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(CC1/S1) Encoded as a 2-line Band in the Poudre School District, so students from other schools are allowed to participate. This year we had
students from Conard Middle School, Preston Middle School, Timnath Middle High School, and Fort Collins High School all compete with Fossil Ridge High School's marching band. This championship is a celebration
not only of fossil, but of the collective talent and commitment across our entire district to give a context of what state champion means under the CBA system. Bands are evaluated by panels of judges
using detailed adjudication sheets. The judges assess multiple options, including music, both individual and ensemble, visual performance, marching, and movement, overall
musical and visual effect. Percussion and color guard. What this means is that success doesn't come from one strong soloist or section. It comes from the band functioning as an
integrated whole, with every student contributing in all elements, working together seamlessly. The marching band's victories attribute not only to the skill of the students, but to their determination. Beating
it in mid-July, students devoted three weeks of their summer break to learning the fundamentals of music and marching. Students rehearse three days per week after school, along with Saturdays
until competitions began in late September. By the end of the season, our students put in over 200 hours of extracurricular time to make this championship reality. It's a credit to the support of
their families and the wider community as a whole. It reminds us what high quality public education music education specifically can build discipline, pride,
artistry, and community service. Please join me in congratulating the Fossil Ridge High School Marching band and all the PhD students who make it possible on their fourth straight state championship,
and in thanking them for representing Poudre School District with such pride and
excellence. Thank you. Okay, I think we should do a picture at the end with all of you. Thank you so much for being here. I
can't I don't know if anybody else in here was. I was not expecting you guys to be like the whole crew and just it was very impressive. Thank you so much for all of you being here. And congratulations. Yeah. And
when you win the fifth consecutive state championship, I expect the performance to celebrate. At this time next year, you're going to need a bigger boat. Can you. Are you
able to please wait? Yeah. Oh, wait for a picture after all of that? No. Please sit. And then all of our. Sorry, I'm being unclear, I apologize. Okay?
Okay. I think we should do what we've been doing consistently. Congratulations again to the
Fossil Ridge High School marching band. Our next honoree is Dave Wolke, also from Fossil
Ridge High School. Dave is the winner of the Colorado Athletic Directors Association State Award of Merit. Here tonight, to say a few words about this amazing honor is Fossil Ridge
principal Mark Berry. Good evening, board President Zamora, vice president of the board directors. And by the way, welcome to our new board
directors here tonight, superintendent Kingsly, cabinet community members and those of you watching from home. Name is Mark Berry, and I am the principal of Fossil Ridge High School. You just heard from Mr. Nye about our amazing students.
And he spoke about representing not only Fossil Ridge High School, but Poudre School District with pride and excellence. I'd like to add to that list and articulate our ridge values of respect,
integrity, determination, gratitude and excellence. One of the people who embodies all of these values is our assistant principal and athletic director, Mr. Dave
Walk. Sitting here in the front row. Excuse me, I want to read a clip, an excerpt for you, because it can sum this up better than I could say it. So from a national selection
committee, Dave Walk, athletic director and assistant principal at Fossil Ridge High School, is a 2025 National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association
State Award of Merit recipient. Walk holds 20 years of experience as an assistant principal and athletic director. He's also coached volleyball and track, as well as served
the Front Range League as vice president and president and the Northern League as their secretary. At the state level, walk is involved with the Colorado High School Activities Association. We know that as
chassis where he's served on committees including volleyball, playoff finance and equity walk is also a Chasa Legislative Council member. This award is
provided by the Niaa to only one deserving member in each state, for recognition of their meritorious dedication to high school and middle school athletics. That's the end of
the excerpt, but I would like to say how proud I am of my colleague, Mr. Walk. He he does represent ridge values not just at school, but in his life. And our student athletes benefit
from this every day. I've never seen and this is not I'm not embellishing. I have never worked with or seen an athletic director work as hard as Mr. Walk, not only for athletics
and academics, but for an equitable system that supports athletics, academics and activities and celebrates actively all three. The collaboration that takes place
between our football program, for example, and our marching band, makes for an awesome student experience and everyone benefits. And the two apps that you see here collaborate to
provide that leadership. But the real story or the students that you already heard about. So I'm here to celebrate, Dave, but tie that together and say it's super, super a privilege. And I'm proud to be a Sabercat
and a member of PSD. Dave, congratulations to you my
friend. Appreciate it. Thank you. Our final recognitions of
the night are both from Polaris Expeditionary Learning School. Alicia Ernest was awarded the 2025 Charles Red Center Teaching Western History Award, and Sarah Beyer was named a
finalist for the Colorado Teacher of the year. At this time, I'd like to invite Polaris Principal Star Hill to the podium to tell us a little more about these amazing
educators. All right. Thank you. Well, as John said, I am Star Hill, the principal at Polaris Expeditionary Learning School. Superintendent Kingsley PSD cabinet members of the board.
Tonight, I am excited to be here to celebrate two teachers from Polaris. I think it's particularly exciting because these teachers, the awards that they're being recognized for, really represent the
expeditionary learning process. But also, we're a K-12 school, one of two K-12 schools in the system. And so Alicia, being an elementary teacher and Sarah being a high school teacher, they're they're these end caps
to what our K-12 program provides to families. And so, first off, I am excited to honor Alicia. Alicia Ernest as an elementary teacher. And she has been awarded one of the
highest honors in her academic field, the 2025 Charles Read Teaching Western History Award. It does highlight her exceptional curriculum design and her commitment to intellectual rigor. Her award
winning National Day of Mourning resource is a prime example of culturally responsive teaching. The lesson decentralizes romanticized narratives inviting students as young as fourth grade, in this
case, to engage in critical discourse in complex issues like decolonization and indigenous resilience. These collaborative, collaborative experiences linked her students at Polaris to local leaders,
CSU students, and community leaders as she created this traveling discourse model. It is designed for easy use across K-12 and recently actually is looking at publication and is
going to be used at other schools in the area. It promotes broader literacy and citizenship goals and supports teachers districtwide. If you know Alicia, you know she is
also an advocate and a district support for both math and social studies adoptions as well as literacy adoptions. And she is a powerful force for curriculum excellence. And we are very proud to celebrate
your achievement and proud to have you on the crew at Polaris. So. And the innovation again,
if you know Sarah, she's been with the district for a long time as well. The innovation of Sarah Beyer. She was recently named as a semifinalist for Colorado Teacher of the year. If you're aware that that's the
top 52 teachers in the state of Colorado. So it's pretty awesome that she is a part of Poudre School District. She holds that honor, as we would both agree, among many fantastic educators throughout
the state. And she is a humble, lifelong learner. In the 12 years that I worked with her, she has been transforming student potential in our building, but has been doing it for over 20 years. Recently,
her development of the Natural Resource and Outdoor Leadership CTE pathway, the current technical education pathway at Polaris Expeditionary Learning. It is the only one of its kind in our district. For her, these
aren't just classes for the students, they aren't just classes. They are a launchpad to the future. In fact, I just learned this evening from Sarah that one of her seniors that has followed that pathway all the way through has been
accepted into Montana State next year in the honors program on scholarship. So nice job, Mama Bear. So in this process, through her leadership class, students gain first Wilderness
Responder Certification, Leave No Trace principles, and they develop leadership skills directly relevant to Colorado's multibillion dollar, billion dollar outdoor recreation industry. So really, again, that launch pad to the the
future, the courses that Sarah teaches are also accredited through PSD and through Front Range Community College through that concurrent enrollment collaboration. So students are also able to graduate with a substantial amount of college
credit. And that is due to Sarah going back and getting a second master's degree so that she can earn or teach front range college classes. So she blends together this academic rigor with with really practical fieldwork every
single week. If you would like to go to Lory State Park, look at elk scat, just let us know. We'll get you right on the bus. Sarah and her students are not just learning about nature, but are prepared to be informed
leaders and professionals. And we're looking towards that work workforce readiness goal. So we at Polaris are so grateful and proud to have both of these teachers and all the educators, employers as part of our crew.
So thank you for celebrating them tonight. I appreciate the time. Thank you so much. All
right. Should we take a picture? Can we all. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it in front again. Thank you.
Coming up in front. Yeah. So are you all seeing this? That's the way I did. Things over
there. Oh, we're going to do over here okay. So. Yeah. Nice to see you. Yes. Thank you. All
right. There you go. All people
that. She is. Well. Yeah. A
bunch of. We'll do it. All.
Well we've been with them. Yeah,
yeah. Exactly. Congratulations.
Thank you. Yeah yeah yeah. Well,
I want to congratulate you. All. For. All right. Thank you so
much for being here. It's very good to see you all. Have an amazing evening. All right. So next we have 5.0. It's our superintendent report. Superintendent Kingsley will now make remarks to the Board
of Education and to the community. Thank you, President Zamora. That kind of just, you know, just rolls off the tongue. It's really nice to see that. Congratulations to you and Director Velda. Good evening everybody. It's wonderful to be
with all of you tonight. I want to start our evening by giving a very special thank you to and congratulations and welcome to Doctor Ziegler, Director Baz, as well as Doctor Spain. This is, I think, for the two of you,
your first televised meeting. My mom and many others want to say hi right now, but welcome. I know this is going to be the first of many important, but also very productive meetings. So I just want to congratulate you on a very well deserved
opportunity to be a part of this team. Tonight's highlight video is a really special one because it talks about and elevates our kindergarten students. For parents and
students who are just becoming a part of the PSD family, we are so excited to welcome you to our school system. In the fall, there's going to be more information regarding kindergarten choices that are available on our choose PSD website. But as always, our
communications team does an amazing job elevating various aspects of our system, and I can't think of anything more important than elevating five year olds. So let's let's learn a little bit more about our
kindergarten class. Welcome to kindergarten in Poudre School District. My name is Caitlin Cheramie and I am a kindergarten teacher. We are so happy you're joining us. You have many schools to choose
from in Poudre School District. Our motto here in PSD is to educate every child, every single day, and our teachers are ready with heart and caring to take care of your children.
Good job. Try that one. All of our schools focus on the Colorado Academic Standards. Teach your child. Your child will come to school every single day and learn math. Learn how to read and learn how
to write. They will attend special classes where they can do technology, PE, art, and music. All kinds of things are waiting for your child at our
school district. When your child walks in the door in the morning, they may find a beautiful morning meaning for them to start their day. We greet each other and say hello. We check the calendar and learn
about the date, and then we move into different subjects. Each subject can be broken up into different ways. Sometimes our students will encounter a whole class lesson where all students are learning together.
Sometimes children will go into small groups and work based on their individual needs. We're so happy you and your child are joining our school district. For more information about
registering your child for kindergarten, or information about any of our amazing schools you have to choose from, please visit our school
district's website. Huge special thanks to our communications team for once again putting together another really quick win video to elevate the incredible work that's happening in our system.
And as the superintendent now for about four and a half years, I'll tell you, there's nothing that brings me more joy than going into a kindergarten class on the most difficult of difficult days going and spending time with five year
olds. An amazing, incredible rock star teachers is a highlight of of all of our employees opportunities to be a part of this great system. And just in the past week, I had a chance to visit firsthand
Eyestone Elementary School. Rice Elementary School was at Tivoli Elementary School yesterday, and just continued to be so impressed around how they're tending to the academic needs of our students, but also the social emotional well-being
of our students. It's a both and not an either or. And and I think that's one of the reasons, amongst many others, that makes our district really special. Tonight, members of our board and members of our community, we have a really important
meeting this evening for a lot of different reasons. We're going to be joined and have presentations from two really important partners. One is our state Demographer's office. I want to welcome you, as well as our leader, Anne Hutchinson,
from our local Chamber of Commerce, who has just been an incredible thought partner to this district for quite some time today. Those both presentations are going to be important to help us kind of ground ourselves as a school
district, community, and data and trends around what our future may look like today, as well as what might look like in the near future. We as a governance team, have collectively shared messages
with our community around how we are shifting. Our landscape is shifting locally, at the state level and at the federal level, and I think today is an opportunity for us to learn and lean into. What are some of
those changes surprised that we, as a school system are continuing to regress in our school enrollment? There's just simply not as many school aged children in our community as there were. We have 500 fewer students in our school system
this year that represents 500 children, represents the fifth largest elementary school district, and we are losing an entire school's worth of children in an academic year. So that's something that we
need to tend to. We'll also learn, and you'll hear from an from the chamber talking about, you know, birth rates are kind of an interesting data point to unpack. You know, the city of Fort Collins, when you look at
the northern Colorado region, the city of Fort Collins has the fewest married households and is only yielding approximately 23% of the households in the city of Fort Collins actually have school aged children in it. And so
that's a data point that we need to continue to unpack and think about. So I'm really excited. Well, I'm going to take that back. It's a sobering reality. So excitement is not
the appropriate word to use as we talk about the data, but it is important for us to have alignment around what we're learning about what's happening in our local community. And we're learning each and every
day what's happening in Denver regarding state policy shifts, how they're looking to balance $1 billion shortfall in their budget. We'll talk a little bit later about our budget process around how we're approaching that. And all of us across our community know that we have
already experienced reductions in federal funding, both at the state level as well as a reduction in our other entitlement programs across the school system. So it is an important meeting for us to
level set. I welcome all of you to ask as many questions as you have, because it is important that we calibrate around this information and continue to be vulnerable and open to our community as we learn around
all of these data points together. So I look forward to a very productive meeting. Thank you for the time. Thank you so much, Superintendent Kingsley. All right. 6.0 is next with our community comment.
This is an opportunity for public comment or sorry. This opportunity for public comment is for members of the community who registered to speak by the designated deadline. Those people will be called on to make remarks in the order that
they signed up. Each speaker will be allowed three minutes to address the board. First up, we have Amy Healy and welcome.
Here we go. Yeah. Right here. Okay. Can you hear me? All right. Hi. My name is Amy Healy, and I am a German teacher here in the district. I'm at Fossil
Ridge High School. Very proud of our kiddos over there. And I came to speak because I want to draw attention to the proposed calendar for next school year. I do not know all the details about the calendar committee.
We've heard a mix about disbanding the group, then quickly bringing it together and voting on the proposed calendar. Tonight. My concern predominantly impacts the thousands of high school
students in SWD. It's vitally important that the school board is aware of the constraint this calendar will have on high school students, including those enrolled in AP and college level courses. The
majority of the high schools in SWD are currently on the block schedule, meaning what is accomplished in an academic course over a school year is now accomplished in a semester. As such, ten school days on the
block schedule is equivalent to a month of content on in a normal school schedule. The proposed calendar for next school year has a difference of
14 more school days in in second semester than in first, meaning courses will have a difference of a month and a half of material depending on which term they take the class
automatically. This means classes will be inequitable in the same building, let alone across the district. How can there be alignment between schools and courses when there is such a massive difference in
the contact time between semesters? Now, what does this kind of imbalance mean for our student experiences in SWD? Not only are there fewer days, but that translates into teachers
having to cut entire units or have less time for students to review, less time for additional learning opportunities, less time for
reinforcement of concepts. That makes for an entirely inequitable and vastly different experience for students with little choice for alignment due to lack of time. This will carry over to second
semester courses, having larger numbers of students in them, creating more inequity in teacher workload. In addition, having almost all of teacher workdays during the first week
defeats the purpose of workdays. I need time to grade and I can't grade before my students arrive. It will be impossible for many students to give or many teachers to give students timely and meaningful feedback
when workdays are not there throughout the year. Please consider taking more time to finalize our district calendar. On a completely other note, I wanted to also thank you guys
for implementing the school phone policy at the high school level. This has made a massive, massive improvement to student relationships in my classroom. Not all students are really
taking the opportunity to talk, but they're at least not pulling out their phones. As soon as they're done with their work. They may choose to write or read instead, but it has been an incredibly positive shift in our school. Thank you
very much and have a great night. Thank you for being here. All right. Next up we have Laura Whitehead. Thank you for
coming. Hello. I'm here today to speak about something essential safety. We practice for the possibility of danger entering our schools. But the
truth is, violence has already crossed our thresholds and entered our classrooms. I have lived every side of this issue. I have had a child whose instruction was interrupted because of unsafe behavior.
I've gone into a classroom myself to hold my own neurodivergent child accountable when safety was at risk. I've been the person staff call when they need help managing behavior crisis
because I've lived it personally and professionally, I feel compelled to speak plainly. Inclusion cannot outweigh safety when one child's behavior consistently
jeopardizes the learning and safety of 25 others. Those 25 children must take priority. That is not exclusion. It is responsible stewardship of
every student's right to a safe learning environment for our most behavioral, complex and violent students, early and appropriate programing is critical. We have small windows to help them develop the skills
they need, because the world outside of school is far less forgiving. Assaults, destruction of property, and dangerous behavior have real consequences. This work is
possible, but only when adults hold consistent boundaries. Growth happens when expectations are firm, even when it's difficult. Walking on eggshells teaches a child nothing except that they hold
the power, and calling that building trust is misleading. In fact, it often communicates the opposite that we do not care enough to hold them accountable. That's what happened at CLP. A child was
harmed by the system intended to support them, and to this day, no one has publicly taken accountability for that. Behind the scenes, there has been damage control, but not honesty. The recommendations made by the
team were ignored until they quietly became the very steps taken later. Let me be clear three staff members quit because they refused to participate in a practice they believe were harmful. That
alone should have been an alarm loud enough for an action. Now it is time for PSD to take accountability, a situation that could have been handled responsibly became a big deal
when it could have been a little one. Avoidance and refusal to acknowledge that what went wrong. So when we know better, we must do better. I am asking this board firmly and respectfully to take this
issue seriously. At last, our students, our staff and our community deserve nothing less. Thank you for being here. All
right, next up we have Lonnie Williams. Welcome. Hi. I am here today because I think it's important to recognize,
celebrate and show appreciation for people in our community that run for office and lead with integrity, intelligence and kindness. I have known our new president, Jessica Zamora,
for many, many years. I've had the honor of working side by side with her and seeing her leadership in action. Jess is brilliant. She does her research, makes data informed
decisions, and is a collaborative leader. I am proud and grateful to have Jessica Zamora as our new Board of Education president. And now, if this were a rom com, this
would be my grand gesture, because I think it's important to show up for people that show up for you. So I'm nervous, but
I'm going to do it. Here we go. Well, come. Jess. Hello, Jess. Happy your president. With your thoughtful leadership and
skills, you put our minds at rest. Educate every child without pay and with a smile. Your courage and commitment are contagious and terrific. You
research before you vote. Your decisions steer our boat. It's a hard job that comes with a lot of stress. We're so grateful for all you give to us.
Thank you Jess, you're the best. Here's to Jess. So I want to say cheers to you, Madam President. And cheers to our
new Board of Education. May you all lead with open hearts, open minds and open ears. Thank you. On. That was a first for sure.
I don't really know what to say. I was not expecting that. Thank you. It's very kind. Okay. Next up we have Michelle Fincham.
Yep. Corey Pierce is not here. Sorry. Thank you for being
willing to step in. To follow that. Yeah. Do not have a song prepared. Good evening everyone.
Community members, school staff, parents, board members and everybody online. My name is Michelle Fincham and I want to take a moment to congratulate Jessica Zamora on her election as president of the Board of
Education. This is a milestone not only for Jessica, but for our entire district. Jessica brings to this leadership role a deep and proven commitment to our schools. As a former educator and a parent, she
understands our students, families, staff, and teachers from the inside out. She's voted for and supported initiatives that lift student voices, promote equity and
ensure stability and quality in staffing and services. Her work to champion access, whether it's through early childhood programs or district wide support systems, reflects a
vision that centers the well-being and potential of every student, as well as helping to accomplish. The district ends. As Jessica steps into this role of board
president, I am confident she will lead with integrity, empathy, and a strong commitment for collaboration and fairness across the district. Jessica, thank you for your willingness to serve,
for your dedication, and for putting students and community first. I look forward to supporting you in your leadership. Congratulations. Thank you. I really wasn't
expecting this this evening, so I appreciate you guys. Thank you very much. All right. Next up we have Charles Stone. Welcome. Dear Board of
Educators, thank you for hearing my voice tonight. And hopefully, as we said, we'll open. You'll listen with open ears. My name is Charles Stone and I am a science teacher at
Fossil Ridge High School. I am part of an educational team, team of educators in earth system sciences. For example, among many classes. One thing that we pride ourselves in is
that we are aligned as a common course. We sacrifice one duty free lunch each week, with the goal of aligning our curriculum to create an equitable
experience, regardless of teacher. Fossil is now on the block schedule, which might be just an issue for those of this fossil people who have been there for a while. Okay, and
this is where one year long class is completed in a single semester. And so our team actually makes two calendars, one for fall semester and
another for spring. Sometimes I lose the thread a little bit when we meet and I say, don't we teach endo and exothermic chemical reactions in this unit?
And my colleagues look at me and they say, oh yeah, we teach that in the spring when we have time. We don't have time in the fall. Okay? And this is always
seemed inequitable that I would be teaching the same course but not have the same information. But but we that's what it was.
And the difference this year between fall and between spring is eight working days. Okay. So the issue at hand is that the
as I understand it, the board has asked for and the calendar committee has given you and presented a calendar that will exacerbate this problem. In the
proposed calendar, there are 14 days more education in the spring than in the fall. So that equates to 1200
educational minutes, 1200 okay, so now we teach an AP chemistry and AP biology or any course at this point. Really, with nearly
three weeks fewer contact days in the spring and the fall, 1200 minutes less. And then we will tell students that they
have taken the same course. So next, I would really like to point out that teachers really value our workdays, especially
those at the end of the quarter when work piles up and grades are due. And I should not have to tell you, as somebody pointed out earlier in their
wonderful song, that teachers often give up time and their own time at home, outside of work hours. And what you're asking us to do and what the
current proposed calendar does, is that it? Let's see. That's going to be done. Not on our own time. So I believe that you
should take the time to reconsider this decision and this calendar and get equitable and give teachers the work time
that they need at the end of the semester, not at the beginning when we have our grading. Okay, I'm your time has expired due to thank you for your time. Thank you so
much. All right, next up we have Sabrina Herrick. Welcome. Excuse me. We do not. All right.
Next up we have Danae Lawrence. Welcome, Danae. Following the November 4th discussion about
graduation rates for disabled students and our district's lack of implementation, nearly 14 years after the state of Colorado enacted eo's for disabled students, I have some
observations with a graduating senior with a disability that I think might help you. As a current board. You can't create a policy 14 years after the fact without adequate training for all staff and administrators, and hope that
it's going to work out. PSC site based policies are the ultimate barrier to these modifications being allowed for the students that they're intended for, even when disabled students don't need modification. I wanted to share
how difficult the district and our school side has made graduating with options for a student like my son. Recently, he applied to 11 colleges. He's been accepted to ten so far. In the application process, he
wrote an essay that described the 420 hours of Braille literacy instruction and the 670 hours of assistive technology instruction he received outside of the general education classroom and his K
through 12 education. His essay went on to convey that he didn't receive a single graduation credit for any of it no elective, no independent study, not a single literacy or computer science credit toward graduation. Not one. Conversely,
if he were deaf in this state receiving ASL, he would have received language credit. But for my son, nothing. All while being pulled out of the general education setting and being expected to maintain his classwork while using that same
curriculum in his Braille education studies. Additionally, PE was a huge risk for my child with balls flying around his face. There were real dangers for his remaining eye, and the only solution that was found
was that he could take culinary arts classes. So handing a visually impaired child with no depth perception a knife sounded like a safer bet than having him in PE. He faced nothing but rigidity here.
There's no flexibility, there's no care, no attempt to try to be anything other, no attempt to try by anyone other than Scott Nielson who left our district years ago. Don't let them tell you this is a CTE problem, because talks with them and other visually
impaired high schoolers around the state have proven otherwise. Other districts found a way to give credit. He did three educations credit wise to his general education peers while fighting accessible educational
materials with non-compliant teachers every single day. While the systems designed to ensure his civil rights were crumbling around him. So before you start handing out diplomas like participation trophies to
satisfy the 14 years that we didn't implement those eo's that would have helped disabled children graduate with their peers in real time, maybe you should do a little research about the current messages that your high school and IEP teams
are sending to disabled students and their families. Graduation with options in every child, every day only. If you're willing to do the work of three high school diplomas and manage your disability at the same time. So when you want
to know why I'm so off, maybe watching your medically challenged child fight this hard for the past five years while you're told to be patient, is something you could all find to muster a little empathy for, because 164 days can't come
soon enough for this senior mom. In a place where no one is willing to help or find solutions, no amount of policy making is going to change the mindset or the culture. Here it. I can't wait until my son is
free from the hostility he's experienced in school district. Thank you. Thank you. Next we
have Eric Sutherland. Welcome. Hello y'all. I'm here for the very same reason that I sent you all a lengthy email. Let's
make sure that there's no question that this board is contemplating taking an action that would be in violation of the Colorado Constitution setting mill levy rates. I'm also here mostly primarily
because I really think the greater community in Fort Collins that funds its school district deserves far more respect than it's ever seen from this administration or
board. Going back for decades takes a lot to pay those taxes, guys. Brian Kingsley, superintendent. He sure likes
to say thank you to the voters. He also likes to mislead the voters and rip off the taxpayers. What am I talking about? Prior to four being
placed on the ballot in 2024, PSD said that if the ballot measure passes, $49 million, X amount of dollars will be taxed. And just about a month and a
half after the ballot measure passed, the board set the tax at 52 million. 49 million is not 52 million guys. Now, one
could get really lost trying to chase down the rabbit hole as to whether or not that's legally allowable, whether or not the taxpayers have recourse in this situation, but
forgetting and they don't and they do. It's kind of a slam dunk lawsuit, guys. But more importantly is the ethics that this shows. How many times in
our life do we end up in a situation where we all of a sudden end up paying more money than we thought we had contracted to pay for something that's reprehensible? When it
happens in our society, it's decried because it's just far outside the norms of ethical behavior. But that is PTSD.
PTSD is the walking model of exactly why voters approve the Tabor amendment a long time ago, and it is the Tabor amendment
that provides US protections here with significant penalties, with significant liabilities for the school district going forward, simply because you can't live up to your promises.
And in this particular case, there was absolutely no reason for a was an enormous tax increase passed at a time when no other school district our size had anything chance of
passing something, and that this is what you do say to the community. Yeah, don't worry about what we what we said. We're going to tax what we want, you know. And that's really the
problem up here. That's really the problem. Yeah. The legal thing that's going to get worked out, guarantee you and the taxpayers will be made whole in this whole situation. The district now is in a
position to afford to do just that. But you really ought to think about the ethics involved. Thank you. Next we have Jeff
Hardy. Nope, we do not. Next we have Janet Wright. Welcome. Hello. Thank you for allowing
me to speak. And I want to pass on my congratulations to President Zamora and the new board members. Thank you all for everything you do. These
are my notes. I'm not really prepared, but per usual, I'm Janet Wright and I live in Fort Collins. I have three kids in the school district, and I'm on
the board of directors for PFLAG Fort Collins. And I just want to thank you for your continued support of the LGBTQ
plus community and the inclusion. And I would just like to suggest more continuing education for the teachers and
for the counselors. We'll have a parent at some other time speak to her recent experience, but a little bit goes a long
ways. But you guys are behind the kids and that matters. But the teachers and counselors need that as well. And the
education. But like I said, these are my notes. So I've I've gone over everything. I just wanted to thank you for everything as usual. And
welcome you guys to the the board. Thank you very much. Next we have Christopher
Kendall. Welcome. Good evening. Can you hear me? Okay. Thanks for having me. I'm Chris Kendall. I have three daughters
in Poudre school district, in sixth grade, ninth grade and 11th grade. My purpose for speaking tonight is just to raise some concern about some questions contained in the Healthy Kids Colorado survey
that will be administered in the district in the middle of January. The middle school survey consists of 72 questions. The high school survey has 100. All questions are provided by
the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Survey was last administered in 2023, with approximately 120,000 respondents, roughly
25% of the estimated 450,000 Colorado middle and high school students. While most of the survey questions are benign and may even provide beneficial information to the district, I
fear that several have potential to expose students to agenda's, thoughts, questions, and ideas that are not relevant to their education and have potential to negatively influence students. The
district correspondence regarding the survey notes that survey topics include mental health, suicide, bullying, diet, exercise, physical health, alcohol, tobacco and drug use,
school safety, and trusted adult relationships. But the correspondence fails to note that the survey also includes questions about gender identity and sexual preference. It's
also interesting to note that the summarized results from 2023 do not show the answers to those questions. My expectation is that the board is aware the
questions in the survey, but I thought I'd share a few and follow those with my own rhetorical questions. Middle school students ages 11 to 14 are asked the following
questions in the demographics section of the survey. What is your gender identity? Girl. Woman. Boy band? Non-binary. I describe my gender identity
another way. Fill in the blank. This language of this question seems curious to me. It relates to gender identity, which is expression rather than biological sex, which is
physiology. Question four some people describe themselves as transgender when their sex does not match the way they think or feel about their gender. Are you transgender? My translation
to this is are you sure you're not transgender? I don't think that question is appropriate for an 11 year old student. I don't understand why the
district believes it's beneficial to present questions about sexual sexuality, including terms like bisexual, pansexual, questioning, etc. to
children as young as 11, many of whom are dealing with the physiological, hormonal and emotional changes of puberty. I also don't feel that these questions have anything to do
with education and academics. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes our community comment for the evening. Our next section is Board Topics and
Committee reports. This agenda item is an opportunity for board members to provide an update on committee work or speak to board topics. Do any board members have something they would like to report? Okay,
I've got two updates announcements. The first concerns the upcoming Board of Education engagement sessions. Doctor Hooten I think the sites where sites have been confirmed.
Is she here? She couldn't see you. Sorry. Okay, so I can. I can announce them. All right. I'll just read these dates. So the first one of the next year will be February 19th. That's
from 530 to 7. The two host schools host sites will be Laurel and Tivoli. The next one will be March 5th from 530 to 7
p.m. The host schools are Bauder and Zack. And then April 16th, 530 to 7. The host schools will be Banford and Rice. And we also want to thank our host schools for for
putting these on. It does create a little bit of extra work for the staff to stay late and make sure that we're there, as well as our security, so thank you for that. We're also contemplating tweaking the
format ever so slightly and trying to solicit some topics from our community the week before that they may want to address. Typically, these are completely informal, unscripted agendas. People come and they
want to talk about what they want to talk about, which is certainly what we want to continue to honor. But some of the things that we keep hearing are requesting updates on how the board is discussing Bell
schedules or instructional time conversations. So I think it's nice to be able to have maybe a five, ten minute, hey, here's here's what we're here's where we are in the process of the decisions. Here's what the
milestones are coming up. You know, please let us know your thoughts, etc. without taking over the meeting, but also just kind of presenting some information. The horse's mouth, we thought helpful. Second
update is the Screenagers final screening will be January 28th at Rocky Mountain High School at 6 p.m. I'm not sure if you're allowed to bring your own popcorn, but snacks
encouraged. Thank you. Anyone else? Moving on to our consent agenda? Would any board members like to pull an item from
consent? I'd like to pull 811 adoption of the 2026 2027 school year calendar for action item, please. All right. I will
move this to 9.4. All right. Any other actions? All right. Can I get a motion? I move that
the board approve and adopt the recommended actions actions for the items on the consent agenda. Thank you. Can I get a second? Thank you. Andrew. Jill, will
you please call the vote? Karla. I Conor Duffy, I Kevin. Hi, Scott. Schoenbaum. Hi, Andrew.
Spain. Hi. Jessica zamora. Hi. Karen de Ziegler I motion passes seven zero. All right, moving on to our action items.
9.1 monitoring Policy review L 2.3. Can I get a motion? I move that the board determined that the superintendent has reasonably interpreted board of Education policy. L 2.3 is
internal monitoring report dated 12 nine 2025. And that the evidence presented supports the superintendent's conclusions stated in the internal monitoring report.
Thank you, Kevin, for the second. Do any board members have any questions about this item? Seeing none. Jill, please call the vote. Karla I Conor
Duffy. Hi Kevin I Scott Schoenbaum hi, Andrew Spain. Hi Jessica Zamora I conda Ziegler
I motion passes seven zero all right. 9.2 internal monitoring report and policy review L 2.7. Can I get a motion? I move that
the board determined that the superintendent has reasonably interpreted board of Education policy L 2.7 and is internal monitoring report dated December 9th, 2025 and that the evidence presented supports the
superintendent's conclusions stated in the internal monitoring report. Can I get a second? Thank you. Connor. Do any board members have any questions about this item? All
right. Jill, please call the vote. Karla I Conor Duffy I Kevin I Scott Schoenbaum I
Andrew Spain I Jessica Zamora I Karen de Ziegler I motion passes seven zero all right 9.3 annual mill levy certification.
Can I get a motion. I move that the board certify the mill levy by the following resolution. Be it resolved by the Board of Education of Poudre School District R-1, that the Secretary of the Board of
Education formally certify to the Board of Larimer County Commissioners the mill levy as presented in the board packet in the following manner. For
the tax year 2025. Collectible in 2026, the governing Board of the Poudre School District R-1 hereby certify a total levy of
54.090 mills to be extended by you upon the total net assessed
valuation of 5,651,000,400 and and 13,399 to produce
303,737,000 and $710 in revenue. Excuse me. Thank you, Kevin, for the second just quickly
reversed two of the numbers in the first valuation. I just wanna make sure we're clear that it was the 5,615,000,000, not 651 million. Thank you.
Thank you. Andrew, joining us this evening speak about the annual mill levy certification is our chief finance officer, Dave Montoya. Welcome, Dave. Good evening board. Tonight we
are here to certify our mill levy for the, for the, for the year. And this is something we do annually this time of year. So I apologize ahead of time as we go through this material. Sometimes this feels like it
just happens really fast. And that's because we're getting information from the county late November, running those through and actually doing the calculations. So so just to
start off the the presentation here, just a little background, no later than December 15th, the Board of Education is required to certify a levy to the county commissioners. And and so that's what we're here
to do tonight. We're going to walk through the resolution that is prepared to to do this, as well as some of the calculations, so that you can understand how this is all
working. So let's get into just briefly some key terms that we have in the presentation. Assessed valuation. Assessed valuation is the value of the property that is taxed. So that
is determined by the county. And and if you hold property you get an assessed valuation every year in the mail that tells you what the county thinks your property is worth.
Then we take that that value, or we take that assessment rate and multiply it times the assessed valuation. And that's how I'm sorry. We take the assessment rate and we multiply against the actual value. And
that's how we come up with the assessed valuation. So think about this. You have an actual value of your property. The county is going to tax you at the assessed valuation. So there is a calculation. And
we're going to see this in a second. There's a calculation that goes from actual value down to assessed valuation. There is a mill levy that is going to be in this conversation tonight. And for
this purposes tonight. The mill levy is simply a tax rate that is going to be multiplied up against that assessed valuation. You're going to see some terms in the packet tonight as well, like tax increment financing.
We'll see that in the resolution I'll explain how that that is working. But this is basically property tax that is not available to the district. And it is diverted directly to urban renewal or
downtown Downtown Development Authority or DIA's another key term that that is in this packet. We don't hit on this a whole lot. It's a pretty small number, but there is also an
abatement that we use to set the tax rate. And this is a little more complicated. This is more like when people protest their property taxes. They're kind of put on sidelines for a little bit. And
then it turns out that they have to pay those. We are allowed by statute to set an abatement abatement levy. And so that's what that is. It's a pretty small, but it is something that we have to do.
So just to basically break this down, this is what I was trying to stumble through in the last slide was this is how we get to your taxes owed. And it's really these simple formulas. And it doesn't get much more
complicated than that. You first take an actual value. And again I alluded to that. That is determined by the Larimer County. So so each year you will get a notice in your mail if you hold property and it'll
tell you what they think the value of your property is. You then multiply that times that assessment rate. And for residential this year it's 7.05%. And for commercial it's
27%. Generally depends on the class of commercial. But most commercial is 27%. And so when you multiply these two you come up with an assessed valuation. So you take your actual value times the rate comes up with an
assessed valuation. Then we take the assessed valuation and we apply the tax rate which is the mill levy I was talking about. And to get to in the term mill as means that it's
mills. So to be able to convert that into the the right rate, you have to divide that by a thousand. And when you do that calculation you come up with taxes owed. And so we're going to see this same calculation
over again as we go through the materials tonight. To start off with and kind of just following along with the calculation, first thing we need is an assessed valuation from the
county. And so the county does provide us a preliminary assessed valuation in August. But what we're really waiting for and I've highlighted in green here, I think I can show
my cursor here. And you'll see there's a date of 11 2425 on this. That is when the county finalized their assessed valuation. Now, if you look at the the information I have
under the title, there is a note that says the county can change these these amounts up until December, 10th of which is not today, it's tomorrow. And so in some weird situation,
I will get back on the county's website, make sure they haven't changed any numbers, but if that were to happen, we would have to probably reconvene and figure that out. That has not happened since I've been doing this for 19 years, but I have
heard in the past that did happen a long time ago. So I do pay attention to that after the board meeting. So taking this information and this is an image directly out of the out of the assessed valuation that
we get as a school district. I'm really looking for a couple numbers on here, because there's a lot of information on here. And the numbers I'm looking for are really number four. And I've highlighted all
the green here because basically what they're showing is you got a gross taxable assessed valuation minus the tax tax increment financing coming up with a net total taxable assessed valuation. The
total net taxable assessed assessed valuation is important to us because that's what we apply all the calculations against. And then way down at the bottom on line 11 you're going to see taxes abated and refunded. And so that number is
also provided by the county. I'm not going to repeat those big numbers for the assessed valuation. Talking in billions is hard sometimes. But but yes, there are very large numbers.
When we look at the assessed valuation okay. So step two we get the assessed valuation. Then what we do is we start calculating the overrides or
the tax rates. And and what I do I do this two different ways because I like to have kind of double checks, is I have my own spreadsheets that I've developed over the years that actually calculate the the mill
levy. And then CDE provides districts a template of which they can use to plug in information to calculate the mill levy. So I'm doing it in two different ways. And then they come up to the same answer.
Hopefully that's always happened. But that's just a double check there. So if we have questions as we're going through the CDE is around to help. It's been pretty basic, so we haven't had to ask CDE
for a lot of help on this recently. And then at times CDE may help us recalculate the levies if necessary. That was not necessary this year. So then step three is we take all
of this information and we combine it and we draft a resolution. And so we use the final assessed valuation from the county and then calculated with the with the information from the CDE template to create
a resolution for the board to certify the mill levy. We have four types of levies that are used in the district currently. And we're going to go through each one of these. We have statutory levies, which is like
our our school finance levy. That's driven by state statute. We have voter approved overrides of which are where we've gone to our voters and have asked for additional revenue to do additional things.
We have another override that is a unique override, and that's a debt free, debt free mill levy override. And so that is also a category that we have. And then the last category we
have is our bond redemption fund. And so bond redemption is simply where in the past we have taken out bonds to do buildings. Think about like the building at Timnath, Timnath Middle High School, Wellington
Middle High School, Bamford Elementary. Those were built with bond dollars. And so when we issue bonds, our obligation is to pay those back in principal and interest. And so
that's what we're setting the levy to do, is just pay the principal and interest on those bonds okay. So we're going to go through this and I'm going to try to pick it up a little bit here, because these are all
going to look very similar as we go through the slides. The first one I want to talk about and I've highlighted it for you is the statutory levies. And so in the School Finance Act itself, there is a levy that we
are required to assess. And that is 27 mills. It has been 27 mills for quite a long time. I was here when they changed it. It's a long time ago and I can't even remember when it was.
Now I'll tell you the truth, but it's been 27 mills for Poudre School District for a good amount of time now, and that was that was due to some changes under Governor Ritter, I believe, was the governor at
that time. We have an abatement levy that is also part of our statutory levies. And then I just make the statement here that these are required by state law. So if we did not set these, the state would assume we did and they wouldn't we
wouldn't get this money and we would have a real problem. So you can see that the general fund levy is the one of the largest levies in there. It is $151 million, $151.6 million. And then that taxes abated and
refund is a smaller amount. But again, that kind of fluctuates from year to year. These calculations are still the same. They are driven off of assessed valuation times, the mill levy divided by 1000 to generate tax.
This this slide. And the resolution goes into some detail so that you can see the gross tax generated minus the TIF to come up with the net tax
generated of, which is what we are allowed to generate taxes on. So the next slide here, we have our voter approved overrides. And I want to call
out that I'm going to exclude the Debt Free Schools Act for a second because I've got a separate slide for that one. And as as we heard, this is always a good time to stop and thank the voters, because as
you look at this sheet and you can see the dollar amounts that we're collecting from the items I've highlighted in green, and then the next slide as well. And when we get to it and without this revenue we would
be a very, very different district. And so you can see we have a a long history of having overrides with our voters and having these agreements. So it
started back in 1988, long time ago. And our most recent ones are are the 20 2019 and the 2016 overrides. Those are kind of more current time if you think about that. It's within
the last ten years. And so those are really the overrides that our voters have approved through a ballot. The 2019 levy override is it's really
important to understand this. All our historical overrides, 2016, all the way back to 1988 are static dollar amounts. So they don't change every year. So like the 20 the 2000
override, you can see it's calculated out to just about $10 million. That was what was on the ballot question there. And so when we when we have these overrides they don't change the dollar amounts. And
so the only exception to that is the 2019 override and the 2024 override. That or the Debt Free Schools Act. That's on the next slide. And the the difference here is the 2019
override does grow by inflation. And so when we when I looked at that to calculate that we had a an amount of 20 just let's call it 22 million. And then you're
applying a 2.3% inflation rate to come up with the the new amount of 22.5 million. As an example for the for the 2019 override. Okay. And then we get
into the Debt Free Schools Act. It is also a mill levy override, but it is a mill levy override that is a separate category. And actually when we report these taxes to the to the CDE, this is one category that we
actually report separately. The other overrides are kind of combined together and reported as a group. So the Debt Free Schools Act is the most recent election that we passed. It was
passed last November 2024, and it is specifically designed to help with salaries, small neighborhood school support, as well as curricular replacements.
But the biggest part of the debt free override, and that was all done in general fund by by funds that we were able to free up there. What the debt free mill levy is really doing is handling our preventative
and our deferred maintenance. And so that is exactly what it's doing. And in this example, you can see that the number that we are taxing to is 50.1
million. And the way we get to that is you take $49 million from last year and you multiply it by 2.3% inflation again. And that's how you get to the 50.1 million that we are levying
tonight. Okay. Getting into the bond levy, I kind of alluded to what this is. Again, this is purely to pay our principal and interest payments. Sorry for the way that slid off the
screen there. And so what this is doing is we're just setting a levy so that we make our principal and interest payments. We, we pay principal or we pay interest in June. So that'll come up in June 26th. And then
in December we have a bigger payment that includes both principal and interest for our bonds. And so that that levy is designed to support those payments when that happens.
Okay. So one of the things I like to talk about when I'm doing this is the changes. And and one of the things I'd like to do is separate it between statutory and things our voters have approved. So the first
thing you're going to see is, is that in the statutory levies, and we're going to see why this is when we get to the tax, the tax impacts, but the or the how the assessed valuations are
being calculated. But what you're going to see is that the actual general fund levy had has increased quite a bit. And so what you're going to see is
it's gone from 132 million to 151 million now. Okay. And so that is a change that we, we kind of anticipated that was going to happen. We're going to
see it when we really look at the assessment rates and what happened there in the tax impact. But really the point of the takeaway from this is that about $20 million of the increased revenue that we're getting is statutorily required,
so we don't have a choice on it. We have to set the 27 mills. We don't have a choice. The voter approved overrides, again, they don't. The majority of them, the 88 through the through the
2016 do not grow by inflation or anything. So they're static dollar amounts. And you'll see they haven't changed greatly. There's rounding allowed there because we can go out to, you know, three three decimals on
our mill levies. And then what you're going to see is that the, the both the 19 and the 24 overrides have grown. And again, this is purely based on the
inflation rate that we're talking about of 2.3%. And the bond levy has not changed drastically. We try to keep level debt service. So I don't anticipate that changing any in
the next couple of years at least. So so really the takeaway on this slide or this bottom part is that the voter approved overrides are generating about $2 million more than they were last year.
The majority of that is coming from those inflationary increases of 2019 and 2020 for levies. And so the tax impact
is something I also include in your packet. This is a very basic attempt to describe tax impacts. I will I always say this every year. It will depend on your unique situation. So
you want to do your own numbers. Don't don't take this away thinking that this is going to apply to you. But what I what it does is give you the information to think about it. And so what I'm doing is I'm
comparing the 25 total levy of 57.37 to the new, the new levy for 26 of 54.09. Okay. So you see there's an actual three mill difference. And we're
going to I'm going to kind of tease out what that why that is in a second here. So now let's get into kind of the calculation of how you calculate a tax. So the first line under and I'm going to
focus on residential at the top. I do have some commercial multipliers down below that are helpful for people that might might be in the commercial business. But let's go through the residential and a little
bit of detail. So there's been some changes to how assessed valuation is determined. And this is really part in the note is at the bottom. It was part of House Bill 24 B 1001 of
which was if I tried to forget this, that had happened, but there was a special session last year where they actually tried to fix some of the issues that they had with assessments and property taxes. It was a
big effort at the state, and what it did is it actually changed how we calculate the the value that we're going to apply the assessment rate against. So in 25, what we had
was and I have not changed the value of the home intentionally on this so that we can see the changes. So 700,000 last year I'm going to assume that that has not changed in the next year. Again, that may be a poor
assumption if you're trying to calculate your own taxes at home. But last year 25 we started with 700,000. There was an exemption of 55,000 that was
taken off. Then the what was left was multiplied by 0.7%. And so last year, the estimated tax on a median home would be
about two 2479. So roll forward to 26 where the the impacts of House Bill 24 B are now being applied. And what you have is you no longer have the
exemption coming off. So you have 700,000. The residential assessment rate. And this is this is interesting from this interim committee right now it
is 7.05%, but it will actually fluctuate between 7.05% or 6.85% I believe, depending on how much growth is in the state from assessed valuation. So
this year we had the the growth in assessed valuation. And I'm saying assessed valuation intentionally. We're talking about value of property. There was there was enough of an
increase in that that that it was applied. So so as we look at this you take the 700,000, you multiply that times the
7.05% and you get to two 2669. If we were not, if the assessed valuation was not growing statewide, that number would have been a little bit lower. But when you compare those two numbers 25 and 26 together,
what you're seeing is really the impact of the change in how they're calculating the assessed valuation on the property down in the commercial. I'll hit this lightly down below in the commercial
multiplier. It's the exact opposite. What the interim committee had done in that time was that commercial was going to go from 27.9% down to 27%.
And so similar to the residential, what we've done is calculated that. So in 25 at 27.9%, was $1,601 in 26. Now,
with the new assessed rate for commercial at 27%, it comes out to be 1460. So again, this is a very simple approach to look at this, but I think it kind of
puts in context the changing or the moving pieces from year to year. So the timeline that we have is is pretty is pretty fast here. So we we got a preliminary AV from the county
back in August. We don't put too much stock into that one. There's a lot of work that has to go into the final. The November 24th is when we got the actual final assessed valuation from the county. If
we needed to revise any calculations with CDE, we we've done that. We did not need to do that this year. In December 9th tonight, the board is going to consider the approval of the
mill levy. And then once the board has approved the mill levy, I have a very short timeline to get it over to the county by the 15th. And actually we upload it now on. I
don't go to the county anymore. I actually put it in the computer. I used to go to the county and hand it over, but so that that will have need to happen before the 15th. That is a statutory deadline that we
must meet. We also have a deadline to provide the final levy to CDE. It's a couple days after that. I believe that December 20th is when that one is, but those are really the
timelines. So tonight we are asking the board to consider the resolution that was read by Director Duffy. And that's the end of the presentation. Thank
you so much Dave. Is there any discussion. Yes. Go ahead Dave. Just a quick rapid fire questions to clarify. Just so
that the public knows what is the inflation rate based upon. So the inflation rate is based on I don't remember the exact basket of goods. It is it is driven by the Department of
Labor and Statistics. It's a federal number that we get. It's changed. It's Lakewood Greeley Denver I think I'm getting that wrong. It used to be something else that I
remember a long time ago, but it's basically three major cities in in the state that they take a basket of goods for. They look at the dollar value of what it was in the past, what it is now, and then they
calculate what the inflation rate is just it's got it's got like groceries, housing, all of that stuff. And just for clarification on that, we don't set that rate. We we do not set that rate. But it does come from the Department of Labor
and Statistics. And that's something I want to pay attention to. And then another one was, correct me if I'm wrong, but there was an there was an actual change at the state about the month in which
we receive the funding. This last year, the actual disbursement of funds to the school district, because in the resolution, you know, it's collectible in 2026. Yeah. But
don't we wasn't there a change there in the last year or 18? There was. You're thinking of a different change though. And so what that change was is a way that they were out. Because
we're going to get into cash flow for a second. So when we're getting money from the state, think about property taxes don't come in until the spring. Right. And so we're getting money from the state.
And what the state is doing is doing a division of here's your pot. And we're going to divide it by they used to divide it by 12. Now they divide it by some other number to get more state funding up front. But we're
really relying on that state funding the first couple months. And if you think about it, we don't get the the cash from the property taxes till later. So barring no reserves and no ability to borrow from the
state of which you just approved the interest free loan program, we would not be able to make cash flow because property taxes haven't come in yet. And that's exactly what the, the tax, the the tax free
interest free loan program is, is it's a program that the state provides that we can actually borrow from the state. Once we get our property taxes, we have to immediately pay it back to the state. And so that
is it's a cash flow issue. And then the last one that I have, you were you were touching on this this residential assessment rate. And it's a range. Yeah. And you said it
was a 6.8 to 7.05 something. I think it's slide 14 there. Yeah. Yeah. 6.85. What, what sets that rate. And you had just mentioned if assessed value is
down then they apply. So smaller tax rate or a higher tax rate. So it's based on 5% growth in my my understanding of this is it's based on a
calculation of 5% growth across the state. So the assessed valuation grew enough that it was above 5%. That kicked us up into the 7.05% range. If that
growth would have been less for school districts, our mill levy or our assessment rate would actually drop to 6.85%. 6.85%. Yes. And that's what that House
bill did in the interim committee. And so school districts actually have two assessed valuations depending on what's happening in the state. And it's interesting, as I started thinking about this
when I was putting it together, what that means is we're going to probably see ups and downs depending on what's happening with the state assessed valuation, and the state is going to have to backfill on
those. Remember the water glasses. So they're going to have to backfill that if if that happens. And so so yeah that's that's what we're paying
attention to is that, that that change in the House bill that basically gives us two answers depending on what happens at
the state. Yeah. Thank you. Go ahead Andrew. First of all, thank you for going into the detail on different things and even sharing some of the
information about how we have. It's pretty easy to see why the ballot language was one thing, and the actual amount is a different thing related to things like inflation and so
forth. But I just wanted to add a few things based on we've gotten some feedback as you via email and things like that, just requests about how we're using things. And I know many
in the community have concerns about how mill levy funds are used and how the amounts are set for what is collected. And so I, you know, asked for for some information. And first, thank you for for to all those
who shared their concerns, this is an example of how we should be working together to build a better district. The amount seen in the presentation are embedded in many quality components. That should give us all confidence in the outcomes.
Notably the Colorado Constitution itself, which has a number of pieces of information about levies, Tabor and other related components. Our external legal assistance that guides us with what the
Constitution says reviews all of our proposals and benchmarks to known case law that have been tested with what is in the Colorado Constitution and how that is interpreted. We have
checks and balances within the county that must approve what has been submitted. So what we send in, they're going to have to validate and verify. And of course, we have our own series of internal processes that lead
to what has been created. And you've seen today and finally earlier on, you saw that we approved what the audit committee had gone through. And that's obviously post fact work that gets run through by not
just the audit committee, but an external audit firm. Our audit is complete and we receive the output of responsive, unmodified, the highest level that can be
achieved. As such, I am confident that we have many layers of protection to ensure we are legally in order. And I share this with the. The community sees the parts of the
process and the multiple checks that are in place. I also want to say thank you to our community for the mill levies you have approved, and to your desire to ensure that we use those approved funds
appropriately. I ask that you continue to keep us sharp by asking the questions and thank you to the audit, the Mill Levy Committee and the Comprehensive Planning Committee, who are most closely aligned to the
output of the mill levy. I appreciate your work and diligence and request that you ask questions and guidance of us to help you. Together, we will work to maximize what we
do for the district. Thank you, thank you. Are there any other discussions or questions? All right. Seeing none. Jill, can
you call the vote? Vote Karla Bayes I Conor Duffy. Hi, Kevin I Sean bauer. Hi Andrew Spain I
Jessica zamora I Karen de Ziegler. Hi. Motion passes seven zero. Thank you. Thank
you. So now we have 9.4. Our adoption of the 2627 school year calendar. Can I get a motion? Thank you. I move that
the board approve the 2026 2027 school year calendar as submitted. Can I get a second? Thank you. Connor. All right. Is there I don't think there's
a presentation. Correct. President Zamora no, we don't have a presentation prepared. But we do have our two co-chairs of the calendar committee. Our principal from Lopez Elementary School, Cheryl
Day, and one of our assistant principals at Poudre High School, Brian Keil, are in attendance here tonight and prepared to answer any questions that the board may have regarding the proposed
calendar. Thank you. And is there any discussion we'd like
or question? Yeah, I definitely am curious about some of the community comment we've heard from email. And tonight,
obviously, there's a lot of concern in the high schools about losing losing time in the fall and the, the equity of of
that. At the same time, just so everybody knows, we've been wrestling with the heat day concern at the beginning of every year for the last several years. That disproportionately
affects the elementary schools and middle schools. High schools are already they have AC. So I'd like to hear from you guys what you think you
know, or what were thoughts that went into. Those types of things. Was that considered in terms of instructional minutes
for the high schools when when this proposal was put together? I would say the top priority
which we were given was to create a calendar that started the school year later. And so that was the primary consideration, creating the calendar, which then of course
has impacts on other aspects of it. We did look at other potential options, but they were taking away from
Thanksgiving break or fall break or. You know, adjusting the winter break to either to lose days in order to have
everything work out with numbers and keep that start date later. If you wanted to keep the start date later and
try to even out the semesters, a couple things you could consider would be reducing the number of days for the fall break. You could consider
moving days from the beginning of winter break to the end of winter break. You could consider ending the first semester after winter break to
add days. Those are some of the options that we've come up with. If you were trying to accomplish both of those priorities. Yeah, that's one
thing I, I literally wrote. It may be crazy, but. Have we ever or have schools ever ended first semester in January? Not
as long as I've been in the district. The the issue that I can see with that is our concurrent enrollment classes. They end today essentially.
Right. So students in those classes according to Front Range can't have any grade changes. The grades must match
between Front Range and PSD. So if we were to extend the first semester into January, those students in those concurrent
enrollment classes, what are they doing. So that that is the biggest issue that I can see impacting that for for a non
concurrent enrollment class, it could be possible for sure. But there are a lot of of concurrent enrollment classes
across all the high schools. To answer your question, we used to go into January way back when having lived through that. Yeah. But I also recognize you
had mentioned previously that there was a strong community preference to have the first semester done prior to the winter break, exceedingly strong if the results from the
23 survey. Is that correct? That was more input, I would say, from staff for the reasons that Brian mentioned. Thank you.
Other questions? Discussion. Go ahead. Kevin, I have thoughts. I want to clarify a little bit about how we got here, because I do think it's the end of the
year when we're having this discussion about the vote. It was a Boe push. It was the it was a directive that we gave. And I know it's colder now. It's warmer today, but it's colder now than it was when we
started this discussion. And if I can remind everyone the emails that we got, the the data we received from teachers, our classrooms are too hot for a long part of of the first
part of the year. They're too hot. I don't envy the two of you and the the brave souls that are on the calendar committee. It feels the more I
learn about it. A little bit of chess meets minesweeper at every iteration, and it's it is impossible to make a system change of this magnitude and not have disruption to some
subset of our district, that it's not going to be a fan of the work that we do. So I just want to at least validate that and say thank you for the work, and thank you for the proposals that you've done, especially
with the stop start that we had to do with the Bell schedule conversation, instructional time. The one thing I'd say, having learned a little bit about this work on the calendar committee and the conversations we've had, is to make sure that
we don't let perfect be the enemy of good in our in our discussions, we could go back to the drawing board. You could give us iteration after iteration after iteration, and I can promise something will happen, which will be we'll
hear from a different category of of our community that will have a tremendous pushback or issue with that. That's not to say we shouldn't examine, and that's not to invalidate the concerns we had. I think the
ones that we listened to tonight, that's a really compelling concern about, and it will expand inequity in our system from academic learning that AP teachers and some other high school folks are going to
have to wrestle with. And that's something that we should examine. I one of the things that I learned whenever I was teaching in New York, I had a great principal who's not watching, but I'm going to give
him a shout out. Eric Green. He had us read a passage from Tina Fey's Bossypants before we started the year, and it's about improv. And the point of this little parable was that if you want the stage to continue,
if you want the act to continue improv, you have to say yes to things. You can't just shut things down and say no, because the idea goes and the comedy goes. And then kind of over. There's a lot of reasons in
this job to say no to a lot of things. I could find a reason to say no to this. I could find a reason to say no to everything we picked out on consent. It's it is our job to scrutinize. But sometimes it's
our job to try to get to a yes. And so my case this for this for this calendar because I don't I can't wave a wand and do a year round school, which is what I would rather do. We're not there yet, and I
don't think we're going to be there for some time, although I'd like to have that conversation. But this is this is, in my view, as good as it's going to get right now to give us the reprieve that we need for the beginning of the year,
we as directors don't have the luxury of looking at things in a vacuum or isolation. We have to look at what it's going to do for our district on scale. And so I do think that if I'm looking at the elementary schools that are don't have air
conditioning, they're not going to have air conditioning. Those classrooms are too hot. And if this calendar offers just a slight reprieve from that so that students can learn because they're not learning when it's this hot, then I think that that's that's enough to justify
my vote tonight. It's also presents terrible working conditions for our teachers and our staff, who are in those buildings that have no end in sight as far as getting air conditioning in the next calendar year, or the year after or the year after that.
So I this is a it's a tough call as far as changing a system like this and moving dates. And I know it's going to require adjustments. But for those reasons, I'm voting
tonight on this one. To follow up on that quickly. Yeah, the calendar is never going to be perfect for everybody. That's just the inherent nature of it.
The other thing is the heat is affecting a lot more students than block scheduling or concurrent enrollment. The amount of schools that do not have air conditioning far
exceed the amount of kids in concurrent enrollment. So we have to address the heat issue first. And hopefully the small switch that was proposed in
tonight's packet. Hopefully that will give us some reprieve. The other thing is, and I think we've heard it maybe a little bit more last year than this
year is. Why can't we just have different start times for those concurrent enrollment kids? And to tie that back to the budget that comes at a cost. That is an option that the calendar
committee has looked at in the past. But if we do that and we and we want to kind of give everybody their perfect schedule, it comes at a cost.
Go ahead. Miranda, I think I just want to say it's important what I'm hearing is, is an either or conversation versus what is an inclusive conversation. What are all the
considerations, not whether high schoolers have concurrent enrollment versus elementary school heat days versus teachers in the classroom is
how do we consider all of these and be inclusive in that conversation? And so for me to a question I have for you all, whether it's now or throughout this process, how are we including the multiple voices
of our community? Have we done that have beyond folks who can participate? Have we worked hard to make accessible outlets for people to participate, whether that's forum multiple
questionnaires, listening sessions, whatever that might include the voices of students, of teachers, of community members of staff, etcetera,
etcetera, so that we don't arrive at this place where now our voices, voices are being or questions are being asked could have been encountered in the future. Can you speak a little
bit about the inclusiveness of that process? Sure. So this should have been a survey year. So we were working on that,
creating a survey to ask those questions. But because of the instructional minute conversation, we were put on pause for the calendar
committee. So the the goal was, you know, once that was solved, we would finish our survey, send that out to staff, parents, the community to get that
feedback in order to make adjustments to the following year. And I would say some of the conversations we've had as
a committee around making things more accessible are things like providing actual copies of the proposed calendars, as opposed to just asking questions about which
would you prefer? We talked about having videos to try to explain some of the rationale behind those things, and we were working with the district as far as like having
translations, I think the possibility of like some in-person feedback is a great one, and it just takes a longer
timeline than what we had for this particular proposal. I just want to say thank you. It does sound like there was a lot that y'all had to consider, and
incorporating in the process and taking place, and I just want to say thank you for your work. And then one additional comment, if that's okay, to really think about a broad base
of who this impact. I think that tonight we heard teachers speak to the differences in the semesters, and when I hear that, I think about differences for our students. I think about who
we are picturing in our mind. For me as a student, maybe it's a higher achiever that would like some extra time to make certain that their grades is as best as they want it to be.
Maybe it's someone who had obligations to previous night and have time to go to class and ask the teacher a question, so it's extra days in the semester matters. Maybe those
students who can take that class in the spring and get that additional educational opportunity. It matters greatly for them and those students who can't take the spring semester
because of conditions in life that requires them to take that fall semester. They don't get access to that opportunity. And I believe if our focus is on an equitable and inclusive
district, then we have to make things accessible to in a difference in those states. Actually, in my opinion, impacts that mission. Thank you.
Thanks, Scott. Did you have a question or comment? Okay, Carla. Thank you, Principal Keeley. My questions for you. I have an Impala and kind of
leaning into what Kuranda was saying. My question to you would be what is your. Take on
our kids not having as much access in the fall semester as spring? Do you think that it's as impactful as it as it feels like it is? I mean, Zoe's in AP
classes she's done today, so it doesn't feel like the fall really affected her. But for students that need more instruction or need more help,
it feels like they're being let down in the fall. It's kind of a loaded question, just because Poudre High School has a vastly
different schedule than the other high schools. So not only do we have a block schedule, but we have an alternating block schedule. Those classes
go for the year. So so that impacts things. I think the biggest thing, and I think why I was asked to be on the calendar committee is because
if you look at the breakdown from quarter to quarter, right. So some classes are two quarters, right. And that would be a year long class. But in a block schedule, that's a
semester long, right? Ten credit class. We also have classes that are five credits. And that's just a quarter. If you look at the breakdown per
quarter right. This year quarter one is 45 days. Quarter two is 39 days, quarter three is 46 and quarter four is 45.
Right. So quarter two is always short always. Semester one is always short. I think our teachers, it is hard and I'm
not going to dismiss that. It is really difficult. And like like they said tonight they have to cut units or just
modify the way they teach. You know, I like the idea of of what you're saying that second semester kids have more
opportunity, more time to, to get help, more time to learn. It's it's hard, right? I don't
know if there's a benefit. I don't know if there's a cost. If I look at grades for students, I wouldn't say there's a difference. But I've
never actually pulled that data. That's just my gut. Right. And and does that make them college ready? I mean, are they missing out on things that other kids are getting that make them more
for the college class? They have to teach the college curriculum, right? Right. So they are getting the college curriculum first semester and second semester. They can't cut
things out. So that stuff is taught exactly the same. But for kids who aren't in the early colleges, for them it's different. Yeah. So they're missing stuff like exothermic
or endothermic, like like Mr. Stone. Yeah. Doctor Stone, actually. Yeah. Have you okay.
Yeah. I did have one question for clarity. In October. I think you guys might have heard this already, but I'd like to talk about it in the public.
There are a couple days, I think it's the 15th and 16th of October. And there was a question about one was listed as a conference day versus
elementary exchange day. Do you want to clarify that? Sure. The employee agreement specifies two exchange days in the fall for elementary. Traditionally,
the Thursday has been used by many buildings for conferences. When we labeled them both as change days. That led to some confusion because people then
thought conferences were not being held that day. So the there are the correct number of exchange days. It really comes down to how we choose to label
it and communicate it on the calendar. Okay. Go ahead. Sorry, Dave, I got some rapid fire questions for you. I think
you'll be able to answer. I think he's got I think he's got this. I'm putting on the spot. First question, how many of our high schools have air conditioning currently? All of our high schools have air
conditioning. Currently out of the comprehensive high schools. Out of how many? The six comprehensive high schools, the ones I'm talking about, Centennial, I believe is
partially air conditioned. How many middle schools have air conditioned currently? I don't know that right off the top of my head. Sorry. Do you know how many elementary schools have
air conditioning currently? No, I don't have that in front of me either. I can go find out if you. I don't have it in front of me at the elementary school
level, it's less than a handful. So of our 49 traditional public schools, I think we have 32 of the 49 that no longer have air conditioning. 30. Is it 30? 30? Yeah, it's 30 because of 80,
because Beatty and O'Dea are done. Thank you for correcting. So coming at it the other side. Yes. We have 30 schools that are not air conditioned at the elementary school. Okay I appreciate it. Sorry. It was going to have the same result
for me regardless of where I was going, is that I've said it before. I'll say it again. We're talking about access. We're talking about equity. But I also want to bring into the room Maslow's before blooms.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Before Bloom's taxonomy. If kids are in a situation where they're not going to learn because of physical barriers, then they can't focus on the Bloom's Taxonomy. And so I also
want to remind our board and our community that we have to have early release for an entire week of the first week of school where there was no learning. And let's talk about the disruption to families that that causes to. And one of the
things that we heard from our Board of engagement sessions to give another plug for that, I'm going to amplify this was not my idea or my thought, but one of our community members said, as a single working parent, that is a tremendously
difficult thing to have to navigate on a whim. And it's it's similar to a snow day, but it's something that the ask was from the district. Maybe we contemplate doing an early release for the first week of school if we're going to
maintain the calendar where it is. So we're talking about instructional time. We're talking about these bleed days that we may have to carry over to get the quota. I see a solution. It's not perfect and it's not the best solution in
the world, but that one week may give us a little bit of reprieve to that problem that was very urgent in August, September. When we're having those conversations, leave it at that. Go ahead. Scott. Yeah,
I agree with Kevin on that. I did as as administrators, you guys are both administrators. The concern about workdays came
up all being front loaded. Is there is that going to be productive time, even though it's not going to be used for grading, is that, you know, what are alternatives that
those teachers are going to be able to use that for where they'll feel like it's productive and and makes sense. And later in the semester, they're not presenting that.
It's a tough question. Sorry. Can I give an opinion? Honestly, after hearing the feedback, I do think it would be valuable
to look at how we could move one of the workdays to the second semester, however, right. Like everything we've talked about, then there are ripple
effects of that. So we were kind of over there consulting like what? What would be some ways you could do that? Because if you add a day right where
the where the workdays currently are before students come back, they have no impact on the total number of days in the school year. We move one into the school year. We're now
impacting the number of student contact days, and we have to get one back from somewhere. So again, there's different ways you could do that. You could get one back by having students come the day after Memorial Day
for the last day of school. Probably not a great choice. You remove one day from fall break or winter break. You
could remove one other holiday. Those are just like quick off the top of the head ways that you could take a workday that's not currently a student day and
not impacting the number of days. Place it somewhere else. But we have to figure out then where we get that day back. Or you could move the start date,
the start day one day earlier. Any other discussion or questions? Yeah. When's the last what's the last possible day we would need to make a
decision on the calendar in order for it to go into effect. Doctor who and I believe the board's current policy calls for an approval of next year's calendar by the end of this
calendar year, calendar year. So you would need to make a decision by December 31st. Thank you. All right. Are we prepared to call the question?
Can I get a motion or did we already do the motion? We did the motion. Jill, can we call the vote? Thank you. Carla Bays.
I Conor Duffy, I Kevin Gavalda, I Scott Schoenberger I Andrew Spain, I Jessica Zamora I Karen
Ziegler. Nay motion passes six one. At this time we're going to take a five minute break and then we will come back for our informational reports and
discussions. I will see you
guys at 740.
I offered they she she could make it. I was like, why don't you just come for one night, you know? Yeah. So they're coming Friday night and then I'm hoping to get there before bowling. All right. With
the high school, we are going to get started again. Okay. So continuing our meeting, we have our next informational report. Brian, I believe we have some
guests. At this time. Thank you. I'm so sorry. It is 745 and we are continuing our meeting. All right. So with us this evening to present information about
the demographic trends in the state of Colorado is the Colorado State Demographer, Kate Watkins. Kate, I want to welcome you. And thank you. I met with Kate last week to have
an idea of what might be presented here tonight. And if you remember, members of the board, members of the community, I think it was the 22, 2022, 2023 school year was the last
time we as a school district invited the state Demographer's office. And after spending some time with Kate, the Demographer's office has since downgraded their expectations for this region regarding
school age children. And I think it's important data point that as you're listening to Kate present the various modes of different data and lenses in which we should be breaking
down these data points, I just invite you to kind of center on the school age children aspect of that, knowing that that has what what I would say has the greatest set of implications
for us as a governance team moving forward. Kate, I'm really glad that you're here. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you so much. Wonderful to be here. And today I'll be presenting kind of our latest and greatest
when it comes to population projections specifically for Larimer County. And I do want to acknowledge right from the get go that, of course, the Poudre School District is, is a portion of Larimer County, but
is not all of Larimer County. And so some of the trends, you know, there's a little bit of a disconnect there where some of the district specific trends might differ a little bit from the presentation that I'm sharing today. But these are
the latest and greatest that I'll be sharing. We just about a month ago released our latest projections. So so you are you're getting it hot off the presses. Want to acknowledge a couple of kind of key themes
that you'll hear throughout the presentation. And one is this interplay between people and the economy. When we're talking about jobs, we're actually talking about humans and even things like housing. There's
this interplay here. So supply and demand for housing, it takes people to build those houses. It takes people to demand those houses and to kind of necessitate that additional building. So there's always
this inherent interplay between people and the economy, some other key trends and key trends that I want to acknowledge are not just specific to Larimer County or Colorado, but are
things that we're seeing across the globe, across the US and across the globe. First, we're seeing fairly dramatically lower fertility rates than we saw even a decade or two ago.
And that translates to fewer births. We are aging, which translates to more deaths. And the combination of those two factors results in slower population growth. Again, something that we're seeing
globally when we have fewer births, more deaths, net migration becomes even more consequential for population growth. And lastly, we're increasingly more diverse. Our
younger populations are more diverse when it comes to race and ethnicity. So simply by aging, we we will become a more diverse society and economy. So some key trends that you'll see kind of playing out in the
slides moving forward. But I want to zoom out a little bit and give you a bit more of a global perspective, because again, when we're talking about populations, these are global dynamics here. So snapshot in
time 2023. And what you're seeing here are fertility rates across countries. And any country in pink is below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. What that means is
over the course of multiple generations, the countries in pink would decline if not for international migration. So
pretty amazing that already in 2023 so much of the globe is in pink. When we look at population projections for the globe, we can break this down
into kind of three age cohorts, let's say roughly the school age population 0 to 19, the traditional working age population 20 to 20 to 64, and our traditional retirement
population 65 plus. So looking at these global population projections, and this is from the latest United Nations World Population Prospects report, school age population perhaps
has already peaked and will decline moving into the future. The working age population expected to see some growth but leveling off come the 2050s and eventually declining. And the
65 plus year old population expected to see ongoing growth over time. If we look at US population projections, this is the latest from the Congressional Budget Office. We
see that the school age population has perhaps already peaked and been in decline for over a decade, and will continue to decline moving forward. Traditional working age expected to continue to
grow, but if anything perhaps peak in the 2040s before declining and nowhere to grow but up when it comes to our 65 plus year old population. So I
mentioned this again as the backdrop in that Colorado and Larimer County, we bring in a lot of folks from other states and other countries. And so what happens globally and nationally matters for state
level growth. So to focus more squarely on Colorado and Larimer County specific trends, Brian had done a great job of sort of kicking off this and
teeing up the downgrade in our population expectations. So here showing Larimer County's total population, not the school districts or the school age specific population. And
you can see that the change in our vintages 2023, our expectations from last year relative to what we're expecting now with that vintage 2024 estimate. So this is a
downgrade of about 35,900, or 7.5% fewer people through 2050. If if you want to kind of wrap your head around that, the town of Berthoud is around 11,000
people. So three times the town, plus ten times the town of Bertha. That's how much we've downgraded our expectations. We've downgraded them largely across the state and on a
couple of different factors. One is that fertility rates continue to be lower than expected. Secondly, we've seen labor mobility and just mobility generally be much
weaker than what we've expected. We're now five years out from the Covid pandemic, and what we found is that people just aren't moving around as much as they were historically. And so we're kind of changing our
expectations for what the future brings when it comes to both expectations for net migration and fertility rates. The other element here also is a change in immigration
policies, which also will produce lower net migration when it comes to the international net migration to the state. So looking at percent change, we can look at
our annual population, percent change and compare Colorado relative to the US. Colorado historically has outpaced the nation when it comes to population growth, and we're projecting that it will continue to do so moving in
future. But that's not a guarantee. And this is a kind of a key risk to the forecast that I will continue to highlight throughout. So anytime that blue line is above
above the gray line, that means Colorado is picking up share in the National when it comes to the national population. So no guarantee that Colorado will
continue to outpace the nation. Historically, Colorado's been really good at attracting kind of younger folks to the state given our housing affordability issues. That in particular, I
think is is the key downside risk and the key thing to watch moving forward. So adding Larimer County into into the mix here to compare growth, Larimer County is largely kept
pace with the state as a whole. It's actually quite remarkable how closely it's been tied to that state level growth and projecting that it continues to to kind of match that state level pattern. But again, some downside risk in particular
when it comes to housing affordability and net migration to the area. When we're talking about population growth, we're really only talking about a couple of things. It's births
minus deaths or natural change. And it's our ins minus our outs or our net migration. And this chart is one of my favorite charts, is showing those components of population change for the state of Colorado. And
the next slide I'll show you Larimer County specifically. So a couple of key things to tease out. One, when we look at natural change, it's made up. It's been a much stronger population growth driver historically relative to what
we're projecting moving forward. And again, that's because we are having fewer children, fewer births, and more of us are dying because we are more of us are aging. We are, for the first time in our forecast
horizon, projecting natural decline for the state's population. We're expecting that to happen in 2047, based on our latest population projections. Net migration for
the state has largely been tied to the business cycle in Colorado. So when we go into a recession, we tend to see net outmigration or really weak net migration to the state. We can see that in the late 1980s, oil
and gas bust, the early 2000.com recession and the Covid recession in 2020, the Great Recession bucked the trend. And part of the story there. I think that there are
lots of pieces to that story, but one big part of it was that that was when Colorado, believe it or not, was relatively more affordable when it comes to housing. So looking to the future, we are expecting fairly
weak net migration over the course of the next years. And that's on kind of two main factors. One, changes to immigration policy. So very weak international net
migration and also a fairly slow growth economy, a slow expectations for jobs growth, which also will kind of dampen that both international and domestic net migration to to
the state. We expect to ramp up and to basically get up to our historical average net migration levels of about 38,000 per year over the long
run. Looking to Larimer County, we see we see a bit of a different trajectory here where that natural decline is expected much sooner based on our latest population
projections, expecting natural decline to start in 2029. When that happens, the only way to grow the population within the region is through net migration.
You're seeing fairly healthy projections here when it comes to that net migration to the area. But again, downside risk both for Colorado as a whole and for Larimer County, given some of the affordability
challenges that might be facing moving forward. So want to break down some of the components here for fertility rates, births, deaths and net migration. And I'll start with fertility rates. So here are
the total fertility rate. Again replacement rate would be 2.1 births per woman. They peaked both nationally and for Colorado roughly around 2007.
And since we've seen this very precipitous decline in fertility rates, we're projecting that Colorado will to some degree start to level off. But we'll continue to kind
of see an in down infertility rates over time. So those are our underlying assumptions for our population projections when it comes to births. We can also compare some counties here
comparing weld because it's a bit of an outlier relative to and our next door neighbor here and our county to Colorado. We can see that Larimer County's fertility rates have been historically lower than the
state as a whole. And we're largely projecting that they just kind of remain constant at roughly about 0 or 1.8 births per per female, per woman over
time. There's certainly some downside risk to that. But Larimer County already fairly low fertility rate. And so we're kind of holding steady in
our assumptions. Looking at the levels. So number of births compared to number of deaths. We've seen a decline in births in Larimer County for quite
some time. We're projecting that that essentially births level off and grow starting in the 2030s even. But that rebound is high, contingent upon net migration to the area.
So kind of your younger adults who move in start families and and age in place when it comes to deaths. Again, we're we're an aging population. And so
we'll continue to see a growing number of deaths. And we can compare that to the state level trends where similarly births have been in decline for quite some time now. And here again,
you see that crossover happening much sooner for Larimer County relative to the state as a whole. All right. So net migration Colorado, I think I already mentioned this,
Colorado has been really good at bringing in 20 and 30 somethings. So this is the level of net migration, the balance of ins minus outs across age five year age cohorts. And so lots of 20 and
30 somethings coming into the state. And this was over the period of 2010 to 2020. A couple of kind of key things to tease out or key things to think about are given some of the affordability challenges,
can we continue to bring in 20 and 30 somethings to come into the state, maybe for a job opportunity, maybe move around the state, find themselves in Larimer County, start a family?
That child enters the school system. Can we count on those same trends moving forward? I think that that's kind of the key question to ask. Larimer County has a slightly different
distribution when it comes to net migration by age. Here, we're seeing that strong college contingent coming in attending CSU. They age out of
of the college system. Many of them move out, but many of them also stay in the area and perhaps form families. Weld County again, a bit of an outlier, one of our highest
growth areas in the state. Here, you're seeing a lot of growth basically 40 and below population in particular, but with a lot of growth in your school aged population. Weld
County, relatively speaking, a more affordable part of the state. So combining all of the components of change, our births or deaths, our net migration, here's a ten year outlook for total population
growth across counties in the state. Larimer County. So think of this as a heat map. Anything yellow orange, red is is growth. The brighter the red or the I guess the darker the red. In
this case, the higher the growth. Anything in blue is in decline over that ten year period. So most of the growth are along kind of the I-25 corridor, Front Range area.
Larimer among the higher growth regions, but not the highest growth county. All right. So now I want to focus in on age.
And first just show Larimer County's population distribution by single year of age and by generation. And if you go to this QR code it'll
take you to this animation. On our website you can look at statewide trends or county level trends. Go back to 1990, play it forward as an animation up to the the most current estimate, which is 2024 and
into the future to see how we've evolved when it comes to our age distribution and how we're projecting that that age distribution continues to evolve. So a couple key takeaways. If you were to go to
that QR code of that website, you'd see not a lot of growth in the school age population, quite a bit of growth in the working age population, and quite a bit of growth in our traditional retirement age
population. And I think some key things to highlight there. The school aged and the working age population highly contingent upon net migration. The 65 plus year old population
is largely simply aging in place. So I'll kind of walk through some of those trends in in a higher level of detail in the, in the in the slides ahead.
But first, just to acknowledge that every county has a unique age distribution and some are are frankly outliers. So looking at some of the variation and when we think about this age distribution and
why it matters, certainly it matters for enrollment k through 12 enrollment. It also matters for our economies, our economic base, how state and local governments get their revenue. And and then also
certainly matters when it comes to our our retiree population, those needing perhaps more assistance moving into the future. So age absolutely matters. Larimer County clearly
an outlier when it comes to the college age component or cohort. All right, so breaking down the population across some of these
cohorts a bit more. So the next several slides will show the level of the population across a couple of key cohorts. This first one and projected going back to 1990 and projected
through 2060. So population levels in this case, for those most likely to work, those 25 to 54, as I mentioned already, this is a population that is highly dependent upon net
migration. And so our projections do assume a healthy level of net migration among those that are this age into the area. The growth here is is
a little less than 1% on average per year. And that is, you know, great when it comes to growing, growing an economy. It's not robust growth per se,
but it is ongoing growth that's expected. But again, reliant on net migration to the area when it comes to our 65 plus year old population, we've come off of a period of really strong
growth, a real strong ramp up in our 65 plus year old and projecting quite a bit of growth moving forward. So three, if not more percent or three or more times that of our population, that's most likely
to work. So as we age, as more and more of us move into the 65 plus year old cohort, our needs and wants will evolve, our economy will evolve, our tax
base will evolve over time across the state. We're seeing growth in the 65 plus year old population. Again, think of this as a heat map. Yellow, orange. Red is growth. Blue is
decline. The only reason we're really seeing declines or projecting declines in some of our more rural areas of the state is that they have less access to health care, and so we've seen some out net
outmigration of 65 plus year olds among those areas. Also, many of them are smaller counties. And so we're talking just a few people kind of
coming and going. So most of the growth in 65 plus year olds in our most populated areas of the state, including Larimer, Weld County, kind of that Front
Range region and all along the I-25 corridor. I also want to highlight one additional kind of key cohort, and that's our
population age 65 plus. This is a population that we're just on the cusp of seeing fairly dramatic growth in. This is a population that's right around the age when our older adults start to need more assistance,
be it health care assistance or in-home assistance. And why this might be relevant to to you all is that when it comes to state and local government services, there may be
additional need for funds that go towards these populations. So when we can think about the state budget situation, general fund now some of the highest share going towards Medicaid
costs or health care costs, when we think about growth in our 80 plus year old population, those who maybe kind of spend down their retirement savings become eligible for Medicaid,
and seeing this type of rapid growth, inevitably it will put some pressure on the state budget. So mention it in that context as well. All right. And
then focusing kind of I think what you all expected me to talk about why why we're here perhaps today talking squarely about the school age population. And I'm starting with Colorado and then I'll show you Larimer
County's, because again, thinking about that state budget situation, looking across across districts when it comes to enrollment, this might give us a bit of a feel for
what those pressures might look like across the board. So Colorado's school aged population and that defined as those aged 5 to 17, we've seen several years of decline
already in that school age population. And we're projecting an ongoing decline, at least for the next five ish years across the state before seeing stabilization and growth.
The growth is reliant, heavily reliant on net migration, again, not a guarantee. So if anything, I would say downside risk to this forecast, meaning a
likelihood, if anything, of fewer people that are 5 to 17 moving into the future, looking
at Larimer County, we are projecting basically 15 plus years of decline moving forward into the future before stabilization and growth. But
that stabilization and growth, again, highly contingent upon net migration to the area. So over the course of the next ten years, projecting about a 2.8%
decline in that school age population. We are seeing. So there's a lot of variation across counties when it comes to the school age population.
And here we're showing those aged 5 to 19. So it's a little bit outside of the bounds of of those actually in K through 12. And that's because we map doing
five year increments instead of one year increments. So this map showing the change in that population between 2020 and 2030. So we're smack dab in the middle of that decade. Anything
in blue is decline. And we're seeing a lot of declines in some of our most populated areas of the state. Larimer County, based on on this map. And again, it touches on on the
18 and 19 year olds. And so the college population being kind of a big component of of what's happening when it comes to CSU and Larimer County, it might be skewing this a little bit. So
that's why we're seeing a roughly stable, at least in part why we're seeing roughly stable population growth in Larimer County. But I mentioned this also to highlight the
variation that exists even within our counties. So sub county level, we see fairly dramatic variation. And so within Larimer County you might
see more or less blue within certain areas of the county itself. All right I want to highlight the downside risks to the forecast of the school age
population. And so I want to run you through two different scenarios. We've just recently started producing some scenario analysis to to help people understand what what kind of
the alternative futures might bring and to help people wrap their heads around kind of what the risks are, what the magnitude of those risks might be. So here's one of them. And and so comparing our baseline.
So the gray is that's our latest and greatest when it comes to population projections. The blue or the teal color is a low net migration scenario that basically assumes that the
state and Larimer County don't pick up a share of of the national population, but instead just grow at rates consistent with national population projections. So I'll show you kind of what that
looks like. Basically, your orange line would match the gray line when it comes to projected US population growth. And so we're balancing this out with our net migration
assumptions to get to that, that kind of closer to 0% growth in population. That's a very possible scenario. And I say that in part because over
the course of the last couple of years, we've tracked really closely with the nation when it's to population growth. So if we can if we can believe these population projections
moving forward into the future, certainly it is a possibility that we would see much lower population growth in Larimer County. So under that scenario,
ongoing decline in the school age population over time. So that's one scenario I want to run by you. Another one is tied to fertility rates. So Larimer
County currently or as of 2024 at 1.19 births per per woman, projecting that we roughly tick down to 0 or 1.08 and stay
there. Certainly we could see ongoing declines in fertility rates. We can compare relative to kind of what we've seen in countries elsewhere, and one
country that's an outlier on the low side is South Korea. So South Korea is at 0.75 births per woman. And so if we assumed
that we ticked down in Larimer County to that fertility rate by the end of our forecast period, 2060, this is what the population projections would
look like for that school age population. This is an unlikely scenario, but I think what it helps to communicate is the bounds of possibilities. When it comes to fertility rates.
Could fertility rates rise? Yes, though based on what we've seen globally, it's it's an unlikely scenario, even with policy implemented to try to increase
fertility rates. So if anything, maybe take this as the range of possibilities baseline versus downside kind of risk when it comes to fertility rates. Here
a slide just kind of capturing what the assumptions behind those, those various alternative scenarios in case you want to take a peek later and winding down, want to talk
a little bit about affordability and why why we're talking more about this than than perhaps we have in the past. There are a number of different metrics that we can look at. And so here comparing
median home prices across counties across the US. And so anything in red is basically higher than your your national average. And Larimer certainly
among among those kind of higher cost areas across countries. So if you're kind of a young family trying to figure out where, where you want to locate, where you want to raise
a family, Larimer County might not be affordable. And so that could put some downward pressure on on certainly not migration, but also the types of people moving to Larimer
County. They might be kind of higher income, want to have fewer children, etc. We can also look at this basically
factoring in higher pay. So Colorado tends to pay its employees more than other states. When we kind of factor in the that combination of housing costs and income. This
map communicates a lot of information, but it kind of helps us get a feel for that as well. So what this is doing is, is comparing the years of median income needed to buy a
median value home as of 2023. And again, anything kind of in that yellow orange red is higher than the national
average. And and more expensive. Larimer County number 57 among counties that has a population that have a population above 65,000. So a fairly high
ranking when it comes to kind of relative lack of affordability relative to other areas, because this is a forecast, I do want to highlight the risks. And I've
hopefully I've driven home the housing affordability piece. Some other risks to think about are competition for labor relative to other states. Certainly things like natural disaster or even water
availability can constrain population growth. Or displaced populations. Certainly we want to think about national population growth drivers. So immigration policy and even geopolitical events. I'd
mentioned that Colorado's net migration is heavily tied to the business cycle. So if we were to enter a recession or have weaker economic activity, we would expect net migration
to weaken. And even things like hybrid versus remote remote work requirements or automation and AI can affect our
populations in that they affect our labor markets. So just acknowledging many of the risks. But I would say on across the board, we're viewing those
risks as skewed to the downside, meaning if anything, lower population growth than what we're projecting. So as I as we wrap up, I want to return to
kind of a key point, which is that these projections are at the county level. And and Poudre district is school district is no different than,
than the county. So there are some tools out there that might be of interest in exploring. One is the Census Bureau housing Unit change viewer. And there's a link at the bottom of
this slide that can take you to it. This is kind of a cool tool that gives you a more regional feel for where housing development is happening, which can be an indicator of
population growth. What it's not telling you, it's telling you the number of the change in the housing units, but it's not telling you who's living there. So is it is it a family moving in? Are these units affordable?
It's not going to give you that information, but it will tell you kind of magnitude of change and both at the percentage level and then also the number of housing units. So perhaps something to to take a peek at
and to supplement some of the information that I've provided today. And with that, please don't hesitate to to reach out. We're we are here for answering questions and helping people
understand what our population estimates and projections mean as we love doing presentations like this. So please, we are a resource and we'd love to to hear from you, but otherwise
we'd love to take any questions that you might have. Thank you so much for being here. Are
there any questions? For. I'm just curious because I, I believe like the migrations and growth towers, like art, like the district is impacted by
businesses being able to attract families. So I was curious if you had any insights on what you're hearing in the business community in terms of how they're able to attract that age, 25 to 54, in terms of
professional position? Yeah, some some of the anecdotes that I've heard and even in kind of being at presentations where at
various kind of business chambers, if you will, across the state, what I've heard is that a lot of businesses are attracted to Colorado because
we already have kind of a lot of young talent, if you will, already here. And so so it's it's been an attractive place to relocate to because we have
a lot of kind of that, for lack of a better word, quote unquote, prime working age population, highly educated. And, and Colorado is an attractive place for, for folks to to come to. What I heard actually, just
this week is that some companies are that relocated here because it was kind of more, relatively more affordable than, say, places like San Francisco or California generally. Some of
them are going back to those higher cost areas because Colorado has kind of become comparable. And so and it's not necessarily for well, to some degree it's for the talent. So for some of the other
infrastructure that they might have in those areas. So that was kind of an interesting new wrinkle that that I've heard just this week in balancing
that affordability versus talent piece. Other questions.
I probably have quite a few. So I'll limit them because I, I guess I'd like to. Do you have any graphs visualizations that
show? The stochastic variance, given that there's a number of assumptions, and I'd love to see the full list of assumptions and what those numbers look like, which I don't know if you also have on
the website and if all those things are there. And I just need to go and look around, just tell me that. And that's fine, because of course, the reality is we're seeing a single line and that's based on a number of assumptions. So I
just want and that's that's our best guess. I totally get it. But I also want to have an idea of the, the range of variations and to what standard deviations that we're looking at. And if it's a cone of uncertainty for
a hurricane. Same thing with population graphics. Just wondering if you can give some insight. Yeah, it's a great question. And it's something that we're we're starting to explore a bit more. It's
historically we have not published that cone of uncertainty, so to speak, and we're starting to kind of play with it a little bit with some of the scenario analysis, just to kind of give people a feel
for that. But it is not something that we've published in the past. And, and it's we hired a new projections demographer who is able to do
that. And historically, it's not been something that we even explored, but it is something that will likely explore moving forward. So that that cone we don't currently have, that it's
not something on our website. What we can provide are the underlying assumptions for mortality, mortality, life expectancy, which kind of leads to the projections of of deaths,
fertility rates, which I showed those projections here, those underlying assumptions. And then our net migration assumptions are kind of explicit just in that they're right out there in terms of the
levels expected. So those are your three main drivers and three main underlying assumptions. Yeah. And I think I would what I would say with
the. Yeah I'll back up a little bit. So by statute we're required to produce population estimates and projections. And we do. We're also required to
solicit feedback on our methodologies. And so we're we like that kind of feedback and want to be as transparent as possible when it comes to kind of how we how we come up with
these projections. So welcome kind of the feedback on on those levels. So it's yeah, it's a great it's a great question. And again if you have even the, the sources of, of things like the fertility rates
and the projections, that clearly is one of your variables and you tweak that one and it goes wildly different, there's no doubt about that one. And so just understanding where those sources are, whether it's the
CDC or etc. all those things would be super useful. Sure. Yeah. Happy to follow up. Thanks. To your plethora of
questions. Your plethora of questions was one. Other questions. Yeah, please. You
showed the growth of housing units. Do you have anything that shows the turnover rate of housing units? Because we keep
hearing this is a an aging in place community, at least Fort Collins. I recognize Wellington and Timnath and everything might be different, but even that would be really interesting and indifference. I
know we're supposed to focus on the school age group, but if we can't move out, if we have an aging in place, then then there's nobody that can move in, right? I mean, and so trying to get a feel for that as well.
Yeah. The Census Bureau puts out information on on mobility through the American Community Survey. And some of those mobility data do give us a feel
for kind of the extent to which at least people are moving. And so so, for example, 65 plus year olds statewide, 94% remain in their homes year after year.
So not a not a ton of turnover. And that's, you know, the shares and American Survey gives us gives us a good feel for the composition of a population but doesn't give us
a great feel for estimate point estimates because of the nature of it being a survey. And that may be a better question for our realty friends. Honestly, I understand that as well because I'm sure they have. Yeah, and
lots of variation, even at the neighborhood level. Other questions? Okay, I know I'm a
little can I make a comment? Yes, please. So Kate, I want to thank you again for your thoughtful presentation. I think as Kate, Doctor Hooten and myself spent some time
together last Friday, I think one of the takeaways I just want to put into the room is that there are so many intersections here between these various data points, and I can't see a silver bullet
that we pulled this one lever, and we fixed the challenges that we're grappling with. And when you think about the data points that you did see here, I also want us to be mindful of
what we didn't see here, which is policy change that's happening to K-12 education in the state of Colorado and across this country. Like right now, we're in the same week of talking about what this
forecast might be, but it doesn't take into consideration that the ecosystem of the number of schools, the types of schools, whether they're private, charter, parochial, may change as our governor is opting us into a statewide
voucher program or a federal voucher program. So I just want us to be mindful of that. And regarding our kind of financial stability of what we're planning for, what we can currently do in terms of the
level of service, the number of schools, and what that looks like in the near future. You also maybe, as we're kind of wrestling with what our state legislature is wrestling with,
they're introducing a concept right now around a potential way of reducing monies from K-12 education to balance the budget deficit at the state, called a specific ownership tax.
And if you think about the famous water glass slide that Dave Montoya shared across this community, in spirit of helping people understand how schools and our districts are funded between local share and state
share, right, based on assessed property value, and then the state backfills the rest, depending upon the state legislature's amount of what they dedicate towards a per pupil allocation, the mill levy overrides and the debt
overrides that we have in this district, which are significant, according to Dave's presentation. I think it's actually almost double the amount of mills that every other district, at a minimum at the floor would be. They've
always lived above the water glass. They're a supplement. Well, what our state legislature is wrestling with now is actually considering that to be part of our local share. So the state share
actually reduces. That's millions of dollars of impact. So not just PSD but many, many large school systems across the Front Range, especially who have a voting base, who support
mill levy overrides and debt levies. So I shared that with you as context. That's not you know, none of those data points are being taken into consideration through the state Demographer's office yet. But I do appreciate their willingness
to continue to look at the data in real time. I do think it's significant that where we were two years ago was, you know, we were in a spot. We're in a different spot now. And to see
the the downgrading and the expectations align to the narrative, that's not just happening within our system. It's happening within our city. It's happening within our county. It's happening with the university. The workforce analysis presentation that
you're about to hear is only going to talk about there's intersections that will need to continue to pull back the layers to help create shared understanding. But I would invite as a governance team for
us to think about how do we help educate not just ourselves, but the broader community on these particular sets of data? I think that's really, really important. We have a well-educated community that
wants to know this information, but there's so many other pieces of information that are out there. Sometimes it's easy to cherry pick. I'm curious, like, you don't need to answer this tonight, but I just think
it's going to be really incumbent upon us as a governance team to figure out how we can get a data set that we align, believe and make decisions about moving forward in the next several years. But
I just want to say thank you on behalf of the entire district and our community. That information is incredibly helpful, and I just want to say thank you again. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being here. I'm
sure we'll have more questions. Might be getting emails. Thank you very much. All right. I believe we have a second informational report from our Fort Collins Chamber of Commerce. Yeah. So when you
think about the presentation that you just heard regarding the state of the state and what that means for the region in terms of population demographics, we have key partners here that are talking
to us tonight around a workforce analysis specific to how to build and sustain economic vitality in our region, not just in our school district. So tonight, we look forward to hearing a presentation about
the Northern Colorado workforce Analysis from Anne Hutchinson, our president CEO of the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce, Mark Johnson of Larimer County Economic and Workforce Development, and
Sonya Kendall from the City of Fort Collins. I want to welcome the three of you, but I also want to say thank you. Since I've arrived here four and a half years ago, your collective thought partnership around how
to come alongside this school system for us to be in partners with each other, it has had huge implications and benefit, in my opinion, around our curricular offerings to align
to the local economy and to help our economy grow and be more attractive from talent standpoint. So I just want to say thank you for your partnership, and thank you here for being here for this presentation. Fantastic. Thank
you again. Good evening. Board members were were thrilled to provide a bit of a snapshot in town in time. You have Kate with the the wherewithal in order to do the projections. We
collectively have worked together with a company called Tip strategies to really begin to understand what is our workforce today and what are the what are the things that
are impacting that ability to either grow, maintain or lose workforce here in Northern Colorado already mentioned, it's the three organizations working together in order to
bring this information to our community. We're really fortunate to be working under, before this report, data that that sauna Kendall and the City
of Fort Collins created in in order for us to understand our workforce. And that data, however, is very much out of date. 2017 was the last time that we did an update, and so
the three partners came together at the end of last year to find the funding in order to make this report possible. So really want to acknowledge that this is a team
sport. None of us do this work individually. And we're we're very pleased to be able to share that with you today. Let me turn it over to Sonia to talk a little bit through
statistics. All right. An already kind of gave the baseline, I think one of the biggest conversations that we've been having specifically as economic developers is that
this really is one economy. When we think about Larimer and Weld, most of our labor shed actually commutes in and from Larimer and Weld. We have the one offs like Colorado Springs,
El Paso County or the Boulder Broomfield, but about 80% of our actual workforce commute in and out from Larimer and Weld County. So really wanting to
share that with you. The other piece is it's not just Fort Collins, it's not just Greeley. There are 36 communities in this real large kind of component of it. So we're
really wanting to share that with you, wanting to really get to actually, though the dashboard in the workforce analysis. But before we get there, it was why now? Right. I
think that's the real big piece and why this work. And so as Anne mentioned, we actually did this data in 2014 just to really say what's the baseline? What's the foundation of what
this looks like for Fort Collins? What we ended up doing is saying this is great information, but what next? So in 2017, we actually lifted up and said, what does that look
like for Larimer County as a whole? And that was actually what formed an action plan called talent 2.0 that was led by the chamber and the county and the city, as well as city of Loveland, really came
involved into that portion of it. And then obviously, after things have shifted and we're like, why are we still using 2017 data at that point? And so
we really said, we're talking about sunsetting talent 2.0. And really looking at this from a two county region, what does that look like and how do we really update that information.
So this is actually an interactive dashboard that I could geek out on all the time and have been told not to. So I will share that with you. There is so much in terms of this and
we'll send you the link. So the first portion is around the baseline. So the blue is all the population trends and information in that baseline. Then we actually have what does
that talent supply look like. What do we actually have in our communities. What is coming up through our educational system. And how many talent are we actually being able to retain?
And then this grayish blue is really our talent demand. So Tip strategies actually looked at two years of job postings and really looked at what is it
that the companies in Northern Colorado are really looking for in those spaces. So that's kind of how we kind of looked at this dashboard. It is an interactive one. You can hover
over it. There's even this at the bottom what if scenario. And that was really for conversations we're having around business attraction. So for City of Fort Collins we
actually were not allowed to do business attraction. We were allowed to do great customer service if a company came to us. Right. But now the City of Fort Collins has said, you know what?
We're no longer the regional hub. This is not where all the jobs are. How do we really sustain ourselves as a community? And one of those is around business attraction. But being very mindful and very
specific in two industries life sciences and in clean and clean tech. So those are kind of the areas that we're focused on in those spaces. So then I believe and we're going back to you for
sure. And my slide is super easy because it's ditto. You just had the in-depth college level presentation from Kate.
So rather than going too far here, I will simply say pay attention to that super dark blue line on the slide that shows that Fort Collins is flattening when it comes to
population growth. This is a surprise for many of our community members. I think lots of people wake up every day and they maybe drive in Fort Collins and they see this
increased traffic. So there's an assumption that we have increased population that's creating that traffic. What our data will show you is that we're bringing people into our
community to work. So we are remaining a hub for work. But most of our population that is working in Fort Collins on a daily basis is living somewhere else and commuting in. So
that's what you're seeing when when we talk about increased vehicle miles traveled, increased cars on the road. That's not growth here. That's creating that. That's that
commute in and that commute out. So yeah, ditto it is. And let me turn it over to my colleagues for some other conversation. Yeah. That's right. Hi everybody. I was going to say the same thing Kate Watkins really, really
stole the thunder here as well because this is a chart that is part of a part of the population drivers of change. It's that net migration. So she
spent quite a bit of time here to dissect the slide. This is northern Colorado. So imagine you could get on that dashboard and you could toggle Larimer County. You could toggle Weld
County, you could toggle Northern Colorado I don't I don't think the data goes deep enough for Fort Collins for this particular set of information. But if we look at the slide bottom dark blue,
Kate talked about natural change that's at birth and death rate. So you can see from left to right 1991 to 2023 that
middle large volume. That's that domestic net migration. These are folks who are choosing to move there from another area of the United
States. And then that tops that international migration. So migrants, refugees, asylees students that that makes up that upper quadrant. So, you
know, what you can see here is it ends in 23. So I don't think frankly, the chart represents the current shifts happening at our federal level. And our
population and labor force continues to depend on attracting people to Colorado, not just our residents. So moving to the next slide. This
digs into again, Kate spoke about some age distribution in her slides, but to the left of the margin you can see Fort Collins Greeley next. Then it
goes into weld, northern Colorado, Larimer County, Colorado and the United States. And. So, so essentially the top
left 0 to 19 years of age. So here in Fort Collins, we can see a 22.7% makeup of our residents in the community, 0
to 19. Interesting. You can juxtapose that to the United States. 24.8 Colorado 24%. And then, of course, the outlier
Greeley. We've learned Greeley's attracting more 0 to 19 year olds. I think that theory, in part I heard from
Kate, was housing costs. No doubt. What else stands out here? I think I think we're good on that. Okay. And then
number eight or. Excuse me. Oh, total. Okay. So total employment here. Yes. So this is measure. Hold on. Sorry. There you go okay. So yeah last
one here. So this this kind of drills into then houses with children and again left. You can see Weld County's that
outlier 37.4%. And then we come to the far right margin the second second from the right. Larimer County 25.3%. Fort Collins 23.3%. Why again,
housing affordability, more experienced people attracted to Fort Collins, Larimer County likely then less children and
households. But you can see that difference between City of Greeley and Fort Collins, something I think that's important for the board to to
keep in mind. All right. So now I am going to talk total employment. So the interesting thing as mentioned is Fort Collins really is starting to
lose its kind of stronghold on being that hub. Right. But however, we are still seeing that at least one out of every three jobs are, still can be traced back to Fort Collins.
Meaning those jobs are still here and there are people commuting in. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a bit. The other piece is Greeley is 1 in 6 regional jobs can be
traced to Greeley. So people are going into Greeley for those jobs. But in Fort Collins specifically, I just wanted to share where's kind of that cluster of work in terms of
employment, professional services, arts, entertainment, outdoor rec, education, information and media. And when you think about who are the companies that we have in the
Fort Collins area, you can really kind of understand that Fort Collins today is the fourth largest city in the state of Colorado. Greeley obviously has been really kind of coming up there. And so we
anticipate Greeley will become the fourth largest, and we will probably take a back seat to them, probably at 5 or 6, depending on how big Lakewood grows in that space as well.
And I think that's you. Yeah. So I would be a very bad chamber exec if I didn't remind all of you that you are creating products, you are training product for the
economy to grow. And so we want to make sure you understand, again, a snapshot in time relative to job counts that we are seeing in in northern Colorado at this point in time. So you can see health care
continues to be one of our single largest employers across that two county region. Education. Again, neither one of these are a surprise with
for higher ed institutions here in northern Colorado. It's not surprising. Education then sits in that second seat as far as pure number of jobs. And then retail trade ends up in number
three. Again, we've built economies around this idea of a quality of life with amenities that follow that. It makes sense that we have that many jobs that are attached to that.
I do think it's interesting, as we come down that list, relative to number of jobs attached to specific industries. We talk a lot about government and the number of government jobs that we actually have here
in Larimer County and specifically Fort Collins. From a pure number count, it's actually further down if you pull out education and healthcare, but certainly still an important part of our
economy. And then this slide takes into account that percentage of jobs that are located within a specific community. So the darkest blue is Fort Collins. The next color
is Greeley. And then the last one is the rest of the region. Again you see this sizable impact of jobs and percentage of jobs being in Fort Collins.
But you also see this growing percentage with our other community members over time. All right. This one's me for
Northern Colorado again when we're talking Larimer Weld northern Colorado is a net exporter. So residents are leaving their city or town to
go and get their go to work every day. Sorry. So more than two thirds of Weld County working residents actually commute out. But when you think about their proximity and their
affordability of housing, those aspects, there is a rationale as to why that is happening. However, Fort Collins is a net importer, so almost 50,000
workers come into Fort Collins daily. So to work. So we are a net importer. Sorry, I've got something in my throat but so but they're usually commuting
from nearby communities. So the Timnath the Wellington's the Greeley's of the world's. One thing I would also mention is 1 in 5 Fort Collins residents are
work from home. So when we start talking about AI and the implications of that, as well as commuting, that will be something the labor force study will be looking at as well. Oh,
thanks. Well I'm done. Thank you. Yeah, okay. Hi everyone. Again this this slide gosh is
one I love talking about education attainment in 2023. So a couple couple things here to ground us on what we're looking at here. This is a five
year sample from American Community Survey. And it's it's surveying the population 25 and over. So I think that's important to note because I
think we've had some some folks in different audiences wonder, is this any indication of our K-12 system? It's 25 plus. So with that said again left of
the margin, you can see the key there, starting with Fort Collins, Larimer County, ending with Weld and Greeley. And then as we go left or light blue, we
start with no diploma. So these are 25 plus folks who do not have a high school diploma or alternative diploma, then moves
into high school diploma, some college, but no degree. The associate's degree, the bachelor's degree and then graduate degree. And I think
what you can really see here in Fort Collins is a is a pretty high concentration bachelor's and master's degrees. When you look at that, which you know as
sort and kind of talked about, maybe not surprising based on some some of the workers that were attracting, we had across the interstate into Weld and
Greeley, higher concentration of high school diploma, some college a, a a degree that's more of that labor shed of technical and applied
industries. So for me, what I think I like to illustrate here is Workforce Solutions. This district, all districts really
need to consider the full continuum because again, we have people traveling in between regions, staying in one
area, living in one area, commuting to another region. So the work that you're continuing to do to support work based learning, you know, the career and technical education
programing, it's critical for for for your students. And I feel like this education attainment rate shows that. So great. So that is an entire 70
page document that we have available for you. Boiled down to a couple of highlights that we felt like you would want to see today. As Sonia mentioned, there's an amazing tool that we
will give you all access to that you can do every what if scenario and the deepest of data diving that you would like, and we certainly encourage it.
Our hope in releasing this report and releasing these tools was to inspire them. The conversation about so what? And that certainly is already beginning to happen in the two
county region. We have peers that have now come alongside us to say we need to come together as Larimer and Weld counties to begin to build a new talent
plan. That does consider the fact that there are no walls when it comes to being a family or a worker. Those lines that
we all like to draw on maps really don't matter when it comes to the economy. They also don't matter when it comes to families. And how can we work together as a two county area
to continue to grow our economy? I thought Kate did a great job of of really pointing out, yes, we need to be keeping an eye on birth rates. Yes, we need to be
looking at this aging in place, which I do believe is is a key challenge for us in Fort Collins. But we also need to be keeping an eye on that economy, knowing that it can have a very
direct impact on our ability to keep that migration number up. In order to keep this self-fulfilling prophecy occur. So we're happy to answer any questions, but also let you get
on with your conversation. Thank you so much for being here. Do we have questions just really quick? Of course. Thanks for coming. Really appreciate
the information. Have you heard from any of the business leaders in the community about the talents that they want to see? Our students have come out of our schools. Well, yeah,
absolutely. You know, sector partnerships I think are one one area where businesses are rallying, driving conversations. Your your educators are in the
room listening, hearing, adapting curriculum. We have an active manufacturing, construction, healthcare,
financial, nonprofit and hospitality all industry business led. Additionally through this partnership and
and others, we'll be launching a regional action committee that has a two and five year tactical plan that businesses
have influenced and essentially guided in manufacturing, construction and health care. It's essentially a bit of a playbook from from the business community. And again, school
district leaders, not only here in Poudre, but others were at the table listening to to to businesses. And we're going to roll that plan out through our workforce development boards
and through our regional action committees. One of one of Anne's leaders will be on that. So that's a couple of ways. And and maybe to put a finer point
on it, we're needing skill set across industry. So we need everything from the the guy or gal who can show up at 5 a.m.
and turn on that next computer system that makes things happen in a building all day, all the way up to the individual that can dream the next solution. So it is across the skill set
continuum. And all of our industries are saying we need more of everything. And I think that's an important part of the
conversation. Yeah. Others go ahead. Andrew. You talked a lot about people driving in as we
drive around. There's loads of construction people moving into it and staying. So do you have any insight into what we're seeing there with the populations that are actually moving in and and hitting those
places? I mean, there's a lot of growth going on with that. And even if they're, you know, migrating internally in Fort Collins, that leaves where are people filling in, etcetera, for sure. And so I'll provide
maybe a bit of residential perspective and then ask Sonia to provide that more business based perspective. When it comes to residents. We're behind. We are we are somewhere
between 500 to 1000 home units behind when it comes to creating supply. And we've been 500 to 1000 units behind for a
number of years. 2008 truly did impact Fort Collins in a way, when it comes to that supply of housing that we still have not caught up with in my role, I
would then offer the observation that we, in addition to crashing our supply chain, we've now made it harder to build that supply in Fort Collins in comparison to other
locations. So that added regulation, those added expectations, those added costs are causing us to not be able to catch up to the demand that we have when it comes to our
residential demand. But I'll have to talk about the spaces that are filled with workers. Yeah, you know, I would say so. I typically have conversations with a lot of the larger
employers, and they've really been talking about how do they find in be able to retain their employees. So we are seeing obviously growth in the northeast side. But there's
also then the challenges of transportation back into town, as well as the amenities that they're looking for in terms of that. So I do think that is something we're hearing a lot
from our employers. And our employers are saying, tap us into the conversations as we try to figure out what type of solutions there might be opportunities for in those spaces. But when, you know, we
were talking to Anheuser-Busch, I think around a project, about 60% of their employees live in Fort Collins. The rest are
commuting in. And so when you think about these 12 a.m. to 12 p.m. shifts, or this actually it's usually 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. shifts, right. We are seeing that. And actually Broadcom
made the concerted effort to say we don't want our employees then to leave to go get higher education to actually give opportunity for economic mobility to the Boulder
Longmont area where you're driving another hour each way after a 12 hour shift. So they've actually worked with Larimer County workforce as well as Front Range Community College to have that training
actually on site. So we're seeing that more creative ways to really help their workforce with upward mobility in those
spaces to. So I have two questions, but I have an assumption. So I think the first question is probably more for I was just curious why you
all are targeting attracting life science and clean tech versus other other industries that call for that. Yeah. So again, so our office actually
was formed in 2011. So economic health which is economic development and other communities we do a lot around business retention and expansion. When we proposed actually those two industries
specifically the conversation was around we really targeting high quality paying jobs where there's economic mobility opportunities, but also to help
and support in really be not supplemental, but very like kind to what is already happening in our region. So Colorado State University, being an R-1 school with a lot
of research, it's an opportunity to really leverage the assets you already have. And then in terms of the clean tech, obviously the city of
Fort Collins has climate goals. And how do we really leverage the talent that's in our community, but also the talent that wants to be in our community to help really solve those big, hairy, audacious
goals. So that's why those two were the first two to be proposed. We are going to be talking to council about obviously with softening sales tax, is there going to be other
types of businesses that we want to attract? But one of the biggest criterias was around quality of jobs and leveraging the assets and the like minded
set of the businesses to the community. So not bringing in something that is completely different than what the community is interested in our community. Thank you. That makes sense. So then I think
the reason I was like, I'm trying to make sense of it. So I'm trying to understand like, like you spoke a lot about Weld County and Greeley and whatnot and their growth rate. But then
I'm also conflicted in my head when I'm thinking about the industries that we are focusing and targeting in the limitation in terms of maybe how many jobs
are available. And then going back to what Kate shared, I'm also thinking about education level in child birth. Right. And so, you know, more
education making assumptions in a statement. Right. Impacts fertility rates. And so I think I'm kind of confused as the industries we're targeting
while also talking about growth. And it feels like there's an inverse relationship there somehow. Didn't know if you had any thoughts on that. No, I, I
think your observation is a very thoughtful one. And that is as long as we do pursue a knowledge based economy, which is our primary focus here in
Larimer County, but specifically in Fort Collins. The reality is we will most likely continue to see that decreased growth rate. Does
that mean we throw out all of the work that we've done to date, and we pursue less knowledge based jobs? I don't think so, but I do. The conversation that I've
certainly been having with our city Council members is, how do we make it easier to build things in Fort Collins? And when I say build things, that's
housing. How do we build commercial properties? How do we build stuff? We've we've not necessarily been a community that has put our arms around
manufacturing at a high level in Fort Collins. I think it's time for us to have the conversation about, do we want to lean more heavily on a
manufacturing perspective for our city limits or not? I don't know that I have the magic answer, but I am very curious about the question. Can we make it easier to build things in
Fort Collins? Thank you so much. I really appreciate your response to that question. I would add a couple of things when we were talking about those industries specifically.
It was also about what we're seeing coming out of the educational systems and making sure that there was economic mobility opportunities for those folks so that they don't have to leave our community to
have a good quality job and then come back after they've succeeded. So that was one of the really big targets that we were looking at. I can tell you,
we're working with a company that's in clean energy right now with Colorado State University. They're talking about potentially a thousand jobs, right. And not all of those will be brand new jobs
coming in. It will be from people in our community. So what we're doing now is pulling all the skill sets of those jobs to say, here's what we have in our community thus far that you could tap into that
would also help them in terms of quality of economic mobility supports. Right. So the other piece I wanted to mention is we do have this dashboard, the Northern Colorado Workforce
Analysis. We also have a job quality and access tool dashboard that you can actually click on to from here. And you can look at how many jobs in 854 in let's say, restaurant
retail. And it will tell you the demographics of those folks as well as what is the educational requirements and the educational attainment of those folks as well. So wanting
to make sure you're aware that there's an additional resource on that dashboard. So we really try to look at it from both kind of components. But yeah, I
want to thank you all for being here and staying late and maybe may or may not be missing a CSU game that you all we're all very coordinated address for. I
want to pick up on one one thought that Ann said and it was partnership and I think what what Doctor Ziegler is talking about bleeds right into this, is that we are in our locus of control here at the
school board. I can't create jobs. I can't create migration patterns from the state demographer. I can't force people to move into Larimer County any quicker because I can't make housing more affordable. That's not in the
purview of this dais. What I can do is prepare the kids that we have for any kind of environment they got. But also, what I would like to be able to do is have the jobs that wouldn't force that reverse
migration out. To your point about it's being too expensive to live here for the kids that we are graduating. And so we've graduated with options. And your option is to leave Larimer County. And so I think we need to have that continued focus
and partnership between being intentional with our strategic partnerships throughout the region and attracting that workforce in to say, hey, we've got a willing and able workforce, not just in the higher ed life sciences and the professional services
categories, but in manufacturing. Look at what we're doing in our CTE classes, because I think we are one of the beacons in the state as far as our programing, and we're continuing to put investment in
it, as you all know. And so we're chomping at the bit. We'd love to be able to send them and release them out into our own backyard. Yeah. So that's my pitch. Sorry. The spirit moved me a little bit.
Certainly. And I certainly want to appreciate those comments because I don't do a single presentation in the community without reminding people that we need raw product in order to
drive this economy. The kids that you are seeing every day are exactly that for our economy, and partnership is key, and we're looking forward to
continuing to work with Poudre School District and others in order to to grow that opportunity for the kids today to be the leaders of tomorrow.
Yeah. Go ahead. Scott. Thanks to echo, a lot of what everybody is saying up here. And thank you very much for being here and for that in-depth study. Actually, I
want to dig into into that a lot further. I would kind of like to add on to that. Like, do you feel like you're getting enough support or input from
PSD when making pitches to potential businesses? It feels like that's changed for the positive, and I just like to learn more about that. And what else can we do to help to help
support that? The example I would give is obviously there was an announcement about the USDA regional hub, right. And a big conversation about that was
the potential of moving anywhere from, they said 50 to 1000, 2000. We're we're most likely going to be in the 500 to 800 jobs Poudre School
District, coming in and talking with us and talking with the USDA decision makers in that, I think was a huge component of that. The sector partnership model works, right. I remember
the first time standing up with the manufacturing sector partnership, and they were like, we've done this before, right? And I think it really is the everyone down the line. Right.
Really listening and hearing industry in having that opportunity I think has been one. But I know Brian and I were texting about USDA and, and really making sure that they knew they were welcome in
our community, but that we and that we wanted to see them succeed in in the moves that are going to happen. So keep saying yes, keep, keep, keep,
keep giving your leaders enough of a leash in order to do the things they need to do in order to be good partners. Please continue to support that work.
Other questions or comments? Okay, that's the end of the game. But it was a win. Well that's good. I think it was a win. I'm looking. Okay. Thank you. Well half the battles
there. You shouldn't get to be there to see it. Thank you so much for being here. I don't know that you have the answers question, but I did have one question. Do we know a percent of households with children
that are needed to maintain our population? No, but we'll get it. No, but we'll we'll make a we'll make we'll phone a friend and see if we can't get that back to you. Awesome. I had one
other and it was slide nine and it just you were commenting like that. This was big shifts happening, but I'm having a hard time just because there's
so many of those bars on the far side. I see 2001 and it looks like Fort Collins is at just over 60% on the far other side. Do you have what kind of
percentage is for Fort Collins right now? Is this the slide you're talking about? I don't know, do you have that number on your on your documents? I do not have that one. Are you
asking how many jobs that is? No, I'm just asking for the percent because it looks as percent is pretty flat. Oh actually let's see here. So if we just kind of reverse
engineer that, it looks like a little bit under 40%. Yeah. So that looks sounds pretty comparable to where it was in 2001. But when you were talking
about it, it sounded like these shifts were large. This is the 100% rate in as our population has doubled since 1990, you're seeing that Greeley is starting
to even a little shift in that will actually pop them up higher. So we're still at 170,000, I believe they're at like 100, 110,000. They're
going to be moving more towards the West. We're moving more towards the East in terms of growth. And I think that's where we're going to see a lot of those employment hubs starting to really pop up too.
Great. Thank you. I just want to thank for the clarity. All right. Seeing oh yes. Thank you so much for being here. All
right. Okay. Last agenda item. We have our district annual budget process priorities and update. Yes. So with us this evening to present the district annual budget process is our
budget director Brian Gustafson. Brian, I want to welcome you. Thank you for having me. See,
this is what happens. I, I clear the room. All right.
Thanks. Brian Gustafson, thanks for the introduction. I look forward to meeting Doctor Ziegler and Doctor Spain and Miss Blake. Miss Bayes down the road here, doing some
introductions and even some budget onboarding, talking about school finance, those kinds of things in the future. But it's budget season now and kind of like a professional
sports season. It's really long and really long, and there's a lot of momentum and energy at the beginning. And then at the end and in the middle it can be pretty tough. But but my
purpose tonight is to hopefully kind of lay out what is the process look like. Set the stage for the fiscal year 27 budget we're in. Current fiscal
year is fiscal year 26, 20, 25, 26. We call it fiscal year 26. Next year will be fiscal year 27. And that's what we're starting to plan now. We're in
the middle of revising our current budget, but we're already getting into next year. And that'll be the focus of what I talk about. But what I'm excited about with this presentation this evening is that we have now some
additional perspective from the previous two presenters to really consider as we think about our process. And as you think about some of the the information I discussed, it's not going to be as detailed as
it would be later in the in the year or as certainly as what we've seen earlier. But I think those perspectives are going to impact a lot of maybe the priorities that go into the
budget this year. So the hope is we can come away with thinking about the challenges we've got, the processes we use and the initial components going into our planning. So
let's just jump right into challenges and take a look at it really from three perspectives right now the local perspective, the state perspective, and the federal perspective. A lot of this has
been touched on already. Again, refer to to those previous presentations and think about some of those things that have been brought up already tonight. And the very first bullet there has been addressed multiple
times over the last hour, hour and a half. A local challenge of declining enrollment trends in the district, not only in the district, but statewide as well. And that impacts the next
bullet, the state formula. But in our in our local budget, the local district, declining enrollment trends certainly are impacting how we fund schools.
We'll talk about how that formula works as we get more in depth into the budget process. And and really, that's that's a huge driver of, of what we're
going to be faced with as we go forward, not only in fiscal year 27, but beyond. And we're awaiting updated projections for next year. Those will be coming in January to really start to put meat on the bones
of our projections when it comes to dollars, but we've got some a little bit of data to work with, and we've got an early projection on on funding,
at least proposals from the state level that will impact us locally and that state budget challenge. We're currently in
the process of a ramp up of a new school finance formula. So concurrently, this is the first year of two finance formulas working simultaneously and the phase out of one from 1994, the
phase in of a new one starting this year, that is a little bit mind blowing to start with, but as that proceeds, our funding
and our mechanisms are going to change and there's some significant impacts, I think that will will be hitting SDE as well as other districts, but in different ways. On top of
that, implementation of a new school finance formula. Well, as part of it, there's a significant component that is a reduction of averaging. What does that mean? That means we
are funded on an average pupil count as a declining enrollment district. That mechanism of the formula is starting to go away. It's being phased out. And as we see that phase out proceed
over a series of years, we're going to experience student student funding declines that are accelerating even ahead of our actual enrollment declines.
And that's a lot to digest. And it'll take a little bit more time to get into some of the the in-depth nuances of how that works. But that is a significant challenge that we face from the from the state
perspective. Additionally, just just listening earlier discussion about potential additional changes to the finance formula structures of
how does the state manage to figure out its budget by adjusting its pieces of the pie? There was talk earlier about specific ownership tax and how
that could potentially change, right. Shifting of dollars in one pot. That would impact certainly the K-12 education pot as well. So we're going to
be navigating those things, of course, as best as we can and trying to get up to speed with the dynamics of those things, the timing of those, those
mechanisms, if they are to to proceed. And then overall, there's the challenge that that Kate talked about earlier, really, of the fewer statewide
resources for the state budget and how it impacts school budgeting, public schools K-12 portion of the budget is the largest section of the state of
Colorado budget, and I thought the the the illustration of the aging population here in Colorado and thinking about
that impact, it feels like it's as far removed from, you know, those kindergartners or those third graders. But that impact of that aging population on a finite pot of resources will
certainly impact school funding down the road. And so considering that we've got significant challenges ahead of us, and that's just local and state, there are also federal challenges. And that's also
been referred to tonight, whether it's funding for special education funding for early childhood programs. There is a lot of impact that that we
feel from federal dollars, even though we don't see a lot of federal dollars directly in our general fund. We see those in other funds like our grants fund and even a little bit in our child nutrition fund,
although that's that's dynamic shifts a little bit with our our Healthy Meals program. So we've got a lot ahead of us, a lot of things that we have to think about navigating as we
work through our process here. Let's talk a little bit more about that local challenge. And while I don't have the nice bar graphs that you've seen earlier and and this graphic is
extremely hard to read, I believe you do have this in your packets. You had this earlier tonight. This is the comparison of the fiscal year 26. That's the current year October count versus last
year's October count. And if nothing else, a what you may notice if you're able to see colors there is that that reddish shade is pretty
prevalent which indicates declines year over year of enrollment. A October of 2025 compared to October of 2024. And if you were to look more
closely at that, that chart and that table of information, you see a lot of negative numbers that generate that shade of color. A very few schools in
the span of the last year experiencing growth of enrollment population. When comparing last year to this
year, Hey St is recognizing 513 fewer district non-charter students. And that that is exclusive of those five charter
schools. So that's just our our basically our our core schools that we talk most, most regularly about, say that's the big challenge really is that
dynamic as we move forward into fiscal year 27. So jumping a little more toward the statewide challenges and statewide projections at the
end of October or early November of each year, the governor kicks off this budget season by proposing a budget to the legislature, and usually
that well, I would instead of usually, I would say oftentimes that kind of sets the tone for what things will happen throughout the actual public
School Finance Act every once in a while. It's variable as far as large changes that could occur at the end of the budget season compared to the beginning. Sometimes it starts
at one place, has various fluctuations throughout the season. It ends up back where the governor proposes it. We're really unsure right now what that will look like at the end of this season, but the
governor came out with that request actually on Halloween and declared in this proposal a total program increase across the state of about $413 more
per pupil of per pupil revenue. So that's a significant increase in public school funding. Now total program is
this this phrase that I'll use a lot. That's basically the the formula. That's the formula of kids times a per pupil rate that generates three quarters of our general fund revenue.
And when you take that per pupil rate times whatever number of kids you have, you generate, you know, in our, in our case, hundreds of millions of dollars for operating your
school system. That's largely based on the inflation rate. And Dave talked about that inflation rate earlier. The Denver Lakewood Aurora Consumer Price Index is what gets used
to to standardize that rate. In the school finance formula, it's projected to be 2.6% when the formula gets put together for next fiscal year. That is
part of this $413 per pupil increase. It's important to remember, as I mentioned, that we're going to continue reducing the pupil count averaging, and that will go from four years of averaging
this year to three next year. So that's part of this phase out of being funded for average pupils in a declining enrollment scenario, categorical programs. The
categorical categorical programs are a little bit outside of that formula. But they are specific buckets targeted for specific types of funding like special education,
transportation, vocational education. Those those items come into our general fund revenue and usually grow at about that rate of inflation. When all is worked out in the
School Finance Act, that's the projection for next year as well. However, what does that mean for us? Because that's the first thing we all look at. The
governor releases his budget request and then we all are clamoring for what are the runs? Where are the runs? Where are all the calculations? We want to see them for our districts. And as we got that information
and we scrolled, I had to do a double take because I got to Larimer County, Poudre School District and it's they're proposed to be an increase of
$126 per pupil, which is about a 1.1% increase. And and immediately the question is why so different? Why so different?
Why would the per pupil rate increase here be less than half of that rate of inflation driving the school finance formula? And really it's a really hard question to answer.
But it's really embedded in this, this new formula. The difference is are beyond or they come above a base level of funding. Every district is
going to receive a base level of funding all the same. And then it's all these what we call factors that get piled on top of that, that create changes in differences across
the district. Districts are start are are measured. Then at what kind of at risk population are in the district? How many of those students are are determined to be at risk? In
this case, free and reduced lunch eligible families that for for PTSD, we're always just kind of on the sort of middle
to low end compared to other districts as far as our at risk population. Hey, now that's not to to discount our our specific population. When looked at it
from a state perspective, our rates just aren't the same level as some of the other rates, especially if cities this size or or larger. So that's not a big differentiator
for us. We do receive some at risk funding and will in the formula next year. The cost of living rate is another calculation that's differentiated from district to district. And we just saw some
information that was pretty interesting. That showed Larimer County and Fort Collins is pretty high. And we've experienced that. It's you know, it's probably part of the
reason why we just heard conversations about, well, Fort Collins is growing to the northeast, and Weld County is growing toward the west and trying to find affordable places. Folks in Weld County
migrate out to work those kinds of things due to cost of cost of living. Well, unfortunately for Josh and Dave, could talk
to this for hours, for years and years and years. The cost of living factor for our district is quite low relative to what we experience in cost
of living daily. We received some and and will continue to receive some cost of living funding, but relative out of the cost of living bucket of the school finance formula,
it's just not a huge differentiator again, for us. Then we get into some other, other factors. A newer one is this locale factor that's based
on a federal designation of like rural or distant communities, urban communities. We're a mid-sized city as our
designation, and that generates exactly $0 in the new formula for us in the locale factor. Again, other districts, especially rural, are benefiting in the new the new
formula from this locale factor. And that was a lot of the push to update the school finance formula was to address some of those changes. And, you know,
for us at least, we're not receiving that funding. Can I interrupt and ask a question on that? Because it's always fascinating to me. What's the criteria by which a rural county is designated and how
come we don't make the cut. So this particular factor again, I it's it's tied to a federal designation. And I couldn't give you the exact specific
nomenclature for that, that that specifies certain population ranges for rural distant midsize towns. I'd have
to look through all the various ones. And then I could get the ranges so it's tethered more to population than it would be geographic sprawl. Okay. So and it looks at the district in its
entirety as opposed to portions of the district. We're we're somewhat unique in that we have a pretty heavy population center in parts of our district, and then some real rural, maybe
borderline remote portions of the district as well. And unfortunately, those don't care enough, I guess. Wait in the district as a whole to generate
funds in the local factor. Now there is a small segment of funding that we do receive called small attendance centers. It's outside of the the formula
for, I guess, assistance with or recognition of those more remote schools in our district. But it's a relatively small amount when we're talking about
the formula. Yeah. Similarly, there are still size factors in the formula size of district, not just the geographic location, but more of
population size. And again, we're just kind of in that spot where we're in the middle. And this is really targeted toward providing assistance to greater
funding for more rural locations to assist with funding places that have a harder time with transportation, attracting staff, those kinds of things. And we don't see any
size factor funding in the formula either. So there we start to get that differentiation. The why of for 13 versus $126 in per pupil
increase, will that be the number 126 additional for us when this is all said and done. No it won't. That'll change. We expect changes to come throughout the the legislative
process that will start in January. But that's at least where things are being kicked off. So acknowledging those
challenges, thinking about, okay, what's ahead of us, what is our budget process look like? And really to break it down into pretty big categories right here. Four. Well, three
really primary areas. One that we're already starting into is our student base budget or SBB process. And you probably newer, newer directors have probably heard about this a lot. I know
we've discussed this a lot over the last year with with returners and talking about how does SBB formula work, but really this is a collaboration between administration
centrally at schools, the school communities and school staffs to work on allocating their funds that are that are submitted to the schools
through our process and building their staffing, their operations from those allocations, we we almost
mirror sort of the the Colorado school finance approach and that we allocate dollars on a per student basis with some additional factors based on
student characteristics at each school that then turn into an allocation of X amount of dollars that goes to the school, the principal and that community work on. Okay, based
on our goals and the focus of the district and the strategic plan, how do we allocate these dollars each year? Hey, that process is we're in the middle of the current year's process.
I'll talk a little bit more about that, and we're getting ready to kick that process off for next year. Already with looking at enrollment projections and then this data from the governor's budget
proposal as well. So that's that's the first push. And that takes a lot of effort early here in January, February and March so that schools can build their plans and address their
staffing needs for the next year. Right. Get their staffing lined up, attract staff, address retirements, whatever it is they have to do. But as
that's going on, we also have operational budgets. So if you think of academic departments or facilities departments, those kinds of things, those groups are also starting to
review budgets and think about planning for the next year when those things are occurring. We start to to convene different review teams won the budget
design team, that group. I'll talk a little bit more about here in a moment. The District Accountability Committee, for which I believe you reviewed their recommendation earlier
this evening. They provide some feedback about the budget and how how dollars should be utilized in planning for the next year. The district advisory board is also a group
as and we're starting to try and tie in more and more with these committees. That's giving us a lens on community perspective on the budget and thoughts on how it's utilized,
feedback, those kinds of things. And then ultimately, you all not only have the burden of approving adopting budgets, but provide feedback and input on priorities. And that's kind of
what tonight's about, too, is how do we prioritize things with your lens as well? So I'll step back to that first step,
the student based budget cycle. And if if you take a look at this, this chart that's on the screen, it's basically a clock. We start right up at 12:00, right at the top. December 2025.
We're in the middle of the current year's true ups. What that means is we started a budget process last year, with predictions in January of last year to fund schools for this
year, and we allocated budgets and they were distributed and and managed and staff were hired. And then we have to get to October to see how close
those projections came. And then we true them up. So let's say just pick a school bacon Elementary school. I believe they are projected to have 378
students last January and October 1st. They ended up with 378 students. So not a lot of true up there. True up means if bacon were to come in at 370,
we funded them for 378. We'd be taking some money back. But also if they came in at 388 and we funded them for 378, we would be forwarding on more
funds to address the needs of that change of population. That's the process we're in right now, calculating that this week, and hope to have those numbers finalized by the
end of the week, and those transfers out to schools next week before the break. So as we move clockwise here, that happens. And then we move into January. And I mentioned
earlier that we get enrollment projections in January that we start building next year's budgets with we take those projections, we start to plug them into our formula, and we determine allocations that go
to schools by about Valentine's Day. Okay. So schools get these allocations middle of February. Then they've got a couple weeks to work through their planning. We call that the planning
process that happens in late February to early March. And they each go through a presentation with myself, HR folks, assistant
superintendents on. Here's what our plan looks like based on the resources that have been allocated. That happens in early March and by right after or right around spring break,
the budgets for the schools are set, barring some really significant changes, whether it's in the school finance formula or or enrollments, those kinds of things that that
schools are seeing that they're going to be set in March. And then it's that that game of all right, we got to see what the whites of the eyes show up in
August and then stay through October 1st. And what we really get funded at and the cycle continues back in December next year. We'll be truing up next
year's budget for the schools. On that other side of things, the departmental side. Oh, sorry, sorry, let me stick with SBB, the student based budget, real quick just to to
illustrate that we are taking our enrollment projections with that school finance formula, information to generate dollars that go to the schools and then into those comp plan meetings.
So as I mentioned earlier, pretty similar to the way the state formula works in many regards, but concurrently, our departments are analyzing their
staffing. They're looking at what are their budgetary objectives, what are their objectives within the system? What are they charged to achieve? What are they trying to achieve with long term
projects, whatever it is, and then analyzing their financial data to plan their budgets for next year. And that process has already begun as well, especially with our academic groups and our our facilities
and operational groups. Any proposals that come out of there will go to what we call that budget design team. And that budget design team really
is just a group of of various staff representatives that will review, do, provide feedback, ask questions about these. These recommendations, provide
suggestions on the formula or the whatever it is we've we've got. That's maybe a pressing topic. Budgetarily each year that the beat is made up of
licensed classified administrative staff members and includes employee association representatives. And that group reviews budget recommendations that may come
from cabinet or the negotiations process. As I mentioned earlier, the District Accountability Committee or the Board of Education, and ultimately those perspectives
and feedback help determine what's in the budget each year. This again, lots of stuff there for you to look at in your packet. Really, this is just
the budget process timeline that shows that, hey, budget season began and it's off and we're running. And some things to note as you look through that as sort of some
checkpoints, whether it's for negotiations when those things occur from my my lens as the budget director, I look at like in January, we're going to submit a revised budget for
this current year to you all. By the end of January. We have until January 31st to do that, to change this year's budget. And that's one that's kind of the next point checkpoint that
you all have to to look at the budget for approval or adoption. Then you'll see a variety of iterations of the budget in the spring and April, May, and then
in June, a preliminary budget that's really kind of just sort of the starting point for what does that document look like, a proposed budget, like here's where we think it should be.
And then if there are any changes, updates for a budget for adoption in June, so that that's what you can glean out of this timeline. Just to summarize those next steps,
we're in that fiscal year 26 student based budget true up. We're getting ready to revise this current year's budget. And you'll see that in January. I already talked about enrollment
projections and allocations to schools, as well as the departmental analysis and planning that's ongoing. Additionally, on top of these things, we usually see, and
we'll probably see, I can't speak for Mr. Hunt in the back, but I think I heard him mention earlier, we may see some adjusted multi-year projections.
I don't I don't know exactly when I underpromise and overdeliver. I gave spring of 2026. But we'll we'll see there because that that takes a lot of work to try and figure out
what does that look like for five years we have a current year or current set of multi-year projections that we work with. And and they've been pretty dang close. If you look
at what the enrollment overall was this year compared to what was projected, pretty spot on. So all of that to think about
what are our priorities, we've got challenges we were under taking our process. These are the priorities we communicated coming into this current budget
season or fiscal year 26, the one we're currently in. And that was to address and align to the strategic plan to address literacy, to address mental health and belonging
needs, and graduating with options. Additional priorities were continued evaluation of enrollment trends. And then, of course, to address safety and
competitive compensation and benefits within the lens of right, how does the budget everything we budget really stay focused on these
priorities? Hey, these really thinking about the challenges are probably becoming more and more challenging to address as we go on, as we think about
declining enrollment, as we think about scarcity and resources, and providing not only compliance related
services, but addressing the needs and wants of our district as well. Kind of the the sobering reality is that, right, we've got to address these
priorities with either limited or stagnant resources. If you look at a lot of the data that was presented earlier. I would
love some feedback on priorities, but also your questions or thoughts as we are kicking off the budget season.
Brian, just really quickly has your department looked at the financial impact? If we have a complete and total erase of
averaging this year instead of the drawdown, I do have that modeled somewhere, and I, I don't know that number off the top of my head, but I, I can
certainly get that for you. Can I weigh in on that. So this year under the four year averaging, not including where Brian's suggesting we're going,
which is a three year averaging, we benefited this year, approximately 595 students of additional funding. So when you think about the loss of
enrollment at an average of 500, I think it was 513 students. And then the elimination of the averaging piece, which right now we benefited this year of upwards of funding for almost 600 students. That's like two
school, two elementary. Well, it's actually more than we have elementary schools that are hovering in the three hundreds. You're talking about 3 or 4 schools of funding. So it's
pretty significant. I again, I can get that exact projection, but I think with averaging just an early look at the next year
of averaging decline, it would be in the mid five, hundreds of funded pupils. And that's not the projected enrollment decline that exceeds the
projected enrollment decline. Compound that with taking away averaging in general, it'd be pretty high. Thank you. Any
other questions? Yes, please. I just have a quick question. You said 513 Non-charter students, so it doesn't include our charter students. That number
does not. The handout you have does have the charter schools at the bottom. And so the subtotal right above, just so I
can see it a little bit. The subtotal above the charters is that change of 513. If you include the district charters,
the five district charters, that's a 493 student overall enrollment decline. So they went up slightly. They got 96
okay. Yeah. That's what I was curious about. Thank you. Other questions or comments? It's
okay Andrew you can ask questions. Yes of course I know. I've had some good conversations with Bud about some of the data and things
like that. And. You know, when we're looking at 513 lost this year, what's the breakdown by grades? Because that wasn't in this presentation, of course.
So you may not know that. And logically it can't be all at the kindergarten level because that has a very finite how many years you can keep losing that
many at kindergarten, etc. That then begs, why are students, why do we have a net net movement out at different grades and things like that? So I'm wondering what we have
compiled in terms of the of any kind of survey or other qualitative data to get an understanding of what is
causing changes? Sure. While I wouldn't have that information beyond the the really helpful information earlier about the
the natural changes and that is that how she put it, the natural change and the net migration for for the other various reasons, I have to reference our data as well as
those folks diving into the the birth rates, the really specific local data to keep talking to Bud. That's what first grade, second grade. It
is interesting to look at that chart and see how each grade, you can kind of see bands of how each grade are sort of sized. Similarly, you've got your kindergarten and first
grade in one sort of same size, and then your second and third in kind of the same size, and then your fourth and fifth are a little, little bit bigger. They're somewhat similar. That
that's kind of fascinating. It makes me ask the same question as well. Do you mind if I weigh in just a little bit too? So just I know this slide is really difficult to read, but if you can ground yourself in
what's in your packet, if you look at the right hand side of the screen and you see that wave of green in the middle, I want to explain that a little bit, because green is a there's
more kids than we had expected, right? And that is roughly our middle schools. And so we like kind of unpacking why why are we getting more students in our middle schools compared to our
elementary and our high? We really see two things that are at play. Many of you have elementary age children that historically were a four track school, may have went to a
three and now a two track school. So they're like the fourth and fifth grade students, which are larger cohorts of kids compared to our kindergarten, first and second grade. Those students are migrating into our middle
schools. So that is accounting for some of the bump that's happening there. I would also say when you look at the total K-12 ecosystem, not just our traditional schools, but a lot
of our charter schools are elementary only. And so we see students come back from charter into our middle school. So we believe those are the two primary reasons why we're seeing a bump at the middle
school level. I would also say you probably through other net migration. Think about the presentation we heard heard earlier, the people who are moving here maybe a little bit further along in their career and have middle to high school
aged students. That's accounting for some of that waves to. But there's no question about it. I mean, it's really hard to see. But our kindergarten cohort this year is under 1500, and that's by
far it's the only cohort of students that we have that's under 1500. And so as we have to really pay attention, in my opinion, to how our ecosystem of schools shift either
contracting or expanding with some of the state policy changes that are happening, I just think that's really, really important. But I really appreciate the question. Can I
ask you, with the middle schools, if I hear you saying correctly, I mean, every year we're going to get that bump coming out of from charter schools. They're they're they're already just through
fifth grade. They're coming to middle school. That's been there for a while. So this data would show that more have migrated. Actually, no, that doesn't make sense because they
still stop. So that doesn't explain the growth in middle schools because for year to year, I mean, they left they left charter schools at fifth grade coming into this year,
just as they will, and the year before and the year before and the year before. So we still had a bump this year that that wouldn't explain because
because there the the variable didn't change for charter schools ending at fifth grade. That that hasn't changed. So the it's a really good question. I think I'm tracking with you.
So if you look at our elementary schools in totality, the number of students who are in the grade bands three, four and five, that's a larger amount of students in those
grade bands compared to k one and two. And as those students continue to matriculate through the system, we anticipate that there's this little a little wave. It's not a tsunami by any
means. It's a bump more than anything else. It's still, you know, elevating itself through the system. And it will take some time for those smaller cohorts who are in K one and two to get into our middle
schools, where we'll see probably at some level, some contraction. I would also say that our charter school footprint, it's not really captured here, but at some level, the middle school level,
we have one of our district sponsored charter schools that expanded in the junior high area this year. So that is something that we need to be mindful around what impact that
has on our footprint there too. So just a couple of data points there. And just to add to that, this this does not capture all the charter schools that impact
the district. These are district charter schools. So we are the authorizer for these particular five charters. But there are others in the district. Yeah, that that have
populations that move in and out of the district schools as well. So and this the Comprehensive Planning Committee is looking at this
data. Eight eight ways come to Sunday. Right. As they as they're looking at their work over the next few years. Yeah. We we just had a meeting
earlier this week. It was really productive. We again went into depth on this. And it's a lot of the same questions. I can't say it's the most uplifting topic because
we've looked at this for, you know, many years. And it's more than just a projection now. It's a it's a trend. And we're going to address it. The Comprehensive Planning Commission is on the schedule
for a report out in, I think, the second meeting in January where we'll get. Yeah. And to ground everybody in the community. We've gone very slow
and deliberate on the numbers. We said that when we first started that we were going to take a lot of time so that we are all reading from the same playbook and that we understand what numbers we're looking at.
Because the last iteration of this, I think there was many data sets that we were using and mingled together, and it was not communicated well to the community. So we want to
level set and say, here's the playbook of numbers that we're going off of. This is what we'll make decisions off of. And going forward, we're going to start coming up with some recommendations for the board, okay. And they'll have how they
came up with that final data set, what they use to create the aggregate. ET cetera. ET cetera. Yes. It's for their report. It's going to be October numbers. I think we're getting that presentation in January, if I'm not mistaken. I
think it's the next I think it's the next board meeting. Next one or the January 27th I don't want to get into. It's the second 1st January 22nd meeting, okay I guess. Well, I wanted to make a comment. I'm
just going to ditto what Director Spain said, and I have a question and I'm going to say my real comment. I'm also I'm just curious. In gathering, I often ask questions is where I
generate. I keep hearing us talk about a district, and I'm wondering if we need to start looking at our district and blocks, right? So what is our hearing, Superintendent
Kingsley? What is our district in terms of three third, fourth and fifth grade? What is our district in terms of K through second you may already do this amazing work, but it's just
something that popped up in my head to kind of consider, and I'll just say maybe some of that's coming from my own work in terms of how, you know, I look at student success in a different area of education.
But I have found that when we're looking at that whole right, we miss the details. And maybe because it's complicated, we might need to start looking at the details, because then if
we can look at what that is, we can have particular strategies. Maybe we need a PhD strategy for K2. Second, a choose PhD strategy from 3 to 5 high
school, so on and so forth versus a comprehensive district. Choose PhD strategy. So that's what's popping in circulating in my head right now. And to my comment, I just wanted to comment and say, my heart goes
out to you and your team in the work that you all have ahead of you. There's already a lot of instability that's taking place, and there will be consistently a lot of changes. You will only
be working with what you have, but you'll be working with new things. And we also learning new skills along the way with things that you already have to do. And I just want to
acknowledge in this moment, I think acknowledgment and thanks can come later, but I want to acknowledge and thank you all for the work that you are planning to do ahead, despite what this world may be giving you. So thank you. Thank you.
We're we have a few of our teammates in here actually. And so I'm sure they would express their gratitude as well. And and yeah, we learned something
new. It feels like daily for sure. Yeah. All right. Are there any other questions or comments. All right. Of course.
So just a closing comment because as Brian, thank you for your presentation. He closed out by talking a little bit about what we know to be true about our district priorities, our strategic plan around
literacy, mental health and belonging, graduation with options. We also know that, you know, we continue to prioritize safety and compensation and benefits. I think one of the
things that I will respectfully and gently ask for all of our collective and individual help with, is we're going to need to manage our expectations in our system right now. And for those
of you that were on the board prior to the recent election, you know, there's a there's a feeling amongst our employees that everything feels urgent, everything feels important. That's real for a lot of people,
including myself. But we are in a current financial state where we're going to need to flip that paradigm and have courageous conversations of what are we going to stop doing?
And what's going to be painful about that is it's going to be even things that are aligned to our district priorities that we're going to know we will no longer be able to financially continue to do. And that's not
me wanting to be an alarmist. It's just wanting me to be real. When you think about us being a floor funded district and traditionally just compensation and benefits has been driven by
inflation. And I think a step increase which many of our employees have come to expect on average, I think costs about 3%. Is that correct, Dave? 2.1,
2.1%. So, so when you think about our initial run of us actually getting a 1.1% bump just based on the students we have, which will be fewer and
it will be a lesser amount of funding because the averaging is going to go away. You pay attention to the specific ownership tax and the the shell game of. Is the state share going to be what we can count
on or something different? We're talking about some pretty significant levels of cuts that will need to be made to do anything in our system and or maybe even to just maintain our
current reality, which is when I say current reality, it's just kind of keeping departments moving with less people, keeping schools moving with fewer people, knowing that
85% of every dollar that we have is going towards employees. And so I shared that with you, again, not to bring the room down and to take the oxygen out of the room, but just to level
set on expectations, because the work in front of us, that will probably and I've talked with board leadership last week through, you know, retreats of really getting tight around what's most important, what's
most urgent and be able to make hard decisions in partnership with our employee groups and partnership with staff and partnership with our community. We have really brilliant people at every level of this organization that can come up
with solutions to these things. I'm super hopeful and confident in that, so hear that too. But it is going to be challenging and I know that we can get through it together. But I just think managing our expectations as a collective governance team
is going to be really important in setting the tone of what that looks like in negotiations, of what that looks like in the budget development process. And I look forward to having conversations with you as a collective as well as
individually in the days, weeks and months ahead. So thank you for listening. Thank you very much. I think that was great. All right. Barring any other
conversation, thank you so much for the presentation. We look forward to seeing you more in the spring. And that's it. This meeting is now adjourned.
Adjourned. Wow. Adjourned. Man. At 951 I was so close. I was doing so good. Thank you so much. Do I have to do th