it is 6:02 p.m on Wednesday February 26 2025 and I am Brian Leon the chair of the school committee I am calling the school committee meeting to order the first item of the agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance if you please
rise pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for stand na indivisible andice thank you next item of the agenda is public comment I'll open up the
public comment from the public we need to raise our St ask uh good evening Mary foil 985 flat Hill Road do want keep I am here representing the lunenberg Education
Association obviously the proposed cuts are concerning to Educators in the district and we will have more concrete details of those concerns in subsequent meetings today I'm going to speak more about the institutional history and moving forward in regards to the budget
this is my 10th non-consecutive year serving as Union president I've also spent 19 of my 23 years teaching here as a member of the Lea board I can attest to the fact that many most budget conversations in these past years have
had talks of cuts your lunenberg Educators believe in the promise of a free and a public education and what it offers for all students a public school system is a nonprofit often making the fluctuations of the economy that much
more impactful lack of overides not leving a full 2 and 12% tax creates and pushes off and pushing off building projects for decades creates an even larger budget Gap we cannot rely on the lack of raises ones and 2% to make up
budget shortfall the last time we faced significant Cuts we closed a building removed key administrative positions and had department and grade level Cuts I say this not to encourage the same actions this time but for institutional
history unfortunately we have been here before and if we as a school Community Committee and town continue making the same decisions we will continue to find ourselves in the same situation covid despite all of its negative impacts
actually helped our current budget scenario at keep our current budget scenario at Bay for a few years if you watch meetings from PR years I sound like a broken record this shows that these budget Wows are not enough anomalies but rather perpetual and yes
the Commonwealth could do more and needs reform in regards to school funding but lunenberg also needs to take responsibility for its part in the issue as a school committee your staff implores you to determine publicize and advocate for the school system you
believe that our students deserve decide if we will be a school system that offers the minimum for our students or one that is comprehensive allowing for the development of the whole student become more of a mouthpiece for the town in its goals perhaps a 5 or 10e plan
with steps on how to actually achieve it if history repeats itself luneberg's budget woes will continue it is clear that the town needs to make a decision will it continue with taking similar actions and do what is needed to Simply maintain a status quo or will it take
steps to imagine a different future on the behalf of Educators and students I implore you as the school committee to consider what part you can and will play in what the future looks like for our students and schools thank you thank
you any other public comment from the public if you're on Zoom you can raise your virtual hand or your actual hand Mr chair just to be uh clear you're planning for a public Q&A some point yes on our agenda we do have
a budget Q&A to participate everybody knows that all right seeing no other Public public comment from the public I'll open up to public comment from the committee Mr Bard good evening this will be a little bit
repetitive but I told people that I was going to be locked on to this until it was resolved and I am still locked on tonight you are going to watch five people make gut-wrenching work work to making gut-wrenching
decisions that I think we all hope will ultimately prove to be the least bad options I've been dreading tonight and our next meeting and our next meeting after that since our last meeting that's the situation
that we're in previous commenter though is not wrong we talked about the structural situation and the challenges that we could potentially face particularly in an inflationary situation when I was on the finance
committee in 20120 in 2021 and in 2022 and while I was on the school committee in 2022 2023 2024 2025 our legislators came and talked to
us in 2022 and in 2023 and told us that local Aid is their top priority then last year they told us that they would come and meet with us following the election they did not instead they held a meeting and
invited our chair to the meeting we have had an open invitation to our legislators all along a few weeks ago right about the day give or take a day of our last
meeting representative Scarsdale spoke at the lunenberg Council on Aging event during the day and spoke on camera about education funding in
Chapter 70 hasn't spoken with us in her comments that day she spoke about the situation that we understand she spoke about the student Opportunity Act and anticipated a very
long period of time that it would take to resolve the formulas in the student Opportunity Act but that there were things that could be done such as supplemental budget actions that could serve as a Band-Aid until that time let me tell you folks that what we heard
from her that day about a supplemental budget action or what we heard today from the Regional Schools Consortium or what we heard a couple of weeks ago from a Consortium of the um MTA and the mas
and the masc amongst other organizations are not going to help us anytime soon the best will'll see any resolution to any of those items is this summer and probably later long after these drastic
cuts are made but none of that was unanticipated we talked about this with our legislators years ago and months ago and they have done nothing they've talked about getting together 20111
towns of similar interest but they have proposed nothing there is no legislation other than legislation that would form a special committee that will report out in the summer of 2027 and I say that wishing it was a
joke but it is not that is the situation we're in so our legislators went to our local newspaper to try to explain the situation again rather than coming to us they went and talked to a reporter from the local newsp paper with no Counterpoint I might
add Bel labored this whole issue explained that the student Opportunity Act took 10 years to put into place and God forbid we pull a string that breaks something someplace else but I'm here to tell you that we've been pouring money into Gateway School Districts for the
last three years and to do something to fix this to Target us and bring us to some sort of inflationary Baseline I don't think is going to break anything and nobody has shown me any evidence that it will representative kushar who has been
incredibly silent on this issue pointed out that while Fitchburg doesn't have school department issues they have massive budget woses across their municipality and they in fact do the
contrast is that in the last 20 23 years lunberg has passed an override we've passed a debt exclusion for a fire station a debt exclusion for a primary school a debt exclusion for a middle
High School a debt exclusion for our roads we have poured additional money every year into our pavement Management program we have invested massive amounts of money in lunberg in excess of $60 million just in debt exclusions Fitchburg has never
passed an override or a debt exclusion let that sink in so what you were being asked to do ladies and gentlemen and it was said explicitly by our masc representative when she came and talked to us a couple
of years ago is you are being asked to back stop the state's lack of support by passing more and more overrides so while your income tax dollars and while your sales tax dollars go to Gateway cities and I'm not faulting them I'm not I'm
not I think we have to support them we're also being asked to reach into our pocket again because the only mechanism to offer level services in our local public schools is through overrides that is the only mechanism that we have it is an awful situation and our
legislators lack transparency they lack practicality they lack urgency on these topics and and I know that they're hearing from people they need to hear from us consistently and and and and
constantly until this issue is resolved uh so I'll sit here In This Very unenviable position for the next several weeks and make cuts um but I got to tell you every time I do it I'm thinking about the complete lack of support that we're getting from
our partners in education when proposition two and a half was was passed in 1980 it was passed in a much higher inflationary period than we are currently in much higher but it was passed on the promise that local Aid
would would serve as a back stop because in an inflationary period income taxes and sales taxes tend to go up collections tend to go up our state has gone in the opposite direction instead of 60% in local Aid to support our schools we're about 40% compar you know
in comparison um we have to do better and we have to hold them accountable thank you thank you just make sure your mics are on everybody thanks uh any other public comment from the committee Mr baski um well you stole some of
mine the first thing I wanted to say say again the first thing I wanted to say tonight is that if you are watching this meeting congratulations uh you're on Deck to run for school committee or select board um if you're watching in person on cable on U not tonight but on
zoom on Facebook or you're watching the recording later on YouTube congratulations you are an Engaged and informed citizen who cares about education in Lunenburg and if you are paying attention to the issues we're facing that means you care about the interests of the students and the town
and the citizens who live here so I'm asking you to run uh this town is small this town can feel a little bit insular and sometimes it feels like you might need an engraved invitation to be considered for a town government role but that's not how this works um but if you thought that's how it works uh
consider this your engraved invitation uh please I'm asking you to get involved we have two open seats coming up on the select board we have two open seats coming up on the school committee select board typically historically doesn't
have a lot of parents serving on it uh school committee often does but I think diversity of views is important on both boards so take that into consideration um right now you can help make your corner of the world a better place you
can help your community in your town and if you're watching this you're already engaged so if you could consider that that would be great uh if you wanted to email me and talk more about if you want to email Brian or any of us would be more than happy to answer questions and talk about
what the time commitment is like or what it's like and you don't have to be a good public speaker because I'm doing it so uh that's not a qualification um and the second thing is I was extremely disappointed after reading The lunenberg Ledger on Friday
um spefic specifically representative kushmer had remarks about the last adjustment to Chapter 70 funding taking a decade of Crisis for the Gateway cities they had a decade of Crisis to deal with before action was taken to fix
it um I've been thinking about that comment all weekend long I haven't stopped thinking about it since I read it on Friday that there was a decade of Crisis because my kids don't have a decade um if my kids don't have a decade
none of the kids in lunenberg schools right now have a decade to wait for it to get fixed and none of the kids in any of the towns in Massachusetts dealing with it have a decade to wait for it to get fixed so it seems like I I recommend people go
out and seek out that article and read it because it seems like I am happy that our elected officials understand the scope of the issue I'm happy that they've become educated on on the issue and that they've sought out the information
and they know a lot about the issue um they understand how dire the situation is but it's becoming clear we cannot expect immediate assistance from the state like it's just not something we can rely on um and yes I've emailed all this to my elected reps have not gotten
a response back which is disappointing but I've emailed this as well um but as a parent this is kind of heartbreaking um I'm having a hard time taking off my parent hat cuz this does affect my own children and it affects everyone all the
students in lunenberg um I don't have 10 years to wait for the state to get it together and fix the funding issue and all I see is this year after year coming we talked about it last year we sat here at this exact time last year saying this is going to happen again
this year and I think it's going to happen again next year too I'm very very very concerned um so I'm having a really hard time knowing that this is a repeating issue that they know is an
issue and that it's not being fixed um and I don't know what the town can do to fix it other than continuously R raising property taxes and that is not something we can continuously do
um and that was it for now than Miss AR I just wanted to jump on what Laura said and say that the town caucus is March 10th at I believe 7:00 in our
Auditorium right here if you want to run for the select board or the school committee grab a friend to nominate you and come to the town caucus you don't have to collect signatures you don't have to do anything else if you show up at the Town caucus
and the people there support you so if you would like to be part of the solution that is the way to do it thank you Mr scull so I just wanted to make a couple of of points that are a little different than what everybody else has said the first thing is in
watching other proceedings in other town government boards there's a question about like how did we get here and what happened so I think if you go back and watch the meetings that we had for school committee last year at this time and even before then we indicated that
there was going to be a budget crunch because of predictable obvious causes and so you know one of the things that I was asked when I was delivering the report for the budget task force was like why does this wider costs in schools keep going up and the reality is the costs in schools keep
going up for two reasons number one inflation if you look at inflation since 2020 we've experienced 18% inflation over that four-year period our costs are going to go up at least that much because dollars are worth that much less
the other issue is unlike unlike other service providers in town we have constitutional and legal mandates that we have to abide by we have to provide a free appropriate public education we cannot discriminate based on the amount
of need or the cost of the education and so when people move into town or when people come to town with children that are going to go to school we we have to educate them and sometimes it costs more so those are the two primary causes for why our budgets are constantly under
this strain uh the second thing is I agree with what Peter and Laura said about the need to have action by our legislators but I want to make sure that it's clear that this is not an either or thing we need to be doing both we need
to fix this problem ourselves and we need to be regularly in contact with our legislators um I know that Mike kushar is sponsoring a bill to help address some of the concerns about the transportation costs so that's not a fix for everything but I do think that there
are actions that they could take that would be shorter term Solutions than rejiggering how Chapter 70 funding works the second thing is or the LA the next thing is I think it's important to remember what Mary said but also to think about this experience from your
own personal life I dealt with and I deal with a lot of municipalities in my day job and this pattern of Boom or bust funding for municipalities is not something that is unusual it is something that is normal it is cyclical
and when you're in a boom period it seems like everything is working and when you're in a bust period everybody's grumpy all the belts are tightened and it's unpleasant but I want to make sure that if we don't see this as part of a pattern and think that this is like a
burgeoning crisis that surprised us and happens for reasons we don't understand we're not going to be able to address the problems we've got to understand how this happened and the fact that it repeatedly happens over and over again and I think that that leads me to my last comment which is how do we get out
of this problem so in the short term I think that we need to do restructuring of how the school operates and I think that that's one of the things that the budget is proposed to do I also think that at some point and I hopefully sooner rather than later I think that we need one more Town override and then
finally looking at the numbers and looking how towns generate Revenue in Massachusetts this town in particular needs to adopt the community protection act we have tried to do it multiple times before sometimes it made it all the way to town meeting sometimes it
died at the select board but this is the only other lever of Revenue generation that towns in Massachusetts have and when our tax rate are locked in place by prop uh two and A2 and inflation outstrips prop two and a half we have to
make up the funding gaps some other way the CPA offers us an opportunity to do that but it also provides a state match for tax dollars so that things that we are going to spend money on anyway like renovating buildings in town renovating uh Marshall Park those things will make
us eligible for the CPA and they will help us get money back for things that we are going to spend money on anyway so it's basically a question of do we want to spend this money or do we want to spend this money and get some money back from the state so I think that we've got to move away from this notion that like
this is a crisis that we couldn't that that was you know a surprise we know this is going to happen we knew this was going to happen last year we know what the causes are and the solutions aren't perfect but we need to take steps towards recognizing those Solutions and putting them in place if we're ever
going to solve this problem the reality is we we must solve this problem ourselves thank you the next item of the agenda is the chair's report I prepared a statement I want to thank everyone for being here tonight your engagement is crucial as we navigate these challenging
budget discussions again there will be a budget Q&A where the public can participate later on in the agenda I also want to express my gratitude for all the volunteers in the community my fellow school committee members and our dedicated staff and administrative team who are here to help guide us through these decisions
if this is your first meeting I hope you leave with a clear understanding of the budget situation and the factors that shape it as we navigate the budget season I want to provide an update on the significant financial challenges facing lunenberg public schools and over 200 other districts across Massachusetts
this is not a lunenberg specific issue but a Statewide crisis that requires legislative and budgetary solutions the school committee wants to assure the community that lunenberg public schools is committed to fiscal responsibility and transparen lunenberg has not mismanaged funds or
our and our budget accurately reflects the district's needs we recently negotiated a fair contract with our unions in good faith ensuring that we stay competitive with other towns while attracting talent to our vacancies our staff are working to earn a living wage just like other
Professionals in our community and often take a HomeTown discount to work in their Hometown many of our teachers are also our neighbors we work together to ensure that lunenberg remains an attractive place to work while maintaining Financial sustainability while we actively seek
and receive grants they will not solve this large budget shortfall many other districts are also competing for the same grants and these funds typically come with restrictions that limit their flexibility the real issue is the inflationary measures and the state's funding structure and that is where we
together can focus for our advoc advocacy efforts the financial strain on public schools comes just 5 years after to the overhaul of the state school funding formula through the student Opportunity Act while this law is set to increase school funding by over $1.5
billion by 2027 the majority of those funds are being directed to about three dozen districts with the highest concentrations of students in poverty with disabilities or who are English language Learners meanwhile many other districts including lunenberg are
receiving only modest increases that are not keeping up with Rising costs if you read the most recent news you'll see districts like North middlex North Andover and belr town grappling with multi-million dollar deficits forcing them to the consider drastic measures
such as cutting positions and even closing schools Lun lunberg is not immune to these pressures Rising costs for healthcare insurance transportation and special education are outpacing our Revenue increases making it increasingly difficult to maintain the level of Education our students
deserve fixing this these systematic funding problems will take time but we are actively working with key coalitions to push for change organizations such as the Massachusetts Teachers Association the 211 Coalition United for our future Coalition and 15 other partner
organizations that are advocating for short short-term and long-term legislative solutions to address the inequities in school funding we encourage the community to contact legislators and elected officials attend leg legislative meetings and Coalition events uh and
they need to hear from all the stakeholders several bills have been filed to provide relief for various types of districts including rural vocational minimal Aid Regional Schools as well as to increase chapter 7 inflation adjustments improve special education funding and support in
District transportation while not of all of these bills directly impact lunberg we need to continue to advocate for the ones that benefit our town as well as all districts not just Regional or rural legislative action takes time and changing the Chapter 70 funding formula
or securing additional relief requires uh thorough debate committee reviews and hearings before any bill can move forward in the state however we we remain committed to advocating for fair funding for our schools and ensuring that lunenberg students receive the high quality education they
deserve as we confront the reality of budget shortfalls we welcome feedback and ideas from the community it is also important to recognize the expertise of our Administration and teachers who are making professional informed recommendations on how best to educate our students with the
constraints we face it is important to understand that securing additional Revenue will require a multifaceted approach this includes advocating for state level funding changes while also working with Town officials to explore local Solutions we must also continue to advocate for more local funding from the
finance committee select board and town manager this is not solely a school issue lunenberg is facing inflationary pressures in all departments however as the largest Department in town these Financial challenges are particularly visible in the school budget you will hear tonight that we are
exploring expanding Partnerships revisiting fees and leveraging town resources as part of our effort to increase revenue and minimize cuts the school committee will make decisions that impact the education of lunenberg students uh the least while also looking
at increasing Revenue in an effort to decrease Cuts these are not easy decisions there will be many ideas presented but not all will be accepted as some are not in the best interest of lunenberg or the Student Success a strong school system
is a reflection of a strong town as we have seen in other communities families may choose to move away if they feel their schools are not adequately funded and prospective home buyers often avoid purchasing Town purchasing in towns with struggling schools investing in education is not just about our students it's about the
long-term health and vitality of lunberg as a community we appreciate the community's engagement and support as we navigate these difficult financial decisions together please continue to reach out with your thoughts and let's work together to push for the legislative changes needed to secure the
future for lunberg public schools for those interested in getting more involved the lunberg caucus is an opportunity to run for local office including school committee and select board the caucus will be held Monday March 10th at 700 p.m. in lunenberg midddle high school and the town
election is on May 11th or 17th 18 I had 18 that's all I had uh moving on to the student report hi I'm here on behalf of the lunenberg uh student council um the
biggest concerns of the council today were around the budget and um we were very worried about the cutting of upper level and like high achieving classes as they'll drive those kids out of
ludenberg um because if you can't take the AP classes you want you can't compete to get into the schools you want um and so kids will end up leaving and then the other big thing that they were worried about was the rise in athletic
fees as if there are two three sport athletes they won't be like some of them won't be able to keep up with the rising fees and therefore will have to drop things that that they're passionate about excuse me
um yeah I think that was the biggest thing that we talked about as far as school committee thank you thank you next item on the agenda is to R review and approve minutes we have the regular session
minutes from January 22nd January 29th and February 1st questions comments or corrections I look for a motion I'll move to approve the minutes from regular session January 22nd
January 29th and February 1st is there a second second any discussion all those in favor say I I iOS I think I'm going have to abstain I think I was going abion yeah
and one exstension thank you next item on the agenda is review and approved light on of transfers warrants and donations uh warrants for February 3rd 2025 to February 24th 2025 total $387,900
for the line item transfers turn it over to Dr Gilson okay um I'm requesting as a line item transfer to move $9,200 from vehicle maintenance to um the contractor service line to take care
of hbac unit uh units that are found on the roof of this building um it would involve U addressing three particular units um the repairs of hbac units are very expensive um and I did get a
request that asked to explain um the repairs that we would be doing um so that is in the folder if any would like any more explanation I could certainly provide that yes um I didn't need a two-page memo I just meant on the um
yeah line item transfer it literally did not say what was being fixed at all got it um it just said fan faulty fan fan shaft bearing compressor contractor it didn't say what building or if it was a vehicle like it didn't say what was
being repaired or what building or if it was a vehicle or a building that was I I didn't that's all I meant I needed more information I didn't need it that's fine but thank you for that no it's it's fine so you know basically um
if we don't make these repairs um you know the fans will become noisy they'll stop working poor air flow can cause Heating and Cooling issues in parts of the school and delaying the repairs could lead to higher repair costs and discomfort and we all have been in the
building where it's been extremely cold or extremely hot so we're hoping that some of these repairs will start to help out with those challenges do we anticipate deferring any maintenance on vehicles as a result of this well we
still going to have some ongoing cost so it may involve other transfers down the road and most recently um at the fincom uh we were granted an emergency um for the 911 cabling project to transfer more
money into the contracted service line item so we're going to have to evaluate that as we go in terms of the budget needs so I may be back to you with another line item transfer um but um right now um presenting this for right
now and then um the other line item transfer is going to involve transferring funds from supplies uh the general supplies lines in special ed um elll and Ace and a mileage reimbursement
they're going all into a um a a contracted evaluation special education line and um they're going to pay for three outside evals and um and bilingual evals as well are you looking for approval for that one yes I am we don't
have we don't have that one okay okay in that one that will be next week any other questions or comments about the line item transfering I look for a motion I'll make a motion to improve the line on transfer as described second any discussion all all
those in favor say I I opposed motion passes thank you next item of the agenda is the superintendent's report Dron already provided you part the update that we went before the finance committee a week ago and um
requested uh funding for the uh $60,000 unbudgeted uh additional cost for the 911 upgrades at the Turkey Hill Elementary our next update is finally we are 911 compliant in all
buildings there we go yay um I will just skip quickly to a few reminders we have a pile meeting on March 6th um that will be at 6 PM that's
via Zoom um we will be going before the finance committee on March 6th as well to present the school department budget our next school committee meeting is next week March 5th and the next meeting
after that that is a regularly scheduled meeting would be on March 19th um and that's all I have for this evening we'll focus on the agenda any questions or comments about the superintendent
report seeing none next item of the agenda is the we don't have any presentations no new business action item increasing new and existing revenues okay so um this evening we have several
proposals um one you have seen um presented in depth before and that's the athletic fee increase proposal we also um put together a proposal for restructuring
Student Activity fees um based on questions and feedback that came from the community relative to the budget um there was interest in taking a look at what a uh transportation bus fee uh might look
like so you have that proposal this evening as well and every few years we review the facility rental fees uh and it's it's time it's it's due it's been a few years since we've taken a look so you have uh this evening uh proposal for
increases on those fees as well um can sum up the the gist of the facilities uh increases uh we'd be looking to bump things up 50% because we have taken a look at some comp districts
and uh in in pretty much every case we are well below uh what comperable districts are are charging uh for their rentals but we have um slides for each one of these Dr Dr gillson will review
those slides if you just tell me which one you want to start with I will pull that up uh why don't we start with um the athletic budget um user fee proposal uh and this has been presented
uh twice um actually three times or four times between the amount of presentations at the school committee on the athletic user fees uh and we talked with the various groups in town um or the um there were two virtual sessions
that we held to allow parents to attend and hear the information about the sports fees proposed fee increases um so basically um as we um went in to look at the athletic user fees um we recognized
that as we looked at different uh fees that would charge to uh throughout the midwatch League which is the league that we're part of uh we noticed as we looked at um particularly looked at uh like Groton Dunstable um
which was charging $600 per sport per season um and um a Shirley which had variable fees that were settling around $300 uh for the different sports programs and um we also um considered um
we also looked at bramfield which had very few sports but also we're settling in at $300 one of the things that uh we really made clear in terms of the priority of the school budget the school
budget is um really dedicated to making instruction the top priority um in terms of the funding and I think everybody was in agreement um and looking at the current um the current athletic fees
what we learned was that they're offsetting athletic expenses by 26% uh when our fy2 24 numbers are applied um but the continued stipended increases um for the coaches and the
officials increases the Mia recommended an official um official increase and um if you can go ahead a couple of slides um Dr Burnham um so the so the different
keep uh keep going um keep going and I'll try to get to the punchline um and okay and keep going um so basically what we recognized is um on the next slide with cost
increases um you know the coaches stipend increased 2.5% this year they'll increase 4% next year the trans Transportation costs are increasing um and the official fees increased um with the MIAA
recommendation um and so we are struggling to meet um in balance between the athletic revolving account and the local budget so that is necessitating a fee increase and if you could continue
to get to the proposed um so we are looking at a breakdown and we've presented this now several times um we're looking at high school fees uh for the first student of the family um increasing from 250 to
325 um and then the sibling reduction which is a 25% discount um at 244 um the reduced fee um is a 50% discount um and um and then their middle school fees
that are less than that we put a family cap um and the family cap will address students um from middle school through high school um so if you have several students that are playing sports um
between um grade uh 6 through 12 there will be a family cap applied so we're recommending um looking at the proposed impact if you could um go on to
um to that slide we looked at a projection based on last year's fees and to get at the same parent parent Guardian collected expense of 26% um supported if we continue to
support at 26% we need to bring in more Revenue through the user fees there's no question about it otherwise our athletic revolving account is going to continue to go into deficit so um the Contin so basically we're looking
at um as we compared with u neighboring communities we're looking at increasing the fees um to um from 250 to um by to 325 as a starting place and then continuing to try to be as transparent
as possible look at all incoming data we uh not planning to to collect money in that athletic revolving account we want to be fully trans parent spend out all the money um in the athletic revolving account and continuing to provide
updates um so um I know um you know we had several several parents on the calls the both nights um you know I'm open to any questions um and I think it's about providing the you know continuing to provide data points as we move Beyond
this to show what we're taking in in user fees and how we are going to um balance the um athletic expenses thank you Dr Gilson I'll open up to the committee for questions or comments Mr skull so I have two questions the first
question is uh about trans or the first set of questions about Transportation does this proposed uh impact for fiscal year 26 include like when you have the total cost Does it include the cost for transportation so I know that we spent
like $140,000 last year on Transportation yes and it it does not right now and and the idea is we we did we had to put the transportation back into the local budget thus causing okay increases okay and we had
to put the coaching s back into the local budget is there a possibility that instead of Contracting with dbus for $14,000 a year just for athletic transportation that we could instead use that money to buy two buses and just
have them driven by staff I mean it seems like we're spending more in bus fees than it would cost to own and run the buses ourselves or at least close and then the so that's the transportation issue the second issue is
what is the percentage of subsidy that other districts provide because 26.8% means that we're basically funding 75% of Athletics when we are in a position of
cutting teachers and special ed stuff I mean the the number of people that are impacted just pure utilitarian calculus here the number of people that are impacted by the athletic fees thing is only a portion of the high school and
the middle school no one at Turkey Hill and no one at the public uh Primary School are impacted by this and yet the school is paying a lot of money a very large percentage just you know basically make Athletics run if we are not obligated to do athletics if Athletics
impacts a small percentage of the total number of students why is our why is our uh contribution to running the athletic program 75% in terms of you know I think that's a going to be a budgetary question posed
to the school committee and so I think you know it certainly is is nice that we offer that we clearly need to decide what our priorities are and I think I've always advocated that budgets should be responsible and realistic and so if
you're if we're looking at user fees and we're trying to fund proportionately the 26% and keep it consistent from one year to the next um we're going to have to um make some decisions about directions
that we might want to go in we have a beautiful comprehensive Athletic program program we do and um we have coaches that staff a comprehensive Athletic program I you know what's the percentage compared to other districts are are they
also funding it at se roughly 75% I don't know okay um to be frank with you and I'd have to go and do the research and and see if people would even commit to um finding out what the percentage is that their user fees are contributing
towards the budget so I don't have any permission for you right now I I I'm I'm just going to say this I I don't think I could support this I do not think it is enough of an increase if we are at a point where we are cutting teachers and special ed
staff it's got to be more money it's just I mean like there are no Perfect Solutions I will be a person that pays more my son is an athlete it will cost me more money but at the end of the day it's got we have to have you know like
we have to have a a sense of like what is our main goal as a school district and we've got to provide education that's what we're legally obligated to do we are not legally obligated to provide Athletics and so we got to just have some balance so the counter slide
VI that we did look and consider roten dtile has a fee of $600 per Sport and I think we need to evaluate I felt that looking at the fees and
keeping them in line with a percentage was at least a direction we could go in um but I understand what you're sharing um and I you know I think that um realistically what can we expect parents
to be able to afford to pay for families but again if instructional if if instruction and it should be um every day every kid 100% all the time so if academics are
our first priority and and the school committee has identified with that um right I don't think we have a legal choice we don't right this is not something that we vote on this is just the way it is it is so I think what what
would be important for the school committee to decide um is whether we begin then with um with the increased fees that are proposed and gathered data or whether you want to um consider a uh
a much higher fee and I don't know what the thoughts are on that but I I think that's the that's the challenge and you you know as you heard the young lady who just spoke it's a concern and some kids will come to school because their
motivation is to do sport and be involved in athletics and they do teach a lot of things but um you know so I started with the information that I had with what percentage um and it was 26%
of the local budget was funded based on the information that I had thank you Mr bore go down the line so I I just want to uh first point one thing out that I think has been lost
along the line uh relative to the the discount for uh lowincome students and families when we first began to apply a waiver in discount uh and I don't know if the language was enshrined in the
policy but it was proportional to the discount that was applied for the school lunch discount and it wasn't 50% it was substantially less than that it was I want to Say closer to 30% of the total
value um now that we live in the era of zero cost lunch like I I don't know if that's still applicable or not but I I do think we need to kind of take a look at that uh and see what recent past practices because I just don't know I I honestly don't know where it is relative
to the comments that have just been made uh first of all I'd like to qule the members of our board did anybody participate in the two Q&A sessions that we had or watch the video watch the I watched them Mr scho BR did you I did that I did not so what we heard in those
was that the burden is already considered to be fairly High uh and in addition to the fees that families and students are paying they are also buying athletic shoes and other equipment um they are participating in
uh booster club fundraisers um I I can tell you from my experience I think we spend over $500 per sport per season minimum um when you consider gate fees and everything else
so it's not really moving from 250 to 325 it's moving from probably over 500 to over 700 in in reality is is what we're talking about here uh because the booster clubs will probably wind up picking up more slack if there are cuts
and so on and so forth that's just reality the consequences of that it was suggested that kids will play play fewer Sports K some kids who play three may play two some kids who play two may play one and some kids who play one may play
none um my son is a track athlete and he had a teammate tell him at a meet a few weeks ago that if they raise the fees he will not participate next year flat out they are at their m
and we know in lunenberg that we have about 25% of our population falls into that lowincome category but that doesn't capture everybody who is feeling an economic pinch right now in fact it probably captures a third or a half of
the families that are feeling an economic pinch so I when when we talk about raising fees I I I think we need to be talking about in the same breath that the overall
quality of our Sports programs are going to be degraded as a result of that some kids are going to leave as a result of that um particularly our higher performing athletes will probably leave as a result of that our teams will be less competitive and our Sports will be
less desirable as a result of that this is a slippery slope that I am genuinely very concerned about um and I say that probably ready to vote for the increase that is
proposed um once again we are here to make the least bad decisions um but I am not in favor at all of what Mr schol and breedy is suggesting now there were discussions uh in those uh feedback
sessions about the cost of individual sports um there is interest in looking at the cost of indiv individual sports and potentially graduating this or Shifting the burden on the more expensive sports or perhaps eliminating more expensive sports as a
way to save funds and move direct money into the greatest good for the greatest possible number of people um and the the athletic director uh committed to sharing that data and at this point I don't have that so I don't know if he did or not but I don't have that data I
have the data right in front of me right now for all of the sports for fall season um the total cost for all sports for The Fall season um$ 117,000 um dollars approximately winter sport season um
84,000 um spring Sports season 45,000 I have the breakouts of every single sport um so maybe that's something that we need to look at to consider in this discussion is do we want to look at perhaps applying proportional to cost or potentially look at number of students
cost and and look look at can we actually continue to support all of these Sports in lunenberg I I think unfortunately we have to look at that um lastly I think that it is incumbent Upon Our athletic director to take a hard look at transportation and I have yet to
see a proposal that explores any possibilities of Alternatives I think we should be looking at passenger vans I think we should be looking at Alternatives um um uh purchases um I don't know that we should be out purchasing in buses I don't think it
scales I think we're still going to need DBS no matter what um because there are some Fridays in the fall when we have four or five buses on the road um but I I do think that we do need to look at Cost Containment I don't think it's going to change the economics of this
proposal this year but I think it's something we've got to seriously look at um because that meter that runs particularly for Saturday at Reggie Lewis is just outrageous and we have to look at that Mr Bowski um so the
26% parent gardening expense does that number include the transportation no no okay so the parents are funding 20% but not the transportation that's coming int yeah that I'd be interested in the
number including Transportation how much is funded how much of total they funding um I had also asked in preparation for this meeting if we could get a breakdown for sports of the cost cost of each sport and then also a spreadsheet with the
number of students who participate in each sport so we could figure out the cost per student and do calculations to see which sports were costing us the most per student so we could make those we could have discussions about it one of the things that uh that we were asked
was to look at Middle School sports right and if we were to consider what it would cost us if we were to completely cut out Middle School sports which which year do we add Middle School sports that's a relatively new It's
relatively school year 18 19 uh we had just the one field hockey right and then it was the following year so 1920 we expanded the rough year for that
right so look looking at that all right um and looking at the the total amount that comes in from user fees and the total amount that goes out to pay for coaches officials uniforms dues and fees and
transportation the savings of reducing the entire sports program which last year benefited 107 um middle school kids which I think is important to know um the total impact incoming
expenses outgoing expenses and incoming Revenue um so that there was only like a 6,000 uh it was it would would be a savings of $617 yeah pays for itself what's the driver is the driver
football because if you read off can can you give us the individual sport numbers I think that's important for the commity that's a better way yeah can you email that to us as well because I yeah I can do that um and uh the foot football is
31,700 $75 okay can you say that again 31 it's almost $332,000 how many students and I don't have the number of students in front you do
um we about 40 kids and that doesn't include Transportation oh my God yeah CU Transportation that's important too to know the transportation cost of these things because I can yeah I would have to let's see let me and see if got that number yeah if we
can get those numbers including the transportation cost um and I think it's important to see how many people go to the games because there is a community aspect to it as well like how many people go to a football game is important because there is a community aspect too football games
and how it brings the community together I think there's a lot to it um as for Mr school and brin's point I I so I understand what you're saying Tony but I I do think that Sports is intertwined with the academics and that
there are a lot of kids who come to school for the sports and it gets a lot of them through the day um and I I think it's vitally important I'm not sure I i' I'd rather raise fees more and I
understand Peter's point about if we raise the fees $75 a sport there are people who aren't going to afford to do it and I think we're going to have to monitor that and I I'm not this is like a new thing that we're doing we haven't raised fees in in
a decade I and I and U many people made the point during the um athletic advisory meetings that uh they felt it unfair that we were raising it quickly because they felt they were what was the word
um they were they were paying for the prev sins of the past the past 10 years of people who had not been raising it but we have to do what we have to do at this point um but I would like to point out that on another slide that we're going to see in the future after school
activities are if we Implement those fees would be 61% parent funded yeah and sports are going to be 26% parent funded and I don't think that's what we call it's proportional to the total number it's
not like like the when I when I say percentage like the total cost of Athletics is about $512,000 the total cost for all of the stiens for all of the Student Activities
is much lower you're only talking like a you know like a around a $45,000 amount and so it's different so you're taking like the amount that people are paying for the fees and you're dividing it by the total amount
and then you come up with the percentage so it's far less with a bigger number and that's the difference but isn't that even more telling that we're not spending as much and the parents fund
more like something's got to I mean like no one might wants to make Cuts but like something's got to get we can't like just make we can't print money Mr did you have anything else um so I I think we might have to think
about raising fees even more considering the cost of Transportation or we got to figure out something about track and and those transportation fees to get all the way to Boston we have to figure something out um because that that's killing us and if it's going to Capital
planning and saying we need to do a van or if it's does anyone have a van we can buy real cheap does anyone want to donate a van anyone got a brand new van they want to donate um we we need to figure something out um because that's getting very expensive
um but I I definitely I don't want to just cut Sports I would rather look at individual sports maybe that are that are not serving as many students and costing us too much that's why I wanted the numbers of per student you just having your your PO
fold or now miss Aro um my thought was I would go with this increase to 325 I would like to see what it does over the next year um I don't want kids to
not play that's and and I'm not my kids well my daughter played but my son didn't I mean we're not big um that way into that but I know kids are and I know it's important to some kids I also know
that I feel that something in the athletic budget needs needs to be cut we're cutting everything else and I know the parents will be paying more but there if parents could pay $75 more a year and have a smaller class size
they'd be happy to do that amen so it doesn't work that way so I think we should look at eliminating some expensive sports and we are not experts in this I would like to see a
recommendation from the ad on which sports he feels have the least amount of usership or would affect the least amount of kids or are outrageously expensive for what we're doing I don't
know anything about that but I do know that sports are important to many kids and I don't want to lose the reason a kid comes to school and I also know that sports kids benefit it it's a benefit
and the benefit carries over into their academics I get that but I also think we're cutting all kinds of things and it's also very difficult I think we have to cut something in this area I don't
think we should go to $600 fees because you're not going to have anybody playing because people cannot afford that so um that's my suggestion thank you um I uh I'm definitely interested in uh the investment of a passenger van I had that
down as notes that definitely could help with golf or other small Sports um I think they I would support this athletic fee increase I think it's a a modest increase that it is comparable with sending towns I don't think we will have a drastic uh Exodus of kids going to
different schools because they want to get a a cheaper Sports fee um it is frustrating I I I do have three young boys that all play sports and they will likely play high school sports and I will likely be paying the fees and it is what it is we need to con
continue to increase fees as inflation increases and it hasn't been done for a while I think it's important to to continue the to try to make it competitive in comparable to other towns and also help the budget
um I I'm not a fan of the separate fees at this point I think the athletic director did not propose that so I'm at this point not in favor of that and I am not in favor of cutting any sports at this time until there's a recommendation by the athletic director so at this time I think I'll
open up to a discussion or if there's any motions are you looking potentially to act on fees today or are you looking to get more information relative to the discussion that we had I think it's up to the committee if we want to table this or if we want to act today I think
the more action we can take on fees and revenue then that gives the superintendent more knowledge to take make budget decisions budgetary decisions as we get closer to the so for discussion purposes I would
be okay to vote on it today but I I would like to see um an answer to my question about the proportionality of the the um reduced lunch discount um and I don't know if anybody has that information handy in terms of
where we were previously isn't that here well that represents 50% but what I'm saying is that the previous red was about $32 and change I think right it was very very but that was graduated so the
reason for that is that it was graduated to a the percentage the the cost of a reduced lunch percentage was what we graduated it to um and we do have a fair amount of kids on
that yeah are you worried that is too high of a fee yeah I I think that for the reduced I I think that we should be looking at a proportional amount I think that we can do that that's what we've been doing the challenge is going to
be we're not going to we're not going to see much shift in the revenue I would rather raise the fee to 350 and then do a graduate one because
fees hurt the people who can afford it the least because they're they're nonproportional and I am concerned about that so that's a hold I have on that I I would not vote on it as currently proposed although I'm inclined to vote
for it if we can address that issue so are you concerned with just the $163 on the reduced 50% discount yes okay I am open to suggestions on that one I am fine with reducing that before it was
$32.50 and 26 for Middle School I I I would be happy to support the fee increase if there was also tied to the fee increase a review of the efficacy of sports dollars in terms of
cutting programs like Carol put put it we are cutting everything else and we are not cutting Sports and I I I will tell you my son a lot of the times is excited to go to school because he can go and do athletics so I get it the
problem is we have three principles sitting on my left- hand side two of whom have no impact for this and one of whom has a lot of impact but we are not servicing our children and their needs
in if we are basically taking a handful of kids and spending a half million dollars it's essentially what is it not a handful yeah I also look at it as a school culture it is close to 50% participation but it's also but only don't if you don't have sports let's say
you cut all sports like that is going to not be good for the community people are going to leave agree I mean they also look forward to it like I got I agree Prim Turkey Hill who's like looking forward to come here and playing like it's I I understand all of that but I'm
just saying like from a a utilitarian calculus how many people benefit versus how much of the cost is Mr yon I I disagree with the logic I mean a kid who goes to lunenberg goes to lunenberg from 3K to 12 and that kid
gets the opportunity to play sports from 6 to 12 sure if you're not the the comparison of a kid who's in the 12th grade and a kid who's in the second grade is a ridiculous comparison we run a program for prek to 12 right but the expenses are only
focused on some of those children but that child will eventually sure eventually but then they'll have the same problem with the kids that are younger than them it it's it's never going to be something that will have Universal appeal because we don't have
school sports in the primary and the elementary school we're it's just too few people like we have a financial gun pointed at our head and to say that we are not willing to cut a sport is it's just I don't think that's
what we're saying no we're not saying that the fee increase has got to be tied to a review of the viability of sports can we vote to increase fees now and then go back next meeting and look at the sports closer because I I need time to review we can definitely look at again this is the the decision that we
can look at the sports we can make a decis now we can go back if we can make this one decision then we can move on that's my hope is we can make a decision to that um in regards to the reduced 50% waiver
free the the percentage comes out to 133% of the current the current uh fees the reduced is at 133% of the full price so if we want to go with a percent for
the reduced or the waiver 325 133% of that would be something more closer to like $42 how many sorry 40 42 is what percent
13% I mean the it I'd start by rounding it off to 50 but I I mean it seems ridiculously low relative to the other numbers but that's where we're at and and the alternative is literally raising the
rate at a much higher per you know dollar for dooll rate this for our low income familyes exactly so I just I I just can't I think it's an important thing to consider that so my I would propose changing
the changing the reduced number to $50 do we raise the high school fee to 350 to offset that though no no no so I think you want to again be competitive with your sending talents the middle school would come up
to about $35.75 make sense I we should make 40 yeah 40 and 40 and 50 all right so I will look for a motion um I will move that we increase the current a atic fees as
presented $325 for the high school $275 for the middle school that would be First Student in the family with 25% sibling reduction with the reduced
amounts being um $50 for the high school $40 for the middle school with the family cap of $1,500 that um proposal would also include that
Mr Bigalow um present to us what athletic programs are expensive more expensive than others and have least people using them if he were have
to suppose he needed to cut I don't have a microphone suppose he needed to cut 25% let's say just to throw a number out there which does he feel should be cut I think it's
important that that decision we are not athletic people um trained in that I think that belongs with the staff but I think everything else well now that that motion out the
window I start I second the motion so boxing all right so we have a motion in a second any other discussion just had it we going to do a roll call vote Mr brazowski yes Mr beardmore yes Mr Aro yes Mr
SKB yes and an I have for myself the motion passes thank you everyone all right the next proposal bus transportation let's go to student activ fine okay we're okay
um can oh good it's gonna pop up there um so in talking with Mr Sandry who has been the Principal here at the Middle High School um can you comment on the
last time that the Student Activity fees were addressed so I've been with the middle school since 2003 and agreed the activity fee in then was $43 okay at the high school uh High School I believe I came on as principal
in 2021 which was $55 for each student and it's remained the same at the high school okay so um what I'm proposing um that for right now for consideration and Mr sry and I have discussed this but the current current problem with the
activity fee structure is that um you have about 452 students this is a base this is a current activity fee structure that allows students access to everything that is run after school at
the high school and um it's not keeping up with the the cost of the advisor sens is not keeping it's it's increasing and if you look at um the student enrollment um and the if 100% of all
students paid the $55 activity account fee that would mean um we we' bring in $ 24, 860 um we currently have a loow income percentage that is 22.9% um which means that we're not
going to make the full pay for this um Student Activity uh fund and it's going to mean that we bring in only1 19,000 uh $119,000 approximately um if we keep um running with the one
siiz fits-all fee what is going to happen um if all stiens in the contract right now are exercised that um literally um you're going to end up with a um a negative amount that is going to
continue to in increase exponentially over time in the activity fee account um if you um the amount of stiens with clubs running this year with a base fee will will come up to about
27,000 um $321 and that amount is going to basically net um a a negative u a deficit in the activity account each year um and the deficit U for if the um stiens that people applied for this year
continue to run you're going to end up with NE about negative $8,000 so I think um based on my conversation with Mr santry it might be time to restructure the fees and do um
like a base fee for all students and the base fee um uh certainly would support things like homecoming flp design um membership in in the National Honor Society and um and benefits from all
class and student council sponsored activities but then I think also it's incumbent on us to um propose a special interest breakout fee um and again along the same principles that the athletic user fee is you know created it allows
students a choice to explore and then continue to develop an interest similar to the athletic program and in the same way um that Athletics do special interest activities can be a great experience that lead to future career
opportunities and so um so therefore um I would propose something like this for a base activity fee um I looked at um what it would be to fund um each one of
the stipend expenses for advisors um and student council and the National Honor Society and I come came up with about $112,000 um and so then I looked at um if we considered reducing That Base fee
to uh $50 or $45 the amount that would come in um you know at $50 you would be um looking at um if you do a um a low income reduction um if it
$45 it would be 55 ,000 um or it would be $1 15,681 so um I I feel that if we proposed a base activity fee it could benefit all
the students um and then if we did if we went in to do the special interest breakout fee um I'm looking at considering um if you can go to the next slide um basically we're going to charge for athletics if we're and we're going to
increase those fees if we charge a $75 fee set a minimum for a club to run um and then we can maintain some sort of Reserve in the local budget which um and
and um use those fees to um use use those fees to come up with um the total to contribute to the total cost of the of the sens so um parent Guardian when I
say parent Guardian supports 61% of the cost there're supporting you know that support is like $4,320 so um there are many different these are all the special interest clubs that run um Science Olympiad yearbook
musicals marching band director Etc you can read on the the slide so I'm thinking that um if we separate this into um a base fee we can lower the
base fee from 55 to 45 or 50 $50 um and um come up with a um special interest breakout fee that that um doesn't um break the bank and still
allows us to fund um a comprehensive set of activities provided that there's a minimum number of students participating so we've not done this before um we need to raise fees um to support the budget
um increase I would recommend like since we've not addressed these fees in a long time um that we consider this um as a potential um option and I think that
I'm not asking for anybody to vote on this right now um because this is the first time people have seen this um and I think that um it certainly would be something I would be willing to discuss um
further um and I think you should marinate over what it is and ask questions if you know if I if I can answer right now I'd have be happy to do that thank you Mr B one first of all I appr appreciate the new thinking here I think this is good we should be thinking
differently about lots of things so this is good um one concern that I had when I read it and i' just be curious for your thoughts or perhaps the thoughts of uh in particular Mr sry is that while this does make it more sort
of user based which I think we had all expressed some interest in in looking at um I'm concerned about the number of transactions right because effectively what you have right now is you have one transaction per student for the entire
year so we have I don't know how many kids in our high school 4004 40 kids in our high school that's 440 transactions now we're going to have 440 transactions plus however many activities we're running times the number of kids in each activity um and
I'm I'm just worried about the administrative time and overhead associated with that chasing after kids it's I mean you know those kinds of things or is this something we can do through a website like you know final forms and it's still work but but
less well I think we do a blend of those now but you are correct it would be more of a a task to collect those fees especially at the high school and if we're talking about U reductions at the secretarial piece at the high school
also so that's placing on the bur so I would look at online uh payments for these um and maybe even some paperwork at beginning in school try to identify kids that would be signing up for the
higher tiered uh payment but like we said this is brand new we're trying to figure it out think outside the box and get some programs that are self- sustainable and I think what we discovered is if we continue with the
one siiz fits all payment um of $55 we're going to continue to run that account into deficit and we don't want to do that and with um stiens continuing to increase based on the contract it's 2.5% increase this year
next year it will be four and then the following year it will continue with another increase so um I I think we really need to look at this and the special interest breakout fees I I just I I paralleled it to the athletic
concept you can try something out um and then you continue to explore it for each one of the four years that you're um that you're at the high school or in high school sports Mr Bowski um sorry I was just doing math I
take back my earlier statement um per hour it's about the same a sports per hour of Time for Kids so it's pretty even I I just have one one more thought
here and I'm assuming we're not looking for an action on this tonight no this is one that I would actually really like some feedback from students on um you know this is something that we could potentially take to the student council perhaps Dr Gilson you can meet with the student council have a discussion about
that I'd be really interested in their feedback I think members of our student council kind of get the situation that we're in and can understand a revolving fund and what happens when you run that in deficit and those kinds of things in the need to address this and I I they
are representatives of the student body so let's let's try to solicit some of that feedback we meet next Thursday M pki anything else there was a slide earlier that is not there anymore that had talked about minimum sizes that mentioned the marching
band being needing 20 kids to run yes okay there two um they're actually um I had a recommendation which I went with um to keep it simple and not what I did
initially with the proposal that the school committee got was to look there are different tiers of stipend and they're different costs for each different the full marching band stipend was in there but there was an also a stien for an assistant band director and
my recommendation was that you should have at least 20 students who are taking marching band to fund an assistant band director so that was the the difference in the cost okay and the assistant B record is a stien it's a stien so
they're two stiens there I just wanted to verify this wasn't going to get rid of mar no okay that's not the intent the AC B um I would say I think this is a good idea I'd like to get the kids input
but I think this is a good idea from from what I can see and I do like the idea of reducing the base fee because there are a lot of kids that don't do anything so I I think that's at least
acknowledging that and if if you have a student I had one of each one that did everything and one that did nothing and um if you have a student that doesn't participate in this stuff at least you're getting a little acknowledgement
that you shouldn't be paying as much thank you Mr SC no comments um so I I do like the user based fees um I would be interested in the admin overhead what the concerns are with that the price of that uh I think it's tough to compare
apples to apples with Sports and and clubs but I think it's important to have clubs it's it's just another Avenue for the kids who don't play sports so I have no interest in cutting the programs either at the Athletics or the the clubs um I would appreciate the feedback from
the students um I also appreciate Miss aro's reduced uh flat fee because I had concerns about reducing fees but I think that makes sense and then the only thing I want to add to was I think and I'd be curious from the feedback from the members but I think there was some fees
that were 70 versus 75 I think just one fee if that up yeah so I think the $175 fee I think makes sense versus splitting it up it sounded like most of the clubs are right around the same price so that was all I had so we can table this uh for uh our
next meeting to get some feedback but I think hopefully you got some feedback as well um on the proposal any other discussion on this one all right the next one next Transportation Transportation
sure okay this is much shorter is it it is I think I think she wasn't here for okay you War her all right um so um basically um we
had a request come in to um see what we could do to charge a transportation fee for busing and there's certain rules about um transportation um and ability to charge a fee for
transportation um so basically um the rules include um if basically um we need to provide transportation free for k6 students that live more than 2 miles from school but if there are parents
that want to to have their students that are under 2 miles um be transported you can charge a fee okay um and then we are not required to provide um transportation for for students in grade
7even through 12 and there are districts that do charge bus transportation fees um so um we're looking at a general education um increase uh to um 7even by
7.6% that's essentially moving from $997,000 to $976,000 the Daily um or the cost per year 180 days for a bus is 87,000 um so looking at we took a look
at actual numbers of the ridership for this year um and came up with um the idea that if we took um we if we started with our actual ridership numbers which is are 1563 because we provide free
transport for all students um which were not technically required to do um then we took a look at the um the numbers of students um that um needed to have school transportation required in k6 um
and then we got a number of 9911 students um we applied a 25 % lowi income waiver um and we um ended up with uh about 683 students that meet the
criteria um to um have a transportation fee so um looking at um approximately 7 70% of that number because not all students with a transportation fee maybe they don't they will not ride the bus
next year um and that if we charge um I looked at it if we charged a dollar a day for busing um a125 a day um and also a150 a day and I came out with um you know a $180 fee um
a $225 fee and a $270 fee um and realistically um if we are going to um try to fund something significant I you know the 200 $25 fee would um would
create $775,000 approximately in Revenue so it's something to consider $75,000 would come close to paying a cost per one of the buses um and it
comes and it might fund actually a teacher um so I respect the fact that you haven't charged a transportation fee in the past but we're not required to provide it so
when somebody asked to consider yeah Mr SC how much does a new not electric but gas bus cost because I looked at the cost for Bluebird busing which is like the one that I could think
of over the top of my head and it seemed like there was a price structure that the electric buses have much lower maintenance than they start at $250,000 but that the gas and Diesel buses come in at around what we're paying to use a bus every year now that
doesn't include maintenance and it doesn't include the cost of a driver or the fuel or the fuel insurance or the insurance think we've had the discussion before that we didn't want to get into becoming a bus bus driver then you would really need somebody to manage all of it
a different conversation CDL license there's a lot that goes in there's a medical waiver that you need so there's a reason it's just a different I I get that there's a reason that it costs so
much my point is why are they allowed to raise our costs so much every year if we don't provide them any competition or incentive to lower their PRS by saying we're not using you we'll do this ourselves then we're going to be
stuck with an increasing cost every year regardless of the Fate K C does the bus Cooperative I mean we've got to we've got to scare them and we don't and that's why they take money out of our pockets I think it's a different proposal for a different day
Bowski this is so I love the idea of $75,000 um when I moved to town we had a busing fee yeah and that really bothered me um and it was just that one year as I understand oh was it I just I think I
just remember moving to town and thinking that was it kind of soured my perspective of lunenberg uh $75,000 sounds amazing and that's a teacher I right now everything everything I see is how how what
percentage of a teacher is that going to fund how many teachers would that buy me but I feel as a school system it's our basic responsibility to transport students to school no matter what the Massachusetts law saids I know the bare
minimum and I know what our legal responsibilities are this is really scraping the bottom of the barrel if we require them to be at school we should provide a free way for them to get to school safely we live in
a town with lousy sidewalks I mean how long were the crosswalks unpainted in the center of town we don't have crossing guards we don't we don't have sidewalks do you guys remember the walking on Turkey Hill this is it's not a very walkable
Town um if we require them to be at school we should be providing a safe way for them to get to school this is one of those fees that is going to hurt the most vulnerable people the [Music]
most this this this is a fee that hurts people because everyone has to get to school the parents that aren't able to drive their kids to school those are the ones who are going to work early in the morning and their kids are going to need to get on the bus and they're going to
have to figure something out this I really feel this is going to hurt our most vulnerable students you can't opt out of getting to school like the sports the after school activities those are Cuts you can say I'm really sorry kid we can't afford it this year we're going to have to suck it up what are you going to
tell your kid like sorry you know I know you're in seventh grade and we live you know three miles away but I can't drive you so you know stick out your thumb and start hitchhiking like what I'm this this hurts the most vulnerable
people I would be fine with a nominal fee like $25 to gauge our actual need if it could decrease if we thought it would greatly decrease the number of students who were taking the bus because I know we have empty seats on the buses and
when we did the transportation form people fill it out to save their kids a spot and there are a lot of people who do Drive their kids to school but in order for that to make a difference and let us get rid of a bus and save the cost of a bus Which would get us a teacher and a percentage of a
paa um we would need a about a 10% decrease in bus ridership in order to lose a bus so I'm not sure that would even work yeah and the the tricky thing about is is the kids in seats it really is where are those kids distributed
around town because the timing of a bus route getting the turnaround to get on the second run so like in the morning the first run out they go out and they pick up the middle high school kids drop them off get back out on the road to go pick up yeah we can't so timing on bus
routes so we may reduce the number of students in a seat and still not be able to reduce a bus because we have to keep the 11 rout this is this is one fee you you can't not pay the bus fee and and
make other arrangements I feel that this is this is one fee that that $75,000 I'm real tempted because $75,000 is a very nice that's a teacher number it's almost a teacher um but this this is going to
hurt people Mr beardmore um I am uh I don't know on this one I'll tell you straight up I don't I don't have a strong opinion either way on it I could go either way on this one miss
arelle um I don't like it I was a parent when we had a bus fee um my kids lived further out of town I live further out so my kids still got to ride the bus they were little they still got to ride
the bus um but I agree with Laura in that this is a tax on people who can least afford it people who are home and have the ability to drive their kids to
school that's one thing but I agree that you're you've got families that maybe only have one car and dad has got it at work and or no car or I I don't like this I I think it's attacks on people
who can't afford it w we have in the local budget paying for sports Transportation too more than $75,000 for sports Transportation Mr SC thank you by the way for letting me go my once a meeting we had about bus um
the the one thing that I I'm curious about is Dr Gilson what do you think the impact would be on ridership so that if if we could generate some fees and cut a bus is that is that is that possible because then that would not be just
$775,000 that would be 75 plus 87 which would be teachers right that's two teachers and then I think we got to think long and hard about this if it's just the 75 then I'm not I I'm swayed by Carol and laur's Laura's argument but if it's
a teacher and we get to drop a bus then I'm thinking it's a lot harder cuz that's that's $150,000 oh we you know as I said we were asked to consider this as an option okay and and so there's really no way to
tell because years ago there was implemented right so we don't have any historical data I think the only way that you could assess would be to do a survey of the parents and ask the direct
question there is an easy way to do that yep yes made this proposal you did assume 30% sorry so this is a sorry this is a closed meeting sorry it's a public meeting but you can't participate sorry not not yet um can we survey parents I mean
information is we can do a survey of parents if that's what you want do a very quick one question do we know what our surrounding towns are doing interesting thing because I did also consider that um most of our surrounding
towns are regionalized and regionalized schools must provide transportation for all of their students okay and so like you know that's you know however there are some
some surrounding towns that are municipalities and like Littleton does charge a fee Harvard does charge a bus fee um and so um you know when we were asked to consider this understand that
it was within the past week so we had to use our existing data um and and go from there to try to make a projection um so this is another strategy that could be
used to raise revenue um you know so it's not you know I think that as you look at it it's something that we're I know Tony always ask the question you know are we legally obligated to this um
according to the state we're not and so um yet you know you also honor and respect the fact that um every student needs to get to school and you don't want to put up any barriers in that form
okay and so um you know but this is one proposal it is um up for you to consider um and um you know whether or not it will actually decrease by a bus I don't
know and that depends on the students that are riding the bus and um and the way the roots are designed um because if it does work that's wonderful if it doesn't work then we're just raising
right to but we've got to do something to raise some funds and um you know so whether or so all of these proposals are directed towards a strategy of just raising user fees but
this is probably the one that can raise the most significant amount thank you Dr gson so just for my feedback I did um there was a question on on low income there is a low income waiver in this
proposal so there's a lot of people caught in the middle yeah I just want to share my thoughts that's all um there was also uh talk about tax on parents I think that is totally true there's tot totally a tax on parents and the personally I think the community should
be paying for it and that the to the whole town should be paying for it but that there's a def definitely a different avenue to get the whole town to pay for um the income that we need to revenue that we need uh the the impact on ridership I think it would take a
year I think you would likely have to figure out who would sign up and who would not sign up they would probably figure out the bus routes and then we'd probably have a year of data to get that information hopefully be able to drop a bus and save even more funds I think a survey would be uh important so that we could even table
this and get some data to and get some feedback from parents and get a survey out and I also so full disclosure I have three boys that will all take the bus um but also in that regards I'll be selfish a little bit and I think we should also consider a family cap as well uh for
bigger families if they're all paying this $200 fee I think that could add up for bigger families so that might be something worth looking into any other discussion on this Mr bardor just a thought that kind of popped into my head over the course of this discussion um
once again on the theme of least bad decisions um we have to lie in the bed that we made and I've said this before I mentioned this to Mr sry in a conversation that uh I had with him and his ministrative team a week or so
ago several years ago lunberg made a decision not to regionalize and we made that decision to save money really because the C the the startup cost of regionalization was going to be too high for us if we were in a Regional School District we would be eligible for
transportation and reimbursements from the state our legislator who represents most of the Town top of her list of cures that she has for the funding issue in towns the size of ours is to improve the reimbursement for Regional School
transportation which would not benefit lunberg one iota this we are we are lying in the bed that we made and and you know in in that regard I don't like it but but it is what it is
right we live in lunenberg we have a school of 440 kids in the high school and you know 300 and some odd in the middle school and we don't get help from the state Town's right next door to us who are otherwise residents who are otherwise no
different are in a regional school and the state pays for their transportation or a good hunt of it so again I'm not sure I'm swayed either way here but I I do kind of think think like this is uh this is the burden we
share any other discussion again I I would like to point out that you know when we talked about not transporting the sports students it's this cost it we're we're paying more to transport students to sports
games why why would we not transport students to school we're paying $976,000 to transport our kids to school I'm not but the the $75,000 that we would ask parents to offset the cost of we're it's apples to
oranges we're not asking our St our Sports families to pay a proportional amount in fact we just rais the fees for like I don't know that logic holds no water no I think Laura is right if we are
asking everybody to pay a small amount but we are not asking anybody to pay a large amount like the proposal here is to save to generate $75,000 in revenue for the entire school districts transportation of kids to school but
just the athletic fee Transportation budget for a small percentage of those children is $140,000 so I think the logic does hold it's about how many students per dollar whatever however you want to you know frame the the calculus but like it is
fair to say why are we why are we considering imposing a bus fee on everybody but still subsidizing you know the high school middle school students who take buses for a you just ra you just raised fees you just raised fees
$225 per year for a student athlete you just did wait a minute let me finish this has $225 a year for 360 rolls of a bus yeah but this isn't for every student either like I mean well this is
it's it's a good hunk of them though you know say 478 potential that they'll be paying for the buses this is our basic job and we require students to be at school are we if a kid can't get to school because their parent can't drive them
are they still marked absent I think everybody's got their own opinions that's fine that was the idea of the debate and get the discussion out and see if we had a motion but it sounds like we can table this and discuss it at our next meeting with some data let's move we'll table
that the facilities rate is there anything else besides the facilities rates no is there need for me to screen share that one or so the facilities rates we have recommended labor rates uh increasing
the custodian from $36 per hour to $39 per hour the AV support would stay the same the kitchen would go from $29 to $30 per hour the concession stand monitor would stay the same the field
monitor would increase from $30 per hour to $39 per hour and then the current fy2 facility rental fees are listed and then the proposed FY 26 facility rental fees uh have a 50%
increase so I'll open it up to discussion and this keeps as I said earlier most of the fees well below the lowest comp community that you looked at most of
their gym and field fees um were $20 when ours were $3 and $6 so any discussion Mr SC bre I'm just going to say that I think that these
fees are these fee increases are probably not worth it I mean if we're talking about $3 here and $4 here like I think if we want to use these as as a way to generate more Revenue that we've got to be more serious and I will point out the exact inverse is true here a lot
of these fees are for you know Youth Sports for things that don't have school related Sports and if we're willing to raise the sports fees for students that go here and play sports here then we should be willing to do the same it's just got to be equal treatment and like
some of these are like $6 or $4.50 and it's like I I get that we don't want to make it like a profit Center but we are losing money we could charge more and they would still come right like so I just want to provide
some clarification there are three categories three columns right so the very first column those are all School related activities like when the middle school has a dance yep whereas the middle category would be
Town Affiliated groups right um and then you know for-profit organizations or folks that uh have their organizations outside of town they're in the third category I guess what I'm saying is like if you need the large gymnasium at $108
you'd probably pay $200 for it because you don't have much of an alternative and since they're not students it's not a school related activity and we've raised rates for the the equivalent School related activities I think we got to we could I would be
supportive of a higher increase Mr Browski I see what anony is saying and I partially agree I'm a little concerned that some of these groups need time to adjust yeah yeah um be because they've
they've planned when would these when would they take effect just not until the next fiscal year next fiscal year July so July so okay just okay so they'd have time I'm just cuz I yeah there are there are
outside groups that are going to need time to adjust because this is going to affect their bottom line and how they do things because they run on very these are a lot of them are just nonprofit youth sports leagues that run on a very tight margin I'm really just looking at the profit based organizations I I agree with the other ones
um so I I see what you're saying and I would be up for even raising category three more those more of a thing but I think we need to give the um category two who's
in category three that uses things regularly um dance studios that have their recital in the auditorium um there aren a lot of for-profit organizations or
groups that frequently use the facility a number of years ago there was a men's football league that used the turfield later at night um they would be in that group um but we don't have a lot of those groups there's there's some adult
soccer teams that I think are still using our Fields but I think we're talking about very small numbers here in in the third column that's my guess do they know we're doing this no we did not call all the dance oh Studio yeah know because yeah
really again this is the first look to get some y feedback from the committee I support this cos yeah I well miss asbo I um I support this and I'm
okay I'm okay with not going crazy on Category 3 because it doesn't sound like there's that many people that it would make that big a difference and it may mess some people up but I would suggest that it be a first step and they
say that we're doing it this much this year look for a similar increase next next year you know so so that you know I I think changing things from $3 to 450 isn't going to really affect anybody
terribly but you don't want to do too much all at once they kind of do though in some cases like in the second column excuse me I'm eating chocolate as I'm cing that's why I brought and I really appreciate it keeping me awake um that
was the point these are hourly fees right so like a sports team right like think of like um soccer a youth football team or soccer team or something right they're practicing all day two hours three times a week right so it's not
it's not you know so it they do add up there's a m wi effect all some of these it's not thousands of dollars but it's but it does add up it will affect the budget of and they will end up passing it on to to their to their participants
but I think I I'm fine with this but I think I would put down that this is probably the first step of maybe something else coming thank you I think the fees in general should always be kind of continuously relooked by the school committee members do of the future do we vote on this tonight or
should we we can or we can table it I think we look for a motion I for yeah I move to accept this as proposed I'll second any discussion I'm kind of in favor of leaving it for one week just in case it turns other there no never mind
we have a motion and second any other discussion now we're going do a roll call vote Mr Bowski yes Mr beardmore yes M Aro yes Mr skull yes and an i for myself motion passes thank you everyone all right is that all we have for just want to say for the record I'm
glad we're making these decisions these are least bad decisions all right moving on we have a discussion on a joint meeting with the board on proposed March 11th so the select board chair reached out trying to get a joint meeting with the select
board and the school committee to try to discuss anything and everything they so I I didn't want to speak for the school committee so I said I'd get back to the select board chair and see if we're interested in a joint meeting what's the
agenda probably schools we should talk about the budget yeah I think there needs to be a comprehensive Town plan over our arching where we discuss yeah I think we're going to likely speak to our concerns and they're likely going to
speak to their concerns we really need to cooperate yeah about budget stuff I I yeah I think it's good to collaborate so I think we should try to do a joint meeting as long as they can try to as
long as we can try to find a date that works hopefully the March 11th works I know I was watching the select board meeting they were kind of iffy about the the date but hopefully the the March 11th will work for them any other discussion I would like to see some sort of agenda or outline of yeah I can work
with the the chair of the select board to get a good agenda topics and if people have agenda items that they'd like to see reach out to me and I can get that on the agenda just one editorial comment here which is both of our boards are going to substantially change in a few months
and I I think that a meeting on March 11th is a good meeting because we're in the middle of another hot budget season and we got to get to town meeting we got to get some things worked out but I think a meeting in June is probably just as important yeah because we got to get the next
school committee to work on a joint meeting I think it should be a regular thing like that yeah I think it's a great idea what what if we did it I'm just going to point this out what if we did it so that there was an alternation between it's a joint meeting where we go to them
and a joint meeting go to us because we always go to them and I think that like do meet Town Hall yeah no no I me it's always on their meeting day right so we have essentially they have no extra meeting we have an extra meeting I think the next school committee should invite
them to a school committee meeting we'll go to that first a lovely room extend that all come here I agree I like that all right that sounds good uh next item of the agenda is protection of students and their information
and well either way whoever wants to go up to Bri up to you too I think it's just a a general comment I think that um there's been a lot of concern um recently around
um access to individual data the breach that we had with power school um I just want the committee to know that we have protocols we have policies um I would alleviate any
worries that some entity could come in and ask for uh information that they're not entitled to Student Records are confidential and um we don't share that information with anyone um who doesn't already have legal access to it um so
thank you any other discussion on this all right then we'll move on yeah that's next time in the agenda old business uh discussion on FY 26 budget update just a few slides just a few let's summarize we we aren't going to go
through every single slide I haven't dipped into the chocolate yet want to take a break once you break the seal it's uh it's hard to stop okay and then we'll be following this with the FY 26 budget Q&A where the
public can participate right and this slide deck is available um posted on the website under the school committee meeting for tonight um all right so what you'll see are a bunch of slides that actually have
links to another mini slide presentation um so as an example um if you were to click in there's a whole new slide deck we're not going to go through every
slide that's in every mini slide deck a lot of this is information that we've covered in previous uh presentations um and this is not all going to be narrated by me this evening um we we need to mix it up U to
keep people um I think from nodding off a little bit because there's a lot of information here but we thought it was important to provide context right um we make the decisions
that we make because we have decades in the field and are aware of um research we're aware of the data inside our own districts um and draw on professional uh experience
right the community doesn't have Decades of experience and background in education um so we think that you know it's important for folks tonight to understand
how we think about the cuts that we're facing um so important to note that we are always Guided by the mission of the district that's at the Forefront of the things that we think about when we're
making these decisions we're also Guided by the work that we've outlined and that the school committee has approved as the priority work of the district and because of that focus and
dedication and alignment of our budget resources we have made a lot of progress uh in many areas over the last six or so years we provide a lot of data for
context I mean this is the world we're living in this is stuff that we know we see it dayto day but we always provide this sort of information in all of our budget presentations so that people have a a concept for what we're what we're
talking about um we always look at the enrollment of the class size I'm not going to go into that we've seen that but I think it's important um to address um some comment that has been out in the
public that our customer base hasn't changed our student moment is fairly steady the last handful of years up or down maybe 10 students year to year but the thing is our student
population is changing we are seeing a shift in our uh English language learner population as well as um our lowincome uh population has
shifted so these slides are in the slide deck that's linked on that other page but I wanted to to draw these out it's important yes the number of students that we're serving isn't shifting significantly but the needs of the
population of the students that are in front of us is Shifting the demographics of the town is shifting we have seen an increase of roughly 10% lowincome
population in the number of years that I've been here um so I think I think that that's worth calling out yes we recognize our the student enrollment isn't going up but the student population and their needs is is
changing take questions from you save your questions yeah because we could get hung up um so um we're not going to go into um the performance and achievement growth data we've presented that special services
data we've presented all of that we've presented our Athletics participation um no changes there that's all the same information but anybody in the community that missed all of that when we presented it with the level service
budget in January they may want uh to you know look into this get caught up um little bit of background Lunen BG's
challenge not unique to lunenberg and we've talked a little bit about that already tonight um it's it's rather unprecedented the number of of educational organizations and associations that have gotten together
um to try to outline and address and Advocate um around this problem for a longer term solution so I won't you know really dwell here I'll just the the letter in full is linked into that slide
but the key takeaways are districts everywhere they saw the sunset of the SR funds we addressed that last year because we cut positions with the the sunset of that money Chapter 70 is not
keeping Pace with inflation out of District special ed tuition Rose 14% in 24 another almost 5% in 25 and projected another almost 4% for next year that in a threeyear period
of time is a jump of more than 22% um and transportation costs again this is taken out of the letter this is not Lunen BG's pointing out what the issues are this is multiple educational
organizations working together to identify the more Global problem that public education is facing in Massachusetts okay school department Revenue sources again there's a whole slide deck you can
go click in there but big picture and this slide is in that mini slide deck we use money from Chapter 70 we use money from competitive and entitlement grants circuit
breaker and revolving accounts as we develop a budget and in past years there have been more competitive grants we've been able to fund some things there um we've had more robust revolving accounts and we've been
addressing um and sharing that challenge with the committee for the last several months at this point um important to see that the Chapter 70 money um um in FY 23 Chapter 70 increased 45% but the rate
of inflation that year was 7% in 24 again Chapter 70 increased 4 and a. half% but the rate of inflation was 8% and Chapter 70 increased uh
1.3% in 25 uh but the rate of inflation was 3% so every time that we're not keeping Pace with the actual inflation essentially we're we're losing ground we're we're cutting we're absorbing that that lost
ground I know that there are people who have interest in understanding circuit breaker I'm not going to go into this Juliana hansam our director of special services did a whole uh slide deck on this last year it is also linked into
this document um it does uh also address the extraordinary relief funds that we're not eligible for nor are we looking to get ourselves in the situation that we're eligible for them um so anybody who who needs
to um that video Kate Y and for all of you to that's a new video that desie has just put out so it may be a little bit easier than it's just a different format right some people might look like the Powerpoints um or you can look or you can look at
the video that just like I said it's the new and improved Dy video so the revolving accounts um we've been talking about individual revolving accounts and the status of those accounts since November
through December in advance of um the first budget presentation in January um the key takeaways from all of those presentations the theme is the same the revenue coming in is not equal to the expenses being paid out of those
revolving accounts um user fees have not been increased in the last decade uh and our lowi income percentage the people who are eligible for waivers um that is that is
increasing important to note that our extended day program and our school lunch program are completely self- sustaining and funded through those revolving accounts we've had a lot of questions
about grants and can't you just pay for that with the grant use use the grant money to pay for something different um again there's a whole slide deck um embedded here um some key slides
these are the grants that are the Fed federal grants again that everyone was really concerned about about a month ago when there was a federal Grant freeze we've learned that that freeze does not apply to the special ed Grant
nor to the title grants so those funds are not frozen or they should not be frozen but we talk about how there are strings attached to Grants grants are all identified with their
priorities and your Grant proposal has to align with those priorities that they have identified and there are things that can be funded with this grant but there are things that cannot be funded with the
grant so here we've listed the fundable expenses but if you click on fundable expenses it'll take you to a Desi one pager that outlines what's allowable what's not allowable with these
grants um so there are two special ed grants this one here really targeted to the early years and this grant here um which is a a bigger Grant um for
us I would ask Mrs hansam do you have anything that you want to comment on relative to the grants the federal grants special yeah I me I'm not going to go through and read through the priorities but I am going to tell you that we've done our due diligence over the years to make sure that we really get the best bank
for our buck from these grants so for example um the first the The Early Childhood one it pays for a pair of professional in the preschool part part of her salary um because that's a small gr it's usually less than 15,000 a year the bigger one is our idea Grant um and
so with that how we've capitalized on that Grant is we pay for a a lot of our par professionals out of that Grant because if we were to pay for teachers we would also then have to pay for a 9% mtrs um fee right for for their
retirement so with only taking PA of professionals from this Grant and then I do save some monies for those costs that might come up throughout the year for specific IEP needs we don't have to pay the mtrs so we've already we've been due diligent throughout our years with this
grant shifting to Paris rather than teachers where we also have to pay an ntrs that would take away from take away from we get more mileage for the dollars it actually resides here not in a retirement
system okay the other entitlement grants we get every year Title One title two and title 4 a and I would ask if Dr bookas has anything that she wants to say about any of the title grants sure
um Title One is used to support students who are low achieving and pretty much the entire grant that we receive uh pays for our coach Specialists our mtss Specialists um and one of our mtss tutors so pretty much that entire Grant
stay for a few hundred doll is used towards um salaries so a lot of it's already spoken for title 2A is used for high quality professional development um two-thirds of it is um to support our Mentor program um which we are required
to have for new teachers so and for Google admin stien so again there's you know a handful of thousand dollars left to provide profession other kinds of professional development in the district and then the last brand title 4 A is for safe and healthy learning
environments and um we use that quite bit for um professional development to support creating safe inclusive supportive um learning environments which is our them this year for professional development um that Grant again um it's about 14 to 15,000 so it's
not a big Grant okay I think it's important um to go back a little bit because I understand that there there been some conversation in the community relative
to the override where did the override go I thought the override was going to fix everything um so I think it's important to go back and revisit um how that all went last
year last year when we were going through this process to develop a budget we made Cuts because we were losing the Esser funds we had said for the 3 years that we had those fer funds that we understood that we were we
were hiring staff with it we were going to optimally use the staff for as long as we could have them to impact the kids and the learning gaps as well as the social emotional impact um that came
with Co we made those cuts we honored our word we we made that reduction so we did lose positions from last year to this year but the override did save many positions and it also restored some
funding to expense lines and if anybody wants to know which expense lines I would direct them back to the rainbow sheets of last year where you can see those side by side and you can see where those lines are increased
that's where your override money went I think it's important um to to recap the fact that this committee provided a written statement on the
override it was spoken about in the context of this B's meetings it was referenced in other committee board meetings here in
town last year and it was spoken at the town meeting when this override vote was taken up you clearly stated that the money that we were
asking for in an override was to address fy2 this year that we're in that it was not a longer term fix Beyond this year okay this is where we're going to share
a little bit and there's a whole lot more you can go into the slide deck and many more slides that outline information we'll hit the highlights here we made our decisions based in what we know as
Educators and the research in the field excuse me there are 200 folks who are going to join us they online for this part so thank you I'm going be joined by Lisa Canton who is our literacy coach
specialist and Amy Resnik who's our math coach specialist for this por and just make sure they're here with us there they are hi all right so we're going to start with the um the research on class size and student achievement um and I
want just be really clear you can probably find a lot of um class siiz research as it relates to other kinds of outcomes like class size and how it relates to uh building and developing relationships with parents and Guardians uh class size and how it relates um to
impact and how it impacts educator workload um This research is very specifically about how class size relates to student achievement so um a meta analysis that was done in 2023 um there 62 studies and this was
for K2 um found that the statement that students learn faster and perform better in smaller classes is inconsistent with the bulk of empirical evidence uh the implied class size effect is close to zero so there's
basically no impact um across all methods um level of students grade students are in um by school by jurisdiction and also by subject there's also no systematic evidence to suggest that disadvantaged students benefit from
class size reductions um the star um student achievement ratio research that was done in the 80s is really considered the the most influential study on class size and it's been quoted quite a bit in the
literature in 1999 an independent investigation of the star experiment found some important design and implementation issues um what they found was the effects of class size were really only in kindergarten and possibly first grade so just sharing um what the
research tells us about class size next next slide so thinking about the district priorities and I think Dr Burnham alluded to this earlier um the lunberg school committee has held uh a state of
priority of student achievement for the last three years these are two of the three District priorities for this school year the first priority priority number one is to improve the equity access achievement and opportunity for all students priority two is to ensure a
high quality interactive deeper learning experience with appropriate levels of support and challenge for all students from the teaching and learning office um as we looked at those priorities and all the action items um the role of the director of teaching and
learning and the literacy coach specialist and Mathematics coach specialist have responsibility for a eight of the 14 Action items listed for um priority number one and for priority number two um that goal is completely
led by the curriculum office um we the every action item all nine um towards that goal providing a little bit more context um for you all these two graphs um depict the
spring 2024 mcast mass and uh La results for grades 3 through 10 um you'll see that for multilingual students and for special education students we only have the data for grades 3 through eight because the uh group of students is below 20 and so therefore is not
reported by Desi um but you can see that uh our aggregate for all students we are just above in both categories um the state agria so we've made some progress over the last few years but there's still quite a bit of progress to be made
um and again looking at our different student groups um again focusing on our efforts for all students and as you know our district goal this year is specifically around our special education student group so I'm going to turn this over to Lisa um she's going to
talk a little bit about the early literacy reporting that's come out of Desi recently and Lisa is our literacy specialist instructional coach good evening can you guys hear me okay yep okay great so one of the main
shifts in the department of Ed is really looking at that early literacy and some of the research that has been stated and discovered is that often times when students are at risk in reading or math
in one grade level they're going to shift and have that same at risk or more risk from the next year and evidence shows that if we can get services and support to students who need it sooner and faster we close those
gaps rather than grow them and identify groups such as English language Learners lwi income special education lack of Hispanic they are at significant risk of being in need of intensive support or
below bench marks and so being aware and thoughtful about you know how we approach these to early literacy and making sure that everyone's getting everything that they need and Massachusetts overall has performed fairly well but we know that there's a
lot of work that still needs to be done in that early literacy reading of skills so there's been four major shifts that the department of Ed had focused on and the first shift it says provide explicit systematic instruction in foundational
skills to every child and that's really that big shift we know that there has been uh different data that we've looked at and saying this is kind of an area of Need for us and that's why come the end of spring we'll have chosen a component
that's really going to focus on that systematic and explicit instruction for early foundational skills and thinking about what that roll out is going to look like for next year and if you could please go to the next slide so this is our third grade winter
assessment Benchmark for I ready and what it's showing is that about 80% of our students are already at Benchmark fantastic in grade level um for for reading and one of the things that we know is that like third grade is
really that sweet spot if we're not having proficient readers and writers at this grade level the Gap is only going to get bigger so if I really focusing on those early foundational skills and having an evidencebased program K to2 is
really going to help pinpoint those students or groups of students who really need early literacy support at that ti2 prvention thanks M so when we think about what are some
of the different levers for academic Improvement and before we get started talking about the three that are listed there I want to be really clear that this is in addition the Assumption having a highly qualified educator in the room that goes without saying so what are the three other additional
levers that really Drive academic Improvement and so the first is an mtss which is the multi-tiered system of support that is the framework that can be used to support academic Improvement next sline so a multi-tiered system of
support has um three different oh SEC yep so first let's make the connection between idea and mtss so in the context of Education the way to fail refers to a practice where students are only considered for special education services after they have significantly
fallen behind academically basically essentially waiting for them to their struggles become so severe that they qualifi for special a so to address the way to fail model um many schools now use mtss you might have heard RTI just
intervention that preceded mtss and that's a system where students receive tiered interventions early on allowing for earlier identific ation learning difficulties and intervention before significant academic gaps development so again looking at now what
makes up for an mtss framework um if you click on strong foundation in tier one tier two and tier three it will take you to what our current and ongoing efforts are it's a sampling of what is happening um at the different grade levels K all
the way through 12 um the first level um is tier one and that's that foundational level where every student is receiving highquality evidence-based curriculum and instruction every single day it includes an inclusive and positive School culture and using data to inform
practices tier two is when students in addition to tier one may also receive specific small group instruction and then tier three is when a student may need additional but more intensive instruction mtss is a best practice in
Massachusetts and um ma Massachusetts has provided us with a Playbook um for us to uh use and to make sure that we are um accessing and using all the different components to build a small framework and Le is going to speak a
little bit to that so here are some of the components of mtss and I'm not going to read them all you guys can see them but the Orange is kind of what is going to be impacted by a reduction in our structure and how things work and so if we kind of think
about that effective scheduling and resource allocation that kind of collaborative planning with teachers and teachers team working together towards a common goal is going to really be limited especially in terms of working with a literacy and math specialist
depending on the role that the jobs may take on in the different year and also when we think about just the students and the staff resources and how that's going to be allocated right so we're thinking about teachers have that tier one curriculum
what does it look like when there's tier 2 interventions in the classroom or tier 2B where there's just some more resources that are needed which often are provided by am Ori and or as a group with throughout PLC is like creating this kind of um collaborative work to
say okay we need these pieces how are we going to support students and really build that so those pieces will potentially go away when we think about kind of high quality instruction materials they'll still be there but when we think about how are we working
together as a team to kind of lift and Elevate those materials for students who need that and also how are we creating and looking at different access points to the curriculum for all different Learners to make sure that everyone's getting what they need and definitely something that could be impacted is that
kind of data inform form decisionmaking we will have to continue with our Universal screeners but really taking a l and looking deeper on what that means at a school district and classroom level is going to look very different and then when we think about
kind of those deep Dives in progress monitoring is the intervention that we have in place working what needs to shift how can we make those balanced changes for Student Success those are some of those limited things that are going to be taken away when we don't
have this team working together um between teachers and the curriculum office and everybody in the partnership thanks the next lever for academic Improvement is high quality professional development um sometimes we
use development sometimes we use learning the most current literature and research uses the word learning so just know that we're using those words interchangeably um so back to some of the research uh evidence shows that professional learning can lead to shifts in teacher skills and instructional
practice and significantly improve student learning um effective professional learning can help teachers substantially improve students academic and non-academic performance and those are those important skills for learning so it actually works on both
areas which is really important in the classroom one recent meta analysis that incorporated 60 causal studies that featured instructional coaching found that the difference in Effectiveness between teachers with instructional coaches and those without was equivalent to the difference between a novice
teacher and a teacher with 5 to 10 years experience so there has been a lot about the last 10 years of literature around coaching and its impact on um student outcomes and it's all been very positive SL
stop um I agree another resarch finding this is not budget related let's move on but it is budget related because it substantiates decisions that will need to be made and speed this
up another research finding is that pairing high quality instructional materials and high quality professional learning leads to enhanced improvements in learning um so the curriculum can only do so much it needs to be paired with uh professional learning I'm going to turn over to Amy uh to hear a little
bit more about that thank you um there are I just want to talk about a couple of specific ways that we're working on lifting the high quality curriculum with the math department um and teachers and special Educators this year our Focus has been
at the primary school next year we hope the focus will be at the elementary school doing the same things um classroom teachers in grades kada2 are working with a math consultant named Shelby strong she's got years of experience in math instructional
practices and the goal is to look at different instructional practices lifting the curriculum through these instructional practic is by getting live training where teachers are actually participating in some of these practices
as Learners we've been doing lot walkthroughs in the classrooms providing feedback to teachers and setting goals for what we want to work on next our next step is to take an actual lesson from the material itself and lift it using these best practices for
instruction special Educators and mtss teachers have also been going through a different training where we're taking a class together with uh Becky Lord from Lord math Consulting and they're working on identifying math learning disabilities and disc culia and working
on finding strategies to intervene at the primary level which can really help stop math learning disabilities at the early ages before they begin um they're being provided with understanding and activities and tools to actually take
back and work with their small groups of students while they're also supporting the curriculum that we have right now so it's been wonderful to to work with the teachers and really provide them with training that they feel is relevant so you know research shows that
these four takeaways are the critical aspects to to supporting a high quality curriculum so as we're doing this work what's really happening is that our teams of teachers grade levels are are receiving are really feeling like there
is um a unified belief a shared belief that they can make a difference and since we are focusing on all students and the achievement of all students it's really important that our special Educators and mtss staff are receiving training that enables them to support
even more of the students that they have the um Collective efficacy that is happening among these groups right now really makes makes a very big difference in helping all of our students achieve the success and partnering with outside experts just enhances that
learning Amy thank you the last lever for academic Improvement is Educator evaluation and that's really to develop a culture of feedback and growth um this year as an ilt we have been working together with the goals to focus on
professional dialogue and collaboration um making sure that student learning and educator impact are at the center of the process that we're focusing on learning for all students and that we have consistent common evaluation practices and I think it would be remiss to just mention that um
again as a lover the quality and the kind of feedback that our teachers receive during the evaluation process if we have a reduction in school-based administrators um that will have an impact on the quality of the kind of evaluation and feedback that our
Educators receive thank you okay so a little bit of a recap now um some feedback that the committee um received was we needed to include budget
assumptions we've always included what was included in the budget that we were bringing forward not titled budget assumptions um so too small to see here but it is in the slide deck it gives you you a side
by side comparison of what was factored in when we did the level service budget um as we were thinking about a needs based budget with the town manager's original Target budget as well as the
town manager's Target budget um but now we have a new number from the town manager um after she and um Finance director went through um all of their
revenues um our new number our previous number we were going to get $680,000 our new number is 94,00 98 which is essentially a 3 and 1 12% increase so that's really good news
but it's coupled with some bad news um we got our health insurance number and we were told to budget for a 12% increase and the increase actually came in at
14.8% more good news though the additional monies will absorb that increase and we will still have some additional monies available to make different decisions about the cuts that we had on
the table on February so what were those cuts on the table we had a whole bunch of um expense lines that we reduced and we had a list of 36.5 FTE on the table
on February 5th so some new thoughts um we heard the feedback from the committee at the last meeting asked to take a look at admin
Cuts we have done that um so we also asked to be creative so you'll see some of that as well um but I'm going to to turn it over now uh to Dr gillson I took a look at uh central
office staff comparisons with other Massachusetts districts and what um you know what continues to coincide with the research that Dr book has presented is that um PD training high quality
teachers continuous feedback all are factors in motivating achievement what was interesting as I looked at the leadership and the central office staff in many Massachusetts districts first of all they all the leadership Factor there
was a superintendent a teaching and learning um specialist um or assistant superintendent uh student services for special education there was a finance uh Director of Finance and administration or operations and there was a um there
was a director of facilities our staff is very lean um despite our size we're still responsible for the same amount of mandates that there are that are required by the Department of Education
and so um going into that I in our enrollment um in Lunenburg is over 1500 students uh so if you would like to probe further I looked at all of the comparison districts uh that we that were identified as a part of our budget
task force as comparison districts and so um the um interesting thing or or town to compare against we found ourselves often comparing ourselves with mayard um and so if you take a look at
the list of um the central office staff um I found it very interesting they are um have lower enrollment than us but they maintain their structure which includes a superintendent a Director of Finance a director of Technology they
even have a special projects coordinator um so um you know if you go down the list you can look at that at your um leisure in your free time but um you know you look at what is um
responsible um everything um that is a part of uh the leadership team is what is driving the other the other part s forward so we're looking at forward mechanism and the other thing that I thought was important we are surrounded
by um some Regional School Districts but mayard is a municipality um and it is um very much like us um but above all it was important to note that structures um typic actually all the time included um
the superintendent student services teaching and learning finance and operations so um going on um I also you know you tend to notice what's going on um as you read the papers um and um I
noticed that the um Andover public schools um there was they reported um about their strike regularly in papers um their increase in their teacher contract was
15.5% over four years um they're increased in their um actually PR our professional cont contract was 34% over 4 years so um the school committee was also quoted um and um basically they
clearly heard from the teachers and many in the community that teacher instructional assistant pay was the priority um at the same time they also noted that the final agreement is inconsistent with the principles of of the town's long range financial plan um
so to live within the means we will need to make meaningful program service and staff reductions um this year um Andover was um in the news again um and um they are proposing to possibly eliminate as
many as 24 full-time positions um to close a a budget Gap um and the school the new school committee chair was quoted as saying I just want to acknowledge the gravity of this because it was a challenging cycle last year we had a challenging cycle here last year
um and we know and um even though there was an override the override um was really um you know we we anticipated the need for continued challenges um in where our directions were
going okay so we're going to go through these slides really quickly um lots of things for the committee to consider and some of them you may rule out right away and that's fine um but we thought we would put all kinds of of options up for discussion so
you see on this side of the the slide what we have currently for uh central office administration you could decide that you want to hire a part-time retired superintendent that could save you some money uh you could reduce the director of special services to
part-time you can't eliminate that position it is a required position uh by state law um you you could eliminate the teaching and learning position you could eliminate the finance and administration position
and downgrade that position um to a business manager and hire an accountant that would save you some money um you can uh also opt not to fill the director of facilities and grounds although I
will say we have a candidate that we were ready to offer the position to and put a hold on that following the last meeting creative uh ideas we were actually approached by North Middle
sex's um superintendent uh his chair uh had asked him to reach out to other districts in the area to see if um they could consult solidate I guess
uh central office in other words I think initially when they started looking it was do we have a position that you don't have you could cost share with us we get to keep the position and not have to cut it but you also get the benefit of it um
when we had a conversation uh there really weren't too many areas that they could have offered us something that we didn't have however if you wanted to you could eliminate all of your central office administrators throw in your Tech
consultant um and if you pay 40% of the cost of the central office of North Middle sex Regional you can have two days a week of their time um the commitment was that two days
a week you would have either the superintendent or the deputy super intendent onsite no commitment about onsite for any of the rest of that list um by the
estimates of uh North Middle sex uh we could save about a little more than $300,000 if we let the central office administration of North Middle sex run your your
District um there is a summary slide I'm not not going to go into it but basically I gave you estimates of how much I thought you might be able to save it's not a hard fast number because we've never done these things before and you'd have to negotiate contracts so
um building Administration again what you see as options are things that were um asked of me um or or suggested or proposed um by members of the committee
and or members of the community in the emails that they sent in so you have your current setup here of your Administration um there's an option that you get rid of all of your assistant
principles uh this building would be too large for one principal to manage alone with no assistant principles so you would restore a principal you would have four principles no assistant principles another suggestion was just to reduce
the um number of assistant principles at the Middle High School from 3 to two we did have that cut as a possibility last year um another proposal was to reduce
the number of assistant principles at the middle high school and eliminate assistant principles at the turkey hill and the primary again you have a summary slide that gives you some estimated costs if you decided to go through any
of those relative to Athletics again these are things that were conveyed to me as suggestions you could revisit elimination of your full-time athletic director position and when you factor in health insurance Etc you'd have um some
savings there you could opt to eliminate your full-time athletic trainer you could eliminate your part-time secretary and again same as last year she's currently paid out of the revolving account the athletic revolving account
but if that money was not being paid to her salary it could be applied to either the athletic director's salary or the trainers salary and that would reduce the budget about
20,000 so what could restructuring Athletics look like well maybe you go from a full-time athletic director and trainer part-time secretary to the part-time director full-time trainer part-time
[Music] secretary you could keep a full-time director go to a parttime trainer and part-time secretary you could because and this is a thought right if you reduce the ad and
you reduce the trainer they are likely both going to be looking elsewhere for full-time employment um one option is to have one athletic director trainer
position again run some numbers for you um we could reduce the IT department there's not a lot of savings there um right now we have an IT manager and
an IT Tech on campus every day all day uh we also have our computer Consulting uh group you could keep the full-time manager and I would absolutely absolutely say that redu in
that position is not a viable option at all however you could reduce the the tech to part-time and put a little bit of money into let's say an overtime account in the budget and have an on
call as needed um we have a lot of need at the in the summertime after the new Chromebooks come in they all have to be set up and prepped to be distributed we might need a a little bit extra Hands-On at that point or if broken uh Chromebooks are starting to
pile up they're we're not turning them around fast enough they're coming in more than we can get them out we could call somebody in for some on on call hourly um Peg there are additional expense lines that you could
look to cut um most of these lines would be taking them down to zero taking all of these Cuts would take almost every line down to zero um we
could reduce our uh contract with our computer Consulting Group uh you could consider Some programmatic Cuts you could and we've already discussed this
so we don't need to discuss it again but you could forgo replacing uniforms for a year and take that money back in the budget um you could eliminate Middle School athletics that would save you the coaches stti end
you could reduce the total number of coaches and you've talked about reducing how many sports teams you have how many programs we run um you could reduce the number of
advisors um and we could cut huddle um that is currently paid out of the revolving account but if you're not paying for that you can apply and where I kind of would recommend is to apply that 9,000
from the revolving against the transportation line for athletics and reduce it by the 9,000 if you were to do all of those and I know that you're not ready to to say that
committed to doing all of those but if you were to do all of those that gets you $187,500 there was a thought about could we save money by closing Turkey Hill if the goal is not to um cut K5
teaching positions uh we will have too many teachers too many classrooms to move third and fourth grade down to the primary school and parking becomes a major issue because we have barely enough parking available for the staff
that's there currently all of the teachers and the Paras would be going down to that that building not to mention that we all just agreed that we were going to leave and vacate TCP Central offices have to go
somewhere the only place that can absorb us is the church Hill um so I can't and the nature of the HVAC over there if the heat has to be on I I can't I can't just shut down whole sections of the building readily based
on the design of the HVAC I'd still have to have a Comcast service coming in at phones all the utilities I mean the utility costs might be reduced slightly but there's the building has to stay open and there's really not enough
savings there to make that a option um there's been conversation in a variety of capacities with different boards about the need to relocate Ace somewhere at some point um
so there is a slide deck a couple more slides but this is the key one um okay we can look at that um to move our kids because we have to educate them they they are entitled until they age out at age
22 um we could move them over to the Keystone collaborative um but we're going to be paying a tuition and the net cost is somewhere between 646000 and 767 and change um North Middle sex has a
program that they allow kids to tuition into at $330,000 ahead um so it's cheaper to send them to North middlex um at between 431,000 and 491 th000 depending on the
number of students um but it's a lot cheaper to keep them in District that is the most cost effective way set that aside the goal of the program is to get them
ready to be able to be involved in their community and be familiar with their community so if they're going through a program in some town somewhere not lunenberg they are not being coached how
to navigate and participate in their own Community Miss Anum do you want to add anything to that I think you've said it all even if we saved money sending them somewhere else I would still recommend
them staying in town for that for that specific reason so we we would not entertain the proposal to move them elsewhere it's not going to save us any money and it's not going to benefit the the students okay we're not going to dwell
here because we've had a lengthy conversation about all of these things with one exception we could start a sponsorship program whereby anyone could make a donation and sponsor a club activity as
an example as a former science teacher I might think that the the power of the Science Olympiad activity is so important that I would want to donate and cover the cost of the advisor stien
or donate and cover the materials cost for the program or pay for one of the bus trips to a competition you might have an engineer living in town that really would want to get behind this you have artists in the
community who might want to get behind the art Club any number of people may be interested in sponsoring an activity not advertising this would be somebody coming forward making a donation
earmarked for a certain thing and the school committee would accept that donation and allocate the money as the donor wished something to consider okay all of the proposed Cuts all of
them there are several links on this slide I'm not going to go through them all but what I'm going to show you is that central office by Department the superintendent's office that's what we have now anything that's
uh Pink is a cut that you might consider that's new on the table tonight you have anything highlighted in yellow that was something that was discussed February 5th and this goes through central office it goes um Department by
Department it goes school by school So for anybody who's interested um in seeing what we would keep what we would lose that that's a good um place to look we have um again I we're not going
through all of this it would take take us at another two hours to go through there is an impact statement that's just in the form for the most part of bulleted uh
considerations um they're all available everyone can go through them um Mr SCH brini often talks about what are we legally required to do and I said pretty much everything that we do
it's it's hard to parse out what we're not legally required to do there isn't an existing state document mass does not have one to my knowledge masc does not have one um we started working to build
one this document goes through all of the mandates and who's responsible for it in our district and as you scroll through principles ass assistant principles they're listed many times the
director special ed um you can scroll on through in very few instances our teachers responsible for the mandates that falls to the administration and there are a
lot of mandates um again we can revisit that another time um but factor that in as an impact if you decide to reduce or eliminate admin positions all of the
mandates still exist and then they fall to someone else to do because they have to be done and quite honestly there are so many you put too much on one person's plate things are things are going to be missed it
it's it's just likely to happen um school department budget analysis we were asked to kind of do some visual representations of some things there's another whole slide deck here but we wanted to pull out a couple of key things we've been asked about what seem
to be the biggest drivers and these are the same Universal drivers I will say that uh a little more than a week ago was a little distressed with the news uh uh story on the Boston channels about gas natural gas going up 30 to
40% i' I'd like to know we're going to be able to pay the heating bills next year so that's a worry um so we're we're looking at that to be sure that we don't have to put additional monies into the budget line for those kinds of things but these are the things that were
outlined in that uh United for our future this is impacting everybody everywhere we took a look at you know just kind of summing up the numbers that we've put on the table right so we start with that big number level service with absolutely
nothing else applied that's just the cost to keep everything that we have except now it's got to go up by 87,000 and change because the health insurance went up but if you apply the title grants you've got a figure there
applied special ed grants another figure there little bits of money from extended day facilities revolving athletic revolving Student Activities right you get another total figure from our own revolving accounts applied if you were
to take all of the expense cuts that we put on the table on February 5th there's a number there if you were to take all of the expense cuts that we put on the table tonight there's another number there good
news we are always you know paying attention to fluid and changing situations we have gotten some information just in the last couple of days actually that some placements we
were planning for in the budget there will be placements but at a lesser cost than so we are able to put we're able to reduce that out of District tuition
line and apply that money somewhere else so when you when you take a look at all of that it brings the number down to 27 um 422 795 the new town manager's total budget
with that 94 right, would have us at a target of 2787 474 which means the the gap for personnel cut
is about 1.6 so salaries how the salaries are the biggest part of our budget and how are how are they distributed amongst different categories of employees this is a
breakdown of our current staff and the percentages and where they shap take out if we factor in all the cuts that were on the table on February 5th and we know we don't have to make all of those cuts
because we have a little bit of money to play with um with all of those cuts this is how it shapes up for next year is there a side by
side unfortunately there's not but I can make one for you for the next meeting um just quickly if you look at it um your percentages for
um custodians uh building admin central office and central office I just want to be clear is not just administrators it's all of the people who work at central office that don't fall into a different bargaining
category um like what like Liz Peterson like Heidi spinny who does our data and our account table um but not people who are working in a building who you're counting as central office so there are some people
at central office who are covered under the secretary's contract they are not in the head count for central office they are in the head count for the secretaries group there are there are people at central office that are not part of a bargaining group those are the the people who are
in the head count at central office okay um but I mean the the biggest shift um with all the cuts that we put on the table the teachers portion goes from
685 to 70.3 that said I need to be very clear we did a lot of work through the budget task force and in our entire process in bargaining with the teachers our
teachers all if you look at this this chart yes there might be another uh [Music] Community two um Hudson is just a couple dollars less than than we
are those are their lowest salary cells that's nobody no experience with the bachelor's like right lowest of the lowest of all the salaries on the
schedule we're not the lowest but we're not far from the lowest however when you look at the very top cell we are the we are the lowest so while you look at the impact in that pie chart and the percentage
goes up I need to be very clear for the community the contract that they got still does not bring them up to the middle of the
pack they're still at the bottom and again these were the communities that we used for the budget task force comparison another factor for this school year we made 38
job offers we had 17 declin 12 of the 17 said that they were not taking the position because the pay was too low wow I had a lot a lot of questions come through either to emails that went to
the committee or to me directly so I just wanted to summarize some of those I don't need to read through every single one of them um folks can can go to the slide deck and take a look um all
right here we are recommendations and next steps when we take a look at where are we at after you take a look at the additional money we're getting from the town but take
out the increase that we now have to absorb for the health insurance we have wiggle room with 136,000 if you take almost all of the expense cuts that we put on
on the table tonight and leave the advisor cuts the coach and the the activity advisor cuts out of the mix you got about 210,000 to play with if you recognize
that we're going to drop that uh out of District tuition we've got about another 300 310,000 there if you were to to do the transportation fee you would
have 75,000 sounds like we're not really going to count on that too much right now um that said for sure you have the 136,000 that we're getting from the town and for
sure um well I say for sure until tomorrow when we find out there's another new move in coming in that needs an out of District placement um and bus transportation um right now you now have another
300,000 back in the budget so if you Ballpark and you can't not there's no perfect science for the benefit of the community teachers with 5 years experience don't make $65,000
they have varying levels of Education that put them in different columns they come to us with different years of experience that put them on different steps some of them take health insurance some of them don't so the cost attached is extremely flexible like in some cases
by tens of thousands of dollars by contract the teachers have bumping rights seniority matters so we need to figure out what positions you want to put back so that we can
figure out who that individual actually would be and what money is attached to them um if we ballpark in round numbers okay your average teacher is you know
somewhere in the 60,000 range and maybe they take health insurance so let's ballpark an $85,000 number now some of them are going to be higher than that some of them are going to be lower than that but going with
that sort of midg ground uh if you used all of the money here and we're not committing to using all the money here you could restore eight or nine positions if we don't do the transportation fee uh that's probably
one position less right um depends I guess on what you want to do with the different expense cuts that we put on the table tonight that said talking about
restoring positions I had sent out a survey to the committee asking you to give me feedback if you could restore one position what would you prioritize two positions what would the second one be on up to six I also also asked you for feedback
about if there were expense cuts that you were not comfortable with so I will say that generally speaking the feedback I got focused on restoring K5
positions however we met as a leadership team for almost an entire day today going through the impact statements making sure that we didn't miss
anything um and talking about okay well what would we say we would recommend to restore we had a different list but there are there are impact
statements associated with the different list that we had so what I would like to do is turn it over to those who are leading the building and why they feel the restoring
of this particular position is more critical than restoring a k 1 2 3 4 five right um so special education I'm going to ask
for uh Juliana hansum to kind of tag team comments on any of the thoughts on why we would choose to restore a position connected to special ed but I'm going to turn it over to Mr sry because the first one is connected
to the high school Mr chair before we move forward can I just ask a question yes what are your expectations for the remainder of this meeting oh man I this is not yeah okay I I
just as the primary audience here I'm fading fast it's not almost 9:30 I'm 3 and 1 half hours into this I've been going since 7:00 this morning and I'm fading fast um we had set expectations that there
would be a Q&A y got do that um which I think we need to do I think we need to have more meetings like we got to figure this out over the course of the next couple of weeks but but there's just no way that we're going to do what I think we all set out to do tonight at the r
and I just I apologize but I just have to raise my hand because you're not getting all of me you you can certainly look at the arguments um not the same as somebody speaking to it um however when we get to Q&A you may have questions
about what was written here so we can put that on hold and move to QA I defer to the chair I just I just want to give you I would agree I think it we're a committee so I think we want to do it together but I think it's important to kind of keep going too at the same time think we need actually talk about the
budget I'd like to and have some from I had a was Julian Anna in on the on the meeting well can we get this in a written statement of what this is theirs not ours let's do the Q&A we well we got to get through because they W
know what to ask for I think let's we got to get through this part wa this is like the last this is the end the end okay well we had a section that went like 45 minutes that was sold as a section I want to the 95 slides and stuff okay all right see if we can
quickly go through the priorities Mr Sandry um thank you for having me I can do this in 45 seconds the reason it is our number one priority is because it is going to decrease our case load at the high
school also uh we have put in programs at the high school that have been successful making students one get a diploma and to not Choice out to uh a good rich academy which is costing the district money so we've been able to
knock those numbers down from students going to Goodrich which was traditionally 10 to about two this year with the programs that we put in place thank you I think that's about 45 seconds well
done grade one when we looked at these and I think it's really important because our priorities will change depending on what you guys decide as far as Administration Cuts this is with no cuts to Administration so I need to say that I
think it's really important we're tasked with a lot to do throughout the day without my AP my priority would change from grade one to something else but when we looked at class sizes grade one was prioritized over some
other grades because of the numbers because of the essential skills and a lot of what's up there I think the big thing is going from 30 in a first grade classroom to 23 24 and the reason I say that is because it came to 23.4 you can't split a kid so one class
is going to be 24 um so grade four means it's working is good um the grade four position was was chosen uh because with the reduction of one teacher at each grade level they were grade for was
impacted the uh greatest with the increase in class size their class size would uh have gone up to an average of 31 over four classrooms um restoring a full great teacher would bring that to back down to 25 and uh allow more
personalized instruction more kind folks some differentiated learning strategies for the diverse students reduction in management time um all good things uh to help teachers spend quality time with kids the next priority would be to restore um one mtss teacher that could
be um supporting the two buildings we would prioritize grades one two and three I think the key thing here is when you're looking at the types of Assessments that you're doing how many assessments you're doing and what it
provides we are mandated to do the universal screeners so at the primary school you're doing Universal screeners three times a year each time is 700 students that are being screened at the primary building K through second grade
and then you have to do that at third grade as well so looking if we could get one back it would have to be split and if we were going to split it uh third grade would be the place of focus at at Turkey Hill going from uh a
place where we're starting to go from learning to read and learning to math to using reading and using math to learn um and as I think you saw in the data that we pres was presented earlier it's been effective to this point we're at a point
almost 3/4 the way through the school year and nearly all of our third graders are somewhere in grade level um so it's it's been effectively want to keep that cuz that benefit then moves on to fourth grade fifth grade right through high school thank
you middle school special EDS so same uh rationale for returning uh our LMS special education teacher uh case loads of 29 are becoming untenable um if we reduce those to 18 we continue
to make progress as we have in our accountability score on mcast for our subgroups with students with disabilities and where we're making good progress in those CLS thank you social worker at the um K5 level it would be shared across
the two schools so currently the current budget proposal is to go from a full-time social worker at both buildings to having a0 five so they' be 05 at Turkey Hill point5 if we restored this it would bring us back to at least one full-time
social worker at each building so it's an increase of a0 five but it really brings our buildings back and our social workers are essential with a0 five we're only hitting IEP students so this year alone
we've had families or students that have had deaths in their families my social worker is essential to meet those needs and help with a crisis help with support and provide wraparound services to families that need it and without that
we're just focusing on our IEP students Dr Bas had said something in our meeting this morning that I think is important um if our kids aren't ready to learn they're not going to learn and we've got students with some intense social emotional needs and having that
person in the building full-time to help intervene in time of Crisis or disregulation or to help better yet prevent that crisis and disregulation coming so those students can focus uh and learn uh is important and it also then adds to um reduced disruptions in
the classroom reduced uh distractions in uh in our students so that they're able to focus and uh and learn thank you social worker at the middle high school so a restoration of that position
benefits both of my buildings it drives the social worker numbers down at the high school as well as builds back our guidance department at the middle school which has suffered Cuts over the last few years thank you kindergarten
so kindergarten again it's one of those early development we need to get that social emotional without that without that Foundation they're not ready to learn so I think it's important that we look at lower class sizes so it would go from 29 to 23 and that 29 is a projected
that's not an actual yeah at this point we have 88 kindergarten registrations so it's projected that we'll have about 116 so that's just an estimated number and the grade three runs along the same lines as with our grade four grade three would be the second largest
impact an increasing class size um restoring a grade three position uh would allow us to lower the um proposed average class size from 29 to 23 um again providing uh opportunity for more person instruction time to focus on
differentiating learning strategies for diverse students um and I guess it's important to note that both for every grade we're working with outside of kindergarten the current numbers in the grade before we may have students move in we may have students move out but
we're working with the number that we know thank you and then um an mtss teacher at the lower grades which would
restore one full-time intervention teacher in each building and um the middle high school secretary position Mr s you want to talk about that sure if youve ever stepped
foot into the secretary place at uh the middle high school it's a very busy area cutting a secretaries can have a direct impact on parents and students or tracking of chronic absentee ISM uh it's an important position I'd like to to
restore thank you so those were just some thoughts how we would prioritize restoring positions so do we want to open up to the public first yeah so we're going to open up the Q&A to the public if you're
in person you come up to the microphone if you are on Zoom you can raise your virtual hand and we will take questions and the administration and admin team will take questions so many people still watching and just as a reminder you an address please hi yes my name is Lauren
Pera I'm at 44 Whiting Street I have a kindergartener um who's enrolled at uh the primary school I also had two high school students already go through the number high so I've kind of seen all the different um levels I just want to say all everything I said today was spot on I appreciate all your comments I worked
on a ton get to the questions so um one question I had was you were talking about these metaanalysis studies which again I think there's a lot of different studies out there do you know what that range of classroom size that was studied I don't think obviously there's an end
point that classroom size may cut off you know I don't think anyone's going to argue that a 50 classroom size is the same as a five so do you know actually which range was studied in that study so a meta analysis which looked at many studies like over 16
um the range that they pinpointed that actually had an impact on achievement was from 13 to 17 students at a class okay so it's a very call a very expensive way to have to get that impact and it's it's rare that a district is able to sustain class sizes of 13 to 17
okay and so beyond that to a certain point had no difference do you know like what the biggest classroom size they were studying in there were some that were over 30 um but again it depends on different levels so High School level may have been 30 to 35 um most of the
elementary studies were within the 20 to 28 29 range okay thank you um and then on that note I also appreciated your comments on the mtss because my daughter utilizes that I think it's a wonderful program can you just clarify what the
current proposed cuts to mtss are I noticed when I looked at the Excel spreadsheet kind of things were grouped under Special Ed I think so I wasn't sure exactly what the current proposed number of Mt two we currently have three and the initial proposals were all three
okay so we just talked about how wonderful this program is y and okay just to clarify that um the other question I had was classroom physical classroom sizes has that been assessed for actually how many
students can kind of safely and appropriately fit in these rooms I know again my daughter's kindergarten class has 24 students right now I've been in there with 24 5-year-olds and it's hectic um there's not a lot of space has that been looked at and is that I mean cross I'm not I mean primary
is my daughter school but just for the general CL so we can't fit 30 kids in the classroom but with that said some of the materials that are out would be limited yeah you would have to rearrange classrooms so teachers would have to take away some of their materials that
they have out to safely fit the students it does limit your carp area as well so we're looking at that so more objects will have to come out of the room to safely fit the students and more so at the kindergarten level because they
tables the other classrooms have desks so at other grade levels it's easier to move students around okay thank you and then my last question well a question then a comment one question was and this wasn't talked about tonight but I saw it on the Excel spreadsheets a a salary
increase of 71,000 for an HR specialist I'm just curious what that represents and especially if we're cutting jobs why a need for further HR Support that's a teacher salary to me so that's that's not a new position it's not it's it's
moved this was a previous position that was located in a different part of the budget and it there is a raise for next year but the reason that it looks like such a big jump is that that individual um was moved from a different
portion of the budget down into the HR portion fully into the HR portion of the budget okay so we have somebody who has been managing a good 90% of uh HR yeah I think was there was there an HR business
partner as well I think I saw a couple of HR roles listed on this budet do we have more than one HR no no we just have one okay I thought the spreadsheet I'll look at that again and my only other comment was I noticed on the expense cuts that were presented tonight the additional on cuts to PE and music programs I think at
the lower grade levels was that materials materials only perfect thank you thank you I'm going to just add something um the um position that you're talking about was forly in the business
more on the business office side and was moved to the HR side okay if if you look at last year's budget there's a decrease yeah there so it's just shifting I have same exact I had the same exact question I like why are we
adding again as a reminder if you're on Zoom just raise your virtual hand if you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A this is a public Q&A if you're in person please come up to the microphone Miss perian on Zoom hi good evening thanks for hanging in this was
this is a long one um Laura vuan uh 389 mopus Road and uh just a couple of quick questions um can you repeat again where are the U the slide deck that was just gone through on the website I was trying to look that yep if you go onsite if you
go to the website and then click on the school committee link yep that will take you to another page you have to then look for uh meeting minutes and agendas I think is the name of the next link click there y once you're there
scroll down a little bit um and then you'll see today's date for the school committee meeting and then all of the um the documents are linked under that date because I do find a revised Bud a revised um meeting agenda yep I didn't
see any additional documents there there I will look again okay um one question please on the um there obviously lots of rumors flying around lots of comments you know the the numbers are staggering
um you know one question I had was um on the the line items that you noted the music position feed those were you said were materials those weren't positions so that correct today um there was a there was a slide that had a list of
additional Cuts M largely connected to music and PE in every building um that's all expense stuff that is not that's not a position that's materials okay so okay and um a couple
of things that were coming up was just like extra- large study halls um getting work credit was there other consideration or discussion about know high school credits for working or things like that or there were were there other things that were being
considered that maybe got tabled or uh large PE classes large study halls things like that no I think we acknowledge that all kinds of class sizes are going to go up and we expect that there will be an increased number
of kiddos in a study hall as well um but we we did not or not that I'm aware of if there's any conversation Mr santry at the at the school level around um a work program that would give students credit I know it's something
that we've talked about came to a proposal we're piloting that work based program this year year we'll have more information for you in June but we did come in front of uh School advisory we've tried that program and we'll have more information for you
at the end of this year to provide you if we were going to add that yep thanks thank you and I will comment I do like the idea of the sponsorship I think that there are opportunities there to have um other funds being you know able to come in and I'm appreciative of other avenues
of looking for funding um it's like I said pretty you know you know this is this is overwhelming a little bit um and my final question is is where this is where where we were last year same room same you know web everything what is is the
plan for a longer term you know multi-year look at the school there's other you know needs that have to happen what is the plan for a longer like threeyear plan fiveyear plan something like that that we're not just do a stock Gap once a year I don't have a three to five year
plan um it really is going to come down to is there is there a shift in a funding mechanism um because I can tell you that if this is what it is we will make Cuts this
year and we will be back here a year from now with a 7% increase to transportation for FY 27 likely another double digit increase to health insurance and if our budget goes up 2
and a half to three three and a half and salaries are going up more than two and a half um we're going to be back in the same situation looking at Cuts how many exactly I can't I can't say
because it really will depend on how many we make this year so but I I don't disagree that it would be very helpful for a longterm sort of plan um I think that that's some of what the budget task
force tried to consider um I don't know if Mr scho bini wants to weigh in with any other comments on that so Lauren one thing that I would say is that the the final recommendations from the budget task
force involved uh first getting like a really clear picture of the town's finances and hiring somebody to do a a different kind of audit than we have to every year then the next step was to implement some cost savings measures and
some Revenue generating measures like uh solar fields and things like that but the big key is we've got to figure out a way to change the the intake of Revenue the only way that we have to intake Revenue right now is property taxes and
the slide deck included Mater and Andover they have the ability to do a split tax rate after looking at it at least times in the budget task force it did not seem viable to do that which leaves us with only one other way to change Town Revenue which is the
community preservation act so if if the town wants to talk about long-term planning it has to start with the community preservation act the statutes that Massachusetts has do not give us any other ways to generate Revenue other than property tax split tax rate and the
community preservation act other than like you know dog license fees so if there's going to be if there's going to be a change in long-term planning we have to figure out the revenue piece first and that's just the town vote like
like I said at the beginning of the meeting we are going to spend this money one way or the other the the CPA would give us matching funds for the state if we don't do it then we don't have that money and we will be in this position you know at infinite especially if the
rate of inflation for January carries through for the rest of the year would be 4% that would put us at 22% since Co can I just make a a comment on that yes we are in a slightly different position than we were a year ago there
there actually are more known known today than there were a year ago we had an unsettled we had several unsettled contracts last year that are now settled um including our contract including um
our Lea contract and those are big numbers and now we can project those costs out over the next two years at least um now the numbers that they project to are not good right like we there are going to be more gaps and to
to your point we absolutely need to deal with that and we need to have a very straightforward and realistic conversation with our partners on the select board Town manager and God willing our
legislators um the CPA I know you keep coming back to that Tony the CPA is not going to save the school budget we can invest in properties that we then can't maintain and those sorts of things but we can't take CPA budget money and put
it to teachers it's it's different money and that's not going to solve this problem I support the CPA I'm behind it but it doesn't solve this problem okay uh good evening my name is Vian Brown I live at 118 Whiting Street in
Lunenburg I've been a resident here since 2008 um I have two daughters in the school system now and I'm also the school social worker at the primary school um so my first question is somewhat of an existential question to
the entire lunenberg community and I'll follow up to Mr Beard's um comment just now cuz I'm going to ask about the CPA to that is in a town like Lunenburg that is small and highly
interconnected I do not think that our a solution for the school is taking from another entity because they all matter they all contribute to the school they all contribute to the public safety of
the town they all contribute to the library and all the other various organizations that we have so it all matters that being said I think the CPA money would impact the school so my
question um is what uh and I know that this question answer is probably more directed towards the school budget specifically but since I've established that I think it all matters it all matters um so my question is what has
prevented the town uh because I heard um Mr scol brini say that it is gotten to a certain point but then has not been voted on so why why so the uh according to Tom Alonzo who is pretty good at this kind of stuff there were two attempts
and anybody who knows more can tell I'm not I nowhere near the town credentials Peter does one of them made it all the way to town meeting and it lost a town meeting the other was more recent and it made and I want to say more recent like
1998 something like that and it made it to select for and select board did not put it into a warrant that would make it town meeting so it has failed once in front of the town and then it failed to make it to town meeting because it did not make it to a warrant early 2000s it
failed a town meeting and it failed it failed to make it to the ballot only about four or five years ago I want say I recall the discussion in town meeting before but no one's no one's taken it to the select Court recently or to the not in the last four or five years that
would be the next action of someone want you take it to the select board yes okay um okay um so back to my kind of bigger question for the entire lunenberg Community whoever is listening uh we know that learning can't
happen without a relationship absent of a relationship and the relationships don't necessarily have to be with people they can be relationships with um a spe specific subject matter a specific historian typically with younger
children it is a relationship with a caregiver I want everyone for a moment to think back on your most pivotal educational experiences did the building you were in
matter did the um anything about the grounds or the physical physical what you could see in environment matter likely not it was the people the
people that mattered so Lunenburg we are a community here and we actually get to make the decisions we get to make the decisions this is not about the school committee making decisions it's not about the select
board although they are important it is about all of us so I would implore you when you are making your decisions whether to vote whether to make a public comment to think about What mattered to
you and your educational experience um my final question is about uh so I too was very fond of the sponsorship program uh one thing that has been super impressive to me about this community is um the willingness the
kind of the scrappiness of it and the willingness for people to just roll up their sleeves and do what needs to get done uh the volunteers in this community um are exceptional um you know my the pasta
parties that have been thrown for the Athletics some families are even silly enough to open up their house for an entire month in the fall to let ninth graders come in and build a float um and so my question is about tapping in and
I've asked this question a few different times uh tapping into volunteers and things like the sponsorship program what are the limitations that currently exist in allowing parents or other volunteers to
come in and support the school Comm community and what would we need to like do to kind of get through those barriers that's a that's a big conversation um the long and short I'll
just give you a couple of highlights um we have um we have a flyer on the website we've listed all kinds of uh volunteer opportunities um we don't get a lot of
volunteers um I I'm not sure exactly when that sort of shifted but definitely after co uh because we couldn't have extra people in in the building and in the classrooms um you don't typically get as many Volunteers in the school at
the 612 level as you might at the primary or the Turkey Hill I think really the primary is probably the the the greatest place for that the challenge um if you were looking for volunteers to
do certain kinds of tasks or uh basically free work um there are limitations we have a lot of confidential uh material Student Records are confidential employee information is
confidential um for a non-employee you couldn't you couldn't give them access to those kinds of things right I'm thinking primarily for the extracurriculars like I know a lot of people in town who have coaching
experience who would like lead um some sort of group like just supporting and supplementing the extracurriculars Cory checks May Cory Che for sure um I think we may have a challenge if
we're getting volunteers for positions that are stien in the contract right right but if there was a new after school activity or something you know at tury Hill or primary like that suppor
fundraisers to come in and run an after school activity you know for a several week stretch of of time yeah um so we do have a little bit of that and I think another option too is going through the PTO the parents can get involved with the PTO
and volunteer that way as well add to the PTO add more opportunities with the PTO we have been lucky in getting a couple of the senior tax program uh folks come in to help out with some things um and that's been a huge uge
huge benefit so I think one of the challenges to having parents come in and volunteer when you're alone with children in addition to a Corey in a public school you have to have fingerprints you can't be alone which is a cost to families I
want to say it's 55 if I'm correct 35 35 35 so they would have to do that and not a lot of families or volun are willing to do that to be alone with students that is a requirement that's a safety issue volunteers and at the primary school I can speak to this we have a lot
of volunteers that come in they come in and do our photocopying laminating um we have families that come in and do stories within classroom so we and it's at the younger levels it's easier to get parents want to come in
and volunteer as children get older when I was at Turkey Hill last year we couldn't really get anybody to come in and volunteer and that's 3 to five you start to see it shift a little bit so volunteers can't come in and replace teachers they could volunteer to come in
and support a class there's a lot of uses for volunteers we'd have to be a little creative around how we could support classroom teachers because there is some confidential information thank you all right next up we have Amy King on Zoom
if you're going to unmute yourself yeah sorry I was having trouble getting off mute thank you Amy King fre Gates place um I did have a question there's been a lot of discussion about the Athletics and and the increase in the athletic budgets I I know I asked
this at the meeting that um the athletic director sponsored um a while back is that we see many towns near us that have various advertising on the on the fields and things like that to help support the Athletics budgets and I'm wondering if
that's been discussed and if we're looking at that at all for as one source of Revenue to support some of this currently we have a school committee policy that um prohibits that you should look at
thatte changing that policy in order to help it did come up on the athletic advisory call she's 100% right and we should look at that put it on the docket for next policy sub would be great normally I'd say that's probably not a great idea but
right now take what I can get yeah I mean if you go to if you go to doy field the lemon St if you go to any of those you know it works it it helps it gets some Revenue in there and it sounds like there's a lot of concern about the athletic programs which you
know I want to remind people is is a lot of people participate in athletics and it's a huge Community event as well um so I would hate to see our Athletics um take a major hit here um the next question I have related to
the facilities fees I heard the conversation about increasing facilities fees uh one concern I would have is are we also cutting facilities Personnel but increasing those fees because we really need to make sure we're maintaining the facilities if we're going to start charging people more for them um you
know the fields have been have had some concerns um you know I know that we had a big volunteer group in the fall or late summer that did actually clean up a lot of the facilities for the fields and stuff but I I'm just wondering are those cuts still on the table for facilities if
we're going to increase those fees uh none of the Personnel that would be connected to uh use of the field um or even use of the gym um are going to be impacted
they're not amongst the proposed cuts um a question on the health insurance you mentioned the health insurance went up is that with the current roster of personnel that include might hit the uh hit the override because most of the time it won't set the first time couple
door sensors don't work okay okay have a good night I'm sorry could you repeat that question um with the health insurance increases that you spoke to is that with the current Personnel or does that
include with the cuts that you have for personnel like is that number for health insurance still very much up in the air it is always going to be up in the air because it changes monthly um people have events that are
qualifying events they might join our health insurance um they may have a child and now they're moving to a family plan so the these changes happen every single month um what we've built
into the budget uh is based on the January enrollment and um when we made cuts and pulled individuals out of the budget we go and
look to see if they also were were taking health insurance and we remove that from the budget as well not all of our staff do take health insurance understandable but yes we we take a look at that it's based on the
carrent enrollment as of January but honestly it it changes every single month um all year every year it's important to note that we don't have anything to do with health insurance it's part of the town and place they
negotiate all together so like correct okay another question I had um there was the the large presentation on the Mt I'm going to have the letters wrong but the teach coaches mtss all of that yes um have we looked at how other
school districts are doing some of that like are there other districts out there that are that are not using that coach but having good results in in by doing different things so the co the coach isn't limited to MT TSS in terms of
direct service to students the coach is a little bit of that a little bit of curriculum planning prioritizing data use um differentiating instruction working directly with with
teachers um the mtss structures that we've got in place we have um we have a couple of teachers licensed teachers working as intervention teachers um and we we've also had um
tutors um I think by and large this is kind of the standard practice that you build the system you have staff to provide the direct service for tier 2 definitely
tier three kinds of support um but the goal too for the coaches is to be working with the the teachers to strengthen the instruction that happens every single day because if if we can really strengthen the instruction that's
going on every single day in every single class you have kids learning and and you're not having as many kiddos um that are having difficulty accessing the learning and therefore in need of
additional supports to access that learning um so it's it's a little bit different the coaches versus the mtss staff directly um I think her question was do other school districts use mtss yes my
understanding is it's a desie thing it is a thing yep but as far as the model of delivery this this is pretty much the model y thank you Miss King did you have any other further questions I think the only other question I had was um there was a lot of
comparison to school districts I I remember hearing mayard Hudson Etc in addition to looking at at sort of the school profile did the profile of that town and what kind of I'm sorry what kind of industry and revenue that they have coming in in that town was that
part of the comparison as well so that list of comparables uh was actually created by the budget task force and the budget task force looked at a lot of different parameters how to decide which were the most comparable towns
for Town purposes as well as the school purposes and that was the list um that the budget task force uh came up with this summer yeah great thank you so I guess I mean I think that the athletic the the advertising that type of thing
the sponsorship is is really my biggest Point um the other questions were just wondering about things thank you thank you Miss King all right are there any other questions from the public if you're on Zoom you can raise
your virtual hand if you're in person come up to the microphones all right at this time I see no hands up on zoom and no people in person up at the microphone so I will look for a motion to close the Q&A the public portion of the Q&A so second any
discussion all those in favor say I I motion passes um so yeah I'll open up to the committee I would come back to my earlier question about what are your intentions for this evening I would like to get give feedback to the
superintendent so I have a list and maybe we can start with that um not my personal list but more of what I think is easy for the committee to go with in order um I think the facilities and grounds director
facilities director we can give her some feedback on that just hire him no I I think we' just give it to the town no we don't have M again everybody's got their own opinion that's fine Mr bmore um my my opinion on this has I've
kind of come full circle on this topic um I I have long believed that this is not something that we should pursue uh in terms of conjoining facilities with the town uh and I'm very
much on the record there um my concern is less about the budgetary impact of of hiring somebody who's qualified to do the job and is willing to do it for a long period of time and more about our ability to
actually hire somebody to do the job um and and it is just proven to be impossible very very difficult um now that being said there are lots of people with no shortage of good ideas in this town when it comes to these topics um
what I don't know for sure is if we have a willing partner at the town and I think that that needs a look so I can I can speak to that I've had a conversation with the the town manager and with the DPW director and the
facilities director for Town um we are all in agreement that a merger of this sort is not going to save any money that that would not that it couldn't be the goal right
um but you're talking about if if you need to maintain all of the staff that are currently serving in different departments they're all on different contracts all of that needs to be
bargained um there's there's some real work and thought that needs to go into all of it I think when you ask if there's a willing partner in the town manager I I think there is
um I I'm not sure that department heads see the true benefit um maybe that will come into focus with more conversation but they're willing to have a conversation yeah so so my my
view on this is again this is much less budgetary and more operational We are continuing to really suffer here uh our buildings are not clean our plowing is horrible I scratched my car door this morning
opening my car door and hitting a snow banking where there shouldn't be one um it has nothing to do with our ability to hire and retain people to do the job it has everything to do with supervision and holding people accountable and we need somebody to do
that and I just whatever the shortest path is to that I say we take this action I would hire the person that you um have interviewed I would also say hire the person you've
interviewed and interested in the job are they qualified I think you have the direction of the committee are they ready to start uh I spoke with them uh after the last meeting and told them that uh everything was temporarily on hold until
we had this conversation at this meeting tonight because I knew that you were looking for central office level cuts um easier not to fill something fair enough as a cut than do I understand that I would say as to whether or not they're
qualified I would I would say that they they are qualified uh this would be um a bit of a career advancement move for this individual they've indicated that they're eager to learn and um develop
into the role um and went through two rounds of an interview with a panel okay um and uh everybody agreed that this individual would be a good
V you have Direction y good I don't want to spend more money but so again you it's a position we need to to fill we as a committee we save we need to vote a majority no there's no votes on this right now it's in the budget for it's just the
discussion position the other aspect is just going through the new Personnel cuts and restructuring proposals we can hit up a few or as many as we can um the North Middle sex merger is there any interest in North Middle sex merger no
seems like a great idea let's well hey look I asked for creativity and we got some creativity tonight so for whatever it's worth I just want to thank everybody like there was some creative think appr that came out tonight and I I think that that should be that that
should be applauded a job share position I I don't think so so let me say at a high level I think we first and foremost we need leadership right now and I don't think that part-time
superintendent or shared responsibilities in that role in particular um is anything that I would want myself or a future School Committee Member to have to deal with um it's already too big of a job for one person in my
opinion it's a lot too big of a job for 40% of a person so I I that's not I think we're on the same page that on that one or at least this the direction of the committee on that one um those was another one reducing uh director of special services the part-time no no
she's already moving on yeah again we can do this quick this is not uh hard uh eliminate director of teaching and learning position no no so I think that we need I think that there needs to be a conversation
about where we are with respect to the work that we've done in curriculum over the course of the last five plus years and what needs to be done over the course of the next one to two years um
a lot of feedback that I've gotten is we were stagnant for 10 years until 2019 when we when we staff this position we've done an enormous amount of work from here to there and revamped our curriculum and got the thing moving in
the right direction we've invested in coaches and all these things is there should we be focusing on other things that need to get fixed and not that and and I think that that's a fair question to ask and I I say this not
being an educator not knowing um but you know and I'm not saying that we eliminate the position I'm saying could it be Consolidated with other functions that we're that we're paying in the buildings and I I I'm asking that as a as a open and honest
question um I I can address a little bit of that I haven't taught a very long time and any school dist my school district that I taught in lost that position for a while and totally lost Focus um we
were everybody was doing their own thing and it it just did not work I think that position has to maintain however with what you said combining it with something else or adding I I don't know if that's a
discussion for another day I think but I think that that position curriculum is a living document you can't say we're done you're never done it it just doesn't work that way I think often times administration too takes on additional
roles as they get more experience too and take on more so I I don't know if you can I mean at a at a very distant level or a very high level what we are looking at doing is cutting a substantial amount of teaching
positions people who are in a classroom teaching kids 6 hours a day and to to make the case and I know I'm oversimplifying this and I'll probably get comments next
week Peters yes but I have but I have to I have to try to try to articulate this is that we're cutting the people who are doing the teaching while we're not cut the people who are telling the people who are doing the teaching how to do it right it's like that old picture that
you got where you've got like the guy shoveling in the ditch and you've got like seven supervisors around him telling him how to do it I I I I know this is an extreme example but I kind of feel like that's where we're at and I think we spent a lot of time tonight
talking about why we need to do that but that's what we're doing and and I I just and again this is the I'm back to my least you know my least bad uh decision here but I feel like that is a position that that we are put in yeah
and I think that um we can look at is a movie that you've seen before right this position was eliminated and not even a full 10 years after it was eliminated when I got
here we needed to do a lot of work a lot of work and we've worked to build the infrastructure to support the forward progress our thinking was we need to try to keep as much of
the infrastructure in place because if okay we got a little extra money next year it's easier to restore a teacher than it is to restore the the expert positions that built your infrastructure we saw what happened last
year we had a really difficult time when the univers specialist Coach position became open in October November we we offered the position to people didn't take it because of the pay
um and a lot of Educators don't like to transition once the school year starts um we did the best we could Without A literacy specialist driving the work we had a math specialist driving the math
work and we saw gains in math where the state was flat the state was flat in in ela and we were too so it it's not easy to to cut one of the positions that has some
expertise oh and if we have money next time we'll just we'll just hire some it they aren't easy jobs to fill all right I would like to keep going with the uh our list so I'm on slide 62 we've gone through almost everyone there but uh on slide 62 we
also have number four eliminate Director of Finance and administration position add an accountant position add HR Consulting contracted support for potential Savings of 55,000 yes I'm sorry can I go back that I don't love the argument that we
shouldn't cut a position because it's harder to hire for that position and it's easier to cut teacher it's that's not what I'm saying it's just that all right well let me clarify my thought that's that's what I'm hearing exactly what're let me
clarify I know he said move on I can't yeah a lot of stuff to doef very brief if we can restore a third grade teacher right there are more people with that kind of training available in the
workplace if we're looking for somebody that has the not just a license for for reading but experience and expertise in that there aren't as many of them it
it's it's a harder position to feel because there aren't the people it's just like if we lost a speech language pathologist that's a hard position to build there aren't as many of them out there that that's the that's what I was
trying to say that the the marketplace there just aren't that many people I I totally understand that having to hire people who are in difficult positions difficult uh skill sets skill set I I bring you back to the least bad decision
all right like to keep moving though so uh the next one was eliminate Director of Finance and administration position add accountant position and AD HR Consulting contracted support for potential Savings of 55,000 yes I think we could do that yeah I
would say yes I would like to better understand how that think we need function happens in particular I'm concerned about continuity of operations in our school district we're going to have a new
superintendent next year and if we are mucking with that role and bringing in consultants and a new person who is less qualified and has no Institution knowledge I think that that could be a
recipe for big problems and cost us more than it saves us um yeah I I hear what you're saying I I think we have talked about the fact that that job is really big for one person we've talked in the past about breaking
it into finance and it's the it's the timing of the it's not it's not the idea the idea is actually I think it's a really good idea to look at but you're right timing is a is another matter all right the next one is so definitely
table that one the next one is the slide 63 um reducing the number of assistant principles s sorry principles and actually this one's eliminating all eliminating all the assistant principles
yes all this was presented really confusingly I think we have a majority says no on that one slide 60 yeah so you want to talk more about eliminating all syst principles because 63 64 and 65 are all kind of 64
is different 64 is now saying eliminate one assistant principal at the High School Middle High School Curr down really fast and then you can kind of get a feel for it well again you can like multiple proposals that's fine you could like all the proposals cut all the
principles and assistant principles if you want so for what it's worth um I I really worry that like I I think that the idea of just going to a
principal in each school is an interesting idea I think the problem is is that there's just not enough time in the day to do chase after can't do it to chase after the discipline issues and the other stuff going on in the building right that's why a majority said no yeah
okay so the next slide 64 is to reduce just the lunenberg uh Middle High Middle High School assistant principal from three to two maybe yes I can see doing that I can see doing that he said we wanted more admin Cuts yeah we got to
get more yeah I think we have a majority on that one the next one on 65 slide 65 is reducing the assistant principal at the high school as well as removing the assistant principal at Turkey Hill and
primary no yes I would say no wait no that gets rid of all the assistant principls saying Laur you're saying oh that's no there would still be two at the Middle High School two at the two two at the middle high school but none producing one to two right and then we
removing turkey primary La you're no that's a very no so that's a no on the majority list slide 66 justce it's a summary it's a summary so we're good there 67 Athletics eliminating the athletic director
position yes I think we should table this I'm I'm really t on people we did this last year this is not going we it last year it was a no last year we have said no to cutting everything this is not how you get to a lower budget I think you're going to have a hard time running
Athletics we had this discussion before you're not going to have an assistant principal I had asked for numbers on if we got rid of the athletic trainer how much it would be because you're still paying for a trainer but not HED it have a per on have to do the perum and every
time I ask about it I'm told well there's going to be cost and so I think I think there are a few things that we need to we need to discuss here first of all is what are our total screen we what are our total athletic C really
um we've seen we've seen confusing information still when it comes to Athletics when it comes to substantial increases in busing for athletics whether it's in or outside
being covered by um the uh the revolving account or not it's been very difficult to follow that and understand what's going on and I say that as somebody who's pretty plugged in um when you look at athletic relative to the rest of our budget it is not as big but then when
you add Transportation it's big you know like I I I think we need to look we need uh we need to have a conversation about Athletics in a separate meeting that that talks about these issues I I don't think that in 2025 and
2026 we can run an Athletics program that includes both middle and high school sports with an athletic director that's running on a stipend and or a not having a trainer I don't think that those are
feasible I agree and and a new superintendent coming in I I just do you what is your thought I want to talk about the trying to get a majority somewhere I want to talk about the athletic trainer position because I just need numbers yeah what about the athletic director I don't I don't see
how we run anything without an athletic director especially with a new superintendent coming in who needs to learn how the district works all right athletic trainer um so the trainer is mandated for 11 varsity football okay four JV
football 11 hockey um and any Central Mass or MIAA playoff that ouram get how much does that cost a year we we'd have to figure out what the perdm rate or the
so we can table the Fig to get the numbers because I I agree that you know I don't think we can go without an ad but secretary can I can I just ask the question when did we create the athletic director position has this been an it
has had multiple iterations in the past where it's been a teacher who took it on there's been there been all kinds as a salaried non contractual non CBA covered employee decision was made the position
was posted for the first time when I arrived in the district but that decision was made prior to my arrival in the dist do our comp towns have athletic directors do what our comp all of our comp is a full the the the brief history on it is
it's been about 10 years maybe a little bit more and interestingly when that happened is the same time that we went to the $250 athletic Fe so they're very tied no skill yeah I have a I have a feeling there won't be savings to
cutting it if we then have to pay well that's I want to know and I think having a trainer in the school is a different culture than well I understand that Lit not having 30 kids we're cutting a lot of benefits as you say bad
decision and then secretary eliminate part-time secretary yes if we're keeping the atic I think if we're keeping the ad we can we can absorb that I would prefer to do the other but
yes yeah I I think so I mean we've got to cut something Nota $6 million this not not that no I think that's also I mean and again I think we need a more focused Athletics discussion like we had a
conversation tonight about Middle School sports we got a lot of feedback about Middle School sports there's a lot of talk on social media over the last few weeks about Middle School sports and it was interesting the the information that we got in terms of our actual carrying cost on Middle School sports but I can
tell you from talking to the ad he spends a lot of time on Middle School sport Middle School sports right A lot of it is just dealing with staffing issues and those kinds of things so like I mean I I think that it really needs to be looked at in its totality because it's more than just the carrying cost
for those individual sports all right moving on I'd like to go to slide 72 uh it yes um I'm okay with that part-time it technician was there an impact stat moving it technician to
part-time and it technician on call there I don't think that we did put an impact statement in for that I didn't see one no I'm okay with that potential savings 14,000 what was the Anthony and Carol you were yes so you have a
majority there uh the expensive program Cuts yes which number we on I think we're on the slide 73 maybe we go on the left side first expense line cuts on the left okay since I'm the one that proposed them I will
explain um briefly briefly extremely briefly um what I did those are not like some of those there are some like the music equipment repair um there's $1,000 left in that
line my thought was there were 12 kids in the band at at at the high school at the Christmas concert and because I counted and um $3600 in repairs for 12 kids is too much
money so that is that is what I was thinking and if we can't afford teachers we can't afford band Transportation but we don't have to cut all of these completely but that was my thought High School band and music
supplies what do you need for supplies like you have a library for music so you don't buy new like the are you talking about like those wood thingss should buying their own byy their own reads the only question I had was the red the reduced computer Consulting
contract if we don't have that is that going to be an issue so that's our custom computers um that's half that we would cut down to half okay how does what does that have to do with the is is there any overlap there with the
contract with the with the Consulting contract and the previous slide or is that just a different thing we have an IT consulting contract and we have a computer Consulting contract it's the same okay all right
okay so it's Our IT consulting it's custom computers we would just reduce the number of hours we'd cut it in half is there any opposition to the expense line F I'm a little concerned that we're cutting an IT Tech and we're reducing
our Consulting contract do you want me to look at a different level of redu instead of half or retain the T full time i' much rather different things they do much we get much more mileage
out of the Consulting Group yeah the network and stuff let's reduce the Consulting but I I just maybe reduce not all the way 25% instead of half or something okay and like the
the I don't know it's just that I always think that people don't need brand new stuff all the time right there may be some things that are absolutely vital like if there's no balls in the gym a lot of these I mean they need balls in the gym but you don't
need new scooter boards you know there's two stuck up in the rafters well there you go took care of it all right on the right side program Cuts Athletics and clubs I think we just go one at a time here uh cut replacement uniforms yes I can't imagine that makes a difference for one year all need to be part of that
discussion no just yes I think I'm good yes well I am a hard no on that I will I will tell you why if you want to listen to it or I'll wait till the next meeting not at 10:3 well then we should not be making the decision this tonight we should be having another meeting on
another day to talk this through tell us why you can have you can discuss it if you'd like if you feel like it's important we have a regular uniform replacement program for all of our high school sports just this past
year the football program attempted to raise money to buy to to buy the uniforms and they were told not to because there was a uniform replacement coming this year now we're going to tell them we're not going to replace the
uniforms we the old football uniforms I in my mind you just raise the fees you want to cut transportation and you're going to pull the uniforms and you're going to cut middle school and freshman coaches and you're going to cut a third of your coaches and you're going to cut and you're going to cut huddle I
mean let let's just cut Athletics and stop the madness because that's what you want to do Tony I have no desire to cut anything but I don't want to we move all right the next one was the middle school and freshman coaches yes pause for this
I think we need to pause for this okay we can table this for I think the athletic stuff we should have Mr Bigalow come he needs to talk about what can reasonably cut what sports he thinks may we may be able to cut he can tell us if
the football uniforms are falling apart and therefore need replacing or if it would be nice cuz it's our turn that's different that's different you know yeah that sounds good and I I think that that would be the way to go all right anything else on the
budget all right next item of the agenda is the superintendent search I put this on as a placeholder for any discussion uh there was one member that did reach out about the concerns over the timeline so we can talk about that if there is interest are we on
timeline uh I had sent out the timeline uh me and Carol were okay with it but one member concern and I guess I don't I did have a concern on the timeline because um the interviews are taking place according to that timeline which
we haven't totally firmed up yet at a time when I not available so if the interviews for the search committee are at a time I am not available then either one of two things happens either
um someone else will come and listen to the interviews for me from this group or I will bounce out and somebody will do the whole job which I would prefer not to do or or the committee could run with 11 and not 12 Comm can run with 11 and
not 12 at that time so that was my concern it doesn't have to be decided tonight but um just so people know that with that timeline I do have a major wi conflict which we the first week of April first week of
April I mean can we move it a week earlier I don't know so we can you well I think everything is kind of week by week so everything kind of has its kind of has its spot in order to be done this is the
recommended uh timeline from MC I think you should go with 11 or yeah or add a you get get go okay I can s
for okay Laura did you have any uh concerns about the timeline uh I really think we're cutting it close but the last one um the school committee made a DE decision at the end of of
May so all right we're not that far behind the election is May 17th 17th thank you yeah and we're supposedly done the first week of May and that'll give us also the second week of May if we have to All Right Moving
on next item of the agenda is reports we can can we yes we will table that unless there's any objection evening to take a motion all right next up is public comment if you have a public comment we won't table that no uh I'm
going to start with the public first I just want to make a comment that um I think I just want oh sorry yes Lauren P again 44 weding Street um we started off this meeting talking about priorities being kind of classroom learning I think was instructional
learning is what we heard I heard a few times and I liked to that term and I just would urge the committee and the superintendent to I think keep that in mind as you're looking at the budget I I know I think I heard um Tony say a few times you know we're not cutting enough we're not cutting and yet these are all really hard decisions and nobody
wants to cut anything nobody wants to cut Athletics nobody wants to raise fees nobody wants to cause Transportation but I would just ask that we try to keep in mind serving the most students serving our most vulnerable serving that Early Education that we talked about being so
critical as priority um and that's not going to make everyone happy and that's going to that's going to be hard places I would really urge people to look at that those transportation fees I think that we kind of went over a little quickly that if you looked at the slides there was a proposal of
70% usage of the transportation meaning 30% of the kids currently using the bus and would drop off was based on that estimate so 75,000 savings could actually be more than that if um if less people drop off which would be which would be nice if people need the bus but
it also may also save us a bus to the point if you're losing 30% of kids on the bus and you're saving 75,000 you would think you might be able to lose a bus so I I think that's just things to look at I think that's pretty standard in other districts I totally agree with Laura though saying that that may Target certain groups more but we also don't
want to raise fees so so I just I'm kind of ploring the the group here to really think about our priorities and these are really hard decisions um I I bothers me that I think I see kind of a disproportionate cut at that K through six levels in the classroom with the
ntss tutors and the teachers and I would love to see that be a priority for restoring those positions so and I also appreciate looking at the admin roles I think that that is hugely helpful so thank you thank you carara on Zoom hi I was the student council rep so
I'm Cara haritz 165 Gil street but I am not currently speaking on behalf of the student council this is like my comment um so earlier you guys had mentioned wanting student feedback on
the special activity fees and stuff so my thing when I was looking at that I personally have 1 two 3 four five six of the um of what was listed as a
special activity that would cost $450 which is more than any of the athletic fees were being raised to if I'm remembering correctly I think those are still being kept in the 300s um and on top of that two of them
are directly music related which is also another huge expense so I guess what I'm trying to raise the awareness to is that even though some things that we're providing are seen as they don't cost
anything to the students any student in banded has spent an insane amount of money to be in banded instruments cost a lot you guys were mentioning earlier reads and stuff reads are $50 a box you go through roughly a box per
semester so it's not like those kids aren't paying anything they just aren't paying anything directly to the school that's the end of my comment thank you car any other public comment from the
public that's seeing none I'll open up the public comment from the committee Mr beore um it's been a hard night um and I need to say something that's even harder for me to say um tomorrow morning I will be informing the Town Clerk and the
select board that I am resigning from the school committee effective 16 May um I spoke with the town clerk yesterday and the mechanics of this work such that if I make my resignation known
within a certain amount of time prior to the election the position can be uh made available on the ballot at the next election um my personal circumstances have changed rather dramatically since I
first joined the school committee um I've gotten married my family has expanded quite a bit um my family responsibilities have uh have changed uh and uh I also have recently taken on a new job and uh that job is
taking up a lot more of my time than than my previous job and I just need to manage my responsibilities better uh and and as a result of those changes I I just don't feel like I am
personally able to put everything that I want to put into the school committee um I've certainly felt that over the course of the last several weeks um and and certainly through the budget season I have done a fraction this year uh with
respect to the budget that I did last year and the year before that and um I I think that um I personally and my family and my colleagues and our school department uh deserve a a member that that can p put more into this than than
I am currently able to put into it um so um what that means is that we will have three vacancies on the school committee uh come May and I I think that that's also something for us to kind of think about as we look at schedules and what
needs to be done over the course of the next few months um I don't intend to retire from public service I will be back um but I do need to take a break uh and um so it'll be a little while but I I don't know how long so you're going to
be so annoying in public comment yep thank thanks for your service Peter thank it's been a pleasure any other public comments from the committee um I I do have I guess more of a question oh never mind we'll get to it
at the next thing topics for future discussion that's the question the next thing um do we need to meet for fourth oh no it's next week is we're meeting next never mind late for me to think
clear my question we go me what would you like to have on the agenda for next week I'm wondering if we need to have a different meeting so that we can just talk about what what Laura had said what is our three to five year plan I know that
three of us four of the people at this table aren't going to be here next year so then maybe we should wait to have that me until that changes I can't keep doing these cuts and looking at these these cuts are
untenable agreed I agreed I think we need to have a conversation soon with the select board on March 11th when is the deadline to put stuff on the warrant I'm sorry what when's the deadline to put stuff on the warrant March
17th usually so I think March 11th will be a good good time to meet okay cuz I'm just any other topics for your future discussion otherwise I'll look for a motion to adjourn at 10:43 p.m. motion to adjourn second all
right any discussion all in favor say