Good morning everyone. Welcome to the third budget work session. And today is January 30th, 2025. Before we begin, I want to welcome all the board members and have them introduce themselves. I'm going to start from my left hand side. Good morning. O'Neill Suvarna, student member of the board. Good morning, Natalie Zimmerman representing district two. Buenos dias. Good morning. Carla Silvestre, school board member at large. Good morning. Buenos dias. Grace Rivera oven
representing district one. Good morning, Brenda Wolff, district five. Good morning. Rita montoya, board member at large. Good morning, Laura Stewart. District four. And good morning, everyone. Julie Yang, district three. President of the board. All right. So thank you. I actually want to give a recap of if we were at Paint Branch High School on Tuesday night for our community information session. I
want to thank all the staff who attended and also thank all the participants there. We have a really good Doctor Taylor conversation with our parents and students. There were a number of students show up. They have wonderful info feedback for us. So it demonstrates again, creating a budget is more than just crunching numbers. It's about investing in the future and strengthening our programs.
This process reflects our values and the hard work and the dedication of this board, the administration and all the staff in our system. Today's work session topic are going to be on changes to the base budget and system reorganization. Staff should point out pertinent issues that may concern the board. As always, board members are free to ask questions at any point due to the large quantity
of information. I would like board members to focus on questions that will help you make decisions for this budget. All right. And we have one more community information session, virtual session this evening at 630. All the information is on the board website. The board is scheduled to take tentative action on the proposed operating budget at its business meeting on Tuesday, February the 4th.
All right, Doctor Taylor, let's proceed. Thank you, Madam President. I want to take a few moments to go through some information, and then we'll entertain some of the board's questions. We have a number of follow up items as well, so we'll ask for the presentation to be pulled up on our screens. There we go. Just as a recap, we've marched through our budget documents in detail with the board. At your last two work sessions reviewing revenue,
going over the blueprint, talking about our expenditures that keep the lights on, updating our conversation about revenue, which is an ever evolving conversation, talking about our discretionary expenditures. And we even began the conversation of following up on some of the questions that the board has and will do more of that. Today. We've got the last section of our budget to review, which is our our system
restructure and changes that we're making to the base budget. And, and also some follow up items that we want to talk about today. We also have some contract information. It didn't make it into the slide deck because it was late to be finished. But we're going to add that onto board docs. That was a comparison that the board had requested. And we'll we'll make reference to that later in the presentation as well and highlight that request as well. So to jump right in, as Miss
Yang alluded to in her opening remarks, this is a perfect time for us to pause and to set the stage for today's conversation, but to also review the landscape that our families are experiencing and to think about what M.C.P.S. And the Board of Education believes and what's important to us. The budget is a great opportunity to communicate our values. It's a great opportunity to communicate our
priorities. Many people will look at our budget to find our priorities and to find our values. And never is there more a pressing time than right now to be crystal clear about the things that are important to us? We know that our families are looking at the news, some with some concern, some with some confusion, and when we can be a source of clarity and a source of support, we are really working at our best and it is an
opportunity for us to remind our community of our intentions and our actions to be a school system that strives to be safe for all students when they walk through the front door. All of our students, our staff, our guests, when they come to our campuses and when they engage with us, even in a virtual space that we be welcoming, inclusive and a safe environment. This is critically important, and we hope that this is part of our message that comes through in our budget process. Even in
times where it's difficult and it's challenging. So with that, knowing our values of prioritizing, learning, respect, relationships, equity and excellence, that these should be things that are present in the things that we think, the things that we say and the things that we do. And so with that, it's a perfect time to talk about your priorities and how those things are reflected here as well, and
how this also reflects, in an expanded way, some additional values that the board has, things like fiscal stewardship and transparency, and making sure that we are attentive to the areas that matter most. And so that really sets the stage for our conversation today in terms of making a shift in our organization to focus more on what's happening in the classroom, to get back to the
fundamentals of what teaching and learning should look like, to do it in a really responsive way and a responsible way, with clarity and transparency. So, in truth, reorganization was probably the wrong word to stick in this budget document. In fact, it's probably not a fair representation of what we are trying to accomplish in the next moves that we need to make as a school system reorganization.
Usually involves moving things around, oftentimes superficially. I'm not a particular fan of reorganizations. I actually am much more in favor of working with the team that we have to create a different set of expectations and living up to that, but we have some structural issues that we need to address to serve schools better. And so really, our efforts are about how we can restructure to create a central services model versus a central
office or a central hub model. This is a very different look. And so today I bring you fish. And since this would probably not be welcome, according to Miss Webb in the board room, to bring in fish that will undoubtedly leave a smell, we opted for something a little bit more friendly and way more friendly than broccoli. We opted for Swedish Fish, and so the board all have a packet of
Swedish Fish and inspecting the ingredients in the Swedish fish. This is not something that we would serve in our school cafeterias or even really allow in our schools. I think the red dye 40 is particularly offensive to a number of folks, but if you're a big fan of Swedish Fish, like Miss Wolff and I are, this is our favorite candy. We share that in common. This is a good metaphor for a lot of our transition, because we're a
learning organization, and when we do things for people, we sometimes miss the objective of what we're trying to do. And oftentimes we've been put in a position where we have provided fish for people instead of teaching them how to fish. So I've also brought for you what we believe to be one of the world's smallest fishing rods. As an example of the transition that we are really trying to get
at with our central services restructuring. Now, I want to give a lot of credit to our central services team, because there's no shortage of hard work within this team, spread across the district in several different buildings, providing a whole host of services. Everything from logistical services to welcoming people into this community and getting them set up in a new school environment to providing curriculum, resources, payroll
and human resources services, as well as leadership support. It's a pretty deep and vast commitment to support. One of the downsides is that we've gotten ourselves into a place where we run to the rescue to solve a lot of problems as a as a knee jerk reaction to, to some of our challenges, because it matches with adult convenience and not necessarily what our needs are. And in our
application of rushing to solve problems, we kind of missed the boat of how do we grow as an organization and how do we model learning and how do we create that pervasive learning model throughout the district that that mirrors our values? So a lot of our changes that we need to make as an organization are about how we serve schools better, but also how we might serve schools differently, modeling the behaviors that we expect from them. So even though
this is a restructuring of central services, it's really more like a recoloring of central services in terms of what we need to do and how we can measure our success. One way that we can measure our success is through the lens of our customers, our students, our educators, our parents, our principals when they contact Central Office, and the type of support that they get, how much
time they have to wait until they get a response or until they get support and guidance, how many layers they have to go through to get those responses. There are ways that we can measure our performance better, and some of that even starts with measuring it in the first place, because we haven't been, and there are opportunities for us to operate a little bit more efficiently and to clarify what our objectives are so that we're all rowing in the same direction. The biggest strategy that's tied to this is the
reassignment and realignment of our staff into 13 cross-functional teams. These 13 teams will be on a cluster based model where they will providesua few defined areas. We'd love to grow this over time, but the reality is, is we want to start off strong and focus our energy on the things that matter most, and to marshal our resources in a very concrete and very direct
way. We have pockets of excellence everywhere. People are doing great work. The challenge that we run into is that sometimes we step on each other's toes. The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing all of the time, and that challenge leads to a lot of inefficiency and a lot of turf wars and even combat amongst departments for the attention of our educators and our staff. When we are competing for
professional learning objectives and priorities, that'sot to stop. This is a team approach. The only way that we're going to be able to serve our schools and our students better is if we start acting and working together as a team, dividing our county up into clusters. If you would have told me that this was a great strategy eight months ago, I'm not sure that I would have endorsed that. I have seen
it firsthand. The wisdom in the cluster model and the approach to serving families in a K-12 space, and following those families from one school to the next as they matriculate. There is really great wisdom in that, and our clusters have developed identities unto their own, and those identities have unique needs, and we can honor that approach in a really direct and really interdisciplinary way.
And that's really what our target is. So what is a cross-functional team look like? It looks like both instructional and non-instructional supports. If we really want to make restorative justice a priority, which very clearly from many folks who have come to testify at our public hearings, it is then we need to have a game plan and a strategy on how to make this permeate throughout the entire district, versus an add
on request optional in approach. Now there's a policy side to handle that, and there's a practical side to handle that. The practical side looks an awful lot like this, where we have specialists who can guide the professional learning of our teams in a really specific and concrete way. Same goes for special education services, making sure that a student who matriculates from one school to the next and to the next has that continuity, and that people
are connecting the dots for that child's experience in a really meaningful way. Literacy, mathematics. These are critical focus areas that we need to improve and that we need to support. How about staffing? Staffing is so critically important. But what we have determined and what we've figured out is that different parts of our county have different staffing needs, and there are different priorities and different parts of the county. And having some singular contact that you can have that
is yours makes the world of difference. And to whether or not you fill a vacancy or that vacancy stays open for several months, we can do more and we can marshal our resources a little bit tighter and a little bit better. In that context, some other changes that we brought into our central services is we went through our very first zero budgeting exercise in many, many years. We'll do this again next year. This is not an easy exercise, and it's not something you can
do as a one off and expect to get great results. There was nearly actually a little over a half $1 million in office savings that were identified in going through this zero based budgeting exercise of just our offices, determining what was, in fact, essential. And in many areas, this won't surprise you. We determined that there wasn't enough budgeted in some areas, and that's perfectly natural to that's actually credible that
there are areas that you need to reduce and areas that you need to expand, that that is normal. Doing a contract review is something that this board has indicated that they're passionate about. This needs to be an ongoing exercise as well. My from my perspective, I found this to be most illuminating to see where we are contracting services, what we are contracting services for. And perhaps my favorite question of
all time in relation to contracts came from Miss Silvestre when she said, when do we decide to stop working with someone? Well, that's a great question. And so defining those parameters and really being concrete about that will lead to a better process and a more transparent process, so that this is not something that's just up in the air. And so we're delighted that that's going to be a document that gets attached to board docs, and we can share with the public to compare the fiscal 25 contracts to the
fiscal 26 contract. So you can see the difference and absolutely critical. We realized pretty early on in this process with nearly 3000 employees that are assigned to Central Office, that we need to review this over a two year period. I'm not particularly excited about this. I'm not particularly thrilled about having to do this over a two year period. I think that that's perhaps even unnecessarily messy. But to do
this well requires a lot of deliberate intention, and working with our association partners and going through process steps, there are some fair criticism from our partners at some of the budget testimony that you've received, that there may have been some process steps that that weren't followed to a T, and they need to be followed to a T. And so pausing some of this work to follow those processes is critically important. And we see that as being a necessary step. The best
outcome of this, and something that we're enormously proud of, is something that is also come routinely from our partners, which is how do we balance the workload and responsibilities of people and making sure that we're not overloading people because the, quote unquote work has to go somewhere? Well, truth be told, we also need to decide what work we will focus on and what work we will let go of
that. In this model of delivering fish versus teaching people to fish, we need to evaluate what precisely our service model is and how we are deploying our resources to be most effective. Many of the things that we engage in don't yield a high return on investment, because we are in the fish delivery business versus working with people to teach them to solve their own
problems with some support and guidance, which is really what our model needs to be like. So we do have some things that we need to get done over the next several months. We are about six weeks ahead in the timeline that I shared with the board earlier, we thought that there was some urgency to get this done ahead of time, particularly in the budget cycle, for a reason that might surprise you. We very much wanted to for people to have a very long runway, to know if we
were going to make some changes, to be able to have voice, to complain about those changes because this is their their life and livelihood. We feel very confident that there's more than enough work to do in M.C.P.S. That our very talented staff can stay with us if they want to stay with us, although it may not be in the role that they are are perfectly in favor of at the moment. But we have more than enough things for, for folks to do around here that we will go through the process of landing
people with intention, with care and with support, and with a lot of compassion and empathy. But we do have steps to go through and in this restructuring, and we are we are in the process of hiring. And we'll do this along with our school hiring. And there are some steps, in addition to placements for involuntary transfer and surplus employees, that we will go through layers of placement and
hiring that will all bring back to the board for approval and endorsement along these benchmarks. These are our target dates and really will help us get settled as we go into the new fiscal year. I do have a couple of follow up items that I'll address, and then I'll pass it off to the experts to my left and your right. The first item is something that has been brought up at the last two work sessions, and Mrs. Wolff
guaranteed that she would bring it up at every work session in perpetuity until, doggone it, I answered her question, and her question was, where are the black students in this budget? And this is a really important and fair question, and I want our community to know, and this is really everybody in our community, that this is a population that has, on the average, not performed the way that we want. And we have a lot of student populations that are
not performing the way that we want. The fact that nearly half of all of our students are not meeting literacy, literacy proficiency is really troubling. But when it's disproportionately affecting group of students, our Latino students or our black students, we have to hone in and we have to look at our student populations through a special lens. One might even say that our black students are a special population that deserves special attention, because the issues
are so dramatic, and that's definitely the case. It's also important to point out that our black students are not monolithic. None of our students are. There are pockets of success in some areas that we can be very proud of, and pockets where there are significant lack of success, and those deserve our attention in a really surgical and really intentional way. And a lot of what. We have to do in this room
deals with the 30,000 foot view. And so it's a little hard to drill down to a specific setting or a specific school, or a specific school improvement plan to address a specific population of students and how they're performing. But maybe that's how this work needs to evolve, and maybe that needs to be a turn that we make as a governance team. And as we look to the future, how committees of this board and how our team can
approach this work to speak with more specificity, more specificity of how we're addressing the needs of student populations and in this case, our black students. There are specific examples that we know that will that will enhance the learning experience of our young people. A couple that I want to draw attention to. The first one is any program enhancements that we do to CRE. We really do want to expand this program to be accessible to more than just our
our M.L. Population. We see great utility in a number of students who are just running out of time for high school and who want to contribute positively to their communities. Need an industry credential, want to get on that path to a GED? Want to have access to classes that they can complete in a setting that is not their school setting? This will have an impact on our community. It will have a positive impact. The
things that we do for special education services, the efforts that we make not only impact special education classrooms and the special education environment, but they also impact the general education environment. They also improve our administration's ability to address concerns across a wide range of things, when they're not having to put out a fire in a specific area because of understaffing. These things are all interconnected. No, they don't directly or specifically
speak to one student population or another, but they are connected and they will have a direct influence. And I think that that that does make a difference. Equally impactful, maybe even more impactful are the policy decisions that we make and the direction that we set in our strategic plan and the commitments that we make in terms of policy shifts, how we restructure our code of conduct
to make restorative justice a part of everyday life, and every school critically important. How we make culturally responsive teaching a part of tier one instruction, not just a tier two or tier three approach. Critically important. Those things are baked into our base budget. They're not reflected in the change sheet in table one. A but they are impactful. They will make a significant difference. And this board needs to hold us accountable for the
follow through to see that performance reflects these investments of both time and financial resources. To highlight this a little bit further, because I think it is important to show a concrete example that that schools that have a larger population of black students or Latino students or or student du jour, pick your student group that you be able to see concretely in an example of how your school is impacted by a budget decision.
This is a great example, and at the top of our list on our table one A there is an exhibit that's attached to line 59, our differentiated school site allocation equity add on. And to see firsthand how your school either was advantaged or disadvantaged by our fiscal 25 allocation, and what we're proposing that it should look like in fiscal 26. We are hoping that you see a noticeable
difference, because we see the need for the materials and supplies line at schools to be offset, because we know that there are differences in communities in terms of the support that the outside can provide to our schools and what our principals are able to do. Miss Silvestri is right. We need to create guidelines and expectations. We need to communicate those broadly. We need to report back to the board how those things are being created. We need to utilize our equity team in drafting those
guidelines, so that those guidelines actually reflect our intention of moving the needle for specific populations of students, in this case, black students. So with that, this is something that we are proud of that reflects our values, that communicates hopefully clearly, although tangentially, our intention to improve our academic and other performance metrics for our students and in
this case, to miss Wolfe's point, our black students, I want to pause here for just a quick second on this next item, because we're going to go through this list pretty quickly to get to board feedback and questions. We put this slide deck together before we finished the contracts information. But we now know that the contracts information is up on board docs. Not quite yet, but we're going to add it to board docs today so that everybody can have it. And
so that the board can see a copy. This is reflective of the changes from one year to the next. In terms of our contracts. We've got a list of the contracts. We presented this list to County Council as part of our financial review. It was very illuminating to them. They appreciated it very much. They felt like they'd been asking for it for a while. And now we get to present that same information in a second version in fiscal 26, and to illuminate the differences between one year and the next. Those differences
largely have to do with inflationary factors that are programed into contracts. Changes in mckinney-vento services that we're providing and special education services. I want to illuminate a couple of those changes and share what those means for our viewing audience who don't know what Mckinney-vento is. Mckinney-vento is the provision. It's actually an act by Congress and the federal government that provides protections and supports for our our unhoused
students, either temporarily or permanently. And a lot of this budget goes to some social supports, but primarily it goes to transportation. We have seen an increase in our unhoused student population. And as a as a consequence of this housing insecurity, it calls upon us to provide a higher level of care and a higher level of service. It's not a surprise. We kind of saw this one coming. This is this is not a shock to us. It is
a scary artifact of the times that we're in today and the world that we're living in today, but it presses on us to double down on our values of supporting kids. All the more. Our special education services is one something that this board has spent an awful lot of time talking about are speech services, and how we might provide the best version of speech services. There's definitely a tenor that we could improve. Even our contracted
speech services to, to be more in person and more connected to the student experience, because speech services are certainly at a premium. And there's definitely a labor market shortage. So making sure that we can address that in a meaningful way, should we not be able to, to fully fill our vacancies, is something that's important. And I'll leave it to the experts to take it from here and to also address anything else they want to illuminate in the contract space. Thank you. So as as we've
said, we'll move quickly through the follow up section. There's a lot of follow up. And we certainly want to just highlight what it is so that we can come back and have more questions and discussion from the board. So the first piece of follow up that we're showing here and this is to begin, we're going to start by going through the follow up from the January 14th work session that was not addressed last time. This is the chart Miss Silvestre that does show all of the fixed charges with the complete breakdown of what our current base cost is,
the FY 26 total, and then the change. And so that chart is here for your reference. And again we will post this with our updated information for the public as well. Next slide. Following on with January 14th follow up. We were requested to look into the cost to lower class size by one student in grades K-2. And we want to just reiterate that in this approach, this is taking an average
guideline approach. This is again what an estimate would be of reducing the guidelines by one student per class, per grade, per school in grades K-2. We estimate that that would require adding 74 teachers at about $6.6 million. There was a question regarding the temporary part time funding for transportation. The transportation substitute estimate. I'm sorry, one is about 10% daily. Keeping in mind how many bus drivers we have and
bus attendants. That's a very, very large number of people. And that is approximately the rate that they estimate for this funding, again, catches us up to what we budget for that I'm sorry, what we spend for that. Our budget will catch up to that. The question regarding what is currently budgeted in FY 25 for restorative justice. We have $1.8 million in salaries, benefits, stipends and materials. That is in addition
to the school based coach stipends and the additional central office coaches. Projected cost of one additional restorative justice coach at each high school to add 17 additional restorative justice positions. In addition to that, current nine would include would require $2.8 million additional to the budget. There was a question regarding the process for how and when we allocate
educators for subsequent increases, and how we work our way through changes in enrollment in the year. I'm going to highlight this really briefly, and I think if the board wants to come back to questions, we can discuss this more. But principals will receive their staffing allocations for the upcoming school year on March 6th. The actual enrollment is in is reviewed weekly. And so through the spring process, staff meetings do occur on a very regular basis and a very frequent basis to review
enrollment, review those changes, determine if adjustments are needed, and then make those adjustments and recommendations throughout the spring. So it is an ongoing and evolving process throughout that. Throughout that time frame. The next question, we had regarded AP and IB exams. You see the data here. I won't read all the way through it, but it does show the number of students enrolled, exams administered, and exams with three grader or
four grader for AP and IB. You also see here the intervention materials and costs of what we purchase for elementary schools. Again, those resources are here and this information will all be posted online for the public as well. I had a question regarding how many counselors and media specialists are national board certified, and we have 15 counselors and seven media specialists at this time. We have a number of follow up items
regarding the student data concerns that were presented at the testimony. And I'm sorry, I should have noted. We've moved on to the follow ups from the January 16th public hearing. This. The information here outlines our data protection policies and our current efforts and practices to ensure that data is retained appropriately, but also removed when, when and when it's not necessary for us to keep it any longer. And finally, from from January 16th,
we had a question regarding Monocacy Elementary School, which does have a full time staff development teacher, and where we are in the updating the school counselor job description that is still in process. Our and the elementary school counselors work group will continue to work that through. So we know we now have the follow ups for the January 23rd work session. And there was a
question around information for home and hospital instruction and virtual instruction, as you can see in home and hospital, which is mandated, we spend about $2.5 million. And the virtual instruction between the high school virtual instruction and blended learning is about $2.4 million. As you can see, online pathways to graduation and e-learning courses are the ones with the highest enrollment and attendance, and then blended learning and central hybrid math, you know, have smaller
attendance. But those are in brand new programs. In a way, the contractual amount that we spend on that is about $195,000 and is for the licenses to support those programs. There was also a question around the career food options and a regrettably, Korea is not a program that is allowable under the USDA School Lunch program, but they do receive the bag lunches that are created for that population or students that
attend Korea. And there's also Manna Food Center provides a hot meal on Thursdays for them at this time. Another question was regarding the single administrators. And we only currently we only have two schools with single administrators. One is Monocacy Elementary School and one is North Chevy Chase Elementary schools, and there's no regional programs or system wide programs in those two schools. Those are our smaller schools at this
time. A couple of years ago, when we got the Esser funding, we started the permanent substitute pilot program. I believe this is the third year that we have it, and the cost is approximately $3.1 million, and we have about 85 subs in 90 schools because some of them rotate between two schools. There, there was a question regarding the home policy for Chromebooks, and that policy has not changed since August of
2022. But now there are some schools that have the card distribution model. And those students, those schools that have the card distribution model are eligible to take a Chromebook home. And but we're not 100% right now, 1 to 1 access to Chromebooks. You know, based on, you know, the conversation we had at the last work session and the information provided by Doctor Taylor, amount spent on Chromebook repairs. In this year, we are projecting, is a projection of $3.6 million, and that is to replace the LCD screens. The
cameras on the on the Chromebooks. Those are the biggest expenses to date. Not the only ones, but the biggest ones. Revenue collected for lost and damaged Chromebooks. This is not something that we have applied consistently, you know, since the pandemic, because we were trying to make sure that we're able to provide the Chromebooks for all the students. But since 2020, we've collected around $154,000. And then this year is about $60,000
to date. So it's a small amount compared to the cost of replacing Chromebooks or fixing Chromebooks. So we are there was a lot of discussion around the twice exceptional program for students. And this is there were questions around why has the program has decreased and in enrollment. And the factors for that include, you know, the distance from the home school to the schools that offer the twice exceptional program expansions in home schools of other
programs that are able to provide the supports to those students, or the instruction to those students. And as you can see on the on the slide, there's a misunderstanding of the profile of the students in regards to social, emotional, behavioral and academic needs. So there's going to be increased professional development for special education students to be able to provide support for those students. As of the January 27th public hearings, there were a few questions. And one of them was about the no
work, no pay day for certain employees. The 16 no work, no pay students for ten months. Here. I just want to clarify that some of those days include the system wide closures during winter break and the system wide closures during spring break. So overall, during the school year, outside of those is about 4 to 5, no, no work, no pay days. And the cost is about $2.3 million per day. If you remember, this
was something that we tried to add to the budget a couple of years ago, and eventually we were not able to include it. Bus tracking options. You know, they're still researching those. There is an RFP that was. Published, you know, for, for people to respond. So they're still working through those solutions. And are there plans to replace a ramp in Gaithersburg cluster on CIP list? There is the latest Laytonsville Elementary School
that has requested Ada ramps on all the exterior doors. So they're working the construction and facilities team is working to assess those conditions and identify possible solutions. And then I think this is our second to last. What are the translation headphones budgeted. So as you can see we currently only have one transmitter and 25 receivers. You know that the Language Assistance Services
unit utilizes and they are they're they're extreme cost associated with this. As you know, they're approximately $1,200 per $1,200 per language. We don't have in-house descriptive interpretation. Those are contractual services that they use TPT individuals for support through the Language Assistance Services Unit. And I think that was the last one. I
turn it over. Okay, so what to expect from here and where we go from here. We are seeking the board's direction today, in addition to lingering questions, comments and things that you need in terms to inform your decision, I think we're going to make progress on that. Contracts information before closed today and make sure that that's up so that you have that some things that you will see changed in the
budget documents that get, get presented between now and February 4th is that we will update based on the governor's proposed budget and make the changes on the revenue side and also make the changes on the expenditure side, which won't change our local request. So right now we turn it over to the to the board for discussion and also direction from the board as to what you would like your staff to do next. Doctor Taylor, thank you so much. There's a lot of follow up to the previous two
work sessions. Questions or comments raised by board members. I really appreciate that you provide this timely answers to the board, and I, I'm wondering whether my fellow board member has more clarification on those or questions or comments on the follow up information. And I'm going to go from my right hand side to see anyone still have
lingering questions. I just want to say thank you for saying that, Miss Yang, because the budget staff has requested a good night's sleep this weekend, and we they've been working incredibly hard, and we know how important it is to communicate with the public the questions that you're receiving and that they're receiving, too. So we want to get as much information out there as quickly as possible. So thank you for saying that. We truly appreciate it. We see a very great
improvement in this process. Miss Wolff. Yeah, I just want to thank you for hearing my question and providing a response. Of course, it's still a little bit hard to see for the public, I'm sure, but I do see black students in this budget. I'm also glad that you talked about the code of conduct, because we discussed that. And I really I know that we review it
at the end of every school year for the next school year, and I really want us to take a look at the subjective categories and see if we can tighten those up so that there's not so much subjectivity in them. I also want us to do something that you mentioned, which was drill down more on the specific schools and see if we can identify the schools that need more support in order to bring up the
achievement levels of black students. I just wanted to say thank you, because I know this has been a lot of work, and I really appreciate your taking into consideration my request. Mr. Are we going to have rounds? Yes, absolutely. Thank you for clarifying. Let's go for one question first. Thank you. First of all, I want to thank you for the incredible amount of work. I mean, just flipping through these slides, it really shows
and it really helps us have a clearer picture of the needs of our school system as well. So my question on this round is about the restorative justice piece. So there was some concern that maybe there was a cut to some central office restorative justice positions. And I just thought we could get some clarity on that. Definitely not
a cut. Definitely a re-imagination of how we might deploy those folks and how we might utilize them on cross-functional teams differently. That does, because we do have some changes in job descriptions that does necessitate us to go through some human resources hoops, but definitely not a cut. If anything, a refocusing and a greater intentionality on how we might attach this as a priority. Because we heard that loud and clear too. We share the concern
and we see great opportunity for us to address this in a really more intentional way. And that paired with the code of conduct work, I think will put us on a better path to implementing restorative justice with more fidelity and more consistency throughout the system, and also the fish. I'm hoping that we can teach. Our employees are in the
school every day on how to actually implement that vision, so I really appreciate that and I'll have more questions later. Thank you, Miss Montoya. Thank you. I want to just echo the thoughts of my colleagues. Thank you all so much. I know it takes so many people who are in this room and not in this room to get all of this information, including the very quick answers that you got for all of our follow ups. I know these are little tidbits of information that live in various spaces, so I appreciate that. I would like
to just respectfully remind all of us that when we make presentations or we put things in writing, we need to capitalize the B in black. So that's just something I would like folks to note for the slide presentation. But my question actually is for this round has to do with the two schools that don't have assistant principals. There is not space in the proposed budget for assistant principals for those schools, right. Because because the number of students enrolled is so low. Correct. Great. And I'm
not I don't have a gripe with that. What I would just like to suggest that should there ever be a situation where we consider that, that perhaps M.C.P.S. Should reach out to the principals and staffs at those schools? Because sometimes when schools are smaller like that, they might do things in a different way. They have folks that are filling in those spaces, and we wouldn't want to disrupt that either. So I'm actually really glad that you brought that up because it it really details bigger work that needs to happen on a couple of fronts, something that the board heard an awful lot about of this
budget season was about class size and how we might address class size in a deliberate way. This is very much connected to staffing for administrators, staffing for teachers, staffing for all of our staff positions that are school facing is what ratios do we use to staff buildings, and what are the conditions that we create in order to staff our buildings at a set ratio. So something that
we hope to bring in the next year back before the board for consideration are staffing ratios for school facing positions in terms of how we would staff the buildings moving forward and shifting away from something that's a little loosey goosey with guidelines. So it wouldn't be a discrete question about does this school get this, or does that school get this, but rather there would be some concrete rules to follow in terms of how we would staff a
building. So thank you for illuminating that. I'm going to come to this side, Mr. Savona. Yes. I wanted to say thank you all for this presentation. I feel like it went really into detail about a lot of the questions that we had. I appreciate the very succinct answers to some of like our off the off the top of our head questions, and I think it answered a lot of questions for me. I also want to say thank you for the Swedish Fish. I finished my pack, but alongside that I
just wanted to sort of kind of go back to the idea of like the, the. Reorganization, recapturing and kind of get like sort of an insight into maybe saying, well, some people are like scared right now about their jobs and about all of these things, but what does it mean, like in the future for how we want to keep our retention rates and keep great people within our system? And just kind of maybe talking about that, because I know people see their job cut and you're talking about the HR
loops that, that we have to follow. Yeah. And change is difficult. It's very easy to get excited about change until change shows up on your front doorstep. And so I think the disposition that we need to have is to be clear about the goals and objectives that we want to accomplish, and providing answers, support and guidance to people who may see that their either their role is changing or that there's different expectations tied to their role,
or that their role isn't in this building, but that there are options. And that's on us. It doesn't happen overnight because we do have so many people, and there's a lot of people to communicate with. I know that it's been custom to release organization charts. With the budget release in December, we held off on that intentionally, and the reason that we held off on that intentionally is we wanted to be very sure about the steps that we were taking,
making sure that we were consulting with the leadership of every single department before making a decision, making certain that there wasn't a critical task that was going to go unperformed by making an adjustment and talking through how some of the work could be rearranged without it having a direct impact to services, or overloading somebody's plate in a really inconvenient and disruptive way. The reason we
didn't release org charts and will be releasing org charts I think today, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, first thing tomorrow is because we, we know that we owe our employees a face to face communication. And even though there's uncertainty and people are nervous, that's natural. It's uncomfortable. It doesn't feel good. But we have an obligation to the system to make sure that we are being a good fiduciary, responsible
governance team on how we operate the district efficiently. But we also have a shared responsibility to be kind, compassionate and empathetic with our teammates so that they know how valuable they are and that there is a place for them in the organization, and we just need to work together to find it. Yeah. So I just kind of want to echo that last sentiment. Like there are places for these people within our system kind of going back to the slide to one of the slides where it talks about the target
hiring and placements. Like we have a process. So yeah. Thank you. All right, Miss Rivera-Oven, I'm going to let okay. Because I saw you turn on the. Yeah okay. Miss Zimmerman thank you. I want to also echo sentiments and thank everyone for all of this hard work that's been done and getting information back to us as quickly as possible. Thank you very much. I also want to echo what Miss Stewart, Mr. Serrano had brought up. It's showing up in all of our inboxes, and when we're out in the community,
there's a lot of uncertainty. And I'm. I'm hopeful that with the release of the org chart, that that will help some of these rumors of, oh my gosh, X position has been cut, that it's really just been reorganized. And I'm not trying to put more work on anyone's plate at the very last minute. But if there's a way that we can make sure that that's really clear, that this position is really just being renamed or that it's getting some new responsibilities or some responsibilities are taken away, I think that would ease a
lot of this public discomfort. Yeah. And thank you for saying that. We know that that there is going to be a lot of nervousness. I will say that we intentionally tried to speed up as much as we could and be six weeks ahead so that people could have this settled for them. It's never going to be perfect with nice, neat, tidy job descriptions, everything all lined up because we've accelerated our timeline so
quickly. But we need to work through that. We need to stay in close contact with folks that are impacted. We do know who is impacted, and it's not a reflection of a lack of love, or a lack of support, or a lack of wanting to continue our working relationship. So it it's a difficult process, but it is a it is a part of a process. And so thank you for recognizing that. And we'll, we will honor that as well. Miss Sylvester,
thank you. I had a question or a comment about the recoloring of Central Services. You identify metrics for success, which is wonderful. Reduce wait times, fewer layers, and differentiation between responses, aka improved customer service. So two thoughts. It's really important that we get
feedback from principals in terms of how this support is actually helping them. We think we're doing a good job, but what does the principal think and or the leadership team. And then also, you know, is it having an impact on academic achievement? It can be a lot of activity, a lot of people coming down on schools, but is it actually making a difference? So I'd like to see those integrated into your metrics for success. Thank you. We are great at evidence of
implementation. We are terrible at evidence of impact. So this is a great opportunity for us to showcase that. And I'll have more questions. I'll wait. Yeah. Miss Rivera, no, thank you for the follow up information. And one of the things that I know we cannot put in the budget, but to start thinking with some of the follow up information that occurs to me is especially with our home hospital students, and
it's just the whole breakdown of that population, like how many kids are farms, how many kids are we sell, how many kids are ESL, and what are those services look like for our students on our medical fragile students that I don't see represented, you know, here. But just, you know, we talked about you talked about the speech therapist and the lack of speech therapists and such a commodity. But, you know, it's not a commodity for
our most medical fragile students. It's a need and that it needs to be filled in and just thinking ahead, how we're going to do that, whether we're going to do it in house or so on. And then when we when they you did the follow up for the give me a second. For the two tier, the two E program. Again, I would love to know how many students that we're talking
about has. You know, you said that population has decreased, but then you said it might not be because of need. It might be because of transportation issues and so on. So what are we doing for those students and the breakdown as well geographically, demographic and so on. And then one thing that caught my eye is the whole interpretation services. So I just want to so for the whole system we have one transmitter
like for the whole M.C.P.S. System how much it cost. Right. And we contract out. But we I didn't get a full picture of and again this is probably for next year. But if we have one transmitter and 25 right. And I'm just trying to understand that's what we have in house and the cost, what it is, the cost yearly that we are expending on contracting out for, for this whole department. And just to do
an evaluation, does it behoove us to grow that in-house versus contracting out? Is that a way that, you know, maybe next year we can look at how we can do that? You know, we are one of the most diverse systems in the country. And we know our largest growth students are ESL students, right. So can we do an evaluation of that department to see if it does, if it's worth doing it in-house versus
contracting out. And I don't know how much that is a year, but I appreciate the work. And I know that you have in some of the asks that you have will go for another round. No, I just wanted to know that the relationship between line 67 with how that would affect the two E situation and other groups with our black students and special ed and Latino students and so on, how would that correlate to be able to connect
those two points as you see it? Okay. Thank you. Thank you for talking about your restructuring and recapturing M.C.P.S. I know that a number of positions have new descriptions, job descriptions. So one of the things I would always say that our onboarding and professional
development that need to be relooked at, because these are new positions now. So I'm sure that's on your horizon. But I think that's one important thing to think about during this implementation process. Another thing to consider is there have been quite a lot of changes in our school systems, so there are some historic knowledge or institutional knowledge that
during this process, it's worth for us to remember or value so that when things transition, that we don't need to start everything from the scratch that best practices from before, lessons learned from before can continue. Okay, my clarification is can you tell me for the permanent substitute position that started with a cold during
Covid, with federal subsidies? Do we are we still continue with the process? The practice? And are we funding that from our base budget? So yes, thank you for the question. It did start during the pandemic, a year after we came back in person and it was funded through Esser. We moved it into the operating budget last year. It has been it was decreased from what it was funded from Esser. You know, at
one point we had over 140 permanent substitutes, and now we are at I believe it was around 85. Okay. But it has decreased because as you can tell, it is a you know, it is an expense. But I know that Doctor Taylor is something that he wants to increase or expand in the future. So it is something that that we will consider in the future budget years. Thank you, thank you. We heard good feedback about that program, but
I understand it increases our base budget amounts. I'm going to go for the second round. I'm going to look to my left first to see if there are any lights on. Miss Silvestre. Yes, thank you for the follow up around class size reduction in K to two totaling 6.6 million. I just want to remind the viewing audience that elementary schools at that level already have reduced class sizes in certain schools. And so if you're trying
to extrapolate, as I was into secondary, that's going to be an under count, I guess, of the actual cost. And I also wanted you to talk about the work that you will be doing, Doctor Taylor, this year to look at staffing so that hopefully next year we can make an informed decision about class size reduction in our budget. I absolutely critical, and I'm really glad that you pointed it out, because it's arguably one of the more confusing things for people to understand that when we deal with large numbers of
student population, it is not literally removing one student from a classroom and placing them into another classroom that it really is. Taking a look at the total grade level, population, subject area, population, or secondary school population, and changing a ratio which may or may not influence the need for additional staff or an additional classroom based on the size of that particular
grade or that particular classroom. And those guidelines have certainly served the district well and been very helpful and create a lot of flexibility. Unfortunately, it does allow for there to be a little bit of class size creep over time when you've got a set amount of classrooms and a set area for a set specific space, what what will end up happening typically is that one campus or another that's experiencing a
population boom or a population bubble that their ability to adjust is really limited. So our work really needs to be working with our parent associations and our different community groups, as well as our our associations for our administrators, our support staff, and our educators to talk about what optimal class sizes really should be. Setting those ratios with some rules
about when we round up, when we round down, what triggers an additional section of a class, what timelines we follow in terms of measuring our student enrollment. Because our enrollment does change throughout the year. Currently. Right now we measure typically in the in the fall and in the spring. And we use those numbers for different measurements. But there's a compelling reason that we get a lot of students in
January. And so as a result of that, we need to take those things into consideration. So our work and what our end product is that we hope to bring back to the board, is not just a revision of our guidelines and how we might reduce class size, but what a target might be for us over the next several years, and then also a subsequent plan on how we could get to that target year over year for the next several years, because to make an impact, a meaningful
impact at the secondary level requires not only for us to change a ratio, but to set guidelines on how a principal might arrange their master schedule so that there are some safeguards in place so that an English nine class doesn't have 35 kids in it, and some other class have 12 kids in it. And to set some of those boundaries and to provide that guidance in a really meaningful way, thank you. I appreciate that. And I we
heard from Mark from our testimony that this is important to our families, and I'm a parent too. So I have witnessed it firsthand with my children. I hope that in your analysis, we also take a look at our class size reduction initiative. We've been we've had that for decades. Is it working for us? I know that large class sizes make it very difficult for the teacher to manage classroom management. Just the socialization of having that many students in a
classroom is difficult, but it's my understanding that to really see academic achievement impact, it has to be very, very low in the 14 level, which is difficult, if not impossible for public school systems. Tax supported public school systems to achieve. So I just wanted to kind of put that out there, the academic achievement, what's going to take it to be meaningful, but also recognizing that it does become very difficult for our teachers to manage large class sizes. And
just we are being responsive to the community feedback, but it's not something that you can just flip a switch. We want to be thoughtful and make a good recommendation in next year's budget. Thank you, Mr. Savona. Yeah, kind of piggy backing off that idea of, you know, the class size reduction. I think it's also important for to note that and correct me if I'm wrong, but the redistricting will also affect secondary class sizes in some way, shape or form. Correct. It's actually a
as painful as a boundary study can be, it's actually a tremendous opportunity that if you're going to make a substantive change to the guidelines or the standards in which you staff the building, that in and of itself, it won't make it just the boundary change won't impact class sizes. But what would make a change is that if you're balancing the number of students in a school, coupled with a new set of expectations
for staffing, you'll likely see a pretty dramatic shift because you have an opportunity to create parity amongst campuses that you normally otherwise wouldn't have. So it's more like a multiplier rather than like a that. Yeah, that's one way of looking. Thank you, Miss Zimmerman. Thank you. I figured if we're on the topic, I thought I'd join on in two. So the guideline info is really helpful. And we discussed this
earlier at our fiscal management meeting earlier in the week. I just want to highlight two parts of it that I think are really important, that there's not like an end date to the request. I think there's perception or rumor that there is an end date, but that if your class sizes are over the recommended ratio, you can reach out and say, we are at or over capacity. Please help us at any point in the year. And also that these requests go
through the principal and they're elevated further up. So I just encourage anyone in the community, any staff members work with administrators to bring that up. And you know that if your child's class size or your own class size is at or above, then you know that's something you can collaborate on and work on together, that this is something that everyone wants to help address. Thank you. I'm going to decide, Miss Stewart. Coming up. Well, I. Stewart.
Yes. Thank you. Since I still have more questions. But the one I think to piggyback off of the class size question, because it is something that we heard a lot in message from the public, please reduce class size. We've heard it probably a dozen times. So knowing that we need to go about this strategically seeing the costs for only K through two
and it's not really the full approach we probably even need because like you said, there's creep. For one thing I would like to see that creep not happen next year. So if I could get some kind of assurance that we're not going to let that creep even more. And the second part is really what parents care about mostly is what
improvements in this budget are they going to see in the classroom. So when they talk about class size, it's really because they see that their kid, they're not getting the support they need, and they see that teachers are overwhelmed. We have we do have new positions that we're adding to our system under the special education Paraeducators. And it's a significant you know, if we vote on that, it would be a
significant addition in staff. So can you maybe let our let the community know what will they see in the classroom so that their kid will get more attention because of this budget? Yeah, and it's a good question. And the challenge that we've got in this room is that we really are dealing in the aggregate. And the 30,000 foot view versus what is one
elementary school parents experience with their child and their teacher and their classroom. And the reality is that the budget may not have this immediate, direct or dramatic effect other than a couple of things that that are meaningful. Making an investment in our staff is critically important because the teacher that the third grader hopes they get for fourth grade, we want to make sure that she's there next
year and that she's incentivized to be there, and so that when she when her daughter shows up to fourth grade, that she walks into the classroom and she's so excited to see Mrs. Hoover in room 235, because that was the teacher she always wanted to have, making sure that we retain our great staff is critically, critically important. So a big investment in retention matters. A lot of this is tangential. As I mentioned earlier, a big
investment in special education is not just in special education. It's also an investment in our general ed space because of other resources that get diverted when we're understaffed in special education or we're understaffed in ESL, that educators have partners to collaborate on when they're working with an ESL student that they have, that they have the resources that they need to do that, that there are materials and supplies for
that classroom, that the teacher doesn't have to go into their pocket to cover the cost, because we ran out of copy paper in March, which routinely happens, unfortunately. So making sure that we can cover some of those basics really lays the foundation for people to see a tangible difference. I think any strategy that we put into play, and this is important as a discussion point for our community, is going to be
iterative. And so we're going to see evolution over time. The responsibility that we have is to paint a clear picture through our strategic plan and through the work that we want to do over the next several years about what we expect that great classroom to look like. This is what it should look like. This is how many students should be in that classroom. These are the supports that should be available to that classroom. And here's our plan over the next several years to get there. That's within reach. And that's
really what we need to be doing. The sad reality about the budget that I've presented to you is largely about stabilizing the district and taking some really not awesome situations and really putting them on the path to solvency, making sure we live up to the commitments that we've already made. And if there's a theme to this budget, it is one of transparency where we're reflecting the things that are
our reality, whether it's Chromebook repairs or whether it's our health benefits fund or whether it's our electric bill, making sure that there's a clear and transparent way for how we account for our resources. And no, it doesn't leave a ton of room for innovation or enhancement, but our strategies are are sound. They they are the approach that that we think will get us from point A to point B, but future budgets really do
need to be a reflection of the board's strategic plan moving forward. Those two things need to be synonymous. They need to be aligned, and they need to reflect the values of the school system. So thank you so much for your answer. I just wrote three points down about what parents could see in their classroom with this budget versus last, and that is more stability in their schools, more capital,
human capital, resources to support the kids in the school, and also more materials and supplies to support the educational program. So thank you so much, because it's really important that we have some tangible items so they know that we're going in the right direction and that there will be more in classroom support. Thank you, Miss Montoya. Thank you. I'd like to talk about cryo. I
have to be honest, I'm embarrassed that this is the food that we've been providing. I understand the restraints, right. As you mentioned, it doesn't qualify under the USDA School Lunch program, which I would love to know why, but we can talk about that later. And we've been trying to source from outside. I'm very grateful to manna for the support that they've provided. We had some students come who are not part of the cryo program, but testified on behalf of the participants about some of our
our community restaurants and other providers helping out. So I want to thank our community members, and I want to know what we're going to do about it. We see here that we're expanding. Cryo has been limited with the resources that they had. Again, I'm embarrassed. We're serving Uncrustables to basically adults who have been working all day long for those in the community who may not have a young child in their life. An uncrustable is about the size of my palm, not my fingers, just the palm. So I
want to know with this expansion, which I think is fantastic, I think that's going to be great for our students and our communities. I'm very excited about it actually. Where is the food? Thank you, Miss Wolff. I just have two follow ups. One is I mentioned earlier that while you mentioned some things for black students, there were other things that the
community could see. And one of them, Mr. Serrano, mentioned, and that's program evaluation. I think it was you that mentioned that's going to be very important to our students because we have issues, particularly in East County of access and Opportunity. So this has been something we've been trying to get done for some time. So very appreciative to see that in the budget. But I do have a question about what is
it, the equity add on. I think that this can't be a free for all that we need to require some kind of plan be submitted of what they're going to do with that money. And that's all I had to say about it. Thank you. All right. I appreciate staff providing information on intervention material cost at the elementary school level. At a glance, I can see that math is very clear. Our curriculum. And
then one intervention that we purchase, it's not so clear what's reading. There are curriculum come with intervention and then several for other interventions. We purchase. I would like to see some utilization data. They might be all for purpose for different needs, but it's perplexing. It's confusing for
math. We also have different needs to why reading is all different kind of intervention. I would like to see a school system. It doesn't need to be a large school. Some utilization data and some impact data, right? That that these interventions can bring about. I would appreciate that. Then my question will be about the Chromebook repairs. What is demonstrated here for FY 25? It
is a majority of the money actually is going to re replace the screens. And this is the already we spend on that. This LCD screen is the Chromebook screen and the Chromebook. So this is what we spend and we are projecting. And we didn't have a line item in 25 for this cost. Yes, we've had a line line item for a while for about 3 or 4
years of 1.5 million. That was not sufficient. So we always augmented with the Esser funding in the last couple of years because as you know, the Chromebook inventory increased as a result of the pandemic. If you remember, a couple of years ago, in order to try to balance the budget at $1.5 million, was eliminated from the base budget, moved to Esser, and now we've brought it back with an increase. But again, 3.6 million is what we are projecting to
spend through the end of this year. And then we're budgeting for inflation, cost and so on for next year. For the Chromebook is a $4 million budget item. Gotcha. Thank you for that. All right I'm going to go one last round to see if there's any more questions. I'm going to start from this side, Miss Stewart okay. It's hard to pick the last, but I have to ask this because I believe at this moment in time, especially what
is happening at the national level and what could happen from decisions made there that we need all hands on deck, okay. And that's our full community, our teachers, our kids, everyone on deck to move us forward. So with that, and after hearing about the comments about the choreo program and the food issue there, we have a program
called dine with dignity and it is used mainly, I believe, to pay off lunch debt. But I would like to see also CRA if we cannot find, you know, the budget, we should. I know there are community members that would love to sponsor that program, and we do still have some deep
pockets in Montgomery County that we can reach out to. So dine with dignity. This is an obvious opportunity. So let's all of us think about the ways we can work with our community. Thanks. Checking. And Miss Rivera all this I. Yeah, just to tag it on on on cra I just, I just want us to be. I'm very although I'm very grateful for
the add on. I just want to just be clear that this were years of neglect and inequity. That was towards the students in Korea does not happen overnight. And we did treat them as second class citizens for years. And with our email population, it has the lowest graduation rate than any other group, 28%. So I just want to make sure that the focus is still on lifting,
following the comments of, you know, the food situation that should have honestly been taken care of years ago. I don't think it should take this, you know, add additional funding. Right. Leadership knew the people. You know who who are under the leadership of Korea knew. And if they didn't. But shame on them for not knowing, for not visiting, for not understanding this group of students in our
system. And that's still concerning to me. So I just want to make sure that although we are going to open to other students and so on and, and do the correct place that it is with the lens of equity, of the inequities that have gone on for years towards this program. So I just want to make sure that that focus is still there, because if this as again, this group of students and M.L. Students I feel are still not very well
represented on this budget, and yet they have the lowest graduation rate ever than any other group and has been for years. Ms. Silvestre. Back to Chromebooks. Could you help me understand which schools have a CART distribution model? I don't have that data, but we can get it, you know, and share it with the with the board. Okay. It's not going to influence my
decision on the next board meeting. I'm just curious. Sure. And could you remind us, you mentioned that you will be putting up the org charts in a day or two. Can you all remind us what else is coming up? I know the dashboard still has FY 25 budget on there. What else is being updated in the coming days? So yes. So we will be updating the all the org charts, including chapter one will be uploaded for first thing
tomorrow morning for everyone to see. We will finalize and the contracts, the list of contracts and that will be put on on board docs. There are table five that we didn't provide in the superintendent's budget because we were still making adjustments and had to notify, you know, a staff members, so that that's the one that lists all the positions. So that will be uploaded as well tomorrow morning. And I think that is the complete list obviously. But
that would be for the February 4th. Right. So, you know, that would be once the board adopts their budget, we will have that for that information. And the dashboard. The dashboard. Yes, the dashboard is we're working through it's a little bit more complicated, to be honest, only because we have made changes in the budget again, a restructure. So everything is not lining up. You know departments have changed names. Everything is not lining up. You know, aligning with the FY 24 budget. So we
just want to make sure that that we're able to have a clear crosswalk between the FY 24 budget and the FY 25 budget. So we're working on that. But we hope to have a finalized, you know, within the next few days. But that's supposed to show the 25 budget or the 26 proposed budget. I'm sorry. It was the 25 budget and the 26 proposed budget. You're correct. So thank you. Yes, I appreciate that. I think you're moving on the timeline. I think the slide shows that you will update everything February 4th, and I can see you do need a good night's sleep. You're moving up the timeline, Mr. Zimmerman.
Thank you. So I also want to bring it back to Chromebooks, because I can imagine that someone sitting at home would say, well, you've collected a close to $60,000, but you're projected to spend millions. What's going on? Why are we like, are we letting the kids snap the Chromebooks over their knees and just give them a new one? Like, can we explain and extrapolate a little bit more on policy and collection? Sure. So
there's a Chromebook regulation that was established that indicates that we are only collecting funding from students. Really, if they're intentionally cause damage to the Chromebook. So, you know, it has to be there has to be some investigations at the school level to determine whether it was intentional or it was just, you know, use, you know, if a Chromebook the regular use. So that is what's the difference between the actual impact to the cost of repairing versus what is collected from students? Perfect. Thank you. Am I able to
ask another? Okay, the other question. I guess it's probably more of a request, but when we look at our intervention materials at elementary schools, I'd love to see which ones are gaining great success and which ones maybe are not as successful. That if we want to keep using those interventions. Thank you. Thank you so much, board members, for your comments and questions. And, and the few follow up items and the
affirmative feedback. It's been really helpful. Madam president, at this time, we would request that the board. There's one more. Oh, I'm so sorry. We have some more. Okay. Mr. Savannah? Yes. No worries. Again, kind of going back to the idea of Chromebooks, I feel a lot more comfortable with, you know, the number that we're putting in in the budget. If, you know, I know there's like a lot of e-waste generated. Sometimes when we're looking at some of those Chromebook repairs, we have a lot of great, you know, tech clubs across our schools. So
maybe just looking into practices to kind of see what on those clubs might need. And if we can provide anything from those Chromebooks, I know a lot of them are very resourceful, going into a lot of e-waste shops and getting whatever scraps they can. So I think it'd be great if we can just, you know, make sure that we have a process in place on that side, but just making sure our money is going as far as it can be. And if I may, I do know that the Chromebook repair team reuses parts, you know, from other Chromebooks, you know, to make those repairs. So that is part
of their strategy. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Doctor Taylor, I think I have a question for our board member. You have a proposed budget, but the board members might have thoughts on the budget. So thank you for putting it together. But given the restraints the school system. Face in M.C.P.S, I'm going to turn to my colleagues to find out if there are any items or places in the budget where we believe there are additional items, that we can
see some savings from this operating budget. I would like to turn to my colleagues. If you have, I'll turn your light on and we'll go on. Miss Wolff. Okay, first, I would like to say that I do believe in asking for what we need, and I think this is a bare bones budget, and that we did ask for what we needed. And so I do agree with it. However, anything can be tweaked a little. And so as we looked at the budget, we looked at some of
the items. And I know the public out there likes to think we do nothing but rubber stamp. I used to think that before I got on the board too. And then you, you learn the real situation. But one of the things that I do think we could eliminate off the budget is the proposal for renaming Magruder High School. Now, it doesn't sound like a lot and it isn't. And I quite frankly wouldn't argue over it because I know how sensitive
this issue has been to the community. You know, the naming of a school carries out into the community the feeling about the school. However, at this point in time, even though it's only $1 million, I think we have to stay focused on our North Star, which is achievement, literacy and reading. And that million dollars could fund something we need. More importantly, right now at this time than the
renaming of Magruder High School, I'd actually like to second Miss Wolfe's suggestion. I do want to thank the community for engaging, whether it's at these budget work sessions over the years when we're talking about the names and mascots of schools. I know we had one at Poolesville High School many, many years ago, and I am very sensitive actually to this issue. But I do think given that we have, you know, we have to make sure that we are asking only for what is truly, truly needed. And given that some of the therel be some capital
improvements in Magruder, it seems like we might be duplicating efforts if we were to spend the community's money for renaming now, as well as then later in the CIP budget. So I do want to say that this is important, but I know that we have to really focus on the most important things. And so I would just like to second Miss Wolfe's suggestion. Mr. And I agree with my colleagues on that aspect of the budget. There are other ways
that we can become an anti-racist system that has effect in the classroom. Again, I, I am really focused on the classroom experience in this budget. And so this aligns with that approach. And in addition, I think there's another place where we could, you know, think about our fiscal responsibility. And that is the social emotional
learning specialist. I do know that the Office of Shared Accountability does good work, and I'm confident that we can use existing staff to work on our social emotional learning education for our students. Again, just being cognizant that we need to use our dollars in the best way possible and using
our staff. And with the reorganization, I think our staff could take that on to make improvements. So thank you for that. Thank you, miss Mr. Savona. Yeah, I just kind of want to continue off here. I mean, as any student will tell you, like the social emotional learning of, of students is vitally important. With that being said, I did also have a mental health resolution that
put up earlier to evaluate kind of exactly sort of what mental health resources we're doing. And again, looking at the work that the Office of Shared Accountability Accountability already does, maybe this is something that, you know, in collaboration with that, with that work group, we can see some some movement on rather than just dedicating a full position. And you know, what is a broccoli budget? I also thank you, Mr. Savona. I also have one item. I would like us to take a closer
look. We currently have half $1 million dedicated to leadership development in Central Office. Given all the constraints we are experiencing, I want to see that if we can do to do that with less now, I think professional development is important. Leadership development is important, but is there a way we can decrease this line item and from half 1 million to 250,000?
This is one area, I think, that we can leverage community support. There are a lot of expertise out there, grant opportunities and peer working together model to make us strong. And so I would like to ask Doctor Taylor, in your budget presentation, say we once
were a bullrich a school system. I would like to see that, but I would like us to, given the constraint, take incremental steps towards that. Thank you. I just want to echo support for what Miss Yang has brought up. I think it's a really great way for us to do more with our community, create more with our community partners, and be more fiscally responsible. Any other comments from board members? Mr.
Savona? Yeah, and again, like kind of going back to the idea of McGruder, I feel like it's been said before, you know, what the impact of the renaming has and how much of that can be absorbed like by the CIP. Is there like a rough like percentage that maybe could be shared about how much of the of like that cost comes from just the straight, you know, material like shifts that need to happen? Yeah. So thank you so much. And I want to thank the board for your very clear direction, very
judicious and thoughtful selection of things that would generate a savings. I think your, your partners in the county council will certainly appreciate the efforts that you're making to reduce our our ask. And I think you've selected wisely in terms of things that we can present back to you on February 4th and we'll make sure that this is reflected. You do have a presentation on February 4th about the McGruder renaming, because we this is actually something that that has been on
our to do list for some time. And in that presentation, not to cut to the chase, maybe this will shorten it by five minutes. Is that is the option that you address this as a part of your CIP and, and a large portion of the expense is tied to the CIP type of changes. Things like the signage in the school, the, the gym floor itself, any, any time
that you have something that that does have some kind of connection, you you are actually generating a savings because it has to be redone anyway. So that that's a very astute observation and a great way to look at it. There are some soft costs that you could address in a future operating budget that corresponds with changes that you make to the CIP, or even use CIP savings to fund some of those soft costs as well. So
that's a that's a great selection. Definitely. I think that if you are selecting positions that that make sense versus the ones that don't, especially given the environment of how much change your superintendent is recommending as part of a restructuring, absolutely makes sense to make smaller steps and to be a lot more judicious and be very intentional and deliberate about those steps that are taken. And in terms of professl
learning, absolutely. We'll rise to meet that challenge, and we'll definitely take an approach that is very deliberate as we begin our journey of recovering central services to be more service oriented. So thank thank you for those recommendations and direction to us. Thank you, Miss Rivera. Arvin. Thank you, Doctor Taylor. Appreciate all the work of you and your staff. The endless hours over the weekend and of my colleagues here at the table as well, although I, you know,
we're not saying we're not going to be renaming Magruder High School. We're just saying that this time with the changes in the high school is going to be going through. Right? Doing it smarter at a different time where it makes more financial sense. Yeah, exactly. So I know that we all feel that this is something that's very important to the board, but the timing matters at this point. And with, you know, with staff development and so on, with the changes you're going to be making, I feel very strongly that you do
need best practices and all that good stuff, that you don't have a small staff. We're not a small system. So all that, you know, it costs money to execute best practices and all that good stuff. So I appreciate that. The only the only line that I'm not in agreement with my colleagues is the line 67, which is the equity and organization development assessment reporting. We have. I just I
just want to say, I know that this is a line that that we're thinking of savings. I personally don't think this is a line that we should we should wait on. And with all the reporting requirements in that office, I just want to say that that is those are positions that I fully support. Okay. Miss Stewart, do you have a clarification? I, I do have a clarification. I wasn't
suggesting to get rid of the whole line. I do agree we need the assessment reporting specialist and I would like to prioritize that position. It would be great if we could have both. But in this budget I would choose the assessment reporting specialist and wait on a social emotional learning specialist. Maybe in a future budget as we work through our central office
reorganization or what was your word you like to use, not reorganization, recovery, restructuring. Thank you. All right. We are learning a lot of new vocabulary. But Doctor Taylor, thank you for taking this into consideration. And we look forward to the budget that you will bring forward. Oh, Mr. Savona, look at board member has a lot to share. Yes. Mr. Savona yes. I again just wanted to echo those same sentiments. I think like the equity assessment
specialist is vitally important. I think that the important part is that we understand that the social emotional learning specialist is one that can be, can be looked at for different time and the work can be shifted over through different categories. I appreciate everyone, and I know that we can all agree that we are in our duties to oversee the school system. Fiscal responsibility and financial stewardship is a big part of our job. Thank you,
Doctor Taylor. We look forward to see to the February 4th meeting that you bring forward the budget, the proposed budget. Thank you so much. May I have we don't need a motion. It's a work session. All right. Meeting is adjourned.