson, Elbertly High School, and Sibly. And we are realizing some savings, new roofs partially recently,
but not complete. Um, Elley High School and Southwest Middle School. And then, um, I wanted to note that that Southwest Middle School, um, heating and air conditioning, I think water all comes from, um, for sibly, all comes from Southwest. So, those buildings are attached underground there. Um, and it's
it's good context to have. And we have a large prediction. And I want this one's really kind of scary to me because these are big costs. We built a new stadium, track, turf field up at Hammer Complex in 2018. Well, all that needs to get replaced
over time, right? Those costs for a new turf field, new track, parking lots, they add up. They're really expensive. And those are coming. we we will be really struggling with that LTFM money to replace that, right? So, um we're
going to have to try to build those expenses in long term. Um but also roofs, parking lot, um HVAC, those are all coming too. So, how do we balance all some challenges? >> I was just going to say we plan to bring more information at a future meeting
about just maintenance costs across the district that um and the condition of the building. Um Paul, do you think we're running a little bit behind? So we could do two things. We could send the high school video out as um homework between meetings. >> Good idea. >> Okay. I would say or we could do it at the beginning of next meeting. Do you
want to do it as homework? >> Let's do it homework. Okay. >> Then everybody gets to know Sean. So Sean Gaston, our high school principal, is going to be presenting tonight. >> Um and Christie will have a chance to talk here on the next perspective. But um we just wanted Sean's face and voice to be part of this and you all to
recognize him before we jump into our next meeting. Can you prepare a little video? I think it's a good idea. We'll just send it out. >> Yeah, we can send a link out between meetings. Um I'm just going to get the erased to get ready for kind of the end of the meeting here. Um but we did want
you to benefit from the perspectives of um people who lead buildings in the district. Um so that'll be what his video is about. But um do you mind just kind of going into life at your building? how all you know that obviously I'm hoping people can see you know it's a complicated picture and all
these decisions are interwoven right so you kind of have to look at um all of these things together to talk about being a successful school district so I'd love your your thoughts here >> one of the things that's unique with Calver and Sibly is that we do have the study free special education classrooms
which almost could be considered a fixed expense too because we are legal legally required have a certain number of kids with a certain number of adults that also have specific disabilities. So those that gets expensive and as our
special education population keeps growing as you say these kids keep rolling into these 73 programs we have eight in elementary so that gets to be quite expensive. >> Can I make a comment on that kind of as
that count increases and we know the program's here to stay right we know that we're going to have to these students. Um, our special education cross subsidy, meaning we will get revenue for special ed aid from the state. We're exceeding that revenue by
about $2.5 million. So, that's an important thing. That means that's eating right into that general fund balance and we can't just not pay for it because we have to serve those students. So, there might be some efficiencies we could look at or different ways to serve them or some
other options there, but that's a big part of this. That's that's a strain on the budget. >> It's very much so because there's a lot of mandates on how we do it. >> Yep. >> And so just um taking that into consideration with everything is always
an expensive piece and having um I think how many classes are at Southwest >> two level three. There's two and then there's like two three rooms. >> Yes. So it just and it keeps growing. I've never seen eight before. Um and at
Sibi right now we have um four study in three classrooms. Um one has five students, two pair educators, one teacher. That is a minimum for that class to function. That's the minimum for that class according to statute. Um we have another class with six students,
two pair educators and a teacher. Um another one, seven students, three pair educators and a teacher. Another one with five students, three pair educators and teacher. And you're looking you're looking five students. There's there's four adults then to those five students. However, those five students require
almost one-on-one. They they require diapering. They require transportation in within the building. Um just they they have so much um heavy needs um and that is a big challenge for everyone
there. Um, we also have um a lot of what we have in in our specialized instruction too is a lot of training that goes along with anybody who was in those setting free programs. They have to be trained in how to handle deescalation. So, and that training took
um most of our staff that have already been trained six hours a piece and that's outside of school time. So, it's even the training of just running the programs is expensive. Um I was asked to talk about a few different things. So
um let's see. So um some of the challenges that we see I think I mentioned most of them but just um our staffing. We we're not even able to find a lot of the the licensed staff for a lot of these programs. We're requiring a lot of our staffing our staff from other buildings even to sit in on meetings
because we have to have specific lensures to sit in on a lot of these meetings. So to cover everything, we're we have a lot of people doing a lot of different hats everywhere. Um the the physical space of all of these places,
we're taking up huge rooms that maybe don't need to be that big, but you can't legally put them in any kind of a small closet either. It has to have windows and doors and all these things that, you know, it's it's it's it could be changed, but how and where
and when. Um Um we have we've talked about the declining enrollment but in special education it keeps increasing. Um there's the we all we have to follow the individuals with disabilities act for
everything. Um our numbers just don't move. Does anybody have questions about the 73 >> or just elementary structures in general?
>> That was good. That's what I was hoping to hear from you. Just explain there's some challenges really has a little different their their study classrooms are a little different than the ones that are at um but they still have a lot of the same requirements. >> Sure.
>> I'll ask a question. I already know the answer to this. Why can't you put all special education in one building? >> What's your answer? Is it illegal? It is illegal. So that would actually be that would be a setting for so and we don't actually have a setting for here or
setting for for special education. We do a co-op with Austin. And so we actually have to bust students to that setting for um and they're facing many of the same trouble that we face too with not enough staff. We have students that need more support. Yes, that level four
setting, but because they're underst staff themselves, they can't take them, which then puts a big strain on building. >> So, I believe a lot of our study three classes are housing some probably technically studying four students. Um, and it's just >> it's the best option you have,
>> correct? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I know it is. Yeah, we'll we'll get there. Well, um, we'll keep talking about those things and we have a video from the high school principal. um that I think we're going to send out that um you can all maybe watch at your leisure between meetings just talking about some
of the impacts to the high school specifically. So um so to wrap up, I'm actually I'll come back to this in a second. I'll just kind of tell you what we're going to do after tonight and then I'll go back to that and we'll close on that. So um we'll make sure you get this
information and um it got mentioned a couple times. We know it's kind of a lot coming at you, but um just trying to get you kind of caught up to speed with all the like key influence factors um as as quickly as possible. Um just so that we can all be working from that same level of understanding and actually having,
you know, informed discussions about what are actually the options, you know, ahead of us. Um so we just ask you to come back with questions or reflections, whether you bring them to the meeting or as Paul mentioned, send them in between. Um we've been taking meeting minutes. um you'd be you certainly could respond to
those you know send a send a Paul or Steve um whatever method you prefer um for so for next meeting um we'll we'll leave time at the beginning for what I call thought since last meeting like what's on your mind what are these questions um have you talked to anyone out in the community right like we
encourage you to you know continue to be a conduit of community opinion um but we're going to spend a lot of time talking about community engagement for getting input right so we can't take everyone of the communities through this deep process. Um, but we can gather more opinions about like what's critical
about our school district. Um, what must we maintain? What are some of the hopes and dreams that they would want to see out of a process? Kind of what are our non-negotiables. So, um, we'll talk about the, um, I wrote on here recommended to be multimodal. And by that I mean, you know, might include surveys, might include listening
sessions, might include, you know, showing up at a regularly scheduled meeting for a certain group of people. So, um, start thinking about who you want to hear from, right? You're here to represent, but like, you know, do you want to is there a group we should approach or make sure to get an opinion from? Obviously, parents and staff and
students are are pretty obvious. Um, it got mentioned earlier as well, but, you know, we want to make sure you feel like you have data um to feel confident in making decisions eventually or recommendations eventually. Um, so we
were curious if there's any kind of peer school districts you would want us to pull statistics for for you, right? Um, just because we could work, you know, that's what we could do in between meetings is bring things back to you. Um, so is, you know, as you read this prompt, um, is there anything that comes
to mind that anybody would want to We attended as a small group, but we're running out of time and I'm not going to keep you late, so we can just do it as kind of call out. Is there any any other districts that you would want to hear about whether it's their financial picture or their buildings or their
enrollment trends or right >> where are we like what school districts are similar >> about fair >> and okay >> little bit bigger than us maybe but not
>> I'm pretty proud of my IC number >> well I don't know fair amount number. >> They're a little smaller, but there's some similarities that would benefit >> is not too far away. >> Yeah. I think I'd like to uh I don't have a
name or a district but you know I would if there is districts out there if there are districts out there that um have the same trends that we have. I don't care what size but you know they've had five years of
declining enrollment that are fund balance is okay but it's looking a little shaky. What have they what have they do? >> Yeah. Who's been on this path? >> Yeah. Y What have other people done prior to us? >> Sure.
>> And just to just so I really understand, it doesn't bother you if that's not in southern Minnesota, for example. >> Not at all. >> Okay. >> Any others? >> Marshall. >> Marshall. And what kind of information are people looking for? Are you looking for just
your request is pretty specific, but for some of these others when people are calling out districts, are you looking for like what's their enrollment trend looking like? What's their square footage looking like? Is there specific data we could bring to you? >> I would Yeah. Go ahead.
>> More than just data, but causality might be interested. Yeah, there's districts that have budget issues, but why? >> Sure. >> Heads wrapped around that a little bit. >> So, almost like a little bit of a case study. >> Sure.
>> Okay. >> Maybe are the communities the same. Are they are the communities losing population? >> Are they growing? >> Sure. And I do think um Hazel would have some good statewide trends around that that
we could bring back. Yeah. >> Do you want to see our Hazel stud? >> I think it'll just >> Did she present it at a board meeting? >> No. >> Okay. So, we can just send out the
written report. >> We we provided on >> Sure. Yeah. I would like to see all the counter. They're a smaller district, but um we have plenty of open enrollments that go
there. >> See what's up there. What's up over there? >> Okay. >> I don't think ACG. >> I think when you look at Fairville, you could pull their restructure. They restructured >> uh building and they're closing they
closed closing the building after this year too >> and uh Winona did that as well a few years back but they let away big restructuring if they're handling this garbage. Any others? Otherwise, we'd be happy to
work on this for weather next meeting or the following because we might have to reach out to some of these districts for, you know, there might not just be like a study on their website we could just download, right? But we could certainly reach out to contacts and kind of bring back whatever we can. Um, unrelated to this question, is there
anything else people would hope to get as data? Yeah. Could I get a paper? Can be no form of copy of PowerPoint. >> And I would really love to have, you know, any powerpoints are going to be
ready for this next meeting. >> That would be nice. >> I'll swing by the office. You don't have to mail them out. You can have them here. >> Like I said, this posted. All the information will be posted, too. So, if
you're fine just like going online, it'll take us a little bit to get it all, but we're we want this so that anybody in the community can go back and look at it. >> So, Jeff, just to your question, I think we we should reflect a little bit on our meeting structures before each so we can
ensure that those materials are ready >> on the timeline. So, >> yeah, they might not be ready, you know, weeks in advance, right? But yeah, we can work on that. Yeah, we have like planning meetings in between. So, we'll look at that. >> I don't think, you know, tonight will be by far the biggest data dump meeting,
right? And then we'll have some based on this request here. Um, I think after that it'll be a lot of more input, collaboration, and brainstorming together. But I appreciate the request. >> Along with all of those places you're getting information from, will you also get um like how they structure their
building setups? >> Sure. As a part of that? Yeah. So, like if they had to reduce, like what would the buildings actually look like when they were done? >> Sure. >> All right. Well, I know we're at time. I appreciate it very much. Um, happy to hang back and answer any questions for
anyone. Otherwise, our next meeting is the 25th, I think it is. >> 25th. That's that Tuesday. >> Yep. It'll be on Tuesday, 25th, just because of Thanksgiving that week. So, thank you all. takes you away. Part: 2
All right. Good evening. Well, thanks everybody for coming. Um, so kind of as I transitioned in July, I met with many community members, of course, all the board members, a lot of staff members. Um, and we talked about the direction of
the the school district and and what we're trying to accomplish educationally. Um, part of what's going on is is staff will see a questionnaire come out in the next few days. Uh, the board and I have kind of been working a little bit the strategic plan so that we can officially roll that out. Um, in a
bigger sense though, um, when I got hired, I sat down with the with all the board members, with the board chair and Paul, and we looked at the budget, and the reality is over the last two years, we've cut 36,
3.4, >> yeah, million out of the budget. Uh, we're looking at additional budget cuts. Um and it's not it's not like we're overspending somewhere. So um one of the big uh pieces of this is um how is the
school district functioning? Um how are we using our buildings? Um how how is the finances working? And um what does what does it look like for the next 10
to 15 years for Alberta schools? Um, and what I talked about with the board was I think that's best done um, if we get a community task force together and we present the data that we have. We call them old architects and I'll let them
introduce um, but this is some of what their company does is is come in and do a comprehensive look at the school district. Um, but look at all those pieces that I talked about above. um and help to
provide the information so that we as a community can decide next steps for Albertly area schools and how we want to move forward. Um so you'll get you're going to be on data overload a little bit tonight and that's okay. We're here to answer questions. We'll we'll make
all this available to you. It's being recorded so that anybody in our community can watch this. They can see the data. We'll have >> we'll have um everything posted to. So, um, we just
want to make sure everybody's informed and then ultimately when we get to the end of this, you all will come up with some recommendations that then the task force will present to the board and then that will that will tell us how to work
forward. Um, so without too much extra, I just kind of want to let everybody introduce themselves and start to get the information out there because I also don't want these meetings to last way too long where where we're getting physically tired out there. So again,
thank you for coming. Um, and I look forward to the work that's going to be done. >> Thanks, Steve. >> Um, well, uh, I'll go over. My name is S. I work at World Architects and Engineers. Um, I am an architect by training, but I consider myself an educational planner. So, I work with K12
school districts on um, long-range facility master plans. Certainly, sometimes we end up doing projects because of it, but I spend a lot of my time working with groups like you all. Um, just wrapped up a group in Wisetta Public Schools two weeks ago. Um, so I'm going to just go over our agenda a little bit today so you can see what you
can expect. Um, I have a couple of uh, team members. When we go around the room, I'll let them introduce themselves. Um, I want to start with giving everyone the opportunity to introduce themselves and kind of why they wanted to be on the task force or a little bit their affiliation with the district. Um, then I will go over the
charge and process in a little bit more detail of kind of what we're being asked to review. Um, it is an interesting um, charge in that it is not a strictly facilities topic, right? Um, the operation the operations of the district have a facilities flavor and lens to them. Um but there's a lot of other
factors that go into um balancing a budget and revenue sources. So you'll see myself and Paul a little bit kind of co-f facilitating especially as it relates to um budget topics. Uh we have a couple small group activities planned just to get you all talking getting to know each other. And then as was
indicated we are going to do a little bit of a data dump. Right? I I can't imagine every one of you has been in every one of the buildings. So, we're going to spend a little time educating you about the facilities, talk about capacity, talk about enrollment history, talk about enrollment projections, talk
about the district's um budgetary um sources and situation, and then we will um allow some opportunity for some of the um building leaders to share with you as well. So, hopefully that's all interesting background data for you as we start to move forward together as a group. Um and then we'll talk next
steps. Um, so with that, maybe I'll let everyone start introducing themselves with my colleague Tyler here. >> Yeah, I'm Tyler, an architect working alongside S on our education team. >> Kyle Overson, architect at W also along with them.
>> So we're not task force members, facilitators, and resources to you. My name is April Jeffson. I'm not with them. The executive director of YMCA. I also have three children in the school district and my job overlaps a lot with
youth and so I find this all very fascinating. >> Sure. Thanks for being here. >> Jenna Miller. I grew up here. My sisters and I all teach in the district. I have culture and I actually have taught at all. >> Oh, well we need you here. Thanks for
being here. >> I'm Joe Miller. I'm her dad. >> Yeah. So I have three daughters that teach in the district. I taught in the district few years ago was on the task force to
build the high school >> before I left back in town and I wanted to be a part of this. >> Thanks for being here. >> I'm Rich Murray. I'm the mayor of this fine city and city has an extreme
interest in the healthy uh education of our community. So very very involved with the school with the students here. They're our future workforce and we know that. So what you're doing today for our teachers and everybody that's serving
here very important. We want this community grow to succeed and the school district succeed in the community also. So that's kind of what we're got involved just from the standpoint of wanting
vested interest. from the city's perspective. >> Absolutely. My name is Brandy. Um I'm a PAR for the district. This is my 21st year. I also have three children in the district and I've coached in the district um actually through the high school and then I
involved in the youth sports coaching lots of different activities. Um so I'm really tied >> what what don't you do >> tied in with um that. And so I just kind of wanted to be involved in this. I think I have some valuable information that I can share possibly. Wonderful.
Thank you. >> David Enzer, fifth grade teacher at Auburn. Uh father of two graduates of Albert Lee, two still in school and then two in elementary. So very interested in where the district's moving forward into
school and um years afterward that'll affect the students at all. >> Kristen Seager. I'm a library media specialist and I work at Sibly Elementary, Lake Elementary, and Southwest Middle School. I have two children currently in the district and I'm also the vice president
of our teachers union. I'm Christy. I'm the principal at right now. I've been um in the district for 26 years. Um I have two of my own kids that have gone through school system here. Um
I can probably answer a lot of questions about special education as well. If not, I know where to go. >> Great. Amber Jensen. I am a teacher at um Sibly Elementary. I um as a graduate of I've
had two kids go through the school system and um I just want to bring a teachers perspective into the conversation the last Jesse Courage and I'm students for the
ALC here in this building and I also have two children in elementary this year and we just wanted to come help out again. >> Jess Hatland, I'm a school counselor at
high school, former elementary teacher. I've got oh one child technically in the district and one will be soon. Um and also I'm an Albertly grad. Just want to guess the same thing. Do my part to help out. Wonderful.
>> Cody Harlson, custodian at Hawthorne. Went to school here. So now I work for the school. So I'd like to see what I can do. >> Thank you. >> Good evening everybody. Ken Alexander. I'm a secondary instructor at the area
learning center and also our online learning academy. And pretty much like everybody in this certain we want quality education for our kids and sometimes glamorous work like >> thank you.
I'm the director with the stars mentoring program here in elderly. I was a sub teacher for many many years in elderly as well. Um as I look around I guess maybe the main reason I wanted to join this group is to represent that diversity.
>> Thank you. My name is Paul. I I'm a previous employee at the district, a future one eventually, too. Um, I'm currently a stay at home parent. I have three children in the district, two elementary, and one will be kindergarten next year. Um, and I'm just hoping to
bring a perspective from a parent. Great. I am Casey Walters. I am an alumni from the district and I also have a son at the middle school. Um, I've ran for school board in the past and just really want to bring up that
lens to this discussion. Chair >> Heather Johnson, the principal at Southwest Middle School. Also, I have two little ones uh three and two at home that will be future Tigers as well. So, be a part of this discussion. >> Great. >> Alexa Mccur, fourth grade teacher at Lake View Elementary. Just excited to be
part of the competition. >> Thank you. And I think we have a couple in the back. Correct. >> Uh my name is Tony Franks. I'm the executive director of academics and accountability for the district. Um I started in the district 23 years ago as a special education teacher. Um I've had
an opportunity to be principal at the area learning center and Halverson Elementary. So um had the privilege of serving in a number of buildings here in the district. Um my role covers all things um curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional development,
grants, those >> Ashley Matson the HR director um Albert Lee grad and been with the district for 14 years. You want to introduce yourselves as well? Yeah. >> Gary Schindler is a current school board member a couple grads from the system in
2000 2005. Currently have a grandson in preschool I think class of 2039. So school I born and raised in this community of my wife Jean and I graduated from high school in 1964
and 50 years later I graduated again when I retired at high school. It's the only place I've ever taught. Um, I'm currently uh I went over to the dark side and I know I'm school.
I'm an education junkie. Dave, school board community member um always looking for efficiencies and always concerned about a dollar or two and might have to tell an architect if we need any a little extra help over there too.
And do you want to introduce yourself too? I'm Sarah Schultz with Tribune. I also have a son in the district special classes. So that >> Awesome. Last but not least, >> I'm Anna Anderson. I'm a 2016 grad here in Albert Lee and I'm now a speech
pathologist at elementary and our girls coach. Awesome. So we've got some people here as kind of resources slashobservers, right? Um so we I think we have 26 official task force members if I'm not mistaken. We're missing one or two. Um, do you want to introduce yourself, Paul, since we haven't come up
yet? >> Talking planning this evening as part of the data dump. I'm Paul Durban, executive director and operations. Um, and uh I I don't know. I had a big smile on my face here because this is one of the few moments that you kind of bring a group together when everybody's got the
right they're here for the right reasons, right? So, just appreciative of all your time. Um, and I I think I just want to say this on behalf of the district. We've built this committee um to try to take our voice out of as much of this as we can. So when we have opportunities to share and discuss, I
know sometimes small group activities, those sort of things are uncomfortable, but we really value your input and we want this team here to generate some strong ideas for us to consider as a school district. So we appreciate your help. >> Yeah, it was impressive to hear um how many collective years uh contributing to
the district in some way came out through those introductions. So I'm glad you're all here. I know it's a volunteer effort and I know it's tough to give up busy evenings, but we're really appreciative of it. Um, so I'll go through this kind of quick and we'll try to get into our first activity. Um, just wanted to
remind everyone kind of what we're up to. So the charge of this group, um, is to study how the district's facilities and operational costs align with current and future educational needs. Uh, we're going to look at data and provide recommendations to the administration and eventually the whole board uh, regarding the most effective and
efficient use of school buildings. Uh, a couple background pieces of information. So, um, this is a part of responsible financial stewardship. We we review facilities regularly just to make sure they're meeting everyone's needs. Uh, the average age of buildings in the district is 49 years, right? So, that's
according to the the Department of Ed uh data. Um, Albert Lee High School built in 2000. This is the district's newest building, of course. Um, we will talk more about it later tonight and I'm sure in future evenings, but in general, student enrollment has been declining and is projected to continue doing so,
which has a very direct impact on revenue. Um, and that the district currently has more space than enrollment trends require. Um, and every kind of square foot you have more than you need, you know, you pay to maintain it, you pay to heat it, you pay to cool it, you pay to light it, right? Um, and so it's
um, obviously time to make sure that we're doing the right things in that regard. Um, so we're asking for your help in making a plan for something that's sustainable, right? Um, we are going to make sure that our recommendations are in compliance with a few things. Um, so kind of we can't
leave these um parameters. So we have to make sure in the end we are supporting the educational goals and strategic plan. Uh they have to be financially attainable and sustainable. So we couldn't have an outcome that led to the district being in statutory operating debt in a few years, right? We can't just, you know, outpace our revenue
sources. Um, we want to make sure that we're reflecting the values and priorities of the community and we're asking for your help in knowing what that is and we will do more community engagement as well, get more voices to the table. Um, we're going to talk about facility use and projections for the next 10 years. It is tough to talk about
beyond 10 years because we're starting to talk about a lot of kids who aren't born yet. Um, but if there's anything that we recognize outside of that 10ear window, we'll talk about it. Uh we want to make sure we're having safe, efficient, and effective learning environments for everybody. Um and so we'll we'll make sure to provide any
data that you ask for, but what we know we need to build the plan on as a foundation is capacity, enrollment projections, maintenance and capital improvement cost needs, um and general operational costs, right? Those will kind of be the foundation of data. Uh timeline, we're planning to meet five
times. Obviously, we need to modify that. We can be flexible. Um but the five meetings that we've set up thus far are tonight. Um and then there approximately every two weeks. There's a little bit of a cadence there around Christmas just to miss it. Um so there will be one in two weeks. Uh then December 10th will be our only December
meeting again because of the holiday and winter break. And then we have two scheduled meetings in January. All of them are planned to be 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. I think after tonight we'll be at the Hammer Fieldhouse as a venue is my understanding. Um instead of this room and we'll we can send out a reminder
about that. Um, and we're hoping really at the end of January to be able to start working with the administration on that recommendation. I'm sure they'll have to um help uh pressure test things and run cap cost analysis and things like that. Um, all in preparation for an eventual recommendation to the school
board, you know, sometime, you know, late first quarter of next year. Um, so outcome probably kind of obvious by now, but we really want to have a set of community informed recommendations to guide facility planning, making sure being efficient and effective.
>> Does anybody have any questions about that or comments about process? >> Can I just add a little? So, um, one and Jeff you mentioned this when we built our high school in 2000. I wasn't part of this community at that time, but one one thing we often will identify maybe a
concern or um a need, right? And this is a really common practice for school districts. And then we will set out establish a committee of some sort in this case this task force and we'll come up with solutions towards those needs right and um I think looking back at
historical documents that I have in the business office there was a a committee put together to establish a facility study made recommendations and then there was a committee formed for the solution or recommendations that were passed through the board or decision made by the board. So, um, when we come
across these times, and we'll try to articulate that this evening a little bit to paint kind of a picture of where we're seeing kind of a crossroads at at this point, um, where maybe some creative discussion or ideas will come from this group and then that will lead us towards some other action items,
right? Um, so we we really don't know where it will all go, but we want the community and this team here certainly to understand um the stress points that we're seeing um trying to get ahead of some maybe critical decisions we have to make um so we're ready when the time comes and um so want to kind of uh
recognize that this is this is not new a new practice, right? This is this is something that's fairly common and um s I suppose this is part of your your dayto-day and you can maybe speak to that too. Yeah, I think you know um it's really important that a school district
um spending is in alignment with um its community's values. So, it's always good to step back and ask, are we accomplishing what we want to do with the money we have? And um it's painful to go through budget reduction processes year after year and not have an a clear
understanding of how you're going to get out of it, right? That leads to a lot of stress and it, you know, it means that the following years are even more challenging, right? because it's the things that weren't on the table this year, right? Um and so recognizing that that could be the future. I'm not saying it is, but it could be. You know, now is
the time to make different decisions, right? So, we're trying to be proactive in that regard, right? >> Um all right. Well, I think um Tyler, do you want to hand out our first? So, we're just going to do a little just a little ice cracker activity just get everyone handle or um talking. So, I'm
going to have the four of you be in a group. I didn't have family members on my bingo card. So, next time I'll make you number off, but just in the interest of time, I won't. Tonight, we'll do groups of four. So, the four of you, I think the four of you, the four of you. I'll have the four of you. Do the two of you mind going and meeting up with our
test members in the back? Wonderful. So, we're going to go through this tonight, but I think it's just good to get out on the table. What do people think the capacities and enrollments are in the district? Some of you have insider information, so I'm hope some groups might be more successful at this than others. Um, we do have a table and the
room next door. Um, Paul, I think is it locked from the other side. So, if our if our group that's back here and on the end wants to go into into the cafeteria, you're welcome to. I'll just give you like 5 10 minutes to talk about this. Um, so just fill it out and then we'll kind of go through everybody's reactions
and then we'll spend the first hour kind of talking about this. You got it. >> Yes. Sorry. You don't have to You know what? >> Yeah, that's a good idea. Back up the top. >> Oh.
We can >> move things around. >> Well, then you can move it all over the way. >> Sure. >> Yeah, I know. >> Just kind of look at it wrong and it fails. I think that's good. >> No, that must be yours.
I know. >> And our she had notes from the board meeting and I said, "You know what? I can't pen I can't penalize you for showing up for so I think it's right here. Can we say >> I'll give him a couple more minutes.
Nobody likes All right, you're getting close. >> Let's see what happens. We're not even close. >> Of course, they would have had I'll sit with the bag. I can leave it on a table.
>> All right. >> All right. >> Oh, no. We're all right. >> Let's get the Let's get the school southwest. Okay. So, >> what we're going to do here is I'm going to write down everybody's guesses. So, I'll kind of just go group by group and I'll I'll jot them down and then we'll
kind of, you know, we'll reveal the answer, of course, and then we'll spend the next like 30 minutes talking about about this topic, right? Talking about how we think about building capacity from a planning perspective and we'll talk about enrollment plans. Um, do you all mind going first? What did you have
for Halverson capacity? >> You said 400 students. 400. All right. What about Hawthorne? >> Uh 450. >> 450. Okay. Lake view. >> 560. >> Okay. >> 400 for Sibly. >> Okay. Southwest.
>> 650 for the middle school. >> Okay. >> And 2,000 for the high school. >> Okay. And we'll call you guys cheaters on the middle school, right? >> Insider intel. What about your group? >> Uh we said for Hson 420. >> Okay. >> Uh 498.
very specific836. >> Okay. >> Uh 739 >> and 1756. >> We'll talk about that later. >> What about this group here?
>> 500. >> Oh yeah, I was doing capacity first. Yep. >> 500. >> Yep. Oh, another 500. Sorry. >> 500 for Lake. >> Okay. >> 400 for Sydney. >> Okay. >> 1,000 for Southwest.
>> Okay. >> And 1500 for >> All right. I think I have two more groups to go through. Right. >> We have 450 for >> Okay. >> 400 600 450
900 3,000 There's some prices right going on over here. >> All right. What What do you all think? >> We're just We're going to run right through the numbers. So 350. >> Yep. >> 600. >> Yep. >> 600.
>> Yep. >> 400. >> Yep. >> 900,500. >> Oh, interesting. >> Um, well, I'll tell you, our group number two over here had someone who came to my board presentation, so and they brought their notes. So, I'll never fault someone for showing up to me prepared. Um,
that group was pretty dang close to the study that I'll go through tonight. So, um, we actually, um, presented to the board um, capacity as a range and I'll go through that um, how we calculated that range. Um, all related to class size expectations, right? Um, so the range that the study is going to show
you tonight is Halverson is 424 to 498. That Hawthorne is 356 to 420. That Lake View is 498 to 588. You're seeing some of these really specific numbers come up. Um, uh,
Sibi 284 to 336. Um, Southwest, we've got 668 to 924. And then Albertly High School, we have 1515 to 1818.
So, it's interesting to see which groups um you know fall in that range and which you don't. Um you know, if you went out and asked every community member what they thought, you know, how many students can the district hold, right? I would imagine we'd have somewhat similar results and you're a pretty educated intouch group, right? Like you're here
because you're close to this topic. So, um it's really a foundation of a facilities plan to understand how many people do we need to seat and how many do we have seats for, right? Um, so maybe we'll do the same thing and I'll go in reverse quick on enrollment. You want you all want to go first on your
enrollment? >> Of course. >> Oh, and I should put a caveat. My enrollment numbers, I think we're as of October 1st. So like >> count. >> Yeah. Well, no. When I talk about enrollment, I think I, you know, it could be different actually today, right? When the students are unenrolling and enrolling every day kind of thing,
but yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. >> Uh, Halverson 270 >> 270 >> and then 400 400 280 400. Why not? And 1,200. >> 1200. All right. What's my group four?
>> Uh 280 350 375 25400. >> Yeah. >> And 1250. >> 1250. All right. What about my middle? >> All right. We have um 300,
350, 400, 284, 500, and 1200. >> Okay. Group Group number two. >> All right. We have 291. >> Okay.
>> 363. 416. 281. 492. and 12 and 15. >> And here uh 290,
330, 370, 250, 480, and 1220. So, they're in a much tighter range. That's interesting. You all have a much closer understanding of how many students you have than how many students
you can have kind of thing. So answers are 291, 363, 416, 281, 492, and 1215. Um, and again, those are I don't know, it probably is not
actually true today, but it's close. Um, so you the range of your understanding is really tight here and it's really wide here. So, um we'll spend more time on how we calculate and look at building capacity because it is um heavily dependent on programmatic use of the
building. Um whereas enrollment is just on who's here. Did I leave my click over? Yeah. All right. Um I would also say it's really important that the general public understands these kinds of figures. And again, I would imagine that there's pretty wide range of opinions out there.
So, some people may not know there's any issue at all. Um, so I'll just go quickly over a little history of each building, certainly not deep. Um, and then we'll talk capacity. Um, so each of these slides has like an aerial of the building. Um, and then on the left I've
included key info. Um, mostly around when it was built and or majorly modified. So Halverson was originally built in 1956. Um, they had a pretty major addition in 1965 and then a small addition in 1999. Um, they've had various renovations over
time. Um, some of the more major ones were in 2013 and 2018. Um, it is just under 61,000 square feet and currently serves grades K5. Hawthorne uh was built in 1951.
Uh, oldest elementary school. Um, minor additions have been added in 54,55 and 76. Always want to know what was going on in the 50s that they did, you know, two additions in, you know, year after year. That's it. That's just how it's reported at the Department of Ed, honestly, too. So, um, might have been a
bigger project that had two phases. Um, and then there's been various renovations over time, plenty of them. Most recent kind of major one would be 2012. Um, and it's actually a very similarly sized building at like 66,510 square ft also serving K5.
That's another kind of factor here. So, even if enrollment is very different, like you have a lot of facilities that are actually pretty similar in size, right? Uh, Lake View, sorry, I don't know why the text is behind the image there. um originally built in 1967 and it has not been added on to ever. So, it
has never been expanded. >> I will say my dad went there the year it was built and over winter break the library did blow off the building because of the gas tank. So, they did rebuild the library at one point that >> that's a fun fact. >> That is a fun fact.
>> Hopefully, nobody was in the library. >> Okay. Yeah. Oh, you said that. Yes. >> Um and then there's been renovations there too. Um most recently there was an HBAC project that was wrapped up in 2014. Um and it is just under 60,000 square feet. So 58,554.
Uh last elementary school here we've got Sibly and of course we kind of show Sibly and Southwest campus together. We just labeled the buildings for you. Um originally built in 1957 um major additions in ' 65 and 99. Um and various renovations over time. Again 2012 was a
big year for getting um indoor air quality projects done for the district. kind of 2012 to 2014. Um, and then 61,500 square feet. So, your elementary schools are all in a pretty tight range of size. Um, and three of them built in the kind of mid late 50s.
Uh, Southwest of course was also built in 57. It was kind of built as a campus or a development. They have some shared amenities um when it comes mechanically. Um, minor additions in 93 and 96 and there have been many renovations to that building over time. the most recent
2013. Um, and is 145,71 ft. So, kind of, you know, not quite 2 and a half elementary schools sized, but close. Uh, high school, of course, we've already kind of mentioned it, built in 2000. There have not been any additions
or significant renovations. Not nothing done, but nothing major. Um, and it's about 270,000 square feet, so it is um not quite double the size of the middle school, but not far off. and it currently serves grade I should have said on the last slide sorry middle
school serves 67 right now and the high school serves 812 um that's not necessarily always been the grade configuration at those two buildings but that's the current grade configuration um and then of course we have the Hammer Fieldhouse um not a building that we consider in like a capacity sense but
want to talk about it as a facility asset so originally built in 2019 hasn't been modified it is just under 20,000 square feet and serves well serves a lot of purposes But um some of the primary ones are athletic training, locker rooms, and meeting space.
Um before I Oh, and then uh this building uh last but not least, uh Brookside. Um so this building has had a variety of lives. Um it was originally built in 1965. It has never been expanded. Um but it has had a lot of renovations. If you go to the little
plan room that's in this building, I don't think there's any building with more roles of drawings and renovations than this building. has been um kind of fun to track. Um the most recent in 2019 of any kind of significance and it's just under 120,000 square ft. So if you
compare that to Southwest is about 145,000. So it's you know 25ish,000 square feet less than that. Um and it currently will show you on a plan how it's used but um you know in concept it's used for a lot of things. district office, community ed, there's the school
board um meeting room, there's a daycare, there's a clinic, early childhood, ALC, adult education, right? So, kind of a multi multi-tenant building. Um before I get into capacity analysis, does anybody have any questions on the buildings?
Has anybody been in all of the buildings? More than that's more than most. I like it. So, we're an educated group. I often after a meeting like this get a lot of requests to go tour things just because people don't have exposure. So if anybody wants that we certainly can get
that arrange but it sounds like a lot of you feel pretty informed or knowledgeable. All right so I'll get right to it get into capacity analysis. Um so probably sounds obvious but it's important to define what capacity is. It's the ability of a school facility to house
K12 student programs. um when you um when you're comparing it against like any financial reports, it's really important that you look at like the headcount number as opposed to the um um ADM, right? The ADM formula doesn't translate very well to this. So, go to headcount if you're ever doing a
comparison. Um and it sets a standard for a fully functioning school. Um and a fully functioning school needs more than just home room classrooms, right? Or core content classrooms. So, I'll talk a little bit now before I get into the maps and stuff about how we did the study. Um, so we get our hands-on plans
and um certainly have our our thoughts about how things are used, but we actually went and interviewed all the building principles. So, a couple of you are here. Um, we had a meeting where we talked about what every single room is used for and um how many people are typically in there and how many hours a day is it typically used and um what
would you do if you needed more rooms and do you have any planned changes for next school year? Right? So, a lot of building leadership um was put into this. Um and I think it's really important for everyone to understand capacity can change depending on how you use space, right? I'll I'll point out a
couple examples as we go through. Um but in general, schools often change room assignments from year to year. And so that capacity number can float up or down depending on how we allocate space, right? Um if we have a dedicated space for a um special education program, for example, that's no longer a room serving
25 students, right? Um, so this is something that's pretty healthy to revisit regularly. And if anyone's ever using old numbers, you always have to kind of ask like, well, what were the rooms used for? Was that program in that building? And things like that. Um, when I mentioned before that we came
up with ranges for capacity, um, after a lot of discussion with the um, district leadership, we just talked about, you know, what is the right class size to plan around? and we just kind of kept coming to the idea that it makes more sense to talk about as a range as opposed to like a fixed forever number,
right? Um, so I'll show you throughout the study, but we set these ranges based on how a room is used u for a core content or a home room classroom. So that range for kindergarten was 22 to 25. Uh, first grade was also 22 to 25.
Uh, second grade was 22 to 26. Third was 24 to 28. Uh fourth and fifth is 26 to 32. Um grades 6 through 8 uh was 26 to 36 and 9 through 12 is 30 to 36. Um and again some of this is recognizing that
you have you know you probably have examples all throughout this range and we're actually going to show you what your um class sizes are in comparison to this range at the end of the study. Um there's certainly spaces in the buildings as we go through the maps here um of things that kind of could be a
home room or a core content classroom. that's just not used that way today. Um, so we we like to quantify those and we call them potential capacity. So I I'll I'll go through an example. It probably make more sense. Um, I also think it's important to talk about um the
differences between an elementary building and a secondary building. So an elementary building for most districts, including this district, um when when a home room goes to specialists, nobody comes and uses their room behind them, right? Um, and that group of students on
the whole stays together all day, right? We can almost count on them as a little group that moves through the building. Um, and so in this imaginary four room schoolhouse of an elementary school, um, you know, there's two home room classrooms and then an art and a music room, we don't count the art and the
music as a um as an as a adding to the capacity, right? So other words, we're double counting kids, right? Because they're not roving around and filling in each other's space. So, it's they're either in their home room or they're in the specialist class, but kind of never both. Um, so this imaginary class um
school would be two rooms, 24 kids. A room is 48 kids. Secondary buildings are different because students no longer stay in this cohort together all day and they do move around and people do come behind them and use spaces, right? If you ever seen a, you know, high school principal's
schedule, it's kind of a crazy a crazy thing of trying to find a home for everyone and trying to make teachers not travel and things. Um so we do recommend counting um specialists or non-core areas in a secondary building um because that's actually how you schedule your
rooms, right? So in this same imaginary four room schoolhouse, there's actually four rooms now. We can count them all. Um but it is important we don't just count them all at being used 100% of the time. So that would mean that you have teachers traveling 100% of the time,
right? Teachers without rooms to do prep in. Um it would also mean that you would end up doing things like teaching science outside of a science room or teaching math in a gym, right? So most high schools and u middle schools um you know have a have a schedule of some kind, right? We have this many periods
in a day and there's usually a prep period that a room is held for. So we spent time talking with the secondary administrators about how that looks. Um and after a lot of discussion, it was coming around 85% of the time most rooms are used. Certainly some room used more than that and maybe some special rooms
used less. Um but I think on the whole that was um pretty accurate of life and the the closer you get to 90% um you're starting to do a lot of u teachers on carts and things of that nature, right? Um so this same imaginary um school as a
secondary building is 102 students. Um, I'm not going to go through every room in every building because we'd be here till midnight. But, um, I'll go through, um, an example of an elementary and an example of a high school. Um, all of these are laid out the same and we will be sending them out. I think we
said we make them available to people. So, you can just see here on on the left hand side, we did the math for you of the range minimum and the range maximum, right? And what we do is we go around and we count rooms that are used for these purposes. So, we've got kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade,
and then any rooms that kind of could be a home room potential. Um, and then it's just multiplied times the minimum range and the maximum range. Right? So, when I told you before that it was um sorry, I think I wrote these out of order. Um,
that should say Hawthorne. I don't know why it doesn't. Um, the preage 6 to 420. That's how we get to the range. Um I think it's important that everybody understands special education. It already came up that we've got some special education friends in the audience. Um special education rooms
used for special education purposes don't hold this many students in them, right? And so um the other facet about um special education which we have lots of paras and teachers in the class or in the room who would know um there's students who spend some time
in that specialized environment and then they go back to their home room right we're kind of always trying to have students in their least restrictive environment um and so while you could go add up a small number in all of those special education rooms most of my clients just choose not to have that as
an adder because you often hold a seat for them in a home room and we again we don't want to be double counting So, this building happens to have multiple rooms that kind of look and smell like a full-size classroom here, here, here, here, uh, and here, um, you know, that could be a home room, but
that's not how they're used. So, while you could add to this building and use those as home rooms, they need to go somewhere, right? You can't just say that those rooms don't exist. So, this building is, you know, its capacity is lower because we're not showing those
rooms being home rooms. Um, and if you ever had an attendance area need or a growth need that needed this building to grow, the district likely would talk about is this still the right spot for this program. Um, but we have to have it would have a net effect of reducing somebody else by the same amount, right? You would just move things.
>> So s that just for clarity that is how >> I think maybe on our board we had the ranges switch potentially. >> Oh, I did. >> It is because we deducted the 96 for that special services program. >> Um, and then Lake View is another Lake
is a three store building. So it's on two slides just to give everyone um reference. I'll give another example. This is a good place to talk about potential. So Lake View is this kind of like we call them a pod in an elementary setting. So like this is a second grade pod. So there's you know three rooms used for second grade and then there's a
fourth room that could be. So we show this like open potential dot. Um some of them are like a special education learning center or in the kinder pod. It's kind of used for intervention and a conference room for the building. Um the one in the third grade pod is another
special education learning center. So you'll notice we don't always have four dots in there. Sometimes if it's used for another purpose, we haven't counted it because that's a part of a loadbearing school, right? You have to have space for those programs. Um it's often a big difference between when
buildings especially in the like 50s well earlier than the 50s but even through the 70s were built is like that was not a recognized program need with a bespoke space. It was just you know like the the development of special education programming and acknowledgement of
facilities needs has um changed a lot since these buildings were built. So you often hear out in the community, well that building used to hold X number of students or Y number of students and it's often a higher number and what's going on is that you're allocating space for special needs um just like every
other school district is, but you can't put 30 kids in that room anymore when you're doing that, right? A sensory room is no longer a room for teaching reading either, you know, reading or math in. Um okay, so I'll just kind of click through um because I want to have discussion. So, uh, here's an example of
a secondary building, one of your two secondary buildings, or maybe three if you have ALC, but, um, Southwest Middle School. So, instead of counting home rooms, now you can see we just call them teaching stations. Um, because it's it's not like certain rooms are only used for
certain grade levels exclusively. Um, so we have teaching stations counted here. So, we've got 24 that are used today and then there was another six spaces that could be when we did our walkthrough and and discussions. So in total you would say there's 30 teaching stations times
that 26 students times that efficiency factor. So kind of the the range here, you know, going up to 924 when you call it 36. Um here's an example. They're a little small just because of the screen, but like there's a couple rooms in and around the media center that we
discussed, you know, have served as classrooms over time and and could again if you ever needed it. And you'll notice, especially when we talk about these ranges like the high school 15 18 that class size assumption has a huge effect on capacity right you
can say how can the range be 300 students right and it's the difference of you know five or six students per room it just has a scaling factor so high school we had 57 stations that are used today um you'll notice we I should have probably said on the middle school we do also you know count things like a
gym right there's people are scheduling classes into that for physical education we do not usually into like a pool because you do not most periods of the day have 30 kids in that space. You might like teach a unit in it or something like that. Um and then getting
up to that range of 1818. Again, only difference it's still 572 from a count perspective, but if you went up to the 36 students. So, um now this building, um this building is not an easy building to say
it holds this many people, right? It's kind of too complicated for for that. Um, but we thought you might be interested to know who's using what space and about how much space they're using. So, this is the first floor of the building. Um, anything that's in
white, it's kind of like it's shared, right? Like whose is the hallway or whose is the custodial area, right? It kind of just generally serves the building. But on the whole, we've got our I'm going to come over here just so I can not reach across. Um, we've got our primary uses up here and then just
in parenthesis about how much space they're using again in their color. Um, so we've got community education, um, uses just under 1,000 square ft. Um, adult education uses 38.50. The Tiger Club daycare uses 4650.
Uh, early education uses 15,460. The clinic is 1,200 right here. Uh, special services just under 6,500. ALC is 20 or 80 8240 and the district office is 13,730.
So if you total all those numbers, it doesn't total the size of the building because we didn't like the hallways and bathrooms and things are often or used by many. Um and the gym is a big one that is used by many. So it's not broken up. Um but you can see on the whole here how the first floor is used. Um we've
got kitchen space. Um we've got the cafeteria and the space we're in right now. Um we've got district office and business office. Obviously the gym is in the center. Um there's uh the clinic in the center. We've got some like storage and records room. The technology and
facilities departments. Um we've got the day the daycare which was the project in 2019 I believe was that major renovation. And then here we are upstairs. You can see it's mostly classrooms around a ring right as a former middle school. um primary like the biggest users upstairs
are um ALC and early education but certainly some some other uses mixed. So then here we go to that r those ranges, right? Um and if we just total them all up, the lows plus all the highs or lows to the highs, you know, the district or these the district's
buildings can hold 3745 to 4585. Um when we talk about what you know I we we presented these these ranges um we thought it would be interesting for you all to see kind of what actual student counts and what actual average sizes
are. So like for example right now in kindergarten at the day that we prepare this there were 195 might be a few more few less today um across 10 sections. So you actually have about 19 and a half average. Now it's not perfect because
you don't actually have 19 and a half in each one of them right but normalized across those 10 sections it's 19 and a half. Then you can see for grade one you have 21.4. Um grade two you have 21.1. Grade three you have 21.5, grade four you have 24.6
and grade five you have 23.8. Um and I think one of the discussion topics we had as we were looking at this with the administration is like all of these are below the minimums right um and that's one of the challenges with being a declining district and having multiple facilities and running sections right is
you can't actually reach those um counts. Uh before I I also thought it would be interesting to bring to you some what the department of ed looks at when it comes to facilities and enrollment. Um but before I go into that, does anybody have any major questions? Let's go back
to this. I want to emphasize, you know, capacity is not a fixed thing. Like I said, the way you use buildings changes. If this building tomorrow we said it's a school, it would have a we would have to talk about how it's going to be used and what populations and what class sizes and
what schedule and we could generate a number. That's pretty complicated when it's got so many users and um things. So, we didn't report a number for this building, but if it was a middle school again, it, you know, it would have one. Comments.
Some of you were really quite close. our 3,000 at the high school was kind of a wild card number, but I appreciate it. Somebody has to ring the bell. >> So, a little bit later when I present, we'll share a breakdown of what these uh student counts look like per building
and class like grade level addage buildings. So, we'll break it down a little bit more detail for >> Yeah. Um, so we thought it'd be good just to do some of these comparisons um against Department of Ed guidelines as well as against enrollment as Paul said. Um, I'm not going to read this or
attempt to um go through this chart with you. Um, but the district does regularly do enrollment projections. Um, and we thought it'd be good just to graph um, and these are projections from July to be clear. And I actually think Paul's going to go into maybe even some things
that have changed or updated from July. Um, but we thought it'd be good for you just to kind of visually see what So, this highlighted blue area is the amount of seats you have across all of your elementary schools. So, you have between 1562 and 1842 and this orange line is
how many elementary students you're projected to have, right? So, you can see 1330 down to 1203. Um for 67 um you have between this is your range of students you can house. Um and you can see the middle school in a
little more stable um kind of bouncing in or around that 500 um getting as high as 504 in the next um few years down to 438. >> Did you say where those projection numbers come from? >> Yeah. Do you want to talk about that process a little bit? >> Yeah, I will talk about a little bit
later. But it's um so these projections specifically are from our financial advisors and they use a combination of historical data and then current birth rates in the county that track really well and probably not tonight but another time if people are interested we could talk about how that trends and how
we establish them >> but these do yo-yo a little bit and I'll I'll try to get on that one. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. Um and then 812 last but not least, right? So, how many people fit um in the building that currently houses those grade levels? Um you can see going from
1341 to a slightly lower number of 12. Well, I guess 127 or 1265 is the low. Um and then so K12 um if you um add up all the seats you have, you can see here what district-wide enrollment is supposed to do as opposed to the seats
that you have available for students. Um so I think that's always interesting to look at visually more than that. charge, right? Um there's also good benchmarks to look at, right? So that's current situation here in Albert Lee, but the Department of Ed publishes guidelines for like if you were planning
a school today, how big should that school be? Um so this is a table right out of their they have something called the school planning and construction guide. Um they update it every like five to six years. Um and so the way to read this is that there's columns for every school type. Um elementary, middle
school, and high school. And then on the left hand side there, you can see it says school student enrollment of like how many kids you're planning to have. You'll just notice that kind of like the bigger the building, the more efficient it gets. Like you can think about hallway space and boiler and gyms and things and kitchens. Um so for an
elementary school of less than 550 students, um they want you the recommendation would be in that 125 to 155 range. um for a middle level of like the 500 to 999 is 160 to 190 and then
for a high school of 1,000 to500 um would be 180 to 200. There's a little caveat down here. There's some big like big volume spaces that kind of throw these off. Um so these are meant to be sort of like not yet including things like pools and auditoriums, right? Kind
of those really special use spaces. This is like classrooms, cafeteria, office, media center. um those types of spaces. So, if we look at your buildings, again, I know some of you in the back probably can't um see, so I'll read. So, you know, your elementary schools are all
really should be, you know, the MD would say be in that 125 to 155 range. You can see that here. Um Halverson is at 209. Hawthorne is 183. Lake View is at 140 and Sibli's at 219. The middle school
recommended range was 160 to 190. It is at 296 and the high school is recommended to be 180 to 200 and it is 222. And again that the caveat here is these include things like pools and these department of ed
recommendations don't yet. So you just have to with a little bit of a grain of salt. But um just interesting to always look at like if you were going to go build one tomorrow, how big would you build it? You'd probably build several of these buildings small. That would be what people would would look at. You'd actually have to justify to the
department of ed why you need more than that if you were actually calling the question to the community or something. >> We go back one slide. >> This one right here. >> Yeah. >> So that they the ranges change slightly depending on the school size. So like a
2,000 plus student high school they go down to 150 to 180. Just kind of a recognition of efficiency. And then the kind of the smaller the school, the range gets bigger. And the range is pretty big for like a small high school. >> I think the there's something to
consider with this too is this is for new build, >> right? And if we're working with older buildings, it might not translate the same, right? The class about programming being different now than it was when these buildings were constructed, but it's just a good comparison maybe how much square footage
should we have per student? Um, just to kind of frame it another way. >> Yep. Any other questions or comments on this before we get into the riveting finance portion?
>> Can you help me understand why the recommended square footage decreases when the number of enrolled students increases? >> Uh, it's just related to efficiency of a school. I think it's pretty widely accepted that like the same main office doesn't have to double in size just
because we have twice as many students, right? you might add a few positions, but the reception area maybe doesn't have to get bigger. Maybe the nurs's office doesn't have to double in size. Um, you know, number of gyms, things of that nature. So, yeah, the bigger the school, generally speaking, the more efficient spacewise it is.
>> I see. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Good question. >> And it's like you still need a fullsize gym, we'll call it, whether you have 550 kids or a thousand kids, right? And you might not build a second one here. So, it's some of that.
And Paul's right, this is not a perfect comparison, but um you know, you all every every community has to decide how to use their facilities, but it's always good to just look at what could we benchmark ourselves against, right? And so some of these standards are some of those or guidelines. Um and then we're
going to actually end the meeting tonight by talking about is there data about any peer school districts you would want to look at, right? And that definition of even what is a peer district is an interesting topic. Is peer people we compete against? Is peer people who are near us? Is peer people
who are the same size as us? Right? Like you know what? How do we want to gather data for you? >> Um I think with that maybe I'll let Paul take over. >> How about a five five minute break? Can we >> Sure. >> Can we work it in? >> Yes. What time are we doing? All right.
>> We're a little behind. >> We're a little busted out of time, but that's okay. Five minutes. Hey. Hey. Hey.