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Video-1: youtube.com/watch?v=Q0JOt80M15Y

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The school board meeting will begin in 1 minute. Please take your seats. Again, the school board meeting will begin in 1 minute. >> Good evening. The July 21st, 2026 special meeting of the Marion County School Board is called to order. The purpose of this special meeting is to

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receive the tentative budget for the 2026-2027 fiscal year, approve it for advertising purposes only, and schedule a public hearing on the tentative budget. Board clerk, please call the roll. >> Dr. Allison Campbell, District 1. Ms. Lori Conrad, District 2.

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>> Here. >> Dr. Reverend Eric Cummings, District 3. >> Here. >> Ms. Nancy Thrower, District 4. >> Here. >> Dr. Sarah James, District 5. >> Here. >> Dr. Danielle Brewer, Superintendent. >> Here. >> Mr. Jeremy Powell, School Board Attorney. >> Here. >> Thank you. Please stand for the pledge.

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I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Ms. Martina Young, can you

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please provide the proof of publication? >> The notice for the July 21st, 2026 special school board meeting was placed on the district website on July 14th, 2026. Proof of notification has been placed under proof of publication in BoardDocs. >> Thank you. At this time, I'd like to recognize our Superintendent, Dr.

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Brewer. >> Thank you. In accordance with Florida statutes, the board approved a budget presentation timeline on May 12th, 2026. For your convenience, an additional copy of the budget presentation timeline is being provided today and is in the front

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pocket of your budget notebook. At this time, I would like to introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Rios Welsh. Um, he will come to the podium. He will go into further discussion today and provide context for our tentative budget.

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>> All right. Good evening. >> Good evening. Chair James, board members, Superintendent Brewer, and members of the public. Uh well, what you have before you today is uh the tentative budget for the '26-'27

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school year. Um it is uh tentative as the name implies, which means that we'll be coming back here in just a short uh a few weeks to adopt the budget in September. Uh and this has been a pretty long journey. Uh this journey started shortly after um I came on board here as

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CFO. And uh in October we we hit the ground running with the a couple of different um objectives ahead of us. Uh the biggest um one was obviously having a balanced budget going into um this year, uh and also rolling out site-based

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budgeting, which means that we really wanted to double down on accountability in schools, allowing them to purchase units, uh but also um being much more transparent with the way that the budget is actually developed, particularly between the central office and all of

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the schools throughout the district. So, with that being said, um I would like to just briefly uh walk through some highlights uh for the tentative budget uh for this year. And so, this year we're presenting a $1.2 billion budget, and this is including

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all funds, including general funds. And this includes a carryover balance of $345.7 million, and that represents a decrease of about 6% or $78.7 million from last year.

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One of the things that I want to mention is that the taxable value of property assessed in Marion County um has gone up, which is usually a good thing. Uh most homeowners um always like to bank on that equity and expect that

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over time their homes are worth more uh than when they purchased those homes, whether they stay in those homes forever uh or they stay in those homes for a shorter period of time. Um in this case, our value has gone up by about 3.7

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billion dollars or 8.7% increase year over year. And we have a breakdown of 282 million dollars in local taxes. As the board is aware, the taxpayers in Marion County have to

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basically have some skin in the game. We call it required local effort in order for us to draw down and participate in the FEFP program, which is the primary financing program for Florida public schools. In that regard, we've raised 169.9

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million dollars in the general fund, 67 million dollars in capital outlay used for maintenance and construction of our facilities, which we'll be talking about more later on this week. And then of course, 44.7 million dollars in

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projected referendum funding, which we just had a meeting with the I-Crook committee to go through how that how those dollars are being spent and used in our schools to support our students. The required local effort

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decrease of 0.0260, total millage of 6.290. And I also want to mention that we have a total weighted amount of students at 54,389. But as you guys are aware, we have to

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take off the family empowerment scholarships, and that represents about 8,800 of that 54,000. And that number is is growing. And so we're continuing to monitor that because that number has

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increased quite a bit over the last few years. And in looking at this next year, we're looking at a total of 77.2 million dollars in FES related scholarships um that the board uh the district will basically uh take off the top in terms

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of revenue that then gets passed on um to those families participating in that program. A couple of other things that I did uh want to mention just to provide some additional context and some of the challenges that we've had um is a a

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couple of things. One is we rolled out site-based budgeting which obviously added another layer uh of of of of complications and really again uh trying to get everything to match in our system. Um but our staff did rise to the occasion and I'm glad that you know even

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through a transition myself coming in but also a new finance director and budget director we're still here today um delivering uh on time uh with our tentative budget. And so I do want to give a shout-out to the team and thank them for all their hard work this past weekend. As you guys know this time of

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the year is very compressed. We literally get the second calculation uh we got it late last week when we were off and we were working over the weekend to get the numbers analyzed and into our system and we also had some system changes and things went down but you

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know we we got through all of that. So big shout-out to the team for uh being resilient and powering through. Um but as we face those headwinds uh this past week we do have other headwinds that are before us and we know a lot of those are economic. We still have very high

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inflation right now in terms of what it cost to do business. We know that the state does not provide enough uh funding at that level to keep up um with inflation. So of course that's uh a major uh consideration. And then of course we're still dealing with uh the

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post-COVID era uh and looking at our staffing uh patterns and looking at uh how we do business and how we can be uh more efficient. And so as we take all those things into consideration, uh we know that this budget that we're we're presenting here today and we'll go

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into more detail next week, does provide, um I believe, a good starting point for us to begin those discussions about how we move forward uh in this next year. So, with that, um I really don't have any more comments

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on the budget as to say that there is a lot in here and I really look forward to answering any questions and of course next week uh we're going to get into a lot more detail as I call it the baby budget and presenting uh the tentative and then we have

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two scheduled work sessions in August. Uh we'll we'll go into the general fund, I believe, on the 6th and then we'll do all other funds on or around the 20th and then we also have another date uh scheduled in there just in case we we need to take advantage um of that. And so, uh we will have a

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very robust discussion and hopefully we'll get some some good questions. So, with that, I will I will pause and turn it back over to the chair. >> Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and take the motion and then we'll open it up for board discussion. May I have a motion to receive the tentative budget, approve it for advertising purposes only, and set a public hearing for

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Tuesday, July 28th, 2026 at 5:30 p.m. in the school board room? >> So moved. >> Second. >> A motion by board member Cummings and a second by board member Conrad. I'm going to open up the floor for discussion. Would anyone like to begin? Board member Thayer?

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>> Thank you. And and thank you, uh Mr. Rios-Welsh and your team and um Dr. Brewer for kicking this off. Um we've got multiple steps here. Looks like seven of them to go through before we

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actually get to the final approval of of this budget and I wanted to ask just one clarifying question. You mentioned about the pass-through dollars for the um education empowerment scholarships. What was that figure again? >> $77.2

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million. >> Okay, $77.2 million. So, >> It's going up. >> It's going out. So, technically that's not money that's not money we have to work with. >> No, ma'am. >> Okay. All right, I just >> siphoned off of the top. And and passed through. That's correct.

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>> All right, thank you. I'll look forward to especially our first work session in which is August 6th, where we'll begin to go >> Absolutely. >> All right. Reverend Cummings, do you have anything you wanted to mention on the budget right now? Okay. Well, member Conrad?

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>> I do. >> Thank you, chair. Um, Mr. Rios Welch, thank you for the presentation. Uh, for transparency purposes, I was hoping you could um, briefly run through this timeline so that it's stated for the record. Um, I know it gets a little wordy, especially on the second page, but if you could

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just give us a brief outline um, of what we're doing at each date. >> Yeah, one moment, please. Let me get my document. Uh, hold on one second. >> I have I have a copy if he needs it. I brought it with me. >> I think I have it here. This might be it. >> Hey, Jake.

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>> Miss Markham is going to help him. >> Yeah. >> Oh, wait, I got >> Budget calendar, right? Miss Markham is the director of budgeting and we're so grateful for all of her work this last these last few months. >> Oh, there we go. Okay, thank you. Okay, so I think we read this into the

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record before and I'm going to go ahead and and read it into the record again. So, skip on down to July 21st. So, we're going to receive the certified required local effort millage and rates from the Department of Education. That happened on the 19th, which puts us at the board

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receiving the tentative budget and approving it for advertising purposes only, which is today. And then we will move down um to the truth in millage advertising, which actually will happen on the 24th. So, we've already got that going, which you guys have uh notice of publication. And

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then on the 28th of July, the board will hold a hearing on the uh tentative millage rates and tentative budget, as I like to refer to it as the baby budget. We'll go through a abbreviated version um of that presentation on the 28th. And then on the 20 uh July 29th, tentative

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millage rate submitted to the property appraiser. Um and then on August 6th, followed by the 13th and 20th, we will have three um concurrent work sessions for general fund, all remaining funds, and then the latter will be reserved if need be,

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which is on August 20th. And then that'll round us out in September through October with the 8th of September, where the board will hold a public hearing to adopt the final millage rates, budget, and the final capital improvement plan, or capital

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plan. And then February 9th, the final budget is transmitted to the Department of Education no later than September 11th of every year. And lastly, October 8th, the truth in millage compliance certification

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uh to the Department of Revenue. >> Thank you very much, Mr. Welsh. I appreciate it. Anything else? >> That's all I have, Mr. Welsh. >> Okay. Well, um and this is simply to basically begin our discussion, which he's highlighted we're going to have over the next 6 weeks or so. So, I look forward

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to being a um a thought partner um along with our experts in the room who've worked diligently to get us to where we are. Uh and I feel confident that we are going to get a budget across the finish line that's going to put students first. >> Yeah, and I appreciate that partnership, and um certainly the the budget finance

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team does, and the work uh that we've been doing for a long time. We've been meeting weekly with Mr. Whitehouse, Ms. Morant, our superintendent Dr. Brewer uh has been in the room in every one of these very detailed um arduous meetings that have had to have some very difficult discussions.

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And so, that strategy is really um a collaboration and an outcome of the team really working together to figure out how we can solution a way forward um but with the knowledge that there's there's always work to do and we're going to get some more good work done uh

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this coming year. So, we look forward to the discussion. >> Wonderful. Board, is there any further discussion on the matter? All right. Hearing none, all those in favor say aye. >> Aye. >> Motion passes 4-0. The proposed budget will be posted on the Marion County School District

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website on Wednesday morning, July 22nd, 2026. Please be sure to bring the notebook with you to each work session and budget-related public hearings. And there being no further business, may I have a motion to adjourn? >> Motion to adjourn. >> A motion by board member Conrad. >> Second.

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>> A second by board member Thrower. All those in favor say aye. >> Aye. >> Aye. Uh motion passes 4-0 and we will adjourn at 5:46. Thank you.