##VIDEO ID:1VTZ2oDkFF4## Well, it looks like we're live now. Welcome, everybody, to tonight's discussion and presentation. My name is Chris Cram, the director of communications for Montgomery County Public Schools. I want to quickly turn it over to the president of the Board of Education, Miss Julie Lang and Yang and our superintendent, Thomas Taylor, to make welcoming remarks. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us tonight. I am Julie Yang, president of the school board. And I also want to take this time to acknowledge my fellow board member, Laura Stewart. Laura, can you wave so people see you? Thank you. Really appreciate everyone's here. You're here because you believe education is important for our students and our school system is important in our community. And we have that in common. My first experience with M.C.P.S. Budget was when I was a parent in the school system. At the time, the high school my children attended did not have a teacher for student who do not speak English as their first language. And that was how I started the advocacy work. And because our schools is important, I the intention then was to make schools work better for students and families, and that intention stayed the same now as a board member. So tonight we are going to do a couple of things. Our superintendent is going to go over his proposed budget. Our board staff, Miss Pettiford, will first talk a little bit about the timeline. And the last section of the evening will be Q&A. And I believe you can either type it in the Q&A session or space, or there's a way our staff can unmute you to ask your question. Board members are going to listen very attentively to your feedback, and that's going to help us make decisions. When we adopt the budget. So thank you again for joining us, Chris. I'm going to turn it back to you. Doctor Taylor, did you want to make some opening comments? I think Miss Yang nailed it. I just want to thank everybody for giving up time during your dinner hour. We it's a lot to take some time away from family. So we really appreciate you spending some time wanting to learn a little bit more about the budget process and also to ask pointed questions, because I'm sure you have them. With that, miss Patty, I think we're turning it over to you to get us started. And can we have the slide deck to please. Thank you. While the slides are coming up, I'm Shannon. Patty and I work in the board office. If we could advance to slide number. Thank you. All right, so as Miss Yang mentioned, I'm going to talk to you all a little bit about M.C.P.S. Overall budget process. Doctor Taylor is going to then talk about the overview of the M.C.P.S. Budget. And then we'll get into Q&A. Next slide please. Next one. All right. So on the screen are kind of six bucket items that most of you are likely familiar with in terms of the overall budget process. So for FY 26, like any other year, we start with our community forums in November, the superintendent hosts community forums and starts to finalize that budget. Then in December, the proposed budget is introduced to all of Montgomery County. At that point, the superintendent is taking what was given to them in terms of the board's priorities, has put that into the budget, and then presents their full proposed budget to the community. And then we get to kind of the monitoring and adjustment phase of budget season, if you will. During this time, the Board of Education holds work sessions. We had one this morning. All of the work sessions are televised and available to the public to attend in person or to watch online. In those work sessions, the board gets to ask additional questions and it helps to better understand the budget. After the third work session, today was our third work session. Then the board moves forward to their next board meeting where initial action is taken. So on February 4th, the Board of Education will be voting to tentatively adopt a budget right before that or during this this phase, the board also holds operating budget hearings at night for the community to come and talk about the budget, ask questions during their public testimony, but really so that the board can can really understand what folks in the community are looking to see in the budget, or perhaps not looking to see in the budget. After the board tentatively adopts that budget, then the budget is submitted. Once that happens, it goes to county council and the county executive. And that has to happen by March 1st. After that's done, then the board gets fully adopted or the budget, I'm sorry, gets fully adopted. If we could bring up the next slide, please. So while that seemed like a lot, there's even more things happening behind the scenes. And so we wanted to take some time to really focus on what happens behind the scenes tonight. Next slide. So the full process timeline now is in November. Those community forums are held. The superintendent is hosting community forums and wanting to hear from everyone in the county. At the same time, the Board of Education is communicating what it wants to see prioritized in the upcoming fiscal year budget. Then in December, the superintendent proposes their budget. Everyone in Montgomery County, Montgomery County, is invited to attend. Then we get into those work sessions that I mentioned. So the board holds between 2 and 3 work sessions. So work sessions are also televised and open to the public. The board holds two evening public hearings in order to get community feedback about what should be reflected in the budget, but that number two could become number three. If we didn't hear from everyone. Then in February, we move towards tentative adoption. So the board tentatively adopts the budget by the end of February, and that's sent to both county council and the county executive. Now, kind of behind the scenes, what happens outside of M.C.P.S. Is the county executive is doing their own budget review and then submits a proposed operating budget to the council by March 15th. Those proposed operating budgets are for everyone in the county, not just M.C.P.S. County Council then holds public hearings and deliberates on spending and revenue proposals for all of the county entities, including M.c.p.s. That happens in March and then in April, there are operating budget hearings for M.c.p.s. The Education and Culture Committee holds the operating budget hearings during their public hearing times regarding the M.c.p.s. Operating budget and other entities are also having operating budgets hearings at the same time. Next slide please. In May, the Council does their appropriation where they appropriate the final budget amount, depending on what that final budget amount is, the board may then advise the superintendent to make final changes to the budget based on that final number. So if for some reason that final number meant that M.c.p.s. Wasn't going to be fully funded in terms of what they asked, the board might go back to the superintendent and ask the superintendent to make additional cuts. The county council has to take action no later than June 1st. And then in between June 1st and June 30th. What then happens is the Board of Education approves the final FY 26 operating budget and submits that to County Council. Once that's done, once that is done, then M.c.p.s. Publishes the full and final operating budget that's available on the MCE website by June 30th. And I'm going to hand it over to Doctor Taylor now. All right. Thank you so much, Shannon. If you could advance the next slide and the next one after that, it's a little weird not having the controls for this. Do you want to talk about a few things. And we'll get into some of the nitty gritty here. We want to talk a little bit about our landscape, which is not particularly favorable to any budget expansion this year. Talk a little bit about strategy and some things that we are looking at going into the next several years. We'll go nitty gritty into the details and the numbers, and talk a little bit about our return on investment, and also in particular how you can help. I do want to point out that we do have another board member who is in our our evening presentation, and that's Pernille Suvarna, our student member of the board. So he is also listening as well. So thank you for being here. And thank you all for giving up time during the dinner hour to join us this evening and to ask good questions and to be a part of the conversation today, and to learn a little bit more about our budget process. If you could advance to the next slide very quickly. M.C.P.S. Is a great school system, and Montgomery County is a great place to live, work and learn. And we really do have a fantastic school system. But there there are some things that we need to be attentive to. The fact that we've got a little bit of disproportionality between the number of blue ribbon schools we have versus the number of national title one distinguished schools, is something that that is worth it for us to look at. I'd also love to see our our National Board certified teachers continue to grow, as that's a great, incentivized program to support fantastic educators who are working in our schools. Please advance to the next slide. A lot's been said in the community about how M.c.p.s has changed and how the demographics of M.c.p.s. Has changed, but the reality is that M.c.p.s really hasn't changed a whole lot, at least not in the last 20 years. Plus, M.c.p.s has always been, for the last couple decades, a very diverse school system. We've grown in our diversity, but we have always been a diverse school system. It's you have to go beyond 20 years for us to be less and less diverse in terms of our demographic space. But some things that have changed, that are significant are things like technology, how we teach, the size of our school district, the populations that we serve in terms of students with disabilities, in terms of our ESL population, these things have dramatically changed. And they've also changed the cost structure of public education and how we serve our students. We wouldn't use a rotary telephone to communicate today, and we probably wouldn't use an adding machine by today's standards to teach calculation, we would use much more sophisticated tools so that we can prepare our students for a more relevant working world of tomorrow. That's a natural thing. That's okay, but we need to evolve to go along with that next slide. Another element, and I alluded to this earlier, is that even though our population in terms of the number of students is relatively flat over the last few years, our our student body is changing. We have more students who are learning English for the first time, and more students who are receiving more services. That calls upon us to make some changes to the structure of how we have things in the school system. So this this definitely reflects some of those changes over the last five years. Next slide please. Something that also has changed pretty dramatically in the last three years is coming out of the pandemic. Students who are eligible for our free and reduced meals, free and reduced meal price price meals have grown dramatically. This has also had an impact on our school environment in terms of making sure that every student has access to materials and supplies that are going to help them be successful in schools. This is also a budget driver for us, and making sure that we have equitable access to programs. So things like transportation, extracurricular activities and academic programs are in various places throughout the county where they can have the kind of impact that we really want to see. Next slide please. Another unfortunate part of our landscape has to do with performance. And we are all over the place when it comes to literacy performance. We have a lot of room to grow in this space. And different reporting categories of our students perform differently. That's not a surprise, but it is a challenge and it is a disappointment. Next slide. Same can be said for next slide please name. Same can be said for mathematics. Next slide please. But we can't blame this all on the pandemic. Our poor performance actually predates the pandemic, and growing at a percent a year is not really what we would call a growth that we would be proud of. We do have some things to focus on that reflect how our students are performing, and it's difficult to because when we are looking at these things through multiple measures, we perform well on evidence of learning measures and then not well on on MCAT measures. The outside world is really looking at us through MCAT measures, and MCAT measures are third party validated measure. It makes it tough to say that our students are performing at acceptable levels. Next slide please. Same can be said for mathematics, except it's a little bit worse. Our trickle is really going in the wrong direction and our recovery efforts really need to start taking some root and showing force in the next couple of years, or else our kids really are going to have generational impact from, from this performance. Next slide please. So how do we get out of this mess. How do we focus on things that need to happen in the classroom so that we can get better? I have a few strategies that I want to highlight. Next slide please. And it really all begins with aligning a little bit of the basics of our values, some goals that we have and the resources that we have available. We're going to spend a lot of time tonight talking about the resources that we have available, because they are going to present as being very stretched thin, and they are particularly based on the way that we're set up and how we need to operate moving forward. Ultimately, we need to be aligned in a in a way that in the things that we think, the things that we say and the things that we do, that they all line up with our values and our goals. Today, President Yang and I sent a message to our community and to our staff about our values, and that needs to be present also in our budget document as well. And that we see our values represented in our budget document. The tricky part with budget documents is that you also have to prioritize, and that you can't have everything. And that's a real pain point, especially when you've gotten used to things that that have really benefited the school district and have benefited the school district over a period of time. That was very difficult, like the pandemic. And you had a pandemic revenue source like Esser. And then when that money goes away, you have to evaluate what you need to keep and what you need to deprioritize it doesn't mean that it's less important. It just means that some things might be more important. Next slide please. In a sense, our goal here is to keep the main thing the main thing. And when we met with a group of students earlier this week at our other budget town hall event at Paint Branch High School, they nailed it. In terms of the main thing, they wanted to be well prepared for the next phase of their life. They wanted to have the resources in their classroom that would make them successful. They wanted their schools and their principals to be well supported. And that message came through loud and clear to us. And that really is the main thing. Next slide please. I have a few other strategies that I want to highlight, like how on earth we're going to we're going to do this. If you haven't read the Bethesda magazine article from this fall, that was about M.C.P.S. Losing its edge. It's a it's a pretty robust article about grading policies and things that we've put in place post pandemic that may or may not have served our students very well from an academic and from a social standpoint, and how some students might game our system a little bit to leverage a better GPA. The reality is, is that we do have some low expectations in terms of our students and their performance, and we could hold them to higher expectations for attendance and performance. But we do need to also create the scaffolding and structures that that support that. Aligning our curriculum assessment, instruction, evaluation and professional development to support that as well. We will not be successful by any measure if we don't invest in team M.C.P.S. Our associations have reached a preliminary agreement with us that that request 3.25% plus a step in terms of their wage increase. This is in line with county government. Our best strategy for recruiting the best folks to come to M.c.p.s. Is keeping the best folks and M.C.P.S. And even though we are going through, you know, pain, painful reorganization and restructuring, it doesn't mean that the folks on our team aren't aren't valuable or aren't important and that there's not a place for them in M.c.p.s because we have plenty of work to do. And we need all the help that we can get. But in making an investment in our team is going to be absolutely critical. Our students can't thrive unless they're coming to safe, welcoming and supportive and inclusive environments. That is an absolute critical, must have step in the learning processes that are learning environments be second to none. We have some improvements to make in that space. Speaking of improvements, the best way that we get better is through continuous improvement. If we get incrementally better every day and in a very short period of time, we will be at the levels of excellence. Next slide please. The last three things that I want to highlight in the in our approach have to do with how we are going to shift to support schools. It's hard to envision if you haven't lived this, and it will be hard for our team to envision what our future might look like in a different model, where we are supporting schools in a very intentional way, but doing so in teams that are regionally aligned to specific needs of a particular cluster. This is a big shift. It's a big change. Lots of people love the idea of change until change shows up at your front doorstep, and it will be a learning process, but ultimately providing adequate levels of support for our schools is what we need to be about. We need to be focused from our organizational standpoint on how we support schools. We get it right when we lift up our students and their manifold differences, and we support our kids regardless of their learning needs. And that really needs to be a part of the equation as well. And finally, the least exciting, arguably the most painful and difficult for us to pull off is snapping back into a position of good fiscal stewardship, managing our resources very well, establishing and maintaining internal controls in which we are good stewards of our resources that we have. We are going to be in a very tough position this year. There's no way to sugarcoat it. This is a very large ask of our county government, and in all likelihood, we will have to revisit this budget again in very meaningful ways. And it will be tough. But our reality is, is that we need to think long term about the goals that we have and where we want to go and how we might get there over time. This will require sacrifice, this will require change. This will require us giving up some aspects of our work. But hopefully we'll will ultimately lead to good outcomes in our classrooms. Next slide please. We have great improvements all over the district. As a matter of fact, there are bright shining parts in every aspect of the work that's happening in m.c.p.s. You don't have to go very far to see something amazing happening. One of the things that will help us improve overall is making sure that we're pointing all in the in in one direction. We sometimes have really great activities, engagements and things that are happening that sometimes compete with one another. We may have this outstanding support for students that helps them with their social and emotional skills, and helps them cope with some of the challenges of being an adolescent today. But if they're pulled out of class 50% of the time to make that happen, we can see how some of those things can kind of compete, that there's a little bit of a hyperbole in that. Don't take that as a specific example, but but it is symbolic of some of the challenges that we have in trying to make sure that we are all pointing in one direction with our improvements, and that we are trying to accomplish a same set of goals. Next slide. Okay. So let's dive in into what's actually in the budget. Next slide please. This is a quick reminder that as robust and as significant of a request as this is, this is actually not a budget of cake or or a budget of happiness. It's actually a budget of sacrifice. Next slide please. I've used the metaphor that this is a budget of broccoli, namely because I'm not a particularly large fan of vegetables. I'd rather eat cake, but and broccoli just happens to be not one of my favorites. It's one I will definitely tolerate, but it's not at the top of the list, and it is something that I know I need to eat because of the nutritional value. I know I need to do this because it's important, but it's not something I'm electing to do. Next slide please. The major tenants of our broccoli budget have to do with shifting resources away from our central services and into schools, a strategy that is focused on the fundamentals, practicing exercise and exercising good fiscal stewardship and sharing that information out when we have it available. Next slide please. The budget is broken up into five parts. But before I jump into those five parts, I also want to reiterate that the Board of Education set some priorities and set me on a direction to establish the budget, and I'm glad that we've met those priorities. Next slide please. I want to move along so that people can ask questions. The budget is divided into five parts that will review tonight. The budget itself is, you know, tens of thousands of lines of information. It's a big thick binder worth of, of detail. This is really just the summary of changes, which is an easy, user friendly kind of guide to go through. And the five sections that we'll review tonight are revenue changes to the base, our non-discretionary expenditures, which are the things that are driven by contracts, law, regulation and policy. Our blueprint expenditures and our discretionary expenditures. And so we'll jump right in with revenue. And unfortunately this is probably the ugliest part. So next slide please. And it's that first few lines. About two thirds of our revenue is made up. Roughly two thirds is made up by our local funds that come from county government. And just a little over a quarter of our revenue comes from state sources. Our state revenue is very formulaic. It is driven by an ability to pay index. And it is follows a state funding formula. Our county funding is largely discretionary in the sense that they have some choice over how much that they give the school system, as long as it's above the existing maintenance of effort. Our request is significantly above the maintenance of effort to sustain us. One of the challenges that we have with this particular budget is that our state funding formula is largely driven by our enrollment and the number of students that we have, and that really is not projected to change a whole lot. We are not a school system that's growing rapidly in some parts. You may even think that we're a school system that is actually shrinking a little bit. That is something that does have an impact on our revenue and our ability to pay our bills. And it is completely conceivable, although not likely, that we could actually shrink or have the exact same amount in our budget, which would be pretty catastrophic. And I hope to make the case as to why that would be tonight. Next slide please. Here's the bleak part. We're making a pretty significant ask of our county funding partners, our county council of an additional $285 million, bringing our request from 2.1 billion to 2.4 billion. It's a big jump. It's a big jump, and it's representative of our needs. I feel confident about that. And truthfully, we could be in a place where we could reasonably ask for a lot more and absolutely not even come close to meeting all of our needs, our state revenue. We are projecting some increases, and this number will actually change a little bit over the weekend. Between now and when the board reviews its budget for consideration on Tuesday. The reason that it will change a little bit is that the governor has actually proposed more state revenue that would impact Montgomery County. Yay! The downside is that the governor's budget also encumbers more of that revenue and earmarks that revenue to go to things that weren't in our budget. So this is a little problematic for us because even though the there is additional revenue, all of it gets eaten up by other things that were not in our our budget. They do provide us some interesting opportunities, like for example, the governor's budget included more community schools, and there is definitely a need to support some more of our schools in the community schools format. And that means that we would be hiring more staff for some of those schools to meet those needs. That's definitely a part of that as well. You may be wondering a lot about the federal line. This is something we are very concerned about. Our our federal revenue did go down a little bit next year, and that is a largely an enrollment based number as well. The big question mark is what will our federal revenue look like next year, and what changes can we expect in federal revenue in the in the coming couple of years tied to changes in the federal administration? And so a lot of that is a big question mark for us. And it's very concerning. Our enterprise funds. This is everything like food food and nutrition services. Pretty critical part of our business operation. Other sources have to do and we collect fees or we have some kind of collection that comes in. It's a very small part of our budget. Next slide. Next slide please. The next big section of our budget are changes to the base. And this is something that we shared with our board today. Next slide. And this is tough. There's no way to sugarcoat it. Anytime that we're making a reduction we've made commitments to things that were important to us a few years ago and things that have been important to us for a while, and changing our approach and changing our strategy. This is difficult, and people no doubt will feel some kind of way about this. The only solace that I'm going to offer at this time, because I'm sure this will show up in questions too, is that we certainly have more than enough work for folks to do in M.C.P.S, and we're committed to our team and want to make sure that we've got folks in play in different parts of the organization, even if it may not be in the role that they're in today. We are making changes to the structure of our organization and how we do business. This is reflective not just of us trying to be a little bit more efficient and a little leaner, but also changing the work itself, deciding what work we will do and what we will let go of and rebalancing some of the workloads of our very hard working central staff. Next slide please. The next section of the budget has a lot. This is our keeping the lights on budget. I'm not going to go line by line with this because candidly we would be here all night. But I do want to highlight some really significant and important stuff. The most significant stuff. Next slide please, is the biggest part of our ask, which is our employee compensation and benefits. Two thirds of our request of county government is our employee benefits and compensation. And this is money well spent. Our educators and staff and leaders work very hard. And it is a difficult and expensive place to live in Montgomery County, or in a close by area, to afford to live in Montgomery County and to work and to give service to this community. Making sure that that our staff can, can make it from paycheck to paycheck, from point A to point B, it's absolutely essential in terms of recruitment and retention, that we continue to be a leader in compensation. And truth be told, being a leader in education compensation is being no leader at all. This is an area that definitely could be improved a lot over time. This is a very reasonable request from our associations. They did a very thoughtful job of working with us to come up with tentative agreements that really will will help. Something I'm not particularly proud of and that I'm not excited about. But we have to do it is our employee benefits fund has really, really fallen into disrepair and has not been managed very well over the last several years. We have a gaping hole right now in our employee benefits plan. We are a self-funded insurance system and we have an $80 million hole that if we did nothing about it, would become a $165 million hole next year. I am encouraged by the collaboration and work of our associations to try to come up with a plan to fix this, and the reality is, is we won't be able to fix this all in one year. The ask is just too, too big. But what we can do is we can stabilize the plan and put enough in to support cash flow for the next couple of years so that we can solve this within a two year time window. Next slide. Probably one of the hardest things to explain in the budget is salary lapse and turnover. This is a great accounting strategy for 1 or 2 years. It's a terrible long term accounting strategy essentially. And this is really what it is, is that when you have a vacant position, whether a temporarily vacant position or long term vacant position, where does the money go that's been budgeted for that position? Well, it just kind of sits there. And the accounting trick that is often used, and it's a very appropriate thing to do in a short period of time, is to use part of that money that sits there and apply it to another project. The problem that we're in right now is that you eventually have to go back and restore those funds back to their original intent. Otherwise you are effectively spending the same dollar twice, or you're budgeting for the same dollar in two places, which you can't do. So long term, we really do need to fix this over the next several years. It's a big $75 million hole in the budget. And what we are trying to do is it's reflected as a -$65 million in the budget document. What we're really doing is we're taking the $75 million hole, and we're making it $10 million less in that hole. So it's still -65 million that we've got to close that gap. I know that that one's a little tricky a little confusing, but it's important to kind of know some of the nuance of that. And that that was a really good strategy last year and the year before that, to try to try to solve some of the budget woes. But the problem is, is that you do have to go back and fix that. Paraprofessionals absolutely critical to our success as a school district. Paraprofessionals have a wide range of job responsibilities, everything from academic supports to behavioral supports to toileting supports. I mean, it's all over the place. Anybody who works with a paraprofessional knows that these are incredibly hard working and dedicated teammates, and reclassifying their positions one at a higher rate of pay and then two to differentiate to account for those differences is critically important. So we wanted to honor that request from SEIU to complete that study and to include that in the budget. And it's money well spent. Next slide please. Special education a couple of really big investments here. I'm certain we're going to get questions from everything from, you know, changes to autism programs centrally to infants and toddlers and, and how on earth are we going to support these programs? Well, we are definitely making big investments in special education and moving a lot of our centralized support to our our chapter one supports, as articulated in in the budget and making sure that special education has the positions that it needs to fill some of that gap. This will not actually improve our our staffing ratios. I want to be very transparent in saying that, but what this will actually do is that we'll be able to staff to the ratios that we actually say that we staff at. So a lot of our changes in special education really reflect us aligning our ratios and aligning our budgets. Actually, a lot of our budget is about aligning things to actuals. Sadly, our emergent multilingual learners and our Eld teachers, they're in the same boat. Granted, it's a much less substantial investment because we were less off the mark. Even general education teachers and principals and folks that are in a schoolhouse on a regular basis, you have felt the pain of being as understaffed as we are. What this looks like, and you may be wondering from a, from a special education standpoint, is that we have 188 instructional positions. For the most part, our teachers, some of our specialists spaces in in that as well. And then 500 para educators and special education. The majority of those paraeducators because you may be thinking to yourself, how on earth are you going to hire all those people? Of the 500 para educators, 366, if I'm not mistaken, maybe 360 are already TPT employees that we would be extending to full time and offering benefits. These TPT employees are part time employees, are in some of our toughest learning environments and need a lot of support. They are also receiving the lowest wage and we have a high turnover in that space. So making sure that we are shoring that up on a high level is going to be particularly important. Next slide please. Big budget ask but really important something that is a shared experience. Unfortunately in M.C.P.S. Has a lot to do with our facility maintenance and making sure that our facilities are up to where they need to be. The reality is, is that this is a almost a $180 million hole in our budget. We haven't really kept up with ongoing maintenance. I'm not talking about big renovations. I'm not talking about new school construction. I'm talking about just the maintenance and upkeep of our buildings is we should be spending for a district our size. We really should be spending and catch this. It'll be a big number. We should be spending almost $180 million a year on upkeep. And so when you walk the halls of our schools today, a lot of which were built in the 1950s, renovated in the 1980s and 90s and haven't been touched since. You can definitely see where $180 million can go in ceiling tiles that need to be replaced, floor tiles that need to be replaced, sinks that need to be replaced, light switches that need to be replaced. Pipes that need to be replaced, roofs, windows, HVAC units, you name it. All of that is terribly expensive. And the sad reality is, is that we haven't made big advancements in facility maintenance over the last several years. We are we really are in quite a state, a very dilapidated state right now. And this is really going to be a project that we're going to have to invest in, really for the next several years. It's not going to be something that we can do in one year and say, oh, we did maintenance. It really is going to be something that for the next decade, we're going to have to be committed to adding to a fund over time to dig out of this hole. And it may even be years before we see the fruits of that, that progress. Next slide. Please don't worry, we're closing in on the end here. There is a whole bunch of stuff that we didn't touch in the in the nondiscretionary part. Just as a reminder, non-discretionary means the stuff that's either required by law, required by a contract, required by policy, or required by some kind of regulation. A good example of something that was non-discretionary that we didn't talk about is our electric bill. We pay over $40 million a year for our electric bill. That may seem like a lot of money, but given the amount of square feet that we have in M.C.P.S, we actually have a pretty good rate. Our rate is better than the rate that you pay at home, unfortunately, and we get a volume discount. What can I say? But we are expecting an increase that's pretty substantial, an 8.5% increase in our utilities next year is going to is going to turn out to be over $4 million for us. It's going to be really significant. Pretty pretty tough number to contend with something like Chromebook repairs. You'll see in our budget. This is one of those pain points too. That's a little embarrassing. I'm a little little pained to say that we're going to be spending more and more millions of dollars on Chromebook repairs. The reality is, is that we are actually not spending more on Chromebook repairs, but rather we haven't been budgeting for it the way that we should, and that there's some things that we need to do in terms of investments in Chromebook repairs that would that would keep us up to the level that we have already spent. We were using some of the federal Covid Esser money to balance that out. But now all of that's gone. And so now all that money needs to come to our operating budget. All right. This next section and we're closing in on the end. Here is blueprint. Next slide please. Blueprint expenditures this year are tied to the Maryland's Blueprint for the future and is about $11 million in expected expenditures this year. We've already tagged about $40 million worth of expenditures to blueprint. The reality is, is that we actually could tag a lot more things to it, because they're so integrated into things that we've done. But the way that blueprint wants us to connect dollars, it's 40.6 million, which is still a big investment. Next slide please. The blueprint is broken into pillars. The first two pillars are are pretty significant. I can even admit as a K-12 person that pre-K is where it's at. And it's a great investment to make sure that our youngest learners come to school kindergarten ready. So making an investment of 28 classrooms and enhancing our our pre-K space is a part of the blueprint mission. And it hopefully will pay dividends for generations. But it is expensive. These these classrooms have a low teacher to pupil ratio which makes them very expensive. And we just need to be mindful that this big investment is something that we are taking away from the K-12 space in order to fund something else. The next big section is reimbursement costs to earn and maintain the national board certification. Gladly. We think that this is a great initiative and we'd love to even expand this category even further to encompass other employee groups that have national board certification. We're working out some of those details and some of those finer points for the future. I know that that's a pressing issue for a lot of our folks, because they want parity for what our educators also have. Next slide please. Pillar three is college and career readiness. Not going to lie this one burns a little bit. Not because we don't want to pay for AP and IB testing fees, but we don't know that that's the most equitable use of dollars in in the blueprint right now. The blueprint requires that we pay all AP and IB testing fees, whether the student shows up to take the test or not, whether they have a financial need or not. We still pick up the tab for this. This is one of those things that's like, right idea, maybe not the best application. So it's something that that definitely concerns us a little bit. And it's something that we would love to, to make sure that our students who need the test fee covered, that we cover it. But those who don't need the test fee covered, we could use that money elsewhere for sure. Next slide please. The last section of the budget are discretionary items. These are the things that we have choice that there's no one really telling us what to do in this space. These are ideas that we think would enhance the school system in a meaningful way, and that we've prioritized in this budget to move forward. So next slide please. And I'm just going to highlight a few. But they're they're pretty meaningful. You may have seen this in in other places. And actually there's a chart a couple slides later that will detail what our, our differentiated school based allocations might look like. But the, the days of not having enough materials and supplies need to come to an end. Educators really shouldn't be digging into their own pockets to provide basic materials for their classroom, and we can do a much better job of targeting some resources to student populations who need it most. And we think we got a clever way to start that ball rolling. It won't be the first year that we make an investment in this space, but it is something that we see as as particularly important. We do see the need for additional security, adding security assistance isn't the only way to make our school safe. It's not. There's actually a lot of strategies that we need to put in place to make our schools safer places, but this is a really good start. And it is a it is a place where we need to make some investments. Next slide please. And we would need to do that over time. You may have heard a lot about our boundary study. We do need to follow that up with making sure that when we do open Woodward Crown and Northwood and their new locations, that we have programs that align to student needs and that there's equitable access to those programs. We do need to do a way more comprehensive approach of the programs that lead into secondary programs, so that we do this right. Unfortunately, the clock is ticking. Those schools are going to open in August of 2027, and for us to have our ducks in a row for any changes that might occur, we really need to have those things thought out very well, at least a year plus in advance, which doesn't really give us a ton of time. This is a really pressing priority and something that that really can enhance the learning environment of our young people, but we want to make sure that our kids have access to programs that interest them and a really meaningful way. The students that we talked to a couple nights ago, they were there because they wanted to advocate for more equitable access to programs, making sure that we have menstrual hygiene products in all of our restrooms is actually a state law. So you may be wondering, why on earth is this not a non-discretionary expense versus a discretionary expense? Well, that state law doesn't compel us to pay for it. They just tell you to do it. The reality is, is that our principals have been picking up the check for this and have have eaten into their materials and supply line to pay for this $100,000 is not going to go very far. I'm just going to tell you that right now, this is a paltry amount to spend in this space. But what what we are doing with this and many other things is we're trying to make a small investment so that over years we can add to this investment over time, and that we're not sticking our county government with one big bill to cover everything all at once. Next slide please. So this was that chart that I was talking to you about in terms of our equity add on. And we've got two like schools here in elementary, middle and high that are worth taking a look at. They're both similar in size except that there are some student population differences. And our current allocation system, the way it's set up today is that you get a set dollar amount times the number of students that you have. That's what you get. The downside is, is that really hasn't changed a whole lot in the last 20 years, except a lot has changed in the last 20 years in terms of the materials and supplies needs, in terms of our student needs, in terms of inflation, the value of that money has continued to go down, but yet that dollar figure has really stayed the same. It's nuts. So we really needed to come up with a system that would be a little bit more responsive to the differences in each school community. Again, this is not a solution. This is a starting point, but we wanted to take into account the fact that schools with high farms rate high M.L. High students with disabilities, that we added an equity add on for those students as well. And so the differences look like this. Every school sees an improvement in their materials and supplies line. One of the things that the board has asked is that we create guidelines for how to spend these funds so that they get directed to the right place. I think that that's a great idea, and we will absolutely do that. But you'll see how some of our schools who really need it could really benefit from the extra scratch. And we're pretty confident that this can be a pretty big difference maker in terms of the quality of education that our educators can make in the classroom when they are outfitted properly. Next slide a couple of paired initiatives here have to do with serving students not in the regular education space. Our pre program you may have heard an awful lot about. This has been a program that we've kind of piecemealed stuff together from different parts of the budget. And, you know, this is a big initiative for us because what we want to do is we want to solidify something in the budget and make it real and permanent, and we want to enhance it. We want to make sure that more students have access to this program. And if you're unfamiliar with Ccri, it's fantastic. It it offers students two nights out of the week opportunity for language improvement, as well as GED preparation, and then two nights of the week. It's focused on career and technical education industry certifications. The students get a really broad range of support, and this is something that we really do need to put in place because our students who run out of time and can't get that diploma within Maryland's allowable time frame, the alternatives are not great. And we need to think more comprehensively about how we can enhance our community by investing them in them in a meaningful way. The next one is our blended online and distance learning. We see that there's great utility in virtual learning, that there's great opportunities that we're not capitalizing on. And this year we had to piece together a really incomplete program for some of our students who couldn't access the school day. We needed to put something together that that would meet their needs. And I and I'll be honest with you, it's not it's not great. Our our educators are working very hard with a, with the small group of students that are engaged in this program and our blended learning program for home and hospital for extended times, but it could be a lot more robust and it could be a lot more high quality. And the difference maker is a small investment. And this really could make a difference for a lot of kids. Next slide. So that brings us to kind of the conclusion here about what our request is, what the increase looks like. And it's pretty robust. It's a it's a big increase of $296 million and 285 of that 296. We're going to request from our county government. That is a monumental and pretty historic request. And next slide please. The reason that it's big is because our needs are big. We have some financial things that we need to correct. We need to invest in our people. And we definitely need to keep momentum going. This is a budget filled with sacrifice. This does nothing to improve our class size. This does nothing to speak to innovation. What this is, and a lot of ways for being as big of a budget as it is, is a is an in a lot of sense, a status quo budget. And that's that's not exciting. And it's hard to get get excited about something like that. But it does reflect our needs. And to me, that that's what's important is to reflect what our needs actually are and not to hide behind something that's that's not correct or false. Next slide please. Very briefly I want to talk about a couple of commitments and give you some visioning about where we might go in the future. Next slide please. You know, knowing what this budget is going to do for your student or what this budget will look like for your kid in the classroom is really important. A lot of it has to do with shoring up our budget to make do on the commitments that we've already made. We have ambitious goals. We desperately need to see improvements across the board in a number of areas, whether it's safety or whether it's academic performance or whether it's customer service to our principals and schools and to our educators. We have a lot of room for improvements, but you need to be able to see your kids classroom in in this budget as well, and that that's really important. Next slide please. So we've made a couple of commitments and they're they're pretty pretty big audacious goals for the future. We are need to be able to stand behind our diploma. And I'm very proud of the fact that hanging on my wall over there is a diploma from Montgomery County Public Schools. And that should mean something. And that we are crediting that experience in a meaningful way and that that we believe in, that our graduates have a certain level of academic attainment and that we can stand behind. It is really important. Next slide. This is probably more important. Every student in our school district needs to be able to walk into a top tier school. And we have a lot of great schools. We have a lot of four and five star schools, but we have a lot of schools that are not four and five star, and they may be not four and five star for a whole host of reasons. There's a bunch of our schools that that miss the four star rating on a technicality. It's really, really annoying. But at the same time, every parent needs to be confident that they're sending their child to a place that's safe, welcoming and inclusive, and that their kids are going to get a great education. Every student needs to feel loved, valued, seen and appreciated and prepared for the next phase of their life. And this this is also a big and audacious goal. But but it's attainable. And it's one that we absolutely need to set our sights on and be focused on. Next slide. This budget is missing a lot. I'm certain that there are folks on our team who are like, you're not investing in me. You just cut my position in Central office. And that may be true, but we are investing writ large in trying to build the best team we can with the resources that we have, and to try to make sure that the folks that even though they they may be displaced in the moment, have a place on our team if they want one and that they do feel engaged and supported. That's very important to me, even in moments where we're we're all mad at each other, something that is particularly important is making sure that we put ourselves on a path to fiscal stability, and that we repair the things that are broken, like our employee benefits plan. This is going to be critical. We will not be able to offer benefits successfully unless we fix this. And that is essential for our employees. It is essential for us to have a thriving school system that that our employees need the comfort of knowing that when they go to the doctor, that they can get service the way that they need to. You're going to see a lot of things in the future that are tied to multiyear plans and tied to our strategic plan. That's really important as well. We have a lot of work to do in some really complex spaces, like how we serve our multilingual learners, how we serve our students with disabilities, how we fix our facilities. These are all the beginning stages of really, really big things that we need to do. And they require an investment. The sad reality, friends, is that is that not investing in this space is not going to make these problems go away, and investing only a paltry amount in some of these spaces is effectively a drop in the bucket that dries before you can ever utilize it. And we do need to be very intentional about where we invest and how we invest, so that we get a great return on that investment. Next slide please. Some questions that you may be asking are how can you help. Well there's a step that's actually missing here. And part of that is tonight. And it has to do with sharing your thoughts with the Board of Education, sharing your thoughts with your state legislators and county lawmakers as well. Next slide please. And we're closing up here. I promise you we're going to get to the fun stuff. The questions soon. If you were wondering how to get in touch with your county council member and the county executive, we took care of that for you. If you need to do a screenshot or a photo or what have you, this slide deck will also be online. We'll make sure that you can have access to it as well. Next slide please. Our delegation is in session right now. And I will say that the General Assembly makes decisions that influence the money that M.C.P.S. Gets. They need to know what's important to you and what's a priority and, and how best to represent you. This is particularly important that you you make your state delegation know what what matters to you. Next slide please. So with that we're going to pause here. And we're going to close out the slide deck portion. And we're going to jump to the to the Q&A. And Chris I can quarterback Q&A or you can quarterback Q&A. What what would you like to do. Well I presume you can see our attendees online. Let me just get it started for you by reminding folks that if you raise your electronic hand, we will go to you in order. It would be great if we had your name. So if you're able to change your zoom name to a name we can refer to, that would be wonderful. We also have a number of questions in the Q and A and Doctor Taylor, president Yang maybe we could start there. Do you want to do that? Yeah, I'll jump in with that. And I'll, I'll touch on some of the questions. I do want to post a couple of reminders for folks. Please do your very best not to refer to specific individuals or specific personnel. Try to keep it high level if you'd like. Please make sure you throw in an email address. If we don't get to your question or we don't answer your question fully or satisfactorily, we want to make sure we give you a very detailed response to your question. Please include an email so that we can respond back to you and give you a more thorough response than than probably what you got. It actually might help us some. And we'll we'll get to McDonnell Pena in a minute. Who's the person with the hand up? But it actually might help us if we stay to the Q and A portion. And if you could type your question, it would really be helpful because we've got a queuing system for that. And we will we'll do our best not to miss anybody. We'll also be doing our very best to be as concise as possible. And so let's jump right in. We've got a question from Susan who would like more information on how it was determined that seven speech pathologists and three special educators and the Infants and Toddler program, I'm assuming, were cut directly serving children's and children and families during the central office reorganization. Whew! What a tough question and a good one. I will say this we have a drastic need for speech pathologists. One of the challenges that we have for speech pathologists are balancing the workload of our speech pathologists. We have some capacity in some parts of the district and other capacity in other parts of the district. We also have a need for special educators and other parts of the budget. So just because it doesn't appear in one place in the budget doesn't mean that it's not going to appear in somewhere else in the budget. So I can totally appreciate how alarming it might be to you get this message. And it probably wasn't delivered very well, and it was probably delivered in a, in a clunky way that didn't have all the information that you were looking for. And it probably created a lot of stress and anxiety. But I think that there's more to this that we can share with you, Susan and friends and, and just appreciate your candor and jumping right out in front. I've got another question from anonymous attendee. How can the system state that they are concerned about a social and emotional well-being, and they eliminate the main person who's supporting school counselors? That's a tough one. And I, I I've got really good news for you, anonymous attendee. We don't have one person who supports social and emotional learning in the district. We have thousands of people who support social and emotional learning in the district, and we actually have more than one person who supports counselors. This is hard. Any time that there's a reduction or a change in how we do our work, there's it's a challenge. And I can confidently say that we have more than enough need for all the teammates that we have, that even if a position or something has changed, that there's a room for us to find a solution and for us to carve a path forward. There's definitely a lot of space and, and opportunity for, for us to move forward without losing anybody on the team. So we may not have it reflected in one place, but we may have it reflected in another. Got another question from Susan. I would also like more information on why the agreement with MCP. MCE was not followed as procedure and timelines that should be followed for involuntary transfers. Well, the tough part with this is that we are allowed to reorganize and that we are allowed to restructure as a school system. And at at present, we are within our timelines and we are within our our process and procedure. I will say that ultimately there's this is going to take some time. Hopefully it's really quick and we can land placements and we can land a lot of the back end stuff of this really quick so that people have peace of mind and that they don't have that anxiety of having to deal with all this mess. I'm not a huge fan of reorganization. As a matter of fact, I've tried to avoid them everywhere that I've been. I think they're a huge waste of time. But the way that M.C.P.S. Has been operating, we do need to make some changes. We and we can't be afraid of that. And it's okay to make changes and seek improvements. And sometimes we'll get it right and sometimes we'll get it wrong. But we do need to make an effort to make some of those changes. I've got an anonymous attendee who says, what's your vision for the school counseling department? And how do you plan to support students academic, emotional, and career development needs in the future when removing a role like a coordinator position and tagging back that this is a position that supports ESL counselors and college and career counselors. Well, our college and career information coordinators, well, we have a lot of support in this space. Fortunately, M.C.P.S. Actually has one of the best secondary counselor ratios in the country, but actually one of the worst elementary counselor ratios in the country. There's a tremendous amount of improvement that we need to make in the counselor space. My vision really needs to be a shared vision that we have to make sure that we are meeting the social and emotional needs of our young people, and that there is a pathway that supports life after high school for them, and that we're following the Asca model, and that Asca model calls upon us to have a ratio of 250 to 1 or fewer students to one counselor ratio, where we're doing great at the secondary level, but we have huge improvements that we need to make in elementary. It's important that counselors have support, too, and that they have resources. And that's where the burden is. And I absolutely feel that. But we also have a lot of other positions in the district that support this work, and we will need to take a team approach, and the work will need to look a little bit differently in terms of how we're supporting it in the short term. I got another one from anonymous attendee, very popular today. Anonymous attendee. My understanding is that 95 central office positions have been placed on involuntary transfer this week. This includes ten positions cut from infants and toddlers, and approximately with approximately 600 less early intervention sessions directly with children and families each month. With these changes, why is special education program being cut? I can confidently tell you that special education is not being cut. As a matter of fact, we are net positive in positions improving special education. We are making a sincere effort to balance some of our workloads and make sure that there's an equitable distribution of some of our workloads, whether it be an infants and toddlers or in other places. But but certainly making a change and doing involuntary transfer, it's important to know that an involuntary transfer is just that. It's a transfer. It's not a reduction. It's not a cut, but it is a change. And making change needs to be a part of what we do. Why did another question very similar to the one before? Why did you not follow involuntary transfer procedures set forth in collective bargaining? We are actually within our timeline right now with MCE, but we are definitely going to need to do impact bargaining and provide support for our folks so that everybody lands on their feet. Got a great question. Here is the two E program truly being cut? This program supports students with IEPs and advanced classes. No. The two E program is not being cut. And this was a great flag. And I actually may ask Miss Yang to chime in on this in a second too, but this was a great flag that we got at another budget meeting as well. This was not a program that I was tremendously familiar with, and for those who are wondering what two E stands for, it really is referring to twice exceptional meaning that students receiving both support for advanced courses as well as support for students with disabilities. What what this is referencing is there has been a drop in enrollment and perceived drop in support. And there's a there's a kind of a pervasive question on the table of, like, what on earth are we doing with this? And can we invest in this and figure this out? And Miss Yang, I don't know if there was anything you wanted to add to that or not, because I know that that that was something that the board was passionate about making. Sure continued. I think that we posted that question to staff. If miss, we actually talk about it. I think was doing today's work session. So if Miss Alfonso Windsor is available, maybe she can provide, you know, the answer for the for the interested parents here. Thank you. So yes, we did discuss it today at the work session and the program is the reduced enrollment in the program. In a way, it's because of the lack of transportation or the way to get to the schools that are offering the particular twice exceptional program. But the program has expanded in a way that those students are being served at their home schools, instead of having to travel to a specific locations. So that's how it's how the program is being provided for the students that that that can receive those services. I think one of the suggestions I made last time is in the Board of Education. We have a committee on special population that that address a lot of issues of our special education students, students, ESL students, and gifted and talented students. This can be an area to look at, and so that we can dive deeper into the data and the scenarios that's happening in our school buildings. Okay. All right. Thanks. Miss Yang next question asks last year's coup put a number of non-compete contracts into the budget agreed on as a line items. Oh, sorry. Something just kind of jumped on me there. Sorry about that. I lost my place. Agreed upon as line items to go into pre-selected source. Are those items highlighted in this year's proposed operating budget, and have they been changed or reduced from last year? This one's this one's new territory for me, so thanks, Liz. Yvonne. Yes. So there you know, there were some not necessarily that were. For specific vendors per se. You know, sometimes we do have sole source contracts because there's only one person that offers them. But I do know that we have reviewed the procurement practices. We have reviewed all the all the contracts and we don't I don't I don't see any of those in our, in our, in our budget anymore. Of course, you know, every day we're looking for continuous improvement. We're reviewing our processes, you know, over procurement processes and making sure that we're following the guidelines as they as they are. Okay, I've got a twofer from Jessica. The first question was showing some appreciation for a push towards resources to go to the schools. But the question was, how on earth did you decide on eliminating which positions in Central Office? What metrics did you use to ensure that staff remained, that they're truly the best positioned to support this at each school level? For example, keeping a director versus choosing a coordinator. And I will say that we took a number of data points. The first critical data point was I had a I hosted a number of budget events myself, talking to parents, staff and students to get a whole host of feedback on their experience in a in a number of areas. That's one perspective. We talked to the leadership of every department to talk about ways that they could streamline their operations and the things that they thought that we needed to put in place to have a more streamlined approach to their business. We put all of our department heads in, in, in the position of doing a zero based budgeting exercise. They did a really nice job the first year. We will likely have to do this again next year and for the next several years. A zero based budgeting exercise starts from zero and really builds up from there to assign the number of staff and the things that you need in an office in order for it to run. Our zero based budgeting exercise in office expense actually netted a half $1 million savings just in office expense as an determinant of picking a position versus another position. That's a good way of looking at it, because these are person agnostic decisions. They have nothing to do with the individual person and everything to do with the structure of the organization and making sure that the organizational structure mirrored the approach that would make the specific department or that that element or that functional area of the organization operate the way that that would best meet, meet our needs. There's a follow up question. Could you elaborate a little bit more on cross-functional teams? Well, I would love to. Something that is in place in a lot of other districts is this idea of how we might be able to serve schools a little bit more directly, and this is really a tactic that large districts like ours put into place, because central office is really a big entity unto itself. And how do we shrink that entity to create almost like service areas for a specific cluster of schools or group of schools? If you had asked me eight months ago whether or not I preferred a level of like system or a cluster system, you would have never been able to convince me that a cluster system was the way to go, and that I have really grown to see the benefits. M.C.P.S. Has changed my mind about that, but at the end of the day, principals really do need to have access to a set group of people of subject matter experts in clear domains that are theirs, whether it's somebody in HR who helps them with their staffing, whether it's somebody in security that is theirs alone, and whether it's somebody in special education who guides their instructional practice or their special education compliance. Those things are absolutely critical. And to have to call several different people versus one person makes a big difference. So we are rearranging a lot of our staff to, to serve in, almost deploy into these into these forward groups that that will spend a lot of time with one cluster and work in one articulation pattern. Okay. So we are, I can already tell, are going to run short on time and we'll run over for a little bit to ask some more questions. And, and Chris Cram is trying to tell me to do a lightning round, but I want to do better than that. We'll stick around and answer some more questions, but please add your emails so that we can we can send something back to you that that is absolutely important. Trying to see where we left off here does jump around a little bit on me here. Okay. Anonymous user or anonymous attendee says your cross-functional teams are impressive, but I noticed that there's no representation from mental health professionals. Actually, that's not true. We have 54 pupil personnel, workers that are tied to this work, as well as school assigned social workers and some other folks that will join this team. We would actually love to enhance this over time, but this has got to be the place that we start. So that that's a that's a great comment. Thank you very much. That's good feedback. Should we expect further budget cuts for next year? Well that largely depends on where this budget goes with our board and then with council. I will tell you that as big of a budget ask as this is, it's pretty lean and we would have to be making some very tough choices as we as we move forward. Jessica asks, how will M.C.P.S. And the board work to earn back the trust of the county council? Well, I believe it or not, this big budget request, I hope, is actually an artifact of us building trust, and the reason that it is an artifact of building trust is that we're actually representing what our true needs are. And this is not a budget of wants. It's actually a budget of many sacrifices. And one of the ways that we can earn back trust is by spending the money how we should, and accounting for it in a clear and transparent way. Great question. Anonymous user asks are there many M.C.P.S? Are there any M.C.P.S. Position cuts as part of the budget? Position cuts? Yes. People cuts? No, not at this time. So that there's a big difference. An involuntary transfer which we have many of those definitely represent a big number, but we are hopeful that we can make sure that those folks land a spot on the team, if that's what they want. Another question from anonymous attendee. I heard that the county's infants and Toddlers program had almost a dozen teachers cut and speech therapists cut. No. Reassigned. Yes. And we definitely look forward to adding some clarity to that anonymous attendee. Current M.C.P.S. Structure places employees delivering part C of Early Intervention for Special education. Okay under Ida. Got it. Proposed reorganization. This is pretty much the same question. We hope to bring some clarity to that. Susan asks are you aware of infants and toddlers? Yes, we're very aware of the services that they provide and what they do. We're hoping to balance that workload. I'm concerned where our tax money is generated from and where it goes. Absolutely. The voters just got a hit for a property tax increase that was framed for M.C.P.S. I love how you put that framed for M.C.P.S. We also know that the money is fungible and once raised for M.C.P.S, it can be swept into the general fund. How do we know that the money raised for the tax increase will not be swept into the general fund? Can you provide detailed documentation? You know, I might not be the best person to answer that. You know, my role really is to communicate what I believe our needs are for the board to of education, to check that and for us to advocate on behalf of the needs of the school system to the county government. And it's the county government's responsibility to fund what it feels it can fund in support of public education. Miss Yang, is there anything else you want to add to that? Yes. Board of Education is not in the line of work of deciding people's taxes. I'm a taxpayer, but what we our work is on the system policy and oversight and our systems budget. We present our budget to the county council and county executive executives. That's what I will say for this. Now, previously, there was a question about how can the board to rebuild trust with the county council, and I hope tonight is part of the demonstration that this board is very interested in direct community engagement. We are we are the hosts for this evening. And we want to set a culture of openness, responsiveness and engagement. And, and also in our work of it's a continual improvement. So I hope that it's evident for everyone. And that's how we build trust with everyone. Thank you. All right. I'm gonna try and fly through some of these because they they are kind of repetitive. Another question about speech paths. And our infants and Toddlers program. Good news. I think you're going to find that that's actually going to be okay. Another question about, you know, why would you expand special education but not expand special education? We are expanding. Special education is a net positive for our number of special education positions. It's great to hear that you're considering compensation for 15 counselors who have earned the national Board certification. Yeah. This is this is kind of clutch. These counselors have put in the same time and effort. We've got we've got to write that into our space. That absolutely will become a budget initiative in the future. And something that we talk about and that we get bargained for. So this is this is good. Another question. Many of the central office are central services reductions are student facing. The only push that I've got with that is I'm not sure that a lot of our student facing pieces are in fact cut. They just may be represented elsewhere. And I apologize that we don't have clarity behind that. Another question last year, pre-K expansion under the blueprint was cut under the county council didn't fully fund the budget. Understanding we might be in this position again is pre-K expansion on the table to be cut? The sad reality is everything is on the table, and it really does depend how much we're funded and what we're able to do as to where we go next. We feel like we've put together a budget of needs and a budget that that deserves the merit of that support. So we certainly hope that that, that that rings true. Another question about cutting special education. We are not cutting special education. Another one about the same. You mentioned going the goal of flattening central office, but it seems the majority of cuts are in specialists and coordinators. It's actually not true from a proportion standpoint. But thank you for pointing that out. It is a large number of changed positions. And actually, even though something is moved to a involuntary transfer, we don't want folks to go away. Thank you friends for adding your email addresses. We're happy to expand on these answers in writing so that you can get a copy of that. That's really important. So thank you for throwing that in there. Will you look at cutting consulting teachers. This seems to be so expensive yet harmful, especially to new teachers. Lose lose. Also wondering how much money is spent on the mileage for all the people who drive around all day? It's a good question. Thank you for bringing that up. That's that's a new tag for us. Elementary Hybrid Math is well established program. It's now in its fourth year. Almost 300 advanced math students. Where is that program acknowledged in the budget. So it is in our budget and it's acknowledged in a couple of different places. One, it's a part of our base budget. And tonight we talked about the changes in our budget. And one of the changes in our budget was an expansion of blended virtual and online learning. So that is actually represented in our discretionary portion of the budget right down there at the end. And I think you tagged line 66 and said the language is vague, but in our larger budget documents, you absolutely will see that as something that is represented. We're not getting rid of that hybrid math program. Another question follow up on council support. Is it possible to gain feedback from school counselors in terms of, yeah, we'd love to hear some feedback. I'm sure you won't be shy. Secondary counselors are still overwhelmed and loaded. I have no doubt the work of the school counselor has changed so much over the past. Even though we've got good ratios at the secondary level, we've got an anonymous attendee who wants to make sure everybody knows that counselors still have it tough at the secondary level. That's absolutely true. Our lives have gotten substantially more complex over the last several years, and it's a tough time to be a teenager. So even though we've got great ratios at the secondary level, that doesn't mean that the work is any less challenging. So thank you for pointing that out. Anonymous attendee. You mentioned a goal of flattening. We mentioned that one already. Will schools be informed that they're receiving full day kindergarten. And yes, absolutely. Thank you Janice. We will make sure that, you know, it is our goal that we take some of our part day kindergarten program, our pre-K programs, and turn them into full day. That's part of the part of the change. We love that. It's a great way of doing pre-K expansion. A lot of our unfilled pre-K seats have to do with the fact that we have a partial day program, because it's very difficult for parents to get in and out. I understand and support that some central office positions need to be cut. However, higher level positions that do not provide direct support to schools should be cut over lower level positions. Appreciate that feedback. I can absolutely hear where you're coming from. I can promise you that the folks that I work with every day talk to schools every day for sure, and I can see where you're coming from. What is the thinking of cutting positions out of autism? Good news, we're not cutting positions out of special education. We are adding positions to special education to students. Support needs are very different than most of our special education needs. Most resources have not been trained. Thank you for tagging this. We know that that's a priority, that that's definitely something that we need to look at. I'll be honest, that's not been something that's top of my radar recently. This is a new development going through the budget process. Candidly, this is a big victory. As part of the budget process is that we uncover things that become pretty important. So thank you for elevating that for me. Another question about involuntary transfers. I think we've covered a lot of that, but we're happy to respond to you, Marie. Similar goes to in addition to counselors and high schools, there's one college and career coordinator who serves the entire school, and we want to elevate some of that work. What is the solution to support college and career readiness goals in regard to the present college career coordinators? Without this one role? Well, to my knowledge, that's not changing. The college and career coordinators aren't changing. And we also have some additional support through Worksource Montgomery that hopefully will evolve to continue to be more supportive in the future. One of the goals of having some college and career support is to alleviate some of the things that the that our counselors are having to manage. There's never a panacea for everything, and one person can only carry so much. But thank you for elevating that, Victoria that that's a good one. And McDonnell Penna, you are a gem for switching your comment to the chat instead of in person. We appreciate you. I see expanding special education in your BLP model, but I don't see any Paris listed on the program. Can you please speak to this? Yes, I would love to. We currently right now have 360 paraprofessionals who are tagged as part time and are what we would call critical staffing. They get assigned based on IEP needs, and they support students either on a one on one, a two on one, or for a set amount of hours during the day. It's tough work. Sometimes they're assigned to some self-contained classes, or maybe they're assigned to an inclusion class. But the reality is it's tough work. It's not paid very well. And part of our, our Paris strategy is to convert many of those positions to full time with benefits. And that accounts for 360 of the 500 paraprofessionals that will be adding the other paraprofessionals, the other 140 paraprofessionals that aren't in that mix really are to bring our staffing levels up to what o staffing guidelines say, so that that would be to backfill. A big concern that we've had is to make sure that we can hire for those positions. And so making that position more competitive with the reclassification is really important. So thank you for that question. McDonald Pena, another from anonymous attendee regarding two E programs. There are extensive issues. Thank you for flagging that for us. I'm going to skip the school name, but we'll we'll follow up on that for sure. Thank you for that. Thank you for the presentation. I'm very concerned where our tax money is generated and goes in the future. It's very similar to the comments that were shared before. Thank you for tagging your email. We will certainly respond to you, Sully. We appreciate that. Another question, how do we know that these positions have oh, sorry. How do you know these positions that were involuntary transferred are going to go to part B and not just leave M.C.P.S? Well, the good news and the bad news is still the same. We need all the help we can get and we have plenty of vacancies, and we really could use our support. And so I'm hoping that folks do want to stick with us. I know that it's tough and it's raw when you you get pulled from a position that you love and, and it seems like everything is being really frustrated. But, you know, we do want to make sure that folks have an opportunity, even if it's not the one that's most ideal for them. There's a tag here for a specific school and a specific person. I'm I'm going to pass on that one, but more than happy to if you could keep your comments generic, that would probably be best. Not a question, but rather a comment. While I know we have a lot of work that needs to be done in M.C.P.S, I very much appreciate the transparency. Thank you very much. We really appreciate you too. I know it's not positive news. It's actually really rough news. I really wish I could deliver good news one of these days. I feel bad every time I talk to the Board of Education. I think they're sick of me because I it seems like I only bring them bad news. But one of these days I'm hopeful we're going to we're going to bring them a win. And I'm going to bring you a win, hopefully. But but it's important. There's a request here. Please board. Please maintain a central office staff specifically shout outs for the counseling team. So there's some advocacy there. Proposed staffing plan has a 20% reduction in program specialist support for autism. I think I think we've answered that one. And we'll we'll circle back to anybody who wants more specifics for sure. My question was skipped. So sending again. Oh, I'm so sorry. Anonymous attendee oh. And I it I apologize. This jumps around a little bit when there's a new question that's added. So I think, Doctor Taylor, you're on the question of the proposed staffing plan has 20% reduction i program specialist for autism. Yes. And we covered that. I can follow up with somebody if they want to we'll specific information numeric data regarding workload and caseload be shared specifically for the reductions and central office. What a great idea. We'd love to do that. We definitely need to do workload studies for sure. We have some discrete tasks that need to be performed by individuals, but a lot of our work is shared. We love that. Fantastic. My question was skipped again, so I'm sending it again. This is the one we need to know what the thinking is in moving services directly. Student facing for students with autism. This may be more about how we account for them, not necessarily moving them. So we'll we'll circle back with you if you want to follow up with us that that we would love to add some illumination to that. Not avoiding any autism questions. Just want to speak with some specificity on specific things. So if you want to shoot me an email, I'd love that. As a school based employee, I drive to meetings several times a month and I'm not reimbursed for gas. This is a budget initiative. It's something that we'd have to bring up. I appreciate you elevating that as a concern. We have to disagree on the great ratios for secondary counselors. Touche. I appreciate that. Whether you think we have great ratios or not, I can promise you that compared to the rest of the country, we're sitting pretty in some regards, doesn't mean there's not room for improvement. Thank you for elevating that anonymous attendee. Will your cross-functional teams be student facing or will they be in offices all day? They need to have a student facing component where they are interacting with schools, but primarily they will be teacher facing and principal facing. That is their job. They need to be in the schools. The positions transferred out of autism unit will be working in general special education populations. Not necessarily. This is unfortunate. Yeah. Not necessarily. We need to do a better job of explaining that. Thank you for elevating that. You mentioned in your presentation that you'd be keeping what matters. How has your vision of Central Office flattening support the statement when you're cutting staffing specialists who play a critical role? We are actually increasing our staffing team. So thank you for elevating that. Please just understand in counseling there's a director and a coordinator over high schools and school based that their specific services were very, very aware. Thank you Victoria I appreciate that. And I and I get that we're we're we're not always going to agree on an approach. And I know that that this is a pain point. And I know you're frustrated and I'm sorry for that. Where is the ranch dressing for this broccoli? Anonymous attendee? Preach. I'm right there with you. I'm going to button this up because we've been going over for about 15 minutes, but I do want to hit the last few that are that are in here right now. Can you look at why it's so hard to staff school based special education teachers and speech therapists and correct those issues? Yes, it is hard. The workload is hard. Our speech therapists, massive vacancies, especially in school based. There are some supply and demand issues, but also the workload is demanding. I want to elevate something that we haven't talked about about our speech therapist. If you only had to do speech therapists work, that might be different and you'd probably feel different about the work than if you had to do a bunch of other chores. And so maybe one of the things that we need to look at is how we manage some of the other chores that get assigned to staff, and what you're non focus area tasks are, and how we can manage that a little bit better. I got a note of thanks I appreciate that. Thank you for mentioning that and got a couple other comments. And we're going to close out with these last two. It's very evident that infants and toddlers were highly impacted in the budget plan. Hopefully we can clarify that and bring greater clarity to that. Thank you for including your email. We'll follow up with you. When can folks in the autism program speak to me? We'll be happy to set something up. Thank you for elevating that, Haley. And thank you for reaching out. And we're we're happy to get you some more clarity on next steps, too. I can appreciate for all of our central services folks, especially the ones that are concerned about things that are changing and concerned about how their roles might change, how absolutely nerve wracking that can be, and how much anxiety that creates for not just you, but the teachers and the students that you connect with. Please know that that no decision is ever made in a vacuum, and it's also not made lightly. So thank you for elevating those concerns. And just know that this is the first chapter of many chapters and conversations that we'll have on these issues. So just want to thank you all so much for being here. Huge thanks to the crew at M.C.P.S. TV, and for all of you for giving up time in your schedule. That really is the most valuable commodity that you could offer to us. And thank you for spending some time listening and even on the stuff that we don't, don't have common cause on and that we don't agree on. We appreciate your listening ear and hearing with us, and we look forward to following up with you individually for anybody who likes it. Have a wonderful evening and thank you, M.C.P.S. TV. And yes, one more thing. I want to of course, thank the TV team and all the board staff. I want to highlight one particular board staff for the community to get to know her is our board. Investment coordinator, Miss Yolanda Faber. She just joined the board. She was a former M.C.P.S. Counselor, and she's going to be a great help in helping the community to navigate our school system a bit from the Board of Education side. So I want everyone to be aware that she's available to help. So with that, thank you, everybody. Thank you for my fellow board member, Laura Stewart Parnell, Savannah, for joining us tonight. Thank you. With that, I guess we're going to close it out. Sounds like closing comments to me. M.C.P.S. TV you can close the program. Thank you everyone for your thoughtful questions. We enjoyed answering them and getting to know a little bit more about what your priorities in the budget were. And.