Okay. Okay. Well, we'll go ahead and get started. Call this meeting to order. Please stand for the I'll now turn the time over to Mr. Mapes. Board, this evening, we're going to have a financial presentation. It's going to be led by Mr. Brown and a couple of things. There is a lot of information here tonight and we'll have it posted after the meeting on the website. But we think it would also be just really good that if you have questions when we're done, to please send those to Mr. Brown and we're going to create an FAQ because some of this has to do
with the property tax and Senate Bill one and some of those things have not been solidified yet because we don't have a certified assessed valuation yet. And so what we think will be best for us is to post a presentation on the site. After the presentation is up, we slide an FAQ in there as well with the questions that the Board members have that will hopefully also answer a lot of questions maybe that the public might have. So if you would, we realize you'll ask some questions during the evening, but others, if you just write down and then e mail those to Tim and then we'll
get an FAQ created and get it posted on the website. So at this point, Mr. Brown, we'll turn it over to you. Good evening, members of the Board, Mr. Mapes. I can just about guarantee that when you woke up this morning, the first thing you said is, I get to hear a finance discussion at a Board meeting tonight, and that jumped you right out of bed. So with that being said, we're going to try to cover a lot of information in a short time, really try to paint the picture of where our finances stand today and where we think they're going. I would be remiss if I didn't say thank you to Cecily for all her
work in our department. She's here tonight along with her, support in putting this all together. So obviously with her experience and skill set, we're blessed to have what we have in our department. So thank you to her. Let's dive in. Tonight, really, the theme I'd like to present is just a quick school finance review. I think it helps to set the table for where we're gonna go, then turn it over to kinda where we were, where we are right now, and ultimately where we think we're going with the newest legislation. School finance review. So let's, kinda level set with the various buckets here that we have available when it comes to school finance,
and I'm hitting the the biggest of of those buckets. The Education Fund, as we've talked about, in the past, this is this is the same slide that I've used in in previous conversations, is is what is used to fund basically anything and everything related to the classroom. So these are our teachers, our teacher aids, all of our our supplies in the classroom, technology, building level administrators, everything that goes really inside the school. This is not related to property taxes or any kind of tax levy. This is absolutely based on the number of students enrolled in our school district, our tuition support,
if you will. So that number to complete the twenty four, twenty five year is a $160,000,000 you see that number there in front of you. Unlike the education fund, the operations fund funds everything related to the operation of the school district. This would be our transportation, our various projects, our electricity costs, our our natural gas costs, all the things it takes to run the properties, that we have as a school district. There is a maximum levy that is established every year that we can raise in that fund, and for 2025, that levy for HSE schools is a little over $40,000,000
That is 100% property tax driven. So our local property owners pay property tax that that leads into the the, the funding of the operations fund. A really important fund for HSE schools is the fund. This is also fund funded through property tax. And as you know, prior to my time here, there was a renewal of that at a rate of point one nine nine five. We went and and asked for that maximum rate in the 2025 budget, and as a result, that produced a levy of a little over $26,000,000. Almost all of those dollars fund teacher salary,
wages, and benefits. So without that referendum, you can imagine the number of teachers that aren't being funded, to support the work that's taking place in the classroom. So pivotal for the work that we're doing. The other fund, that goes along with these, which is also property tax driven, is our debt service fund. Our debt service bucket just pay describes itself, pays our debt. It's the it's the expenses that we we push out into the future. We've done several of them this year with GO bonds, the HIDGE project, FCI, and various projects,
excuse me, well before my time here. There are two, different types of debt service fund. One, any debt that was approved through a referendum, that's an exempt debt service. So you see our levy in 2025 is about $10,000,000 there, almost 11. And then we have our nonexempt debt service, which is around $58,000,000 in 2025. So those are the various buckets that we're dealing with. What I would call your attention to, because this is gonna be really important for tonight, is the education fund is all about the number of students and the other funds that you see here all related to property tax rates,
property tax dollars. So where the education fund not really impacted by senate bill one, operations referendum debt service absolutely impacted by Senate Bill one. Can I ask a quick question? Yes. And please, if you're if you're going to get to this in future slides, just tell me. Back on the referendum, you said primarily teacher salaries and benefits. I think we also had security, SROs, that kind of thing. That's also in that referendum, correct? Yes. At about roughly 5.7% at the time of budgeting, that's the percentage breakdown there. Yes. So well over 95% or 94%.
Will you get into in further slides what we actually have used? I'll talk about our budget. I won't break it down necessarily by the dollars that went to security that this will be the last piece that that mentions that. So if we get there and you still have a a question that I I didn't answer, I'm happy to address it. Gotcha. So back to the idea of the education fund to just level set. This is, again, is a slide that we repeated, from our our budget, approval time. Biggest issue here is if we're gonna be paid by the number of students, there's there's a point right here in the 1920 school year and the 2021 school year, where we start seeing a decrease in the number of students.
I would call your attention to the 2425 school year where we graduated and and this was, to be clear, this was our October count, that it certainly fluctuates throughout the year, but where we graduated roughly, you know, 1,800 students and brought in, roughly 1,100 kindergartners. That trend we anticipate continuing. And so what that leads to is obviously, even even as tuition support dollars increase, the number of students decreasing. And so those don't, I guess play nice together. Great that we see an increase, but when we continue to lose students,
there are some significant challenges with that. So we'll continue to use that as a as a piece as we talk here. Switching over to the property tax side, a really big key, and we talked about this in budget time too, is our, net assessed value. So all the taxable properties within the district, not just homes, but businesses, farmland, all the things, after all the deductions fall off, we get what's called a net assessed value. As mister Mades said, we don't know what that's gonna be for 2026 yet. That's a really key number for us. But as you can see, and and all property owners know this as we get our tax bills and and
see what housing rates go for, assessed value has continued to rise pretty rapidly over the last five years, where we see a mean in our certified annual increase of about 8.6%. That's both a blessing and and then there's a challenge with that too. The challenge with that is you heard me say earlier, we are limited in our operations fund to a maximum levy. Right now, that maximum ceiling is 4%. So yet our properties and the value of our community property is growing at 8% on average. We're only able to raise,
operations dollars at a at a 4% increase. So essentially not not keeping pace with the growth of the community, when it comes to the operational cost of our district. Safe to say all those operational costs have escalated pretty rapidly, whether it's electric electricity costs to just running the buses to fuel, all the all the things. So this becomes really important, especially with senate bill one. So I bring us back to the formulas that we talked about at budget time, and it's a pretty simple formula. Rate times, net assessed value equals levy.
Well, what we've been really good about here at HSE is we tried to keep that rate pretty steady, if not dropping. The last two years, we've maintained the rate. Well, that's great because if AV is going up and you keep a flat rate, you're gonna have a larger levy every year. So we're able to keep up in some of the areas whether those be debt service, even operations at 4%. That obviously is is an increase in the amount of money that we bring in. Said another way, if you limit your levy to a 4% growth in operations and your AV continues
to grow, your rate will actually drop, and that's what's happened in our operations fund. So we're limited at 4%. Our AV grew faster than that, and so our rate in the operations fund, and I've got a slide on that in just a second, actually dropped. We made up the difference, if you will, in our, debt service rate to keep an overall flat tax rate. Questions about where the history of sort of school finance is before I go into where we were? Were there any changes to the funding formula on the per student?
I know there's some different things like, complexity scores and those things. Yes. The short answer is yes. The challenging answer is not only was there an increase, but they embedded curricular materials into that. So it looked like a great increase, and it was still a good one, in beds of the $158 roughly a student that we got in tuition support or in in curricular materials. That now lives in tuition support. So it's going to look and feel like a bigger number than it really is. Okay. So it's going to be in the okay. All right. Thank you. But when we talk about, those other things, the other buckets and all the information,
I do have a couple of questions with our referendum. And you had said earlier that you're not talking about dollar amount. But I think it's very crucial that we do point out some of those things. So whether we have those answers today or not, when we went to the public and said, Hey, we need you to approve a referendum, we asked for $6,700,000 to go towards academic and education and about 67 certified teachers, 5,900,000.0 to maintain class sizes, another 59 certified teachers, dollars 9,000,000 to attracting teachers and maintenance of salaries and $2,400,000
for safety initiatives. So if I'm sitting here today listening to finances, I would like to know and get that update, are our funds in fact, are we on that track to give those funds to those areas? Yeah. So obviously, in order to promise class size amounts, we need to support the proper number of teachers it takes to to to support those classrooms. Right? Correct. So I I why when I I wanna be careful when I said I'm not gonna share the numbers. What I can share is we have a levy of 26,000,000
and 94% of that is going all to teachers to do all the things that you just said. Okay. By having more teachers, we reduce the class size number to what we want. We support all the things that need to happen in the classroom. There's a small percentage of that that goes to school safety. Said a different way and I'm totally putting Cecily on the spot here. This in terms of the schools we fund, we don't need to name the schools, but entire school buildings that are funded by the referendum. There are four. Is that correct? One high school, one intermediate, two elementaries. Now that's just a shell game,
but the point of that is we fund an entire high school, an entire intermediate, and two entire elementary schools with referendum dollars to give you the gravity of how much of an impact this has. Mhmm. And and you you could share that any way you want. I could do a little bit in each building. Sure. But but logistically, I think that says how important the referendum fund is. And to answer your question, so much of these dollars, 94% and more, all are going to teachers. And just roughly, that's $24,510,767
Right. I mean, it goes to all the things that you just mentioned and then the rest goes into security, which would just be a little over $2,500,000 Excellent. And that's kind of just what I'm confirming today as we're sitting here getting that financial update. Was that the security number? What number did you say, $2,400,000 Yes, it's $2,400,000 So I think that's right. That's pretty close to right on it. Yes, it is. Right. A little more than that. Excellent. And that's And that's the levy. We'll go into the actual budget amount, which is slightly different than the levy, but the the the math is exactly what we described.
It just gives gravity to how valuable and and critical referendum fund is. And then and when we go to where we stand today in the education fund, if we if we would pull out 24 ish million dollars to try to pay out of the education fund, it it's not possible, which is really the the point I'm trying to make. Thank you. So where we where we were. Just a little bit of background on some of the the previous budgets, just just to kinda level set as to where we are and where we're going. Here are the certified budget amounts over the last four years.
Obviously, you see a pretty steady increase. The cost of doing business is a big part of that. Raises are a big part of that. And to be careful here, this is back to that idea of permission to spend. So this is what the approved budget by the Board said we have permission to spend in a given year. Now, you see the big leap from '24 to '25. I would come back to a slide I shared with you before during the budgeting process of, hey, why the big jump there? And to just hit a couple of the highlights, remember in 'twenty four,
we did not have enough permission for the cost that we truly needed to spend. So we came to you at the end of 'twenty four and asked for additional appropriations. So between the Education Referendum Fund, that was $6,500,000 We had about $11,000,000 in salary increases in the 'twenty three, 'twenty four year, a half half million in turf, that's teacher retirement fund. That was just an index number that went up by a half percent, but for the district, it's about a half a million dollar cost. Here's this idea of curricular materials. They've they've been on a little bit of a train in the last couple of
years. They, you know, parents used to pay for curricular materials, then they moved into the education fund, and now they're gonna be a part of tuition support. When they moved to the education fund, it was just a payment. $3,200,000 we got in December that we deposited into the education fund for curricular materials. So that increases the education fund permission to spend. And 2425 raises equated to about 4,250,000.00, majority of that to teachers, obviously, a significant chunk to support staff, 280,000 to admin, and then just an overall increase in our contribution to health and dental costs.
So that's the big difference between '24 and '25. And again, we talked about this at at budget time. There was some discussion last time to kind of dig ourselves out of a little bit of a hole that we're going to have to use some cash to do that. Did we end up having to do that or did we find some savings in other places and not have to do that? We used a little cash. We found some savings to the increase of the referendum. That was the key. Adding that penny back on with an increased assessed value was was really an important piece. The other piece that was maybe not anticipated by me is some of our, subgrants that go along with tuition support.
These would be special ed, career and tech ed, NESP, English language learners, and academic performance, which I have a slide on. Two of those grants came in a little higher than I thought they would. So those two together helped us a little bit. Okay. But we are at a point previewing a future slide where we are spending cash now. Okay. And we'll talk a little bit about that. Okay. What was the main driver in the $500,000 increase in health and dental services? Just the overall cost being we're self funded. So we take care of all of our own claims. We use, a claims administrator anthem,
that really negotiates our price. But if I personally go to the doctor and there's a cost, we collectively all pay for that. So this was an increase to our premium equivalence so that we could properly fund our benefit trust. So claims, the the the buzzword in that space is claims were hot. And so in order to pay for those hot claims, we had to raise our contribution amount, whether that be a shared contribution from the district or the employee combination of the two. Did that include an increase in broker fees or no?
I don't believe there was an increase let me be clear. When it comes to the claims administrator, I don't believe that there was an increase from Anthem. We did bring on a new health consultant, that did come with some additional costs. I would I would say though in doing so, we've been able to bring in some pretty innovative programming, to help support our staff. So you kinda, it's a it's a deposit into additional resources for our staff. So this is an important slide because it illustrates something that I was trying to
make as a point earlier. So here are our budget summaries over the last five years. And I mentioned, that our operations fund grows at about 4%. There's some additional it's not just a flat 4% in the actual levy. There's some additional pieces there. But we're held to a roughly a 4% growth. And if you see that growing each year, with the assessed value growing at a much higher rate, you saw it at about 8.5. Each of these funds continues to grow. But what allowed us to do the things that we did as a school district
and most importantly keep a level tax rate is you'll notice that debt service levy increases pretty rapidly. That's for a couple reasons. One, again, assessed value is growing much faster than our operations levy is allowed to. The other piece is we've got a couple things starting to fall off. Our debt that is approved by a referendum is getting less and less. Our pension debt, although small, is completely gone away. And so you put all those together, it allows for our debt service to grow at a little bit of a more rapid rate. Now what I will tell you is,
GO bonds are a big part of our debt service and and those are our operational dollars. A lot of what happens in GO, supports the operation of our school district. Yes. We absolutely take on little building projects with our GO dollars. We buy buses now out of GO dollars. But a big portion of that is the maintenance and operation of our school district that otherwise would strap our operations fund. So this is a a a way that we help to to support that. Any questions about where we were?
I have a quick question, going back to this slide. And, again, I don't wanna get us off track here. We did the breakdown of $11,000,000 for salary increases. Is there a way that and then underneath that, there were the other bullet points. There we go. Dollars 11,000,000 in salary increases. And then below, all the way down, we have the 4,250,000 teacher supports. What's the breakdown in that 11,000,000? If you knew Yeah. Great great question. I'd have to get come back to that one. I don't have that in front of me. I would like any school district, a majority of that is classroom teachers Got it.
As they are the majority of the employee employees in the district. Okay. Thank you. That's true for really any district. So where we are. Here's our 2025 budget order. Again, you see I do I I I do wanna digress just a second. I failed to make this point. One of the key things I wanna mention is this jump right here. Mister Orr, you commented a little while ago of of using cash. Had we not Had we not raised that extra penny that we had available for us, we would not have been able to see that increase in the referendum dollars from
$22,000,000 to $26,000,000 That was very significant in our ability to sort of balance the books. And so I when I look at the actual budget order, I think it's important to note there's that that maximum tax rate that the voters allowed us, to go to. So couple of things of an of importance here that are different. What I showed you earlier were levies. These are actual budgets now. This is permission to spend. This is not the money that was raised. This is permission to spend out of that,
various fund. So you've got your education fund all the way down to rainy day for us. So that is not new information to you, but again, it helps this level set where we're headed next. I think this is a really important slide and this is not one you have seen before. On the left is the actual tuition support. So this is all education fund dollars the district received in the 2324 school year. So July one of twenty three to June thirty of twenty four. Again, knowing that a majority of education fund dollars go to teachers,
teacher aids, anything related to the classroom, these are these numbers are really important. Fast forward to the 2425 school year. We talk about this in our finance committee. This is that form 54 from our finance committee members. You see the increase from 2324 to 2425 was $2,700,000, almost 2.8, which is a nice increase. But to level set that a little bit, the the estimated professional agreement this year was $2,800,000.
So legislatively, the the the threshold is that school districts are supposed to spend 62% during the 2425 school year of new money or better said tuition support dollars on teachers' salaries, wages, and benefits. The newest legislative session said that we need to spend 65% of tuition support dollars on teachers' salaries, wages, and benefits. HSE in the 2324 school year had a percentage of 83% there.
So I think an important distinction for us is how important we are investing into our teachers. Sometimes we hear different stories where that maybe is not the case. Financially, it is 100% the case where in 2324, 83.8% of of that number or 83.8 of of tuition support was spent on teacher salary, wages, and benefits. So typically, you would not expect to take in your tuition support at 2.7 and spend 2.8.
The referendum increase is the key here and what made that possible. Do you mind repeating that one more time? Yeah. I was gonna ask you. Percentage that Sure. We're I said a lot of things. Right? Right. I just wanna make sure that for anybody listening at home that they understand the percentage that we are supposed to spend versus where we're at with. Yeah. So in the 2324, and 2425 school year, the legislative requirement is that you spend 62% of your total tuition support on teachers' salaries, wages, and benefits.
In the 2324 school year, we received the report in October of twenty four, our number was 83.8%. Moving forward, we don't know that expense. I mean, internally, we can calculate that. We'll get a report from the state that confirms it in October. Safe to say with the investment that we made last year, it could go down, but it's not going to be anywhere close to 62% that we're required to be. Moving forward with the newest set of legislation, the 2526 school year said that your your contribution needs to be 65% of the
total amount that you receive. So there are some practices when it comes to the collective bargaining process that school districts say, alright. Here's your new money. 65% of that is available for bargaining. Sometimes that is an appropriate approach that is used in the collective bargaining process. Not to go down that that rabbit hole today, my point is we had we did spend, estimated more than we took in in in our year. And we knew that going in. Again, the referendum was the key here. And and the value of supporting our teachers,
there's not a person in this room that doesn't wanna do that. So again and I've got it as in '24, we were required to spend 62% on teachers related things. We spent 84%. Correct. And in 'twenty 5%, we're now required to spend 65%. We spent over 100%. No. No. Let me say that let me say that differently. So in 2425, we're still required to spend 62% Okay. Of total dollars. When I am showing these two numbers, I'm showing the increase amount.
So we did spend more than a 100% or projected to spend more than a 100% of the increase. That is not saying we spend a 100% of this amount. No. A 100% of the increase. Correct. So we were So the calculation is not based on the increase. The increase was about $2,700,000 and we spent over $2,800,000 And again, the reason we're able to do that is the referendum fund. Is that historic? And I guess, to ask Cecily or Mr. Mace, with your experience even at other districts, is that normal? I mean, are other districts doing this at such a level above what's required?
Is this I would say probably just for us high performing districts or how does that compare around and historically here at HSE? Part of the reason we're able to do 83% is the referendum. There's no doubt that that's a factor. I would say, before I turn it over to my colleagues, that 83% is a very high number. It shows a significant commitment and investment in our teaching staff. We were normally around 64% in our Perry Township budget of what we were spending on the teachers and the new money that would come in. So it is extraordinary to be in the eightieth percent of new dollars going straight
there. So to summarize, in short, if I was a teacher looking to be at any district Come here, we're spending the most Yes. And it's all expenses for a teacher, right? And so salary is one small piece of that. Things like a 4035% match is significant. Health insurance contributions, big part of that. So it's the salary piece is one very small piece of that not small, but equal piece of that pie when you start to look at some of those other factors that come in. Mr. Brown, can you clarify then just to make sure I have my numbers and my years
correctly? Was it for the referendum, was the 2024 year, was that the 01/1995 year? And then this year, 2025, we're at the zero point one nine nine five year. And then is that where we currently Taxes payable in 2024, we're at 0.1895 and taxes payable in '25. Right. Because we're paying the year. And so we're paying the right now. So coming up this fall, when we're talking about budget in 2026, we haven't discussed that rate yet,
correct? No. But I will come to you begging and pleading for 0.1995, please. I know. But I'm just saying, but currently, right now, we don't have that. We do know that we are at 0.1995 right now and it's for discussion in the fall for what will come next. And per the process of getting the referendum approved that you approved a maximum rate, so we cannot ask for a rate any higher than that? Correct. Okay. But I will adamantly please ask. I know you will. I just wanted to confirm that that I that that's that we are practicing. And you'll see why that's going to be really important in a minute.
Thank you. And the calculation is not based on the increase. So correct, it's based on what is the calculation based on? It's not based on the increase, which is that big number, the 2,700,000. Yeah. So the calculation is we take all of the, salaries, wages, benefits of teachers, that's your numerator, and this is the denominator, the total tuition support for the year. And then they give us a percentage based on that. And It doesn't matter where it's spent from. Mhmm. I think that's an important distinction. We're not saying we're spending that all out of the education fund. We we we calculate and count all the dollars out of the referendum that go
to teachers' salaries, wages, and benefits. There's a code in the funding world. You put on the end of any teacher salary, and anything that has that code goes to the numerator of the calculation. The total amount goes to the denominator. And the cost of living in Fishers is quite a bit higher than maybe the cost of living in Marion County. We do want our teachers living where they teach. Correct? Sure. K. Yeah. Okay. The next one is too small to see, so you have it in your packet there. This is and I apologize. I just needed this all in one slide. That's why you have a a handout. This is our monthly financial statement through May thirty one of twenty twenty five.
And I'm gonna call your attention to a couple things here. This is each of our various expenditure categories that run from full day kindergarten all the way down to, curricular materials, library, media services, all the all the various fund categories. I would call your attention to the highlight at the bottom, And what this is showing is that currently, we are running a little hot in our expenses. Through five months, you would expect to spend about 41.6% of your budget. That is five twelfths.
So this is five twelfths of the year. We hope to spend about 41.6%. If you look at the bottom right, you see we're spending about 42.4% or about 1,200,000.0 over expected. Not saying cash balance at this point, but if this trend continues to the end of the year, I will be coming back to you in November and December and saying, I need a little bit more permission to spend. Now there's ebbs and flows in this. We've got summer months, or maybe we see a little less, but frankly,
there's payoffs in June for all of our retiring and departing staff. And so it's it's it's saying here that we are spending a little more than we expected at the tune of about $1,200,000 today in the education fund. And what do you feel that cause is? Just increased costs in all of these buckets? Or is there a specific area, let's say, randomly saying, I'm not trying to pick on transportation, but let's just say, is it wow because there's been a huge increase in transportation or there's been a
huge increase in utility bills or whatever? Is there a certain reason you foresee that this number is higher than regular? It really is the cost of mainly staff in this case because the examples you gave unfortunately apply to the operations fund. So so these are all these are all education fund costs. Now I will say our instructional materials, and I'm not necessarily talking like textbooks, I'm talking the the supplies and things in the classroom. Obviously, those are escalating. Technology costs are escalating. I don't know that I can pin it on one particular thing.
The most expensive thing in any district is the people and the personnel. I'm not saying that's a bad thing but that's the reality of what's happening here. And is our education training in this category, in this bucket too? Professional development lives in this space. A lot of these, like instructional supplies outside of curriculum materials and professional development, they have finite budgets. Okay. We we very carefully protect those and send those to the schools that they they spend within. So again, this this one right here, we're only in the education fund. So that does not include central office,
legal, operations, any of those things. That is correct. This is only and there's a the second column to the right, favorable or unfavorable variance, you can kind of look through here and see where we're above and below. Yes. And you're right. It's middle and junior high, high school, then it go all the way down to summer high school, career and tech ed, co op. So you can kind of get an idea of where these different things but again, these are all everything on this sheet is education funds. So to be over the 1.2, it's education fund things. Yeah.
It's not coming from other side. And I wanna be careful not to get caught up in the individual lines here, because the the most important thing is the cumulative total at the bottom. Right? There's gonna be ebbs and flows with the lines throughout the year, and and we may look back on the budget and say, yes, we missed that line a little bit. We need to increase that next year. But there's other lines that are in excess at this point. And so really the cumulative total is the goal here. I think it's important that about a year ago when I presented, I said, hey, we're going to have a deficit. And to circle back to just how important that referendum fund is,
that reduced it. So the $6,000,000 to $7,000,000 we thought, oh my gosh, it's going to be really tough by you approving adding the $0.01 back and the assessed valuation going up really made that less. And without that referendum fund being there, we'd be in much different financial shape than what we are right now. And so just by looking at our accounts and adding the $0.01 and just being better stewards of the dollars that are there, we're still spending a little cash and we knew we were going to spend some
cash. But it's a much better fiscal position than I thought we were going to be in. I think I'd agree. And that's why I kind of wanted to emphasize this is just in the education fund. I'm sure we'll get to the others here in a second, but something we get from the community a lot. And to be honest, I felt this way before I was behind the scenes and saw all the paperwork and all these things. You get questions like, well, if what if we didn't put field turf on the on the soccer fields? Would we have this? Those are totally different funds. They're not related. This is just in the teaching space.
You got it. So when we get over to operations now, that's a question and debt service and those kind of things. But here, this you can't do something like not build a football field and save money here. They're they're out they're separated funds. That is correct. Yep. Can you give a simplified explanation of interfund transfers? Yes. So on the bottom of that, we come to the board every year during the budgeting process and request an amount that we transfer from education to operations. And the history of this is that pre education fund back to the general fund,
there were expenses that previously lived in the general fund or in capital projects, the various buckets that got moved to the operations fund. And so as a result, districts are allowed to move, don't have to, but are allowed to move up to 15% of your education fund dollars to the operation fund because those expenses live in that space when they previously did not. You're welcome. A different look at the education fund.
This is where our cash balance stands. So one thing to have a budget and know how you're spending to the budget, critically important. Another to look at what our cash balance looks like in the Education Fund. So the blue line represents the cash balance. The red bar represents whether it was a deficit or a surplus that month. If you look at the bottom, you can see how the red bars align to the data here. So on January first of twenty twenty five, our our Education Fund had a cash balance of 25,700,000.0.
And you can see how this has steadily dropped in each of the months to a net overall change minus the month of May where there's a little bit of surplus to a net overall change of $1,600,000 This is showing that we our expenses are exceeding our revenue in the education fund at this point. I'm still comfortable with the cash balance. As we sit here today, at least at the May, June 1, our cash balance was at $24,000,000. That's about 15%, of the overall budget.
Said a different way, just shy of two months expenses. We all, you know, just just basic finances. You wanna have at least a couple, if not even three months of expenses if the worst of the worst happens. I'm comfortable where 15% is. I would not wanna dip much below 15% moving forward. I think that's a good place to be. Obviously, if we had an additional surplus there, that would be, a positive thing. Just to level set here to look at what expenses are, in the month of May, for instance, our expenses were about 14,500,000.0
in the education fund. This, April, 13.6, March, 14.6. So we're living in that 13 to $14,000,000, space, and we bring in about $13,000,000 a month in tuition support. Again, one of the themes you've heard from me already, if we took off the referendum at $26,000,000, look how critically strapped this this fund becomes. It simply is not possible. The referendum is key in the work that we're doing in the education space. Mr. Brown, if I can point something out and make sure I'm looking at the right information.
In 2025 earlier, the projection was in our budget story that we would possibly be at $1,800,000 in deficit in this education fund. So to say that we're only at $1,200,000 I would say that's pretty good. I'm not sure where you're saying $1,200,000 Am I looking at the wrong sheet, the education fund? Oh, yes. At the bottom of 1.2. So let me kind of clarify a few things. 1.2 is saying we're a deficit in what we expected to spend.
So this is the budget, permission to spend, maximizing out all those dollars spread out over twelve months, we're running about $1,200,000 hot to use that expression. Okay. Over here is true cash. This is cash on hand. We don't we don't get permission to spend all of our cash. That's why I may come back to you in November and December and say, yep. We spent a little more than I than I anticipated, so I need permission to spend a little bit more, increasing the budget. But you only can do that when you've got the cash to back it up. In my opinion, this is the most important slide because this is showing actual cash balances,
your bank account number if you will. So we are at negative, if you will, 1.6, which is still better to me than 1.8 that we thought we'd be at. Absolutely. I guess I'm trying to point out I was trying to make it a positive. Absolutely. We foresaw that it could be 1.8 and you're showing me 1.6. Yes. And there's a slide coming up where some of the efforts that we put in in a lot of areas are contributing to some of that. Okay. Thank you. Moving over to the referendum fund. I think this one's a little bit more easy to see, but board members, you do have this in front of you.
It is running mildly warm. We're showing that we're spending a little over $200,000 more than we would have expected at this point. Remember, the target is 41.6, that's five twelfths of the year. We're at 42.4. You will not see a cash balance summary on this because unlike tuition support and the education fund that comes in monthly, we get a payment every month, we spend every month. Any property tax driven fund only comes in really twice a year. We get an early draw in May, we get the full amount in June,
then we get an early draw in November and the full amount in December. And so I I don't wanna really focus on any part of the revenue because that wasn't reflected in this because at the time, we hadn't gotten our June, disbursement yet. The key thing here is how are we running to budget? We're running a little, warmer than we'd like, but not by a significant amount, dollars 217,000. Heading over to operations now, you have a copy of that as well. This fund is running much better right now. You can see it's very blurry,
but I know you have the copy in front of you. Again, our target is 41.6, fivetwelve of the year. We we spent about 37.1%. So we are $2,700,000 better than expected in terms of our budget. And although that is cause for celebration and it certainly is, a word of caution, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't, One of the challenges of budgeting every year is predicting what the circuit breaker loss will be. The circuit breaker is the tax caps that all homeowners, you know, have available to them where they max the max amount they would pay would be
1%, their gross assessed value of their home. We do our best and and, frankly, we use the the resources we have with the Department of Local Government Finance to predict what the tax cap loss will be. Collectively, we thought it would be $2,400,000 in the operations fund. That's how we budgeted and planned for that. We got a wonderful circuit breaker report about a month ago that said the circuit breaker for Hamilton Southeastern Schools was $4,600,000 to the operations fund. So a little over $2,000,000 more than we were expecting. This fund is is is is doing well as we stand now and okay,
but I don't want to celebrate too much that we're $2,700,000 under expected, expenses at this point because frankly the revenue is not going to match what we thought it would. And right now the revenue is not including the June disbursement. So unlike education, we won't have a cash balance summary. That's not an accurate portrayal of the operations fund. This fund is in a good spot right now, but understand that the revenue is going to come in less than what we anticipated. I wanted to ask about I see two things on here. The first, second line,
legal services, it looks like that's, a favorable variance about, not much, but it's fair favorable, $1,275. That's a negative amount. So we'll be able to yeah. So we're spending slightly more than what we what we thought. And, again, these are our best predictions come budget time. When you're in a $330,000,000 budget to nail a line item If you're within $1,200 out of 300, that's pretty good. Yeah. And then what the office of the superintendent, is that the, the whole the central office, the entire administrative office, or what is that? Office of the superintendent is a is a fun category and expenditure category that's used
to purchase anything related to a lot of cases, central office, but even times, far reaching to support the district in general. So if it's an operational expense, that ties to this office, this is not just salaries and benefits of the of the central office staff. There are additional supplies and and equipment and things that go in here. So is it really just the operation of this building? That's a I can't really say operation of this building because then you've got electricity and heating and air. That's not gonna live in this line. Okay. A lot of it is salary transparently, but there are additional items that come out of there that get coded in office
of the superintendent. And this is all versus what we initially budgeted, your expectations versus the reality here. Yeah. Okay. The other one, and I would like some more examples, Suzanne, but I I wanted to the biggest one on here is, oh, halfway down, a little less than halfway, 25,860 hardware, software support looks like we're not favorable by 1,700,000.0. Obviously, it still adds up favorably. We're we're still in a good spot overall. Sure. But that's a big one. Any particular reason we're so far up on that one?
Cecily, I know you do a lot in the operations fund. Gotcha. Okay. I'm just going to basically repeat that since you're not on the microphone over there for anybody listening. We have to look at both of those lines together, so 25850 network support and 25,860 hardware software support. We look at both of those together as kind of technology. One's in our favor by almost $1,000,000 the other unfavorable by about $1,700,000 So if you look at them together, that's just overall technology expenses throughout the district. So the laptops and the new iPads,
the laptops, the programs we use, all that stuff? Yes. Some of those are line items in geo bonds. So we want to be careful with that. The most recent item that came before the board with the Dell laptops, that's a GEO bond expense. It's certainly good to look at it in this detail. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The most important is the final number at the bottom, right? Because these are budgeted numbers and we're doing our best to hit those numbers. And we might code something in the, hardware, software support when we easily could have coded it into network support.
There's some gray area there, if you will. And again, on this one, we are favorable $2,700,000 or $37,100,000 when we're trying to get to what's that number, 42%? $41,600,000 is fivetwelve million dollars All this is showing is we are under budget in terms of our expenses. We have brought we anticipated more revenue than what we've expended here. But a word of caution is that circuit breaker piece. So the far left column with budget, that's what you initially were projecting,
correct? Yes, that is correct. Then you have the revised budget, which is the fourth column over. So it's you've adjusted for that. All the revised budget is taking in encumbrance from the previous year. Okay. So a PO that rolled over from '24 to '25 or something happened at the end of the year where it was not closed out in '24. We encumbered it. We said we were going to spend it, but we didn't spend it in 2025 or 2024. So it carried over to 2025. So it's just an addition of those two. So sort of column one plus column two.
Got it. I'm just looking at just purely from budget versus actual. So just to see how we may need to shift or adjust, especially as we consider technology district wide. Are we going to continue to do those in Geo bonds in the future as we take the cohorts of students and shift them to, the laptops that the district owns? We're starting to do that so that all classes rather than bring your own device, we're shifting to that. Yes. So I would say to to make a firm statement that everything will go to the GO bonds is probably not accurate. Okay. But just for this year, that would be just fine.
Absolutely, I believe, going forward, gonna plan a line in the GO bonds to support the technology in our school district. Clearly, it's not covering all of the costs. Right. And I don't think that would ever be the case, but it'll be a portion of that. And just to get glaring areas of opportunities for cost savings, so that's what jumps out at me. Yes. I'm going to ask one more if I can. And like you said, we'll get into some details. But I think there's been some questions from community, and that's kind of our job is to bring those out and make sure we're everybody's heard. There's both this office of the superintendent, then I found there's office of the business manager.
That one looks favorable by not a ton, but 21,000. I guess my question is and again, if you're going to get to this on another slide or Mr. Mapes wants to speak to this. One of the big things we've heard is about staffing here at Central Office. We've added some positions. We've removed some positions. How is the staffing levels of just our Central Office administration going in accordance with our budget? Are we more than expected, less than expected, kind of right on pace? I don't know where to find each one of those, where those would be in here. Sure. To answer your question,
there's a slide coming. But also when you look at the Office of the Business Manager, you look at that budget at $576,000 compared to a budget in the Office of the Superintendent of $4,000,000 So when you look at the variance, we want to keep in mind the budgets that we're talking about here. Again, I know Cicely manages all the operations. Some some examples of cost, office of the business manager versus office of the superintendent. Perfect segue to administrative staffing. I just have one real quick question. So no, that's okay. On each one of these sheets, revenue, operation, education,
when we look at this very first column, you're saying last year these are projections of where we were budgeting for this year and this number over here is saying where we are currently. And then that we will use this information going into the next when you guys figure for the following year, correct? Yes. That's correct. Thank you. Trying to layman terms. No. Absolutely. You got it. So mister Orr brought up the conversation about administrative staffing and where that kinda has landed. So the chart that you see below you has a lot of data. What this includes are all of our certified administrators and non certified,
what we call directors. I took some snapshots in time, of looking at kind of where we were in sort of the January, August flow every year, and then highlighted February of 'twenty four and to essentially where we are in current of May of twenty five. And you can see some ebbs and flows, right? So in August of twenty three, the district had 106, I'll I'll coin them administrators because these folks all have administrative benefits, and and almost all work a two sixty day calendar schedule, minus our building principals and and and some of those folks.
Certainly, some of our building principals work a whole year at the high school. But I wanna highlight the difference between February of twenty four to May of twenty five, and that's a growth of eight. And and I wanna be careful of that because just back in August of twenty three, the number was a 106. But the growth of eight, from February 24 to May of twenty five really honed into a new assistant principal and a new dean at each high school, so that's four, and then four additional instructional coaches, that were added. There are ebbs and flows of positions that no longer exist that were replaced by
something else. This is just a simple headcount, and I wanted to try to draw a little bit of a linear line between February of twenty four to May of twenty five of those eight positions. One other comment I would make is, moving forward for the 'twenty five-'twenty six school year, there have been seven new positions added, and those include the names you see there, Director of Career and Tech Ed. That was a passion, I think, we heard from the community of supporting our own. Executive Director of Elementary Ed, District Workplace Learning Manager, which goes along with the career in tech ed, and four instructional coaches.
One of the things I would point out of all these positions, minus the executive director of elementary education, which is a true central office position, the remainder of these positions are directly in the school building. Yes. The director of career and tech ed is gonna have a little bit of both, but my understanding, and I know our team can speak to that, that person's gonna have an office at HSE High School, along with our workplace learning manager. So these positions are much more connected to the buildings and supporting our teachers. And I know Mr. Mapes, you want to add to that. And I think it's important. You mentioned it. First of all,
if we're going to create our own career and technical education program, it takes staffing. And the other thing is if we're going to comply with the new high school diploma requirements, work based learning experiences is a big piece of that. And so once again, it requires some staffing. So as things get passed at the state level, we've got to staff up in order to support our students so they get all those opportunities. Full time instructional coaches, we've already seen some increased scores academically in iRead, that's directly related to that. And as we look at improving our iLearn scores in the intermediate and middle schools,
you got to have an instructional coach there in order to help support teachers. And, the results that we've seen already because of that support, you know, we're not supposed to release this yet because it's not been public from the state. But preliminarily, you know, last year, we had five elementary schools that were at 95% and above on iRead. Preliminarily, we're at 11, above 95%. And that's a direct correlation to having an instructional coach full time in each elementary school, supporting teachers to make certain that we have the highest level of instruction and look
at data to build the skills of our students. So I think it's really important that once again we emphasize, we're hiring people to support to make certain we have and keep high level academic programming in our school system, which is an expectation of the community. So can you clarify, one thing? Those teaching coaches confirm, I mean, you just said it, but I want you to reiterate it. They are in every school building or elementary school. They're in all of our We have full time. Full time. One full time. We have taken a recommendation from,
the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching. Mhmm. And when we get over 20 30 sections in an elementary, we have two. Okay. Because we have some elementaries that have large enrollments. Right. And like in '26 when we opened Fishers Elementary, that's looking to have an enrollment that could be over 30 that we would have to add one there as well. Can you clarify then just for, there's been chatter of misunderstanding what it is these instructional coaches are doing.
Are they supporting our teachers and helping them in rolling out literacy and education programs? Or are they there to assist for the students and helping them one on one or in groups to assist them in their literacy and growth? Both. Okay. I mean, the focus is on the teachers and helping instructional practices, but there's also times where they may have a small group of students that they're going to work with to help fill some gaps that we have with them academically. So, but just the the consistency and that they're located in one building and they have
time to actually do the work Mhmm. Is is the difference maker. Excellent. Thank you for clarifying. Can I also ask really quick? If we would have done the partnership for the career technical programming charter school, if you will, would we have still needed to fund the director and technical education position? No. That would have been taken by them. Okay. Thank you. So and and again, just to reiterate, so I'm looking through this this slide here, and this is interesting. Like as Ms. Thomas said, there's been a lot of talk in the community about this
very large increase in staffing here at Central Office specifically, but really throughout the district with administrators. Those numbers, so eight more since February 24, which is essentially when you came on board here, but then even back all the way to '22. If we look all the way from '22 to '25, it's eight people. And that does take into consideration, I think I think something that people wouldn't necessarily come up with offhand is these instructional coaches. I think when when we're here, we're heavy on administration. We think people here at Central Office.
So that takes into consideration that. So I mean, we're really three more people here at Central Office? Actually, just one housed here. Really just one housed here? Yes. And then they're out and again They're in buildings. Part of that is because we're starting our own CTE program, which again was kind of the will of the community. We didn't want to go the route of a separate charter deal. If people spoke to that, that's fine. But we're now doing it. So in my opinion, to do something ourselves with maybe one more person here, a couple more out in the district is fairly impressive,
I think. I don't know. We're still for the size of district, we are we're still one of the smallest central offices in the State of Indiana. If you look at the top eight to 10 school districts in the state. And all these numbers would be here in this operations fund for most of these people, all of these people? No. Because certified administrators They'd be over on education. Yeah. Great example would just be my predecessor was not a licensed educator. That position would have been paid out of the operations fund. I'm a licensed educator. My position is paid out of the education fund. Okay. So it can come from both depending on your certification.
That's not correct. I'm a certified educator. I'm still paid out of the operations fund for my position. Bad example. But yes, certified administrators that are in buildings are being paid out of the education fund. If like myself, I'm using my bad example that I work in the central office, then I'm paid out of the operations fund. Okay. Got you. I I just made that way more harder than you did the Office Fund. Well, and I get the idea. But also, I mean, our Assistant Superintendent positions are Operations funded. Yes. And they're responsible for academic progress. Right. So they do all the work in the Education Fund area,
but they're an Operation Fund expenditure. And the Operations Fund has a net favorable balance? That is correct. Great. Thank you. And I will say too in 'twenty three, 'twenty four, we were, I think, ranked eleventh in salaries that we paid in admin in our area. We were only eleventh. So I would later I'll send an e mail and ask. I want to see if we would have been able to right size or move that up a little bit. But in 'twenty three, we were given a chart that showed that HSE was behind Avon,
Brownsburg, Carmel Center Grove, Franklin, quite a bit of others, Warren Washington. I mean, we were eleventh in our admin office. I'm not all excited about paying tons of money out, but at the same time with the size of our school being 21,000 students and what, 2,500 employees and staff, We were eleventh in 2023. And I know one of, Mr. Mapes' plans coming in, which I think you've been doing really well at, is rightsizing that admin. So it is structuring functional support for our teachers,
for our students and the rest of the district. So I commend you on doing that. I would though one of my questions will be after the meeting and I'll e mail it is sending you this chart to see how we've right sized and where we are now compared to where we were then. So I would one piggyback to that. I think you all would have received the ISBA management survey results, the Media School Boards Association where every school district is surveyed, and that's sortable by position. So you can sort by superintendent and say, where does HSE fall in that?
It's not the top, I can assure you. Where does the, assistant superintendent, where is the director of Human Resources, Director of Operations, you can sort each one of those and see where HSE falls in that. Having done that, you nailed it. Right. And they have that CFO, deans, principals, assistant principals, interim principals, high school principals, high school assistant principals, superintendents. And so it's all on here. But instead of going on and on, I'll just give that later. And I'd like to see where we are compared to 'twenty three Sure. Because I know we've done improvements. And that's I'm glad to see that.
Thank you. And the community has spoken about having CTE, so I'm glad to see the director of career and technical education. If we had went the other route, we would have lost ADM. Is that correct? A consistent amount of ADM. I'm assuming it's transferring it. Yes. I don't know that I would necessarily say that. That's probably a whole presentation in itself that we all work through. To draw a linear line with losing students, there's arguments that you could have gained student. I'm just not comfortable saying either way on that. And I don't want to rehash that entire discussion again for obvious reason. But I think there was also something that they were going to bring,
I think, nearly $25,000,000 to help us with that. And then we also would have had an ongoing percentage, I think, 2% or 33% of their revenue would come back here. So it would have somehow made up. But again, we don't have to get into all of that. The only other final comment I would make on this slide is, remember, this is number of people, right? So there were positions that no longer live here that we've added to other positions. And so sometimes that can be a bit confusing of, well, x, y, z position was added, yes, but something else fell off when that position was added.
So I think this is a true apples to apples. Another piece of information I know the Board has asked for is legal expenses. Mr. Ohr, I know you commented on that a little bit earlier. So I put a slide together comparing our current legal counsel, which was approved by the Board in February of 'twenty three to serve in that capacity. And what you see in front of you is any related expense that we paid that was not related to bond issuances. Bond issuances are paid by the bond proceeds. So I took all those off. In some cases, they're professional development costs related to attending a conference that they were supporting,
I took those off. And so I really tried to break this down by retainer costs, litigation and labor. So labor would refer to any kind of ending separation agreement maybe with an employee that our legal team was involved in in the process. Obviously, the ULP we're very familiar with and then collective bargaining. Of note, the litigation is, 12 lawsuits during this time, in addition to, again, many different labor contracts. Again, you see the ULP and the collective bargaining. I will say also that in 2023 as Barnes and Thornburg came on board,
they essentially, as a part of the retainer, took on collective bargaining. They sort of ate that cost as a goodwill effort the first year. That's why you don't see that there. That cost did exist. It just wasn't passed on to us. And then one other note that I would make with this is this is when we paid the cost. So in some cases, you know, the cost may have happened. Great example. Right? You see the carryover collective bargaining from '24 to '25. A portion of the bill was paid in '24. A portion of the bill was paid in '25 for the 2425 school year. So this reflects when it came to board and when we paid for it.
Do we have any and I know you wouldn't have been here for it. I remember seeing some of it before we came on even before I was on the board. Any historical reference to what we were doing prior? Yes. 2023 is a tough year because it was the transition year, right? Again, they took over in 2023. You had some carryover bills. Our previous group, we paid about $52,000 to in 2023. That would have been for the beginning of the year anything carried over from 2022. And in the calendar year 2022, that number was about 139,000
$139,599 to be exact. And obviously, I mean, number of lawsuits and number of issues that legal had to take care of, that's just a hard apples to apples comparison. As we look at this, When you brought Barnes in, you knew at that time that rates were higher for services. But when you get to legal, it's just really hard to say how many cases did you have, what were they dealing with and just how long they ran. And we can't even get into those. It makes it difficult to discuss some of the finances of because we cannot discuss the cases.
Those have to be done in executive session if the public isn't aware of that. We can't sit here and go through every case and why did it cost so much. That's not allowed nor should it be. But knowing this, again, kind of similar to those bigger points that are coming from the community, the size of admin, I think we just tackled that. The cost of legal expenses, we're talking about that now. So in 'twenty two, it was about $140,000 then 'twenty three thousand dollars would have been a combination. Are you saying that $108,000 is all in or was it $108,000 from Barnes plus the $52,000
from CCHA? Correct. So what you see on the screen is just the cost of Barnes. Okay. So that that year combined would have been about 60. You got it. So that 140 to 160, then $2.20. Now we're only is that 126 that's payments through June, so about half the year. Five months of the year, fivetwelve, so you're fivetwelve again. Yes. So we are on pace to exceed that again. Again, it's difficult to talk about because we can't go through the cases and the whys. I do want to correct myself there because we've already approved June.
So technically, that would have been half the year's expenses, not fivetwelve. So for clarity, that is not. $250,000 $250,000 overall. Yes. Okay. And can we also clarify too that, we've never had in the past, well, at least I shouldn't say never, when since I've been on the board and this is now my second term, we did not have a parliamentarian sitting here. But that is not an additional cost. It's part of their retainer, correct? Attending the board meeting is a part of their retainer, yes. Okay. Thank you. And I just did some quick math on it. Even if that does get to $250,000
that would be 0.07% of our total annual budget. I don't know how that compares to other districts, if you have experience with that or Mr. Mabes, but $250,000 in legal for a $325,000,000 budget. And I know, to Suzanne's point, we're doing some additional things. They're going through policies that and know on policy committee, some of those things haven't been touched since 2011, 2012, 2013. They're going through all kinds of other things that maybe we hadn't done. We're paying additional work. They had always gone through policy, though. They had?
Okay. Yeah. So Well, but in the past, they've also had legal representation sitting in those committee meetings, and they aren't doing that here. Okay. So but, again, I guess my my bigger question is, let's say we get all the way to 250,000. How does that compare in your experience in your experience with other districts as a percentage of a budget? Once once again, it it you can't compare because you don't know what issues they have. They was at Delcom a long time and we had maybe in fourteen years,
we may have had four legal cases that came up that required extensive legal expenses. So it's really not something you can put a comparison out to. The rates here that we pay are the same rates that we paid in Perry Township, and Barnes and Thornburg was our attorneys in Perry Township. So there's That's at least helpful. And I would agree, I know from my insurance world, and that there's a few minutes to it, the world has changed litigiously as far as how many things are brought to suit, how many things have to be defended, all this.
So you're right, it's certainly ten years ago, you can't compare, but I wouldn't even compare three or four years ago, the number of things that are coming to become legal. It's just different. So again, the rate is the same as you guys had in Perry. And so we try and do our best to manage it. Also, Ben, to your point, I don't think we had a ULP previously either. But there were other I mean, we can't necessarily speak louder, but there were other litigation cases that we had for those years. But I also want to ask or point out or just reiterate that has been said that we haven't even had a legal update in about in a year and
we were that is on our agenda, our to do list. And so I'm sure we'll get updates on all those cases and those things, and we can talk about later other funding to see the side by sides. Correct. The Board has gotten legal update through e mails. We have had updates. Yes, we've had some e mail updates. But not on a public. But I think we have an executive session scheduled. Correct, yes. In July, I think so? Okay. That's incorrect. We have not had executive content legal updates in about a year.
So one of the things that I am affectionately known at here at HSE is the bean counter, which means I take every single dollar that we can possibly save, and we are proud of that. And I say it selfishly, but it absolutely has very little to do with me. One of the things that I am most proud of of being a staff member here is the amazing collaboration that takes place. The team sitting to my left works hand in hand with our finance department literally on a daily basis considering any new cost or any opportunity to save,
whether it be operationally, whether it be new staff, whether it be evaluating that. The amount of conversation that we spend on literally a daily basis of what can we do to save here, is significant. And so what I tried to bring before you today were some of the big items. Certainly don't need to talk about each one of them, but I'll hit a couple of the highlights. You may remember with our Fall Creek Intermediate project that due to some timing, we had to kind of delay moving forward with the contractor. And as a part of that process and the leadership of Mr.
Rausch, we were able to approximately save in the rebid about $3,000,000 in that project. With all the work we have done in the health space, moving to an emphasis on high deductible health plans, moving to new PBMs, There's significant savings there. Refundings, our new custodial contract year over year, that's about a $400,000 savings, providing additional service as well as better support for those employees in terms of holidays and benefits. The work that we partnered on with the City of Fishers has brought in consumable grants to help support our exponential learning sites,
whether that be Connor Prairie or Hub and Spoke. Some of those spaces, the city has stepped up and supported some of the consumables there as well as supporting us with some draining variances that would have cost us a lot otherwise. The new agreement with community health, the work that we're doing at Durban, to both engineer that from a cost savings perspective but also sort of taking that one in house, in terms of the management of that project. I can keep going on and on. You see bus driver route elimination. We've eliminated 10 drivers and 21 routes.
Our property casualty insurance, we're going to absorb a couple technology positions. I will say one of the strengths of this team is consistently rebidding and negotiating purchases. So option one is this. That doesn't work for us. What can we do to cut that down a little bit more? Okay. Great. What can we do to do a little bit more? One that I'm proud of is the telecom service audit. We've spent the last couple months auditing every telecom service and every phone line going into our schools. When we are done, we think we'll save annually about $170,000 that's not an official number yet.
We're working through that, but that's just eliminating eliminating lines that aren't needed, looking at reduced rates in some spaces, finding places where we were building correctly. We really dove in and have done a lot of work in that space. So cost aversion is a better way of saying this than necessarily cost savings, but at the end of the day, it supports our bottom line. And so we're looking at multiple millions of dollars in just some of these examples, and I could do a whole another slide on a lot of others. And I'm the beneficiary of standing up and sharing this. It's our team that does it every single day. And it just is really cool.
I want to say how much I appreciate you doing this because I think it's so easy to hit the big ones like personnel. And this is this takes, I know, a lot of time and energy to do this. And I'm greatly appreciative because I think this really gets at the crux of that explaining why we do multiyear contracts as well, right? So when we do, but it's not having to do this year over year over year, but strategically looking ahead to set expectations and forecasting and pricing and fix that as much as we can, so for prolonging two,
three, four year contract. So I'm grateful for all the work that you guys are doing, really great job. Yes. And I think it's worth mentioning because I don't see him here, but Mr. Rapp, Matt, Logan, those guys on the Facilities team, and I've gotten to know him through that committee. I know Suzanne was on there for years, and they just do a great job rebidding some of things. I think some of the things we talked about to fit within our ten year plan, we moved things like the FCI project instead of redoing entire buildings, just going for where we need things specifically that freed up money for other things
that we really needed. So we've been able to stay on budget overall. And I know that's you guys, all of you, so thank you for that. I can tell you that the community appreciates it. And we do get questions a lot of times when we throw out a number like there's we've saved $10,000,000 this year. How, where, prove it. Here it is. So we really appreciate that. Could you get in at all to, what could be recurring from this? And I think maybe the answer is this is just a mindset, a method of doing things to continually look at different projects.
It may not be the FCI rebid next year, but it may be a different project. But which ones will continue on and give us savings in the future? Yes. So when you look at some of the position absorptions, that's going to be reoccurring in terms of savings year on year on. The telecom, those lines are essentially have been eliminated. And so that's a year on year on savings. The copy machine and printer contract, year on year savings. There was a significant increase in our financial software. In all seriousness, Cecily and I spent two months negotiating that one down. I wouldn't call that reoccurring,
but had we not done that, it would have been reoccurring. And so, you know, each one has its own nuance, I would say. Bus driver elimination, that's that's just the savings year over year. So each one has its own little nuance, but there's no doubt that there's a significant amount of work being done in this space. Thank you again and thanks to everybody. And like you said, all the people down the line, all the way down to Logan, who's out there giving us a tour at Fishers Elementary. I mean, as we're walking through talking with the architect about, hey, could we do this differently?
Can we move this door over here? What would that say? So it's, I mean, it's unbelievable. Like I said earlier, the things I never considered before I was in this seat in running a would it 23 buildings? I think so. Yeah. 23 building, $325,000,000 budget to find, you know, dollars 170,000 is difficult. So we appreciate it. Every bean counts. It does. So a perfect segue into where we're going now. Again, we're gonna see some some challenges related to Senate Bill one that I wanna talk
about here kind of to close today. And I would reiterate what I commented on earlier in terms of the daily collaboration and communication from our team with Mr. Mapes and really those key people in our buildings of what we can do to weather this incoming challenge. And I think we're positioned to do that as well as anybody. So now we're really going to get in the weeds of Senate Bill one. Miss Thomas, miss Lang set in a presentation very similar to this, about a month ago with Doctor. Kegley and I, at Barnes and Thornburg. Again, a great service they provided to us.
But I wanna I wanna try to give just a little bit of background, and I hope to not get in the weeds too much. But the background here is this. Every every home, our own homes, have a gross assessed value that that our home is valued at, and there's a variety of deductions that come into play that get to a net assessed value. And the net assessed value is what we pay in term is what is the the the rate is multiplied by and determine what we pay in property taxes. And why this is important is because as a part of senate bill one,
what you see here is the standard deduction decreasing over time, but more importantly, the supplemental deduction increasing, meaning the net overall drops. I'm gonna give you a number that kinda level sets this just a little bit. Currently, in 2025, the median home value in our school district is $375,300. That's the median home value, gross. In 2025, the first thing to determine the net value is to take off $48,000 and then 37.5%,
and that gets that home to a net value of $204,000 plus a little bit more, but for rounding numbers. With this legislation, without a growth in AV, and that's a big assumption that wouldn't happen on that home. Our home will continue to grow on a gross AV. But for my illustration here, as you look at these supplemental deductions increasing, that net value of 204,000 on the same home would have a net value of a 125,000 in 2031. Said differently, these deductions are so significant that they will cut or or take away much more
from the gross AV to to the end result of the net AV, which is ultimately gonna have a big impact on our overall district's net AV. But before we do, there's one other little fun caveat to this new bill, which says, hey. After all your taxes are paid, after the circuit breaker, most homeowners are gonna get a minus $300 off their bill, at the end when it's all said and done. And $300 is a lot of money. Probably two trips to the grocery store right now, maybe one if you're a big family.
But the impact to the district is gonna be over, and I have a slide on this, over $4,000,000 from that simple $300 individual minus or deduction. So another sort of angle to the impact this this new bill is gonna have on the district. I'll come back to a special slide on that in a minute. This is probably one of the most important last two slides, that we're gonna talk about. The other is gonna be related to our referendum. I've looked at this so much, it's easy for me, but seeing it for the first time, let me explain it. The green number is the overall gross AV of our school district,
and gross AV will continue to grow at a pretty rapid rate. I don't know if it'll ever level out who who's to say that that's the case? But our home gross values are gonna continue to increase. The blue line is what the district's net AV would have been prior to senate enrolled act one. The orange is what the projected net AV will be for our district post senate enrolled act one. And I have to give credit to policy analytics. This is a group we engaged in that was able to take parcel by parcel
data to be able to produce what you see in front of you. So significant amount of work and expertise that they brought to the table. So again, let me just stop real quick. That is that is our district specifically. This is not an average or the state or a summary, this is us specifically? Correct. And it's projections. So it's on home values. And as Mr. Brown said, in the green line, Real Estate will always it will always where assessors will go up. But can you clarify just I mean, I heard it a little bit, but maybe again,
Cher, right there at 25% where orange and blue meet and why they split, what is making us go down? Since our assessed values are going up for the layman individual? What is bringing it down? It comes back to this calculation. We're taking more off. The deduction is greater. And when the deduction is greater, everybody's net AV is gonna drop along with that. So you can see where in 2025, it was 48,000 off the top as your standard deduction and then 37.5. Well, now all of a sudden in '26,
it's still that 48, but now we're gonna take 40% off the remainder. And And then we're gonna come and take 46%, and by the end, two thirds of the value of your home will be subtracted to get to your net AV. And this tax formula that they put in place for us was if you if you're an individual living in a home in our area, is giving you a 300 benefit? No. Completely independent of each other. So what this is is just determining your net AV, which will determine the amount of taxes you pay based on the rate of your
of your overlapping taxing district. So keep in mind, all of us as homeowners, we're not just paying the school, you know, rate. We're paying the city, the town, the all the things. Right? Correct. This is the calculation determining how much you would pay based on those rates. The $300 is outside of that. It's a whole another bucket. So when all the taxes are done and you pay your taxes or there's your line item, oh, congratulations, minus $300 after it's all said and done. I get that. One would say you're getting hit from both sides. Well, I was trying to look at it as the homeowner.
You're saving money, but as the school, we're not. So any property tax that you would not pay as a homeowner Mhmm. Is gonna impact all those those taxing units. Library, police, etcetera. So savings to the homeowner would be an impact to those units. Okay. Here are the same pieces of data just with the numbers. So you can see pre Senate Bill one, we have a steady increase in our AV, you just see it continuing to grow, continuing to grow. Post Senate Bill one, there's the certified AV,
there you get to 26 it grows a little, uh-oh, 27 there's the drop, there's the drop, there's the drop and we continue until all the new SEA-one initiatives are put in place and then it starts to pick back up a little. But notice in 'twenty six, here's our high watermark of $12,000,000,000 Even in 02/1935, we're not projected to get back to that AV. That creates some challenges. So back to my earlier slide, historically, school districts for years have have have have worked hard to keep a level tax
rate. If your tax rate stays level, but your AV drops, you're gonna produce a much smaller levy. Said a different way, go into the second formula, if we just say, hey. Let's just keep the levy. Let's just keep status quo on the levy. AV's dropping, we're gonna have to increase the rate in order just to obtain the same amount of dollars, not an increase for inflation, not an increase for cost of living, all the things, just to say keep the same exact rate or it's the same exact levy. So what I'm gonna prepare the board for,
I guess, today is where we've always worked hard to keep a level tax rate, our process will now be much more about what can we do to keep a level levy? What can we do to even just obtain the same amount of funds? And in order to do that, the formula is pretty simple. To keep the same money and your AV drops, you're gonna have to raise the rate in order to be able to do that. What's our current rate? 1.1433. Thank you so much. 1.433? Yep. And how long has it been that? It has been that for the last two years.
The years previous, it had dropped. I can go back to that slide in a minute if you'd like. Thank you. I do think when we come to present the 2026 budget, it's possible that we can maintain the same levy excuse me, the same rate based on the fact that we're really not deviating much from pre SEA one and post. But moving to '27 and beyond, it's gonna be very difficult not to propose a higher tax rate due to the impact that you're seeing to the, net AV of the entire community. Would this be tell me if I'm wildly off base here,
which which is definitely okay. I may be. I think I probably am. I'm looking at just the education fund, which is mostly teacher benefits and salaries at a $170,000,000 to keep that. Now that's that's on student count. Yeah. So don't don't think it yeah. Don't think education fund with this conversation. This is not education fund. This would go operations. Operations, debt service, most importantly, operating referendum. Referendum. Those three. Okay. Perfect kickoff, and I'll come back to education in a second. Okay. So you're gonna you're gonna go over if there's impact to the education part?
Absolutely. So here's our operating referendum. Of all the slides I've showed you today, this is the one that gives me the most heartburn. And the reason being is you we showed earlier about a $3,000,000 increase in our levy, the dollars that came in from '24 to '25. There was two reasons for that growth. One, we added the penny. Two, the AV grew. Well, when the AV does not grow or or or drops more importantly, this is the impact on our operations or excuse me, our operating referendum. So the dash line is pre SEA one.
So the projection of where we thought the referendum dollars, what levy we would obtain. The solid line is what we believe through policy analytics will happen after. What I would point out is in '20 in '26, we see a nice still growth with the levy that we're able to pull. But in '27, we're losing money from the previous year, and by '28, we're less than we are right now. Remember, this is the safety net for being able to fund teacher salaries,
wages, and benefits. This is what lifts that up in the tune of $26,000,000. We start losing revenue in this fund with the expenses that are already there. There's only one other place to get that, and that's to the education fund, and there are challenges with that. The idea of dollars lost, I mean, my goodness. If we would've just stayed on the track that we were on, we would've been projected to be at $34,700,000. And in 2031, that number is now projected to be 23.7. That's scary, to be to be quite honest.
And it's not all doom and gloom, but this slide is a little bit. So we we aren't possibly the only school district experiencing this? Without a doubt. We're we're all in it together. Exactly. So what kind of pressure is being put upon the state legislature to change this model because it's obviously having an impact financially statewide? Yes. I I know that's a loaded question for you. That's not in your wheelhouse. But as you talk amongst other CFOs, you know, countywide, statewide, what is what is the Everybody is asking for change. Cities, towns, schools, this was passed without really knowing the the fiscal impact to all those entities.
Yes. It it gave some property tax relief and will have property tax relief, but the cost of services to communities. So each one of those group professional organizations are currently trying to talk with legislators and say, Hey, this needs to get fixed before it goes fully implemented because it's going to be devastating. So, I mean, there is efforts out there and conversations going on about the full impact of this as we get ready to do a '26 budget. And just what Tim just showed you,
it's slightly it's just a light pain the first time, and then it gets really, really hard. And I think what what I keep coming back to is we we get similar questions of, you know, why does the budget grow every year? Will all our expenses grow every year? Mhmm. And that's with, with really not adding anything new. This is forget about adding a CTE center or anything. If we just offer the same services every single year, same exact staffing, same building, same number bus, we did everything the same, our costs are gonna go up with inflation. Yep. Everybody in this in our organization expects a raise every year.
We want to be able to give that to them. That's a huge part of our budget. But then there's gas, electricity, insurance. I know insurance is going up 15%, 20%. That's millions of dollars. So just to do exactly what we're doing without increasing any service and not adding anything, again, people always use examples of we're not building new swimming pools or tennis courts. If we just do exactly what we're doing, that's going to increase along with inflation every year. And on top of that, we do want to do some new things. We do want to improve and get some new carpet in some places and do
some different things at a CTE center. So it does become impactful. So I think the reason And I'm so sorry. I didn't I think the reason this one feels the most is because this is staff, right? This is paying the people that do the work every single day that are so critical to the to the success of our school district. And so seeing this as a flat line slash drop is, is concerning. As well as class size Mhmm. And security. I mean, the plan was as the referendum dollars would go up,
that we'd have more dollars to maintain class sizes and pay teachers, and we'd also continue to be able to add security issues in our buildings where we don't have full time SROs. So it's a it's impacted in both those areas. Will our support staff also come out of this fund or education fund? Or You know, at the end of the day I'm talking about, like, IAs and Sure. Those They're paid they're paid out of the education fund. Okay. But at the end of the day, it it's here's education dollars, here's referendum dollars that are supporting the classroom.
They go together. So if, there's an impact to the referendum, what picks up the slack education? Well, it's not necessarily growing either. We'll talk about that in a in a in a slide here in the future. But, I think going back to the earlier slide where we looked at our tuition support dollars at being about $2,700,000 and we and we supported our teachers with a $2,800,000 increase, the the referendum allowed that. If you take a drop in the referendum, all of a sudden that number of education, how much new money we're getting becomes exponentially important at that time. And this is projections just on our property taxes and our property.
Parcel by parcel. So it's as good a projection as we can get. And every year you go out, the projection gets less and less accurate, obviously. Mhmm. But it's as good a projection as there is. Would that student count being the thing that affects the education fund almost exclusively, I think exclusively, will we get into any discussion of what impact we had with opening up the district for enrollment? Yeah. We can certainly talk about that, and I know our team has some some information there too. So painting a different picture now. So set aside the impact to the,
AV and and what it's gonna do to our referendum and other funds. This is exclusively that $300 I'll call it, bonus that gets subtracted from your tax bill, at the end of all calculations. You got two two graphs here. The first on the left is if we maintain the same levy in debt service that we have in 2025 and continue that on knowing that the rate would have to increase. The graph on the right keeps the rate, the amount of money that we pull from the rate and pretends that SEA one
didn't happen, and that rate continues to grow to pull the same levy that we would have pulled before. That detail is not as important as really what's on the graph. What's on the graph is the impact that $300 has to our levy amounts. The blue graphs represent the operations fund. The orange bar represents debt service. One little caveat to this legislation that I honestly think was a mistake is they did not protect debt service. When it comes to tax credits and circuit breaker,
debt service has always been protected, meaning they don't take it off debt service because you gotta pay the debt that you already established. With this legislation, they're allowing debt service cash balances to be hit. Whether that stays in the future is yet to be determined. What is important of this this graph is that $300 bonus is about a $4,200,000, cost to the school district for every individual taxpayer getting that. So on top of the hit to the, operating referendum and the net AV that impacts operations,
This is another sort of, additional bonus, if you will, and not a good one in that, that would come off the top and impact the school district. Now what I will say is due to these, deductions, our our overall circuit breaker isn't gonna be as significant maybe as it has been in the past. Incorporating these numbers, circuit breaker, money that we're projected to get that we don't get is about $4,700,000 in 2025, most of it in the operations fund because debt service is protected. In 2026, with the graph on the left,
it would be 5,700,000.0. And in 2026 on the graph on the right, meaning to continue to pull the same levy, it would be about 6,500,000.0. All said and done, it's another impact to the process, another impact, to the school district's overall levy pull, in addition to to everything that we've previously talked about. There's a lot of data there, probably a whole presentation in itself, but $300 to an individual, although very valuable, has a $4,200,000 impact to the school district. Now let's shift gears back to what mister Orr said to kinda conclude.
So let's talk tuition support now. So tuition support again is that are the dollars connected to the number of students enrolled in the school district. The blue the blue section on the left is our total tuition support for the twenty four, twenty five year. We we've shown that number at a 160,000,000 before. I did break it down into the basic grant and the supplemental grants. Supplemental grants are special education, career and tech ed, English language learners, and academic performance. Those grants fluctuate quite a bit, and so I wanna be cautious that we kinda focus on both numbers here.
So I backed out curricular materials from the calculations in gray as we project because now that is embedded in tuition support, so it looks like it's much greater than it is. I backed out that 158 roughly dollars per student in these calculations. So our enrollment average between October and February's counts was a little over 20,000 students. It's the average of the two. If we take our demographer predicted number of 20,648, which would be a drop of 59 students,
our basic grant would go up about $2,000,000 Using LSA, that's a legislative services agency that does all the fiscal work, for the legislators in in Indianapolis, I I use their prediction for subgrants, and I wanna be careful locking that number in. That's why you see the statement at the bottom. Subgrants are estimates only based on LSA. I I really wanna be careful saying that those are official numbers. I feel good about what the basic grant number is. I feel less confident in the subgrants. But we'll use their numbers.
It would show an increase of about 3.3, million dollars available for raises for all groups. Remember, the target is to try to take 65% of that. Go over to the second column, LSA, they predict that we would be down a 194 students. Having said that, our basic grant would move to about 1,200,000.0 in an increase, and then the subgrants, factoring those in, would be 2.2. I went ahead and tried to paint another picture just so we see the continuum of options here because remember,
we're graduating 1,700 students. We're projecting to bring in 1,100 ish. That's a big gap. Yes. We see increases in other grade levels, but let's look at maybe an option of if we were down 400 students. If we were down 400 students, even though there's an increase to tuition support, we would actually see less in the basic grant of 229,000. And using the proportionate amounts from LSA's prediction on subgrants, we would see, an overall increase of six twenty five. I wanna be very careful about those subgrants. I won't say it again. Those are those are predictions based on their numbers.
I'm not ready to hang my hat on that. The tuition support numbers, I feel, are accurate based on those counts. So you put this together with what the referendum's gonna do, not in '26, but in '27, we have to be preparing for this, and we are. And so we're gonna be very conservative in what recommendations we have related to expenses and increases in this space knowing that the small wave is coming in '27 and the big waves are coming behind it without any changes.
So a lot to digest there. Any questions? Talk more on the referendum, the recent legislation, and having to hold off for a year from when your referendum ends versus when you have to then go out. Yeah. So because it's an operating referendum, I do and I I'm gonna dab my toes into legal and then walk along the outside of the pool. I do not think that's an impact to us. What would be an impact to us is when we would go to renew that, we would have to go a little earlier because we've gotta get on the even year, general elections. Right? And so I know doctor Kegeli and I were reversing that in the meeting.
We were sitting at Barnes And Thornburg, and we would probably, in 2030, is what we talked about, have to start going out, for a referendum at that point. And then that in itself gets complicated because where we establish a maximum rate, point one nine nine five, knowing AV is gonna continue to drop, we have to start having conversations about a maximum levy versus a maximum rate even in that space and build up, we're we're we're a little time from that, but build up a little confidence in our community to say, hey. We're gonna ask for this right now because we know AV is gonna drop. In year one,
we may not go for this whole levy, but we gotta protect ourselves for year seven of this to be able to not get in a position where we see a decrease in revenue there. So for clarification on some of of this because you'll hear those naysayers out there saying, oh, I'm not gonna do another referendum or there's no way. Why don't you guys make cuts? You guys spend way too much money to make cuts, and that's why we're going through all of this stuff. But if we are to look at our district as a whole,
whether it's operations or, education or salaries and compensation, Can you talk a little bit about what we do, whether it's quarterly or every month, that we are looking at our spending and how we can continue? And I don't want to use the word cuts, but, you know, me, I own my own business as a small business. But I'm constantly looking at marketing and advertising and how I can do less in my spending or how I'm going to use certain services. I know education runs a little bit different that they don't always do that,
but it's still a business and it's still a big corporation. So can you talk a little bit about what an everyday looks like that we are still trying to make cuts in certain areas and it's not all about just going out and getting more money and making a bigger budget. Yeah. I would lead in with that by saying you don't get the title bean counter if you're not counting them every single day, and we really are. Every decision we make collectively is what impact is this gonna have. And, obviously, we're always driven by the fact of what are we doing that's best for students,
helping students in the classroom, and continue to have the amazing success we have, balancing that versus cost. So I'm not kidding when I say when teaching and learning is thinking about doing something new, they're coming down and we're having a conversation saying, what can we do about this? Is there a space that this makes sense financially? Is there a space that that doesn't? Sometimes we come to a collective, no, this isn't gonna work. Sometimes more often than not, we find a way, but then we gotta we gotta work in another area to do that. From a monthly standpoint, that's the job that Cecily and I live really on a weekly,
daily basis where we're monitoring where those monthly financials fall. We share them with mister Mapes, and and he's seen them on a monthly basis. We're having conversations about where this all falls. So to say that it's constant would not be an over exaggeration. It is literally constant. And it's that cost aversion side. Right? I mean, that's the the bones of what happens every day here that that gets us savings. It may not turn into cash balances, but it's it's expenses that we don't have because we've negotiated something better or we
refunded a bond or the other thing we're trying to protect are academic programs. Right? And and if this gets tough, all of a sudden, we're gonna have to look at academic programming and say, we're not gonna offer that anymore because we can't we can't live within our budget and continue to have some luxuries of courses that we offer our students at Hamilton Southeastern Schools. And and that's gonna happen across the state to every school corporation as this gets implemented. And that's the part that that scares us. Mhmm. We've got really great offerings, and we feel like we prepare our students to be able to go anywhere they
wanna go once they graduate from here. And those experiences might dry up because we won't have funding to support them. Well, so you did put a slide up here with those cost versions, which I I greatly appreciate, but not right here, but in my q and a to email to you and your staff. I would like to kinda see thanks for that big list, but maybe you gave that dollar amount, I don't know. But in that was that $5,000,000 in savings? Is that $25,000,000 in savings? Was that Yes. It was about $11,000,000
in cost of version. Okay. Is it all but we're all and I know it was talked about a little bit, but I guess knowing what is repeatable savings, what is sustainable savings and what was a onetime savings that maybe we can touch on that and I'll e mail for an update on that too because, I mean, Mr. Mabesh, you even said when, I had had some questions about administration and some of the changes we're doing, you were respectful and said, you know, we worked on that. We came up with the funds. We've had savings in our district.
I don't want to quote a number. I don't remember what you said, dollars 17,000,000 or some odd million dollars that we've had savings that we can afford these changes in administration. And though that's a great number, I'd like to be able to see are those sustainable numbers, one time numbers or something that's now gonna repeat every year that Yeah. Some of it, like we talked about, some are a little bit of both. The other thing that's not on there, which we get that number well above 17, is our taxable bond. I don't call that a savings, but that was a influx to our operations fund. So we we made the decision last year with your support to go out for
a taxable bond to pay for our previous bus expenses. Mhmm. And what that did is provided a boost to the operations fund. There's no doubt that it's where it's at today because of that decision. I left that off there, but that's a boost of 6 plus million dollars to the operations fund. That kind that kind of brings me to some other things that we and you might still be talking about it, but like we have ESSER funds and, Title I and all those Yes. ESSERs are all on. Okay. That's what I was going to say. If we used all of our funds and stuff, is there anything left over? Or we have I mean, I know we have things that repeat,
right? And does that number goes up and down? Yes. I mean, obviously, our team is constantly working for various grants and supports and mental health. We do some work there. We do some work with our instructional coaches. We're we're constantly in that in that space, but there's no magic coffer that lives in our office that we just pull when we need it. We we just evaluate every decision critically. Now I will say, to kinda conclude before the Slide. As challenging as this is, there's no better place and this is not cliche. There's no better place to be than right here. We're as positioned as anybody possibly could be positively to take this wave that's coming
for us. And and we've got the right people in communication with us on a daily basis to to to see what we need to do to make it work. It's the hand we're dealt, and we're gonna make it work. We we could stay here all night with a lot of this, and we've almost come upon two hours that we've wore Tim out. I think I have two more questions and they'll be easy. And I'd like to conclude. And once again, we do want to prepare an FAQ and want those email questions to come in, so we can create that document.
And some of the things that we've talked about here will be on that document, let alone the questions that you still have. And that way, it will be a whole document that can be out there for the Board as well as for the public that I think is very important. But once again, I want to emphasize a lot of this is projections until we get a certified assessed valuation for the '26 budget, then things become more real and we'll update. And rest assured, I think one of the things that this school district has for it right now that nobody else does, nobody has three superintendents sitting in their central office with experience of doing budgets,
finding cost savings and running a school district. And and and I've had my colleagues tell me that. And they're like, wow. You put together a team that I wish I had. And and that's really important right now. And that's why we are better positioned than most people in the state of Indiana because we have really good people that know how to do this work and run schools as businesses. Again, simple question, if I can please go ahead and get these two out. You might have already said it, I just didn't I don't think I wrote it down, Was what is the total percent of our debt service in our current budget right
now that we are what was that number? There's our current there's our 2025 budget broken down by various debt services. Okay. Thank you. And then the last question is we worked in hard to, have a mental health grant that's phenomenal for our district and things that people are doing some great things. And it was laid out to us by years, and I just wanted to say, are we on track with those positions that we are filling in in lining? At this point, we're supposed to have all of our, support staff or cut to cover all of our elementaries.
I think it's six school social work positions to the grant to cover all of our elementary schools at this time. So I was just wanting to follow-up. Are we on track with those items that We work with Molly on a regular basis. That's probably a whole presentation in itself, so it's probably a good FAQ. Okay. That's in grants. Yes. I just want to take a couple of seconds and say thank you all for making this simple for us and taking time out of your schedules, data that we can better understand where we are. I appreciate you, Nunez. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was a great presentation.