Alright. Good evening and welcome to the Rochester Community Schools Board of Education work session called to order at 06:03. If I could ever have everyone please rise and join with me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. This Board of Education work session is a meeting of the board in public for the purpose of conducting the school district's business and is not a public community meeting.
However, there is a time for public participation during the meeting. General public comment will be heard under agenda item four. If you wish to speak tonight and have not already filled out a yellow card, they're located on a table near the entrance to the media center. Once you've completed the card, please hand it to a shield officer. Please note that cards must be completed prior to speaking and I'll call the names of those who I have a card for during public comment. During our retreat on, oh, I apologize, I'd like to remind everyone of the norms that we have agreed to. These include keeping comments germane to the agenda item,
that we don't surprise each other at the board table, that we have one speaker at a time that is recognized by the chair before speaking, to be honest, to refrain from attacking others motives, to uphold the chain of command, and to truly listen to each other. To those in attendance this evening, I'd like to remind you that this is a meeting for the board to conduct business. We request that there not be any outbursts from the audience. Outbursts or any other behavior that disrupts our meeting will be seen as a breach of the peace, and those individuals will be escorted from the building. On behalf of my colleagues on the board,
we're grateful to be able to serve this community community and appreciate your support. Before we continue with our agenda, I'd like to turn it over to mister Russo for a moment of silence. Thank you, madam president. This past month, we were saddened to learn about the loss of loved ones in our school community. It is with great sorrow that we inform our community about the passing of Agna Goude Agna Goude. I'm sorry. Student at Brooklyn's Elementary School. At just six years old, Agna faced a lifelong illness with quiet strength and a gentle spirit that touched everyone
around her. We also mourn the loss of Linda Luther, Longmeadow Longmeadow Elementary School paraeducator. Miss Linda brought warmth, humor, and incredible ability to connect with one around her. Our most sincere and heartfelt condolences go out to the Gooty and Luther families. At this time, I respectfully ask that you join us in observing a moment of silence. Thank you. For roll call, all board members are present. Moving on to our agenda, is there a motion to approve the agenda as presented? Moved by trustee Gupta in support from trustee Annas.
Is there any discussion? Madam president. Trustee Lacui? I move that we add a discussion item about including I Ready data I Ready trend data in future achievement work session reviews Alright, so I have a motion to amend the agenda to include a discussion on I Ready trend data discussion on I Ready trend data Or I'll just say I Ready data is there support for that? Trustee Lozan? Alright. Is there any discussion on this? Sure. Trustee Lacoue? Alright. I first sent an email to the superintendent to request this idea over a month
ago. I think it was on March 2. We've reviewed this data before and past achievement work sessions. And after writing about it twice, our superintendent finally responded in our most recent superintendent cabinet notes to say he's only willing to do this if it is the will of the full board. Since the board speaks through its votes, I'm afraid that might be the confirmation he needs, and I wanna see if the rest of the board is amenable and in favor of analyzing testing trends in the future. Alright. Does anyone else wish to speak? Alright. So we have a motion to I'm sorry?
There's a motion to add, a item. It would be item 6.2 Yep, 6.2, I Ready data, all of those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Let me see the hands on that. One, two, three, four, five. Opposed, please say no. No. The five to vote, so we will add item 6.2 I ready, data to our agenda. Thank you very much. Alright. So then now we have a motion to approve the agenda as amended.
All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. That's a seven o vote, and the agenda has been approved. We're now at agenda item four, which is public comment. This provides an opportunity for board members to hear from community community members. As I indicated earlier, if you wish to speak and haven't already, please fill out a yellow card. When your name is called, please come up to the microphone and address the board. When addressing the board, you'll have three minutes to speak. We'll let you know when you have thirty seconds remaining.
Please be mindful of this time limit. When addressing the board, please state your name and your relationship to the district. To protect student privacy, we ask that no one identify a specific student without their permission, even if the student's name is not used. Also, we ask that you address your comments to the entire board and not to individual board members, school district employees, or to members of the audience. The board will not be responding to comments or questions during the meeting. However, someone will follow-up if needed. At this time I have two individuals who have requested to speak to the board. First up we have Liz Schreck
And followed by, Dan Bauer. Hello. My name is Liz Schreck and I'm the president of the Rochester Education Association. And And I want to begin by thanking the Board of Education for your unanimous support on February 24 for the resolution calling for full permanent funding of IDEA. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Your support sends a powerful message about our shared commitment to supporting all students. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of IDEA. When it was passed, the federal government promised to fund 40% of the additional cost to support students with
disabilities. Today we see a different reality. Only about 10% of the funding is actually provided and that leaves school districts to cover the shortfall. In your resolution that you passed, you said that the RCS School Board calls on state, the state legislature to provide adequate, equitable, and sustainable funding increases to districts to mitigate the harm caused by decades of underfunded schools. More than 200,000 students in Michigan benefit from IDEA services and year after year, districts are expected to fill the gaps alone. You know this. This is not sustainable and it's not fair to our students,
families, or educators. So to raise awareness and advocate for change, the members of the Rochester Education Association and community members would like to extend an invitation to both the community and to our school board members. Educators from across Oakland County are coming together for a public demonstration to highlight the critical need for fair and full funding for our public schools. So you can find details about this event on the Rochester Education Association Facebook page, and we would love for anyone who's a friend of public ed to join us. Thank you. Thank you. And next up,
we have, Dan Bauer. Evening. Precinct delegate, Oakland Township. Just a couple of updates. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled to back president Trump's cuts to teacher training grants. I really don't know what that translates to as we speak tonight, but that's millions of dollars, I'm sure. And another point is the University of Michigan eliminated their DEI program. Why? They were gonna lose millions tens of millions of dollars in funding. Yet our RCS board and, obviously, the superintendent,
they're full full throttle forward keeping that d DEI program going. I left a message for miss Prasher today for she's the director of the, diversity program, and I'm waiting for a callback. So most of my constituents are not interested in DEI. The majority of Americans, as you know, are not interested in DEI, but Rochester schools continues to be interested in keeping that program going because they're listening to their lawyers, is what you mentioned last month in the meeting last month. That's fine. Continue to do so,
but that's gonna that will be eliminated this year, I believe. You'll be you'll be agreeable to that because funding will be will be, in peril, and the title nine IDEA funding will be in peril because of that as well. Just something to keep in mind. Last year, there was a murder in Maryland of a student, Kayla Hamilton. She was murdered by a fellow student, undocumented immigrant, MS thirteen gang member, and he was sentenced he played guilty, and he was just sentenced to seventy years in prison. So he'll be about 87 when he gets out.
She's never coming back. I'd like to know, obviously, you're not gonna answer this tonight, but I would like to know, and my constituents would like to know, how many undocumented immigrants do we have in the Rochester School System right now? That's an unknown number as far as I know. So I'd like to hear that number, and I'll pursue that with, with the school in my own way via phone call, email, whatever I need to do. But I'm gonna get that number. So thank you very much. Thank you. At this time, we're moving on to, agenda item five, which is communications,
and this is where we reference various communications that have been received. Item 5.1 is communications received by the board. Secretary Blake, would you give us an update? We received 11 communications, which are in the packet, and then we also received three additional communications. One from Amy Ferreira regarding caring steps in the 501 University Building, 1 from a Mr. Hames who was interested in making donations of Central Junior High School memorabilia, and one from a student I don't think I should say her name was a current student at Rochester High, discussing access to websites from the school.
Thank you. Item 5.2 is where members of the board share communications that were sent directly to them and were not sent to the full board. Did any board member receive communications from the public? Trustee Annas? Thank you, madam president. I received an email from Stephanie Miller thanking me for my advocacy first Caring Steps. Both of her now elementary school students attended Caring Steps, and she knows they were set up for success in kindergarten with their attendance through caring steps. Trustee Lecui? Deborah Sharafinski on March 18 contacted me to thank me for my work on the
board and for advocating for students in our community. I received an email from Tina Watson regarding caring steps and from a student regarding firewalls that prevented her from accessing information she needed for school projects. So next, up, we have our work session and we now have two items in this area. So item 6.1 is a discussion about priorities as we look towards setting our twenty five-twenty six budget. And at this time, I'll turn it over to Mr. Russo. Thank you, Madam President. So today, we wanted to present, kind of where we are in the budgeting process and what our priorities are for
the board and hopefully get some feedback in terms of what we're what we are prioritizing and then get feedback from you if, that is aligned with your thinking. So first, provide clarity and understanding where we are in the budgeting process. Right now, the governor has proposed a budget, and mister McDaniel will get into the details of that. It's important to know that, this is step one in multiple step processes. As some of us have heard at at, MASB or through MASB and through our legislative actions and and our or I'm sorry,
our legislative liaisons, we might not get a budget from them until October. And so right now, this is April, and we have a governor's proposal, which means the senate, the house, the the committee, they have yet to give anything back from that. And so, I wanna just put that kind of level set our conversation with we have to have a starting point. And our starting point right now is the information that the governor's budget, which mister McDaniel will talk about, has presented. But it doesn't mean that this is where we're going to live for the next six months or land for the next six months. District priorities.
So we will be talking about what our priorities are, in terms of what we want to prioritize given today, a snapshot in time are what the budget might look like. And then obviously, the input and discussion from you all as board, as board members. Next slide, please. So, this slide is budget planning. Planning priorities is a little bit vague in kind of its presentation. So I want to go into it to some things a little bit here. As we look at what we want to do, not only for the years next year coming and for years forward,
When we talk about teaching and learning as it is juxtaposed and trying to fit into, the the budget, which again, we don't have exactly what it'll look like. We want to talk about that we're going to prioritize our teaching and learning. That first and foremost, we want to prioritize people and students, protecting the classroom as much as possible. So what that means is if we have, staff and we have staff that might not be directly teaching students. We wanna evaluate whether that is a good use of our money, etcetera. We would do that annually.
We want to manage the use of our fund balance in general. So, originally, and and mister McDaniel can go into more detail. Originally, we had we had let you know, but prior to me coming here, that we were going to be dipping into fund balance based on contracts, not only for our teachers, but what our future contracts might look like for third party, etcetera. What our spending compared to what our anticipated, revenue would be through the state. That obviously changes just like the Michigan weather. It changes often. And you had a budget update in January that that talked about, what we thought we would be going into our fund balance.
For this year and then for moving forward, we are trying to minimize that the use of the that much money. We're trying to reduce that as much as possible, without attacking or addressing, you know, major programming changes, etcetera. Which brings me to the efficiency, the next bullet point, which is efficiency, budget, and staffing. So when we start to budget for next year, we want to be very clear that we want to take first the stuff and the expenses that we that we have before we would impact teachers, paras, and, you know, with our cap our our human capital.
We would want to try to reduce our spending that way before we impact classrooms and impact people. Strategic plan costs. So as we build a budget and as we build our program for next year and we look at what year two of our strategic plan will be, we wanna put those things together. And you'll get that, hopefully, a recommendation for that in the coming months here, so that you can take a look at what we provide as what we think are next steps for a strategic plan. We want to have our our costs planned out to the best possible. I wanna talk about a couple instances where that could change too though.
One example is literacy funding. Let me step back for a minute. So so right now the governor's budget talks about a per pupil increase. As we learned last year, that that did not happen. So the potential of that happening is there. Right? Last year, the budget that that we received was very bucketed in nature. So it was very, here's the money that you have to spend on safety and security. So they were restricted funds, not unrestricted funds that we could just use to what we deemed necessary upon board
approval. So when we look at strategic plan and we say that we are going to, for example, purchase things, purchase resources, change programs, whatever that might look like for years forward, we also know that sometimes we budget for that could come out of the general fund. And then if the if the budget, actually the state budget comes out where it's allocated, that would free up general fund dollars or vice versa. We could plan for some grants that we think are coming and then at the last minute the grants don't come, so we'd have to bounce against our general fund. It's just things to keep in play as we go through this because,
again, we're not we're not anywhere near what what we know will be the budget coming forward from the state. And then lastly, safety and security costs. Most recently, safety and security has been a restricted, a restricted portion of what we get allocated. And it looks like that's going to be the same thing coming next year. There's positive news currently. Again, this could change like the wet Michigan weather. There's positive news news currently that they're trying to, come back with increased safety and security costs, which would help us greatly for the things that we wanna do. We've made incredible steps this year of being more coherent and,
cohesive in in our, addressing safety and security at the building level. And so, excuse me, as we move into next year's budget, this is this this could be anywhere from a million to $5,000,000 right, allocated. So we want to make sure that with the money we have set aside for safety and security that we're currently using grant funds for, that we can potentially do that moving forward. Because once we take it out of grant funds and put it in general fund, we can't take it back to use for grant use it against grant fund funds. So sorry. I'm losing my voice here terribly. Next next slide,
please. So before I turn it over to to mister Radan to go to go through this, I just wanna remind everybody that as we talk about this, we are talking about these in general terms. Right? Right now, we're looking at what programs, services, classes, etcetera, we want to offer, given the fact that we are no farther ahead than we were two weeks ago on the governor's budget. Thank you, Mr. McDowell. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Russo. So for some of you, this is not a new timeline. This is historically the process. But we do have some new board members, so I'll go into a little bit of detail with this.
Can everybody hear me all right? Okay. So it kind of starts in January with the Consensus Revenue Estimating Conference. This, is an update to the, the amount of funds that the state believes they'll have available to budget. That's followed typically in January. I think this year was a little bit later. The governor's budget is the first budget out there, you know, for the state as a whole, as well as the school aid fund. We're gonna go into a little bit of depth on the governor's budget, on a future slide. But usually the House and the Senate come after the governor's budget. And so the House, I believe, passed their budget.
I don't have any details on that. That's, a newer topic, but they didn't fully expend the money. I think the terms that they use is they tried to approve a non controversial budget. So there's a per pupil foundation allowance increase in there. I think there's safety and security money, but they didn't allocate I think about $5,000,000,000 of about 20 to 22,000,000,000 in a school aid fund. So, there's still a large portion of that budget that they haven't allocated yet. And then, the Senate will release their budget. Also kind of in this time frame is the consensus revenue estimating conference comes back
together, to kind of do a final update on how much money they think is available. If this was, you know, a time where there was a lot of, doubt as to how much money may be available, they've also, held the conference again in August. I don't know that we'll see that happen, this year, but there is an August date that's kind of, out there in case we need to make adjustments. And I think that happened in, 2020 when, the state budget, after our fiscal year ended, so we're a July 1 to June 30 fiscal year, the state is October 1 to September 30. We get our first State Aid payment in October and our last one in August.
After our fiscal year ended, the state said we don't think we have enough money, we need to cut your funding, and they did. Unfortunately though, the federal government kind of backfilled that money, so we actually got more money. There's some accounting, challenges with that, but you know, in the grand scheme of things, that was what the attempt was. So once all three of those budgets, are released, then that's really when the work begins. All three branches start to, negotiate what that budget will look like. There's another conference committee that comes together, and then typically once the conference agrees, that's when we'll get a budget that each,
of the House and the Senate will approve, and then that will go to the governor. The governor still has the ability to line item veto certain items, so it's not a done deal once it comes from the conference committee, and the governor has done this in the past, but it's pretty close. And then that last bullet there, just a reminder, we have to adopt a budget by June 30 regardless if the state has provided a budget for us or not. So, as mister Russo mentioned, you know, they can take up until September, October. You know, we've been in instances where we had feared a state shutdown because they wouldn't approve a budget,
by that October 1 state. So if that were to happen, we may be into our third or fourth month of operations without knowing what our funding is going to be. So with all that being said, I want to jump a little bit into the governor's, proposal. There's some important pieces here, but at the same time I think we've spoken about how, you know, there's this is the first of three budgets that are going to come out and then a negotiation. So the governor increases the per pupil foundation allowance for school districts to $10,000 per student. And then the next,
I think four bullet points there, five bullet points, all increases to restricted funding. So this doesn't necessarily help the bottom line of the overall budget unless there's things that we can shift into, say, 31 a at risk funding, early literacy funding. If we're purchasing a brand new literacy curriculum, we could use that money. But if we're just maintaining the existing one, then there's a supplement versus the plant rule. Right? So we need to supplement our education with these restricted grants typically, and we can't use those dollars to replace things that we already had in place.
So increases to 31 a at risk, increases to early literacy, increases to CTE funding, a very small, I think about a million and a half, reduction in 31 AA student mental health and safety money. This is a little bit of a shift from prior years where the governor proposes continuing funding at this level. Last year at this time, they were signaling that this funding was going to end or they were going to slowly phase it out. The governor proposed keeping it, and I believe the House, proposed, increasing it back to, I think, its highest level,
which was maybe two or three years ago, up to, I think, around 350,000,000. There's some new, section 16 b best practice funding. That's new, doesn't impact our different our district very much. I think it's about 15 to $20,000, but new money there. The governor, last year, as mister Russo mentioned, we didn't get a per pupil foundation allowance increase. What we got was, money to cover a planned reduction in retirement costs. And so if we can move to the next slide, I'll go into a little bit more of what that looks like, for us. The big concern last year was that if we didn't get the per pupil foundational
allowance increase, which was equivalent to about $5,800,000 is that, you would typically see that in a foundational allowance increase. So you get that full 5,800,000.0. We're losing that 5,800,000.0 in this governor's budget. She's providing a $392 per people increase to get to 10,000, so that's almost a wash, about 5,800,000.0 in new funding there. And what we would have liked to see is a retirement savings of about that 5,800,000.0. That didn't happen. So our retirement savings is 2,800,000.0.
There's some other pieces in here that, as far as I could see in the governor's budget, was not allocated. So hold harmless money, the MPSERS normal costs offset money. We did an estimate on what our special education costs would be because there's a reimbursement, that the state provides each year. And then there's the 3% reimbursement. The state is calling this the MPSERS three percent reimbursement. This is 3% that's withheld from certain, retirement plans or employees in certain, retirement plans to cover the cost of health care in retirement. The governor did do a nice thing for us.
She funded this at, half the amount that she did for the current year. So the current year is estimated about $1.81900000.0. We think we're gonna need more money, and we've, communicated that to Oakland Schools who's trying to advocate on our behalf for that. Because we have a new teacher contract as you guys know, That means we're withholding more money because they're making more money than they did in previous years, and the state based it on a previous year amount. So the other piece is there was some of that retirement savings in some of the plans. For the most part,
we are, not, I guess, distributed equally amongst those plans. We still have, I think, a more tenured staff, which means they're on the older plans. Right? They have the better retirement plans. So that's part of the reason that instead of, having the 5.8 that the governor gave us last year and losing that and then seeing 5,800,000.0 in retirement savings, we're only seeing 2.8. So it's really kind of a cut from last year's, increase because we're not gonna benefit from the full amount of the governor's five point
eight million. We're gonna see an increase of about 3.2. And so this is just unrestricted money. There are, like I mentioned in the last slide 31 a, early literacy, those pieces that will help the budget. But, because they're restricted, we go back to that supplement versus the plant. So when we're looking at just how that helps the bottom line, we're looking at 3,200,000.0. So I spent a little bit of time on that to tell you this is what it looks like right now, and this is kind of what we're working with, but you know this also isn't in stone.
You'll see that in in parentheses is this the snapshot in time. Right? This budget is the first one of really four versions that we'll probably see: the House, the Senate, a conference committee, and then eventually whatever the governor approves, and then line item vetoes. Excuse me. Mr. McDaniel? Who spoke? Okay. Just, can you just let us know when you calculate the found out foundation allowance increase, what enrollment numbers did you use? All of these are flat. So, most of these numbers I took from the,
I think the House or the Senate fiscal agency that put together an estimated district by district impact. So it I mean, if we had 10,000 students, you estimated on 10,000 students. You didn't look at what the forecast is for next year. Correct. Okay. Trustee Anas. Yeah. I'm curious. Obviously, you heard that the House brought forward a partial budget. And I'm sure you've looked at those numbers. How how would they pan out with what, the governor's got going on here? Yeah. I mean, I think the foundation allowance increase was a little bit higher. Yeah. It's,
I think $417 per student, maintaining the 350,000,000 for mental health and safe student safety, and then a $2,700,000,000 investment in special ed. But again, you you mentioned the $5,000,000,000 cut as it heads to the senate. So do you anticipate that, by the consensus revenue conference in May that the senate will have something that fleshes out what the house has. Right? And then it'll come back to the house in theory? Yeah. I mean, I I think typically,
you know, we've been lucky to sometimes get that Senate budget in late April, early May. I'm not sure what's gonna happen, this year. It's been interesting. Two years ago, the governor, who's a Democrat, had a Democratic House and Senate, and that budget process went fairly smooth. And then last year she had the same House and Senate that were Democratic, and it was very different Yeah. Than, we saw. So now we're, you know, we're back to divided government. So who knows? I mean, I I think there's probably a good chance that, you know, we could have a budget that the school district and the board needs to approve
without knowing what the state is going to provide us. So I'm curious if you could do the same exercise with, that budget that the house has done that they sent over to the senate. And I mean, I I understand probably why you didn't because there's nothing in it that accounts for any MPSERS, which is key in this equation for sure. Mhmm. Right? Or is that premature? Yeah. I mean, I think, for purposes of this discussion, these are the numbers that our administration is trying to work with as kind of the guide for how we, develop this next budget.
I think once the House and the Senate both have those budgets out, that the administration will look at those and try to do a comparison to see which ones, you know, how much different that would be, right? It's gonna be hard though, with the House still having 5,000,000,000 or so to allocate, because, you know, we're trying to keep this a little bit higher level and not get into some of the grants, which could have some very negative inputs. Right? Let's say, that safety and security funding was completely eliminated. That would mean some different decisions that that the administration would have to make.
At the federal level, right? There's talk that the title funds are gonna go away. That would mean different discussions. School lunches. Any of these items that, are maybe more at risk than they have been in previous years, that, would mean a big shift in in how we're operating. So, I think we're trying to use the governor's budget because that's, the one that's out there, as a guide to next steps. And then, you know, we'll continue to monitor. I think we're scheduled to present, you know, what we believe will be a finalized budget, to SBOC at the May, and then to the board in June.
So, you know, like we do, I think every year we'll kind of do a comparison of all three of those different budgets, depending on the timeline, right? If we have that that consensus or that conference committee recommendation, we'll probably just present those. But you know, we've been in situations in years past where all three are still kind of out there and we're trying to tell you guys what's going on and we're, you know, trying to pick the middle of the road or trying to be conservative, not including this funding or that funding. One, one more follow-up question. So that 3.13, 3 point 2 million, which is the total impact, you're seeing that coming out of the general or not the general fund,
but coming out of our fund balance. Correct? No. This is the new money that we would see. Oh, okay. So rather than seeing the 5.8 from the governor, we're we're seeing about 3.2. So that number, do you see how that would impact our fund balance at all? Yeah. I mean, I think it it it depends on a number of things. Right? We have, on the on the upcoming slides, some contractual increases. We have and actually, it might be That was a great lead in for you. Yes. It might be an appropriate time to to look at the next slide. So, you know, we've already kind of had snippets. I had a question about that previous slide there.
When president Butel asked you about the foundation allowance and what enrollment numbers you were using, you mentioned, I think, that you're using this year's enrollment rather than any kind of projected enrollment for next year? Yes. But this is about next year, so I was just curious why you're using this year's enrollment count rather than what you might project for next year. Yeah, because I'm using a document that the House, fiscal agency or Senate fiscal agency created. So I didn't go back and change any of these numbers. All of them will change, right? Our number of at risk students will be different. So I'm using documents that they put together for us and for districts and that's
why the numbers stay the same. Okay. But this is estimating that our fund balance might go up by $3,200,000 is what you're saying? Saying? No. Oh. This is estimating that we might see 3.2 additional revenue next year. Okay. If if everything stays the same, I think that's the key. Because if we end up losing one hundred and fifty fifty students, then that reduces it by 1,500,000.0 along with adjusting some of these others. So it seems like it could be less than what comes up on the next slide. I think in the future, I'd like to kind of adjust some of those numbers to what we think our
numbers would be rather than just taking, you know, what they're what they're saying when we know something's changed. Sure. I I can do that. But at the same time, all of these numbers are wrong. You know, the, the retirement estimate and savings is based on our current staff. So, I doubt there's ever been a year where we have not turned over a single person. So, you know, I I don't want the board to get the picture that we we can do some extra work, but the number that I have up there is wrong. There's no doubt about it. It's wrong. We hope it's in the ballpark, but that 3.171584,
don't take that to the bank because it's not going to be accurate. Trustee Gupta? Yeah. Just a couple of questions. Yeah. Was there anything in the governor's budget about universal pre k or GSRP funding? I think she increased that slightly. You know, I think there's already versions of universal pre k that are here. And, you know, I think Mrs. Hampton could speak to this as well, but I think our, tuition based three year old pre k students, regardless of income are eligible to be GSRP students next year. So I think there's aspects of it out there.
There's still the income guidelines, but I think Oakland schools, you know, our ISD has kind of said that no, there's yes, there are income limits, but at the same time that shouldn't preclude anyone from, becoming a GSRP student. And then, on the special ed, reimbursement, the $267,000, reduction in funding, what's informing that? Yeah, so we used, the board approved budget numbers on special education costs and saw a slight reduction. Now we'll continue to revise that number.
You know, we have a final budget that'll be approved by the board in June, and we'll use those updated numbers. But that was just taking what we budgeted for special ed transportation costs, special ed staffing supplies, things like that, and extrapolating that out. So, the special education reimbursement, is always a year behind. And so I think we're, down 100 it's about half of that, dollars 133,000 because, they say we overpaid you if you underspend last year and then they reduce it again for the current year. That's your new estimate. So, when we spend less,
you kind of see double the because they say we overpaid you for last year, and now your new allocation is this. If you spend more, then you kind of get double the benefit because they say, oh, we didn't pay you enough last year, and now we're resetting to this amount. So. Sorry, one final, follow-up about the total impact. You're saying that's 3.2% and more revenue. I'm just wondering compared to the initial budget that we were planning for next year or compared to the last update we got like 3.2 compared to what? Yeah. Compared to, what the state budget has for us now.
Now there's Okay. Other smaller pieces in here that, again, these numbers are wrong. The well, what's not included in here is is the state called out this 16, best practice money, which is, restricted funds. For us, that's not a ton of money. I think I said $15,000 to $20,000 I think it's maybe $16,000 something was their estimate. Again, that'll change based on student count, but it is more for other districts. So the House and the Senate fiscal agency don't go through every single line of the governor's budget. House's budget or the Senate budget. They stick, they stick to the larger, more material items,
and that's, where we take our, our documents from, our numbers from. Trustee Allspa. I have a question on the MIPSTRS three percent reimbursement. Is that the 3% reimbursement for the basic health for the health care of people in the basic plan? Yes. And so that doesn't actually and you said we have a more older staff so that more of our people are on the older basic plan. Right? I think I used the word tenure, but yes. Sorry. Tenured. Seasoned. I stand corrected. Much better way to, praise that. I might have used that. I I meant tenure. Use a tenured.
I I'm the one you use your words were better than mine. But that doesn't apply then to every staff, correct? Correct. Okay. But but because we have a more tenured staff, we do have, like, a large exposure in the area. Yeah. I think about half of our staff is eligible for this. Okay. Thank you. Or maybe more, because it's, I think it's almost a thousand people. Yeah. So some other budgetary considerations, right? We have two different, FTE projections, one PowerSchool predictive enrollment analytics. This has been known as a number of things. So if you've been on the board for a while, you might know this is Who Knew It?
You might know this is Decision Insight. I forget its very first name. It's that same software, 140 FTE loss. Both of these projections are really just looking at Gen Ed, Gen Ed K-twelve, FTE. Right? It's very challenging to get into special ed or some of our our more specific programs. Plan Moran RealPoint, as part of the master property planning process, has also, completed a projection down 177 Feet. Again, just Gen Ed K-twelve. Coming up, we're starting negotiations with our RPEA,
that's our Paraeducators, and MGTTA grounds, tech and tech assistants, technicians and tech assistants, those contracts expire, at the end of this, fiscal year. So those negotiations are ongoing, and I think that was covered in the previous meeting to some degree. And we have, our recent contracts. Again, these are estimates, from that same time period. The RAA 4,600,000.0 increase and that that's our teachers, our SPA, which is our secretaries, seven hundred thousand. Again, those are estimates from August and June of twenty four. So,
we'll go through and continue to update those numbers. Some other considerations to add to that. We talked a little bit about the retirement rate increasing and we're us not getting that full benefit. Health insurance costs are also, likely to increase. In 2025, they were a 12.4% increase. The health insurance were self funded, so we pay actual claims, and it's not based on the fiscal year. So that 12.4% is for calendar year 2025. You know, it's likely that we could see another double digit increase, but we're waiting.
We work with Gallagher, who will give us that projection. We have a very early estimate, which they think is, you know, probably too early to count on. But in total, we spend about 21,000,000 in health care costs. That's the district's portion. So a 10% increase is about $2,100,000 in additional costs. I think in learning from Gallagher, I think it's over ten years they expect, our rates to be about flat, meaning we'll have good years because we're self funded and we'll have bad years. If you sat at this board table for a long time and going back to
2020, I think I shared with you that people weren't using their health insurance, right? There were some places that said you couldn't do certain things. So, those were very good years for the district because they couldn't use their health benefits. We've been on the other side of that because once you could do that and that opened up all these people that had put off surgeries and whatever else they needed, were getting that care and our costs went up. So we continue to see costs, go up for a number of reasons. And we continue to work with Gallagher to try to minimize any of those costs and find, you know,
different solutions, possibilities, programs, you know, trying to educate our staff with the different offerings to save them money as well as save us some money when we can. We also have contracts that we signed. For example, the board knows that we, approved an ABM contract, that last fall. We have the Durham contract. We also have police liaisons. There's a number of contracts out there, but those are some of the bigger ones. Police liaisons, saw a 19% increase. So that's about 62,000 at a 25% cost share with the current model.
I think we received some information that, they would like to increase that cost share from 25% to 50%, which is about 65,000 more, for the school district. Excuse me, Matt, is that negotiable still? Yeah, we haven't signed anything yet. You know, Mr. Russo may have some more up to date information, but I know there's a lot of, at least one meeting that was supposed to happen that I haven't heard the results of, which wasn't with us in the county. It was with, the county and I think a couple other groups.
And so we're kind of waiting on those results and we'll see what happens there. But yeah, we're kind of holding off on agreeing to anything and we'll see what happens. Can you, put any type of number to the Durham and ABM contracts as far as what type of increase we'd see in the twenty five-twenty six year? Yeah, I think those are about 3% for each of those contracts. So if I recall correctly, Durham's about $8,000,000 in total, so 3% of that. The hard part about Durham though, it's also based on our
Enrollment. Right? So if we have a higher special education population, which I think missus Goethe has said, you know, is increasing, we will likely need more special education routes. So depending on the number of routes, we may see, a larger increase than just the 3%. So about, you know, quarter of a million dollars, there. And then custodial, I think, is about 4,500,000.0 in total. 3% of that? Yep. Matt, I noticed that the, enrollment predictions, there's kind of a large spread
with minus one forty to minus one seventy seven. What what does our people count make of that? What do we predict our enrollment to be for next year? Yeah. I mean, I think we typically, refer to the experts. Right? They do a lot more, in-depth, I guess, review and analysis. For example, PowerSchool predictive enrollment analytics looks at all the housing developments that are currently their expected completion dates and, has a capture rate. I know that, I talked to Paul Wilson, Plant Moran, RealPoint this, morning who went into, you know, some detail about they look at our capture rate and and the birth rate and
things like that. One piece and I think we've again been saying this since, you know, you know, shortly after, the pandemic is that 2020 was a very, the lowest birth rate year for Oakland County and probably, you know, maybe The United States in general, the world in general. So, that was kind of the rock bottom number of births in Oakland County. So, you know, we are expecting a decrease. Mister McDaniel, I've I have to interrupt because I sent an article out to the board and to the superintendent. The Census Bureau came out and they've put out information that shows that that's actually
not true for Oakland County and likely not true for our area. The birth rate has not been increasing here and, or has not been decreasing here. And if you look at SEMCOG and you look at at Michigan school data and you look at all of the information that I've shared with you, it does not show that our school age population is decreasing. So I'm not really sure why we keep talking about the birth rate decreasing when first of all, birth rate isn't the issue. If we've got more school age kids, then we've got more school age kids. But second of all, Census Bureau says the birth rate is not decreasing in Oakland County.
We were among one of the highest in terms of growth. So it was a corrective article that was put out. So I just wanna address that. I think the the presentation on April 21 coming from Plante Moran Real Point and through our process, there's been some information released by some that actually I I believe, does not share that same view where there's Rochester Hills and Rochester are actually the color code every city in the county, where their birth rates are and what the move in rates are and etcetera. And I think he's gonna go through that as part of it. That's that's simply not true.
I sent you an article. It's from the Census Bureau itself. So that's Okay. Well, it doesn't it doesn't really matter. I mean, we have two But my question here, we have identified President Vutaut, my question was about Just to look away. You know, quite honestly, you did not even ask. One of our things is to be recognized before you speak. Now I'm happy to have you speak. I I have recognized several people here tonight. We don't need to be argumentative on this. I mean, we have two organizations that this is their one of their specialties who have numbers.
And you're right. There is a difference in those, and I think it will be the board's responsibility to identify what number we want to go with as to a budgeting number. But, president Butel, don't you think we should ask, you know, we should ask the people who are familiar with enrollment and analyzing that if we're using two different experts, okay, what do we make of this? Are we using one number or the other? Are we taking some kind of a middle middle of the line approach? I'm just curious what the process to decide what kind of number are we gonna go with when we're deciding what we're predicting for a moment. Well, I guess I would say that the administration will come back with what they think
would be the best number, and the board can choose whether they wanna go that number or if they want to select something else. And that's what I was asking the administration was what what do you make of those numbers? But my other question that I was going to ask was how does this affect our bottom line? Because back in December financials report, we learned that our revenue was down by, like, $10,000,000 but we figured out a way to cut about $6,000,000 from our budget in spending. So the fund balance was supposed to go down by $4,000,000 And so I'm wondering with the information that you're presenting here,
does that change anything? Does that affect our fund balance and how? Yes. It'll affect our fund balance. How? Can you give a magnitude? I think that depends on the foundational ounce. It also depends on, you know, what we do operational. I think it is for I think she's asking about for this current year. Are you asking about this current year? Are you asking about the following year? Well, is this presentation about this current year or is it about the following year or what? It is about the following year, but I thought your question was about how it was going to affect the impact
of the '20 ending 06/30/2025. That was not your question? No. I I would like I would like to understand that. I guess I'm sort of a little bit puzzled on what our goal is with this meeting in general because so far, we're seeing a lot of vague increases here and there. We don't really have spreadsheets to compare, you know, the numbers from this year to this year to this year. So I'm not really sure that the board has enough information to really make decisions or form opinions about what we're seeing here. So I mean, I'm not sure. Discussion on priorities and getting some information here,
but going from there, I think there'll be some questions once we get through the presentation. Let's start with how the fund balance affects this year. So, I I'm, I don't believe that the 2526 state budget will have an effect on the 2425 fund balance. Okay. Do we have any ideas for next year what this is going to do you keep saying it's going to affect something and I'm just trying to understand that. Yeah. We're we're we're talking 2526 budget and the work that we're doing to, guide next year's budget decisions.
So we start off with the I can, I can go back to a couple slides, would that be helpful? So if we can go back to the state school budget timeline. So, we're kind of on that second bullet there that we have the governor's budget. We just got the Michigan house. So, you know, we're still waiting on a lot of information, to finalize our budget that we'll present to you guys in June. But I think it's it's our intent to share. This is what we're baking our decision making on right now. That's the information that we have, which is the governor's budget.
So I've tried to give you some of the higher level, pieces of the governor's budget because we know at the same time that this budget, even when the governor's had a democratic house and senate, doesn't come through just like she has presented it. So, we're just trying to give you, I think a large scale high level overview of the big things happening with the state budget and how that, affects our school district and some of the bigger material items that'll affect our 2526 budget, while also knowing that there's a lot that's going to change between now
and June when we adopt the budget. Is that helpful? Yes. Thank you. Trustee Annis and then Trustee Blake. Yes. So on the, slide that had budgetary considerations and you talked about the FTE projections. And you had mentioned that you had had a conversation this morning, Moran about the capture rate. For those that don't, know what that is, could you define what you mean by when you say capture rate? Yeah. I'm not, 100% the expert, but I think we were specifically talking about our kindergarten classes and, what percentage of live births for, you know, five years ago, essentially, that we capture and Mr. Willis had shared that that was around,
I think, 7.2 to 7.5% historically. So that was, you know, one of the the large basis for how they calculated that number. And then kind of looking at our our capture rate once we have them in the system. Right? I think kindergarten's, and, and maybe I should be speaking for Mr. Wills, but I think kindergarten's the tougher one to capture because once, we get you in Rochester Community Schools, we do keep a large portion of that and we do see different areas or grade levels where we see growth. Like we have a larger, ninth grade, cohort compared to the eighth grade cohort because,
you know, a lot of our private schools are K-eight and you come and get a high school education from Rochester Mee School. So there's different areas where we'd expect to see some increases to the cohort. So I think Mr. Willis can speak to that a lot better than I can, but yes, their capture rate is, in my understanding is yes, the percentage that we're capturing up live birth rate. Thank you, Daniel. That was I'm sorry. That was a % correct. I just wanna add that the 7.2 slash 7.3 of the capture rate has been consistent for the last ten years in Rochester, as as, mister McDaniel explained it.
No. It's it's every year they have a cap like, what is your birth what is the live births? And then how many of those live births attend your school district? And it's been 7.2 to 7.3% historically. I I guess I apologize. I'm not understanding that that 7.2% of all the in our in our district attend here? That doesn't 7.2 of live births in Oakland County. Oh, and we'll also capture how many live births in the county. Okay. All right. Trustee Blake. A few comments and maybe some of these things are pretty obvious things,
but I just want to make sure that I'm capturing the gist of this. So the first page and then first of all, I understand that this is kind of a made up budget because we don't really know what it's going to be. It's the best we can we could do. You're estimating that we would be 3.171 additional revenue from what we had last year. But if you take the numbers on the next page, and if we take the most pessimistic number to plant Moran, that's one that's 1,000,770 out of that. So if that is what we use, we're down to like 1.4
additional. And then if you go on to the budgetary considerations, you know, you've got 5.3 on recent contracts. We don't know what we have on the new contracts. The health insurance, I did the math, is 2.6, not 2.1. You've got, you know, 62,000 here and 240,000. And I guess my takeaway from all this is we don't know, you know, we don't until we know the budget, we really don't know how this impacts us in any way, but it looks to me like we're expecting to get just very little additional money this year, but have quite a bit additional expenses.
Am I following this correctly? Yes. Okay. So then we are we're gonna need to make some decisions. Thank you. Trustee Alspa. I have two questions that I'm willing to ask them separately if other people need turn, terms in between there. My first question would be, you know, I appreciate that you're going through the budget and the governors and what they may be. I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, that our revenues that is about 10% come from the federal government. And I see no information about federal funds, and I know that is also a big what if.
But I was wondering how much revenue do we get from federal funds and what type of contingency plans do we have if that money does or does not, you know, covering that money? Yeah. I think that's, a big mix. You know, some of it may have to come out of the general fund. Right? So, IDEA, I think is our largest single source of federal revenue. I think that's about 3.2 or $3,300,000 if that money goes away, I don't know that we can just stop those special education services. So that likely has to come out of the general fund.
That's probably the same case for, food service. I think we get, 1,800,000.0 from the federal government for the so, we have to look at that. Title II, professional development, which is, you know, conferences that people attend. Maybe you could go without some of those. Maybe there's some that we have to go to and the general fund would have to pick up that portion. You know, there's services out there, Title one, you know, Title three English language learners, things like that, that I think you may have to reimagine how some of those things happen. So would they receive the same exact services now?
Maybe not. Would we or do we feel the need to still support those kids? I think so. But we'd have to figure out how best to do that. You know, we have still a pretty strong fund balance, but I think we'll have to get, you know, to the model that works for us financially. I don't think this board wants us to continue to spend down fund balance. I mean, if all those grants went away and we're, you know, say $10,000,000 have lost federal funds, if the board's gonna be okay that we say, alright, we don't have any plans to change what we're doing. We want to keep moving forward with that.
You know, maybe that could work for a year, but eventually we're gonna run out of money. So, I think we'll do our best, keep an eye on what's happening at that level. Some things will have some ability to reimagine, others that I think we're gonna have to, you know, continue as is depending on on what programs are changed. If there's state restricted funds that fall into some of the same categories as the federal funding, does the supplement not does the supplement not supplant rule still fill? Still upon we use a supplant to some of those restricted funds?
Yes. I think, let's use title one, for example, all those positions are supplemental and they're not fully funded by the federal government and there's a split, usually 31 a and title one. And so there may be an opportunity depending on 31 a funding to fully fund those positions out of 31 a. That would still be And you see in some cases you'd be able to shift that money from federal funding to state restricted funds in some cases? In some cases, we may be able to. Yep. Okay. Thank you. My other question was going back to the second slide,
maybe third, where we were talking about district budget priorities. And I understand, you know, we're flying really high here. If we could just, if you could just and this might be a question for mister Russo instead. Talk a little bit about what the priorities are on teaching and learning. I heard you say that, you know, the priority is people over stuff, which I agree with. But, you know, do you have, you know, budget priorities that are curriculum implementations or just talk if you could give us a little more detail in that area. It's a great question. So we are looking, when we talk about teaching and learning and we wanna prioritize this stuff first,
we are obviously committed to improving literacy at the elementary level. So that's something we'd be budgeting for, whether that comes out of the general fund or hopefully gets, some restricted funding in in one version of the budget or another. And then we have looked at the secondary level, for example, not trying to purchase, let's say, textbooks for every single core curricular at the same time. So looking at a rotation model, we just looked at that, in the last couple weeks at the secondary. And if mister Romano, who could not be here tonight could speak more about that. But, for example,
we're looking at, and this is anecdotal, but we're looking at purchasing new textbooks for some social studies curriculum at the secondary level. Means that we would not be purchasing, in large amounts something for science or any other sciences for next year, but maybe pushing that to the following year. So doing a rotation model, so we're not hitting the, almost like we would do for roofing or for infrastructure, right? When we say, we're not gonna replace all the roofs at one time because the budget can't handle it. That has been the past practice though, hasn't it here? I mean, it seems like we've kept it to rotational basis.
I think I can speak to the full history. I think we have kept it to a rotational basis. But when we had extra funding, for certain things, I think there was a little more leeway there. So we want to just make sure that we're being very fiscally responsible now that some of these federal funds are falling off and etcetera. As you know, I think since we are so high, it is tough to identify whether we agree with all of the priorities or not. And I would guess that most of my colleagues up here would agree that teaching and learning is the priority, and we would like to impact our classrooms the least amount as possible and,
that we would want to, you know, keep our class sizes as small as possible, keep our, the resources that our students directly interact with, that's where we would want to spend our funds the most. I guess my question to you though is, I don't want to end up into in a situation where the next time the board sees anything or has any discussion is in June when we're going to vote on this, vote on a budget. So I guess I'd just like you to think about, how we're going to be receiving more information and having any other discussions between now
and then. I think that's a very valid point. I think as we go through the budget budgeting process and again, I don't know if this has been done in years past, but using our mechanism of communication through the superintendent cabinet notes to let you know what things are and where they're going, Right? When we look at the senate budget, when we look when it comes to our last stages and what what what we think is going to happen, just keeping in mind that last year, we thought what was gonna happen, and at the very last minute, it completely flipped. Right? But to keep you informed of what might be, what we might have to change something or,
you know, alter a service or look at class sizes, etcetera. We can keep you updated, you know, every two weeks on that. I I I respect what you're saying though from a from the board seat. This is really high level. Right? It's hard to have a starting point when a budget with the process they have in Michigan. And I think there was only one year in the past ten, mister McDaniel, correct me if I'm wrong, that they actually gave us a budget on time. Yeah. I mean, I think historically every year this board has adopted a budget before we had the state budget. Right. So it's it's it's an interesting dynamic to deal with, but we're we're making sure that as we look at our cost increase,
right, and with a 3.1 to to trust you Blake's point, whether it's 3.1 or 1.7 based on enrollment decline or based on the fact that all these budgetary considerations that increase our our costs moving forward, we're actually not realizing in this version, we're actually not realizing a plus. Right? So we we have to look at what can we do tighter. Because if we add up all the things that we know are gonna be increased costs, And again, some of those fluctuate. We don't know how many retirees at this point. We don't know, right, for interim MPSRs. None of these numbers are correct, but the ideals and the concepts around it are something we're watching very closely,
every single week. Trustee Lecui? Well, I don't know. I have a number of things just going on in my mind because I'm wondering if the board is discussing this earlier than they've done in past years or something or cause it seems like everything is so, you know, this is really too early for us to really know anything and that's why the presentation is very vague and we're not able to view anything real. But the reason that I wrote to you, you know, last week and I asked about the fund like, how does this impact the fund balance? Because the last thing I recall was that our fund balance was going down by
$4,000,000 Does this change anything? The reason I was asking that about our budget and our district is because I've been keeping up with some other districts that you might have seen in the news. Like, you might have seen Lance Cruz, you know, in February with what happened there. They were expecting a 3,000,000, fund balance shortfall. And then they discovered, like, in February that it was actually somewhere between 6 to 9,000,000, and it freaked them out. And they discovered that the superintendent knew about this since October. He knew for about four months,
but was keeping it to himself. He didn't wanna let them know. And when I hear things like, well, I'm concerned about letting this information out. We wanna keep this close to our chest for now. We don't want it to get to the public too soon. That sort of thing raises huge concerns. We've gotta be able to be transparent about the whole process all the way through. We've gotta make sure because we we hear a lot of the same kinds of things. That superintendent was saying, oh, well, the reason this is different now is because of declining enrollment, because of, you know, less state funding, because we're losing now these COVID grants that we had before. And, one of the trustees got so upset that he he was calling for a forensic
audit. He goes and he files with the Macomb County Prosecutor And Police Department because he's concerned. Why are they being so secretive? And that's something that we need to say that or did mister McDaniel say that during this meeting? That we were keeping things to our chest. I thought this is a pretty transparent presentation about letting you know that we No one said that this meeting. No one said that this meeting, but this is something I hear from leadership. And I did ask for the I did ask for the fund balance number. Leadership you hear that from? Yes. And I did superintendent Russo.
I hear this from all kinds I I hear this all the time about how we don't want information getting out. So I will address a couple of things. First of all, this presentation, Trustee LeCoultre, was about next year's budget and our priorities within it, to the best of our ability to assess where we are now knowing that the budget could change. Could be drastically different, could be much better, could be worse. In terms of what you're asking about this year, in June, I think it was January. Correct, mister McDaniel? You guys, the board of education approved a budget that looked like we were going to go
into, fund balance about 4.4. So that has already been that that conversation has been had. We are trying to not go to 4.4 as best as possible. Those are two separate budget years. Mhmm. Right? So I think you're you're conflating two budget years and the questions you're asking in my opinion, because right now we're talking about what it looks like from July 1 on for next year. But this doesn't have an impact. Right? The governor's proposal or the Senate's or the House or the committee, then when the governor approves,
it has no impact on this year's. So you've already approved January for what that what that looks like. We are trying to mitigate the 4.4 to the best of our ability. Okay. And so far, I know that that is changing. Are we talking about next year's budget sooner than we typically do? Is that why this is all so vague? And I'm not sure what you're expecting. What is it that you want the board's input on right now? Based on what we just saw, based on everything we just heard, what would you like us to give to you as in I'll just I'll just
say that, and you've been on the board. This is your third year, so you you would know that this is earlier than we've had it. And I had specifically requested that we had it because there were board members who, did have in prior years some thoughts on what the priorities were. And by the time it was discussed in May or June, we were told that it was too late. And so I specifically requested that we have an earlier discussion to talk about, priorities and thoughts on budgeting for the following year at this point rather than waiting
until late May or June to have that discussion. Can you give me some examples then of what it is that you're looking for from the board? For me, it would be things I mean, priorities that, people on the Board may have, whether that be, you know, that our, strategic plan talks about, steam initiatives and supporting that. And so, how are we going to reflect that in our budget? It could be about, you know, that again, I'm gonna go back to our strategic plan and things that are in there and how are we prioritizing some of those items.
So I thought it would be good for the board to have that discussion. And so I think that's, you know, some of the things. I also think we, you know, whether it's now or later discussing about how conservative we wanna be on our projections. As you said, we have two different enrollment numbers, one that's saying we might be down a 40, another that's down a 77. Do we go with one of those, or do we say, okay. We're gonna, you know, split the baby and go in the middle? These are the yeah. This is this is the time for the board to have a discussion.
Trustee Blake. So I don't know if this is what you're talking about or what you're looking for, but my priority in a budget year would be to preserve the classrooms, the things closest to the students, nothing that would, you know, increase class sizes or make it you know, I think that we need to prioritize that over anything else. Trustee Annas? Thank you for bringing up, the issue of making sure that our budget priorities do align with our strategic plan because as a board, we approved a strategic plan.
We have a roadmap for how we should be spending our dollars, and it should be tied to that strategic plan. The other point I wanna make is that, and I think this falls short in foot with folks that don't understand how the budget cycle works for a school district versus the state of Michigan. And and mister McDaniels pointed this out. We are required to pass a budget by June 30. The state of Michigan does not have to pass their state budget until October 1. I've been sitting on this board since 2017, but even prior to that,
I have been asking why isn't the state budget aligned with when school districts are supposed to be passing their budget? This to me seems like a no brainer. So if people are concerned about how this lack of budgetary clarity will impact public education, talk to your elected representatives at the state level and ask why a school district has to pass a budget by June 30, but the state is, you know, required to pass it on October 1. It it's incongruent. It makes absolutely no sense that we have to sit here and make budgetary assumptions
on made up numbers and don't have that clarity even by June 30 when we are required by law to pass this budget. So I just wanna encourage people sitting at this table, also listening at home, people in the audience. That is something that we should be addressing our straight the state legislature about. Shifting the requirement by law for school districts to have their budget align with when the state adopts their budget. That to me makes sense. So that would alleviate a lot of this anxiety that districts have by the requirement
of law of passing it by June 30. Madam president? Trustee Lacui? Well, first of all, I fully and completely agree with what trustee Annas just said. I've been thinking that this whole time too. Like, since I've learned more about what it means to be on the board and how these budgets work, it makes no sense to have these budget timelines out of alignment at all. I fully agree, advocate at the state level. Unfortunately, none of us couldn't really do anything about that in our leadership positions here. But, yes, advocate at the state level. That would make things way easier. I agree with what trustee Blake said about teaching and learning and,
I mean, trying to do what we can to impact the classroom. If I were to think about what is my priority for the school district, it's just totally focused on academic achievement and trying to raise our test scores in the ways that they need to be raised, for instance. And if if we're trying to look at how are we aligning this to our budgetary priorities and spending, I don't know if that means we need to be looking at what kinds of curriculum are we using. You know? Like, what is our math curriculum serving our kids the way that it needs to be serving our kids so that they can grow in their development?
And, of course, I've already talked ad nauseam about the literacy curriculum and what we need to do to switch out of a failing, debunked curriculum that sets up kids for, problems down the road, and switch to a structured literacy approach which hurts no one but helps everyone. So focusing on something like that would be where I would put my focus. I mean, I'm not seeing anything else at this time. Were there any other specific questions, you had for the board, mister Russo? Yeah. Thank you, madam president. I think some of the questions just wanna ask and if they're rhetorical,
that's fine. If there's if they're discussion points, it'd be good to have. I think I got an answer to the first question is, does the board of education agree with the priorities we have laid out? It sounds like just to recap, class sizes matter. Use resources directly to the classroom, which means not only curriculum materials but our human capital as well. That's how I took that sentence. Strategic plan spending that we allocate where we where we want to have a roadmap go. And then, test scores and student achievement were were mentioned as most recently. Any questions you might have about our presentation as we move forward?
Are there things that impact your you know, now that you've seen this and I know that again, it's high level. Right? We we we had this we we had this because we wanted you to talk openly about what other things that there are misaligned that I wanna make sure this is in place. But is there anything that impacts policy that that you that you heard today? And then lastly, enrollment projections. We we showed you two versions of enrollment projections. One is, I'll go back to, I I completely mess up the name every time, but the PowerSchool predictive,
there it is, at a 40 and PlantMaran, RealPoint with a 77. We were planning on going with a 50 as kind of it's not in the middle. It's it's more leaning toward what we use Plant Moran, I'm sorry, PowerSchool predicted for in the past. And so having both of those, we figured we would just hedge a little bit with 10 extra students to plan for 150 student loss. That doesn't mean that that's going to be realized as well. And and I would ask board feedback and input on that on those types of things. Does that number seem realistic?
I guess I'll I'm just curious too, and and not for today, but for at a point whenever we're discussing it, to know exactly where those numbers fall. If, you know, how much of those are kindergarten? Like, are we going to have 150 less kindergarten or do we think we're having kids moving out throughout the district? So where that is. Right. And, then I think it's a bigger picture to me of what does that mean if we think we're going to continue to lose students. And is that something we need to do?
You know, we obviously have been a closed, district. We don't have open enrollment. You know, is that something we need to consider in order to be able to provide the services that we've come to expect here? And I know there's there will be a lot of, opinions on that both, I'm sure, pro and con, But we would need the information right to understand what we're what we're talking about. And I had another comment, but I can't remember what it was right now. So, I'll come back to it. Trustee Gupta.
So I heard a mention that we anticipate, and I know it's been shared in the past presentations, that we anticipate increased enrollment for special education. So do we have any way I know it would be difficult, but is there any way to estimate what that looks like? Because that that is like a missing piece of this kind of predictive puzzle at this point, right, for enrollment. So we certainly can, make our our best guess estimation of,
especially our categorical students. And we typically do that, to the best of our abilities, like five to seven years out if they were to follow in the same trajectory. And then we could get a pretty, we could get an estimate to just based on, historically what the averages are for students, within certain areas, whether it's early childhood, resource, etcetera, just knowing that those can change. But we could provide, I could get some of that information. Trustee Blake, did I see your hand? Okay. Trustee Lecui? I honestly don't totally know what to make of the enrollment question because I feel
like in the past few years, our enrollment projections have been off by quite a few students anyways. It was off by maybe 150 or something or 200 last year even. So it's hard to know exactly how accurate these are going to be, but I don't know. I almost wonder if we might we might be able to on the side of what of what you're saying with a 50 just because I know a lot of private schools in the areas are getting kinda maxed out at this point. And although many are making additions, I a lot of those are not ready yet. And so maybe we won't end up losing as many students.
I I don't even know. But it it would be help I know that Rochester Community Schools used to have a specialist that worked right in Central office for the building who made very accurate enrollment predict predictions. And since we've moved to PowerSchool and and some of these others, it's been harder for us to get more targeted numbers like that. And it might have something to do with the data that we're feeding to them, really. So I'm I'm not really sure why our enrollment numbers have been off the past couple years by so much or what we should make of this now,
but it's hard to it's hard to answer questions about it when it's been the case. I'm just gonna make a comment on that because you keep saying we had the central office that did a great job of predicting. And Mhmm. You're right. They did for quite a while until they didn't. And then there was this huge loss that occurred. And that is when, we did go. They did move to having a service that predicted it. And historically, they've been and Mr. McDaniel, you can probably chime in here like close to 1% difference on it.
And isn't it supposed to have there's a range of amount and just because we're a bigger district, it can potentially be a bigger number. Yeah. I think they say industry standards about 3%. I think we've always been under that 3%. As long as I've been here and this was, you know, we did have some overlap of, I believe, the person that she's referencing, to my knowledge, we've either used Plant Moran, which was Chris at the time, or PowerSchool, which was who knew it, Decision Insight. So I don't at least in my, almost ten years here, we have not relied on a single,
person to do that. I'm this person did, do some projections as well, but I think we've always based the budget on either plant Moran or, any version of the PowerSchool predictive enrollment. You said the number was 3% this time. Is that correct? That there is a three percent potential variance. Is that what you were saying? Yes. I think the industry standard is to be within 3%. And you know, Mr. Wells, I think will be here on April 21 and he can speak to that. I can also reach out to, PowerSchool, but, I've always been told that the industry standard is to be within 3%.
That's interesting. Trustee Trustee Lawson? I see that the foundation allowance was going up to 10,000 per student. What about the special education students? Is that affected, staying the same, increasing? Yeah. That $10,000 per student is k 12. So they would take it would be no matter if you're a special education student or a general education student, we would get funding for that if that was the model, right, that ends up winning, for lack of better words. But the the specific if you're asking, and I don't know if you are, trustee close on I'm just I'm just going to kind of take the question a
little farther into federal funding. So if we don't know right there's some there's some uncertainty at the federal level right now. But all things predicted, you would get an additional promised 40% of that to your right? Which ends up to be about between ten and fifteen. Is that about the right number, mister McDaniel? Level 10. Yeah. 10. About, for the money that comes from the feds. So they would be if we have a special education student who is in third grade here, we would get $10,000 for that student if that's what you're asking. All right. And I guess I would say we've talked about how this is early,
right? And I think you're looking at a lot of the budget items, or line items to identify what's needed or not for next year as well. In my quick numbers similar to what Trustee Blake had done, with what's here, it looks like it's an addition it would be like $7,000,000 if we kept everything else the same, it would be like a $7,000,000 deficit, for the 2025, '20 '20 '6 school year if there were no changes. So I just think, again, as we get closer, it would be nice to be able to see some of those numbers and see
what that impact is and get an idea of what type of decisions we may need to make on how much fund balance to use or what to prioritize to mitigate that. All right. Does anyone have any other comments or questions at this time? Did you ask all of your questions? Okay. Trustee Liqui? Whenever we're talking about numbers and all this, it is helpful if we can have charts, if we can see year after year, you know, what some of those differences are.
Again, in this presentation, we had to basically just take notes about what some of these percentage increases and what the actual numbers are for some of these slides because it wasn't written down. So for future work sessions, it would be helpful to have that information ahead of time to be included in the packet. It'd be easier for the community to be able to see that information also. Alright. Well, thank you to mister Russo and mister McDaniel for, helping to answer some of our questions. Did you have anything else before we move on to item 6.2? No, madam president. Alright. Then 6.2
is the agenda item that was added, on I Ready data. And, trustee Lacui, if you wanted to talk about what your motion is that you'd like to add to this. Sure. Okay. Well, I was kinda working that out while we were doing that. So my motion that I would like to talk about is I move that the Board of Education receive presentations to review fall, winter, and spring I Ready assessment data at public board meetings. Each presentation shall include an analysis of student performance with visual slides illustrating the trend
over the past five years. Okay. Can you get that to me so that I have that? I can write that down. But the main idea of it, as I'm writing this down, if anybody wanted to discuss it, is simply that we review the I Ready data, fall, winter, and spring, and that we see a trend of five years so that we can see how each grade level is progressing over the course of time so that we can see we can have more context. What do these scores mean and what do they look like? Hold on just one second. So we have Trustee Lecuey made the motion.
And is there someone who wants to support it? Trustee LaSanne. And then Yeah. I'm gonna I'm gonna As soon as you're done, we'll we'll take just a little break here while you write that out so I can have it, because there was a lot there, and I'm not sure exactly which date what data you're looking for. Sure. And I'm open to any kinds of amendments or revisions if board members have other ideas. So I know one of the, items that I did catch is that Trustee Lecuee is looking for fall, winter and spring,
data. So rather than just the two times a year that we currently review, it sounds like she's looking for three times a year. And, so I'd like input on that from other trustees if to see whether they are in agreement with that or additional. Trustee Annas. So I guess my question would be to, superintendent Russo and his staff. You know, when is that spring iReady data, ready for board conception? It's my understanding that it comes to us in the fall. The the spring data comes to us the following fall.
Is that correct? Or am I thinking about m step? M step. Okay. So for I Ready specifically, we test the kids in the spring. What's the timing of that, and how would it impact everything else that happens in the spring in our community? Miss Hamden, would you like to answer the questions about, the spring I Ready window and then when it is available most likely for consumption for the board? I'll need a minute to access Generally speaking, and and miss Hampton can get when she gets those dates. Generally speaking, we try to do, because some of our staff have goals that are dependent on I Ready results in
the spring. Usually, those windows are between in in the area of May. Now M STEP is a six week window that the that the state puts out. We, because we have that much control within the six weeks, decide when our third graders take it, when our fourth graders take each subject area. So it's kind of a testing season. And and I would say that probably a week to two weeks after those, that window closes, we could desegregate the results by grade, by subject area, and then put those against a five year trend if that's what you're looking for. So that would be probably a June to July discussion
for the board. If you're talking just generalities, I think that answers the question. Trustee Alspa. I have a question for Trustee Lecluy. It's our norm that we've all agreed that we wouldn't do surprises at the Board table. I think the fact that we are asking Ms. Hampton to come up with something right now, And the fact that you are just literally scribbling the motion as you're thinking about it. And you said you were thinking about it during the buzz budget presentation, which I would hoped you would have been more present during that presentation.
I think that speaks to why we have this norm that we all agree that we won't surprise each other or administration or the public. If somebody wanted to have a comment on this or wanted to, you know, do public comment, they don't have the opportunity. So and we also have a norm and and I know that President Butel has held to this norm that if three of us are interested, which is not even a majority, it's just three. If three of us are interested in putting something on the agenda, it would be put on the agenda.
So my question to you is, who did you reach out to before this to have this conversation about gathering support for putting this on the agenda? I guess I'm gonna stop you right there because I don't think that is not germane to this specific topic. Now, I think it's appropriate if you want to make a motion to postpone or something along those lines. But I don't think that discussion is germane at the moment. So I would like to hear answer why she can't follow our norms though, because that is germane to the way I will vote. But it's while I agree that it's important,
it's not germane to the motion that's on the table at the moment. Madam president? Trustee Lecui. I I don't mind answering that question because I actually did reach out to the full board to ask about this. On March it was March 2 when I wrote to the superintendent and I wrote to the full board to ask about reviewing I Ready at the trend data, and it was be it was prior to the last achievement work session. And I said, don't worry about this for this work session because I know we already have the presentation set. But for the following achievement work sessions,
could we please include trend data? And any board member could have had a chance to to chime in or to talk about that or anything. And and I followed up on it a second time too when I didn't receive the thought. Understand that to be a request to put it on the agenda. I guess I'm specifically asking when did you request to put this on the agenda? Trustee Alspa, it's hard for me to to hear you when you're interrupting me. But my answer to you would just be that the point of putting things on the agenda is to just to get things moving,
to discuss items that we think would be valuable. We wouldn't have had to put this on the agenda. If if people have made it clear that they were interested in this and the superintendent decide, oh, yeah. That is maybe a valuable thing. It wouldn't have to be an agenda item. The only reason I'm putting it on the agenda is because it was ignored a couple times. And then I was told that it can only be on the agenda if the majority of the board agrees to it. And then I was not able to I I wasn't receiving information back. So So if you're not willing to respond to my emails and to and to
make comments like that, then I have to try to get things on the agenda so that we can have the discussion and so that we can put things to a vote to decide if that's how we want to move forward with things. Alright. Well, at this point, we can decide whether we want to move forward with voting on this or not. I'll just say that while I am not opposed to having, five year trends, I am not willing at this point to specifically identify that we will review it at fall, winter, and spring until I can have more time to think about it and talk to the administration and get their thoughts on it.
So, so at this point then I guess. Madam President would you like to amend the motion? I'm not even sure where to start at the moment I personally just as soon wait until another meeting to discuss it but Trustee Blake? So this is information that I would like to, and I think that several people have said that they would like to see. My only question, though, is do we need to vote on this? And from here here on forth, this is the requirement of what it must be presented every single time.
I feel like we've communicated to now to mister Russo that this is what we want to see the next time. Do we need to have a formal vote and tie his hands and tie their hands if there's some other way that we'd like to see it at some point? Alright. Madam President? Trustee Lecui? To to respond to your question, I would say that we should vote because the board speaks as one through its votes. So that's how we can make it clear that we actually do want this or not. Otherwise, it is unclear how many people are interested at the moment. We don't know if it's a majority of the board.
Trustee Annas? I'm just gonna share that I won't be voting for this, for the reasons, that Trustee Alspa outlined. And, I'm calling the question. Alright. There is a motion to vote on the previous question. Is there a second? Second. This is for, yep, a motion, and it's really a motion to, on the previous question. And, Trustee Gupta supported that all in favor of, you know, basically immediately going to vote on the original motion. Say I Opposed. Say no.
No. I'd like to amend the motion. Trustee was on where you know? Okay. So that's a five to vote. The motion does pass. So now we are on, the motion, which is, that the Board of Education receive presentations to review fall, winter, and spring iReady assessment data at public board meetings. Each presentation shall include an analysis of student performance with visual slides illustrating the trend over the last past five years. So all of those in favor, please say aye.
Aye. Aye. I'm sorry. Madam president, this is in favor of this current motion, correct? Okay. I. So dice. I think I have three. Those opposed, please say no. No. No. That's a three four vote. And at this point, that motion does not pass. Madam President? Trustee Lecui? I I'd like to propose a new motion. And the motion is I move that the Board of Education receive presentations to review I Ready assessment data at public board education receive presentations to review I Ready assessment data at public board meetings. Point of order. We currently do. Order, madam president. Well, we are still under we're still not we're still under I Ready data 6.2.
No. We've we've already voted on that issue. We voted on that motion. Then we should be moving on to the next agenda item on the agenda. I I'm gonna allow one other motion. Trustee Madam President, I have a motion that's related to this to this discussion item, and it is that I move that the Board of Education receive presentations to review I Ready assessment data at public board meetings as we currently do. Each presentation shall include an analysis of student performance with visual slides illustrating the trend over the past five Years. So I move that the Board of Education receive presentations to review iReady data,
and then it was the rest of this one each presentation shall include. Right. And basically, this new motion is simply to remove the idea of discussing the data three times a year, fall, winter, and spring. Instead, do it the way that we're currently doing it where we discuss it in the fall, including the spring data then and then also in the winter. But during those two presentations, if we don't wanna do three presentations, maybe we stick with doing it two times a year. But within those presentations, we see the five year trends so that we can at least understand how this achievement data changes across time.
All right. Is there support for the this motion? Trustee Lawson. All right. So we have a motion. Is there any other discussion of this at this time? Trustee Alspa? Once again, I think we need to get administration just like you had said, president Butel, that we need to get more input on this subject. And I don't find this motion to be substantially different than the original motion. I understand there are some minute points that are different, but in general, it is the same. I feel this is highly operational when you're specifically saying that you want a particular
slide and this is just a move. Because as you said, in your own words, your email was ignored. So this is just a move to get your email answered at a board table to dictate an operational item. I am interested in seeing the data, but I am not interested in this process. Madam president? Trustee Lecui? To respond to that, I would I would say that I do disagree with trustee Alspa that this is operational. What I'm asking for is to review the test score data,
and that is totally within the purview of the board of education. That's what we do is we review the high level results, and that's what the community wants to see are the high level results. So we're basically just directing the information. This is the sort of thing we would like to see. You guys do the operational aspect of analyzing this for us, telling us what it means. Are we seeing improvements? Are we seeing struggles? How could what can we do to fix it? That's the operational aspect. I'm not telling people how to fix it. I'm just saying, can I see what the trend looks like over time?
And boards that work for major companies and stuff too, they also ask what kind of data they want their CEOs to present to them so that they can look at it and make decisions based on the data. So analyzing test score data is completely within the purview of the board of education, and for the board to tell the administration what they wanna see is completely appropriate. Madam president. Trustee Annas? So I agree with trustee Lukuy. However, I don't agree with how she's gone about bringing this to our board table.
And, again, I will be voting down, her motion, and she can bring it up, in proper order in another manner as trustee Alspa had pointed out. I'll be voting no. Madam president? Trustee Lacou, you've already spoken to me. Ask a question. And my question is, in what way can I bring this up so that I can get feedback from In an email, you said you Point of order, madam president? Trustee. I'm Trustee Anas. Is she I was is she directing your question to me? I was talking. Okay. Because I I just spoke. And are you directing your question at me? No. I was directing it at madam president.
Okay. Madam president, my question is, how can I bring up my motions? How can I bring up these questions and know that I'm going to receive feedback from the resident? Oh my goodness. Trustee Lecuye, so the as I have told everyone on here, if there is an item that three people would like to put on the agenda, then you just need to email me, and we'll find a time to put that on the agenda. So that would be the appropriate way to do it. I don't like that, similar to what trustee Alspa and trustee Annas because initially,
my thought is I'm good with this, but I really would like to give it some time and to have the administration let me know if there is anything that they see an issue with this that I'm not thinking about. With an issue with five year trend? With With including a five year trend? Right. And and quite honestly, I I mean, I think this is crazy that we're necessarily voting on this because I think this is something that we can just ask to be included versus having to pass a motion on. Well, some of us don't Trustee Blake?
Couple of things. Number one, if Trustee Lecuye wants to put this on a future agenda, she's already had three people vote yes on it tonight. So there's your three people right there. Secondly, respectfully, when you send emails on things and you say that people don't respond to those emails, number one, you send a great deal of emails. They're often argumentative. So I know that I read them and often I just don't want any part of that because it's argumentative, It's abrasive. And so you can't assume that because nobody responds to these types of emails that people think any particular way.
It's just life's too short to get involved in arguments day in, day out and berating of staff members and calling people, you know, that you're you're being dishonest and so forth. So that's why I think you don't get the response that you wish you would to your emails. Alright. So we have a motion right now, which is that the Board of Education receive presentations to review I Ready data. Each presentation shall include an analysis of student performance with visual slides illustrating the trend over the past five years. All of those in favor, please say aye.
Aye. Opposed, please say no. No. That's a three-four vote. And, as we indicated, if this is something you'd like to put on the next agenda, let me know and we can do that since there were three people who were interested in that. Alright, we are moving on to additional comments. Agenda item 8.1 is additional comments by members of the Board of Education. Individual board members may use this time to share information about school visits, updates from committees or organizations they're assigned to, or to express their personal opinion.
Please note that each trustee is limited to three minutes. If you run over that time, I'm happy to ask the board if they're willing to extend that time, but please keep it to three minutes and wait for that approval if you think you will be running over. At this time, Trustee Lozan? Alright. Trustee Lecui? Okay. Alright. Well, president Butel, to follow-up on the last discussion, I would like to request that we put motion on an upcoming agenda. We do have three people interested. I guess I prefer to put the original motion that includes fall, winter, and spring now that people will have more time to think about it and see
whether or not they think it might be a good idea. Trustee Blake accused me of being argumentative and disagreeable and calling people names, so I'm going to go ahead and just read what this email was that I sent. And it was request for I Ready trend data, and I sent it March 2 prior to that other achievement work session. And I said this, hi, team. When we last reviewed winter I Ready data, the district included slides showing how relative placements changed or remain the same from one winter to the next. You can find these on pages 12 to fourteen and nineteen to 21 in the
attached presentation. I appreciate having data like this, which helps to highlight trends over time. For future I Ready reviews, no need to adjust tomorrow's presentation. Could we include this type of data? Thank you. Carol Beth Litkoue. You're set. Okay. Trustee Annas? Thank you, madam president. So I have to speak about a recent, memorandum pressuring, public schools to comply with the Department of Education's new, quote, unquote, certification requirements. Public schools are now required to fill out this certification to assure the Department of
Education that we're not violating federal civil rights laws. What's the irony? This certification itself acknowledges civil rights issues still exist while threatening to cut funding for public schools which will disproportionately impact low income students, students with disabilities, and English language learners. This edict frames equity as a threat. It distorts civil rights law like title title nine and civil rights in the Civil Rights Act to argue that targeted support for historically marginalized students is somehow discriminatory.
That's legally incoherent and morally backwards. A writer I recently read surmised, summarized this certification well. If schools acknowledge racial disparities, that's racism. If English language learners get support, it's considered favoritism. If students with disabilities receive accommodations, it's unfair. Are students who receive IEPs now at risk because they receive additional help? Is the expectation now that we start removing accommodations to avoid offending the able-bodied majority? If we train teachers to understand bias,
it's indoctrination, but training them to ignore it is suddenly restoring neutrality? This selective outrage over equal treatment always seems to appear when conversations about race, identity, and inequality come up. This certification isn't about fairness. It's about silencing truth. It's a political move that uses children as pawns to dismantle equity efforts in public education. But teaching the truth, addressing disparities, and affirming every student is exactly what public schools should be doing if we truly
believe in serving all students. Public school districts must not bow to political pressure that aims to erase the history of some students, chill the ability of educators to teach, and squelch the first amendment rights of learners to an inclusive education and their ability to engage in their public education. Thank you. Trustee Blake? Sure. Just to follow-up with Trustee Lecuey, my comment was in general. I wasn't commenting on that email. But more importantly to that, there there was a gentleman here who spoke at the very beginning.
He's now left, but he said he lives in Oakland Township. He's a precinct delegate there. And the people who live in Oakland Township are not interested in DEI according to him. And when I hear people say things like that, I want to ask them, which part are you not interested in? Are you not interested in having a diverse community? Because that's the D part. Are you not interested in everybody who lives in a community, and in particular the school district, feeling included? Because that's the I part. Probably what he would say to me is the equity part.
And my answer to that is, are you not interested in each kid getting what they need in order to fulfill their potential? Because that's what the equity portion means. Let me just say that as far as I know, the district has always complied with the law. We have never practiced discrimination. We don't offer services for one race as opposed to another, etcetera. But there are certain things that are not going to change in this community. We love our diverse school community. We want all kids to be included and to feel included because they learn better when they do. We will continue to give all kids what they need for success and so that
they can reach their best potential. How we deliver on those promises, that's always possibly up for debate. The structure could change, the way that we deliver these print but our principles as a school district will not change. I know that I will never support abandoning our principles. And I know that our teachers and our parapros will never do that. And they're not going to change their hearts. They're in this field because they have a heart for children, and they have a heart for all children. So I disagree with the gentlemen. I think people in Oakland Township and everywhere are interested in a diverse welcoming school
district where everyone belongs. That's what we provide, that's what we will always continue to provide. Trustee Alsbaugh. So on a little bit of a different note, lately I've been attending the MDE webinars. They've had two on the Michigan Dyslexia Handbook and these webinars are free for anyone. MDE is doing a series of them on literacy, unstructured literacy, on dyslexia, and PA one hundred and forty six and one hundred and forty seven, which are some of the literacy, public acts that have been passed. So if anyone's interested,
I'm really finding this a good conversation and getting some good information. You can go out to MDE and find these webinars. They're free. You could anyone can sign up for them. I also wanted to mention that me and Trustee Annas and Trustee Butel and Mr. Russo attended the Oakland Schools School Board Association meeting, that was held at the, technical campus in Clarkston. And we got a wonderful tour, and it was fantastic to see all the hands on career focused education. Those kids are building one they're building houses,
they're fixing cars, they're they're pimping cars up. And then we got to go into the cluster where one of my children, my daughter, was, a student in. We got to see ag science where, they do raise some animals for they call it farm to fork. So, but they had tilapia and lots of plants, and it was just it was yeah. They had chickens and rabbits, and it was just a really wonderful if you don't get a chance or if you have somebody in high school, I highly I highly suggest that you explore those options that they offer through the
OTech and CTE campuses because it can really be, a way for a student to operationalize and get some great experience. They were talking about a lot of the students that are going to be engineers are actually taking electrical so that they're figuring out how to do the wiring, and then they go on to college to be an electrical engineer. So this does not, you know, exclude this does not exclude college options. It actually gives you a really good foundation for whatever your options are going to be. So I really encourage people to, engage and go out for a tour and consider that type of,
education for your students. Thank you. Thanks. Trustee Gupta. Yeah. So I'm gonna use my time this evening, to talk about, what's been called my pet project. Luckily for me, my pet project also really aligns well with our district's mission and a lot of the feedback we receive from our community on the strategic plan. So RCS has the second largest network of FIRST programs in the state of Michigan, which includes 68 FLL Explore teams serving students in kindergarten through second grade, 29 FLL Challenge teams serving students in third through fifth grades,
12 FTC teams serving our middle schools, and three FRC teams serving our high schools. These programs are almost exclusively run by volunteers who promote the program, recruit other volunteers to help run these programs, train new volunteers, register each team with first, order and deliver their supplies, negotiate with principals for meeting space, fundraise to cover all the costs and host their competition events. These are year long tea, programs. These teams are capped at the elementary and middle school levels to protect the quality
experience for each student involved. There is not a cap at the high school level. This is why we have so many teams in elementary and middle school. And quite frankly, if we had the mentors to run more teams, we would have even more as the student interest in the program exceeds our volunteer capacity each year. Even so, we saw over a thousand students participate in first programs this school year. Our high school teams hosted six different competitions for the elementary and middle school teams. Our high school teams contributed hundreds of mentoring hours to help sustain the younger teams,
and even more hours fundraising to sustain both their teams and these feeder teams. Our alumni stay involved and come back as volunteers, and they tend to go on to pursue STEM careers, with one even becoming a Flight Director at NASA. Most of the other districts in Michigan with similarly large networks of FIRST programs have more district support, such as paid, a paid staff person who coordinates district wide programming. Many districts provide transportation to teams to get to and from competitions, especially when it requires out of town travel.
Others like Avondale, Lake Orion, Romeo and soon Troy are making incredible investments in STEM centers to accommodate STEM programs. The first program understands that interest rather than academic proficiency is a greater predictor of children pursuing studies and careers in STEM fields. It is an evidence based program that uses strategies that, strategies found to increase student interest and engagement in science, technology, engineering and math, including hands on learning, working together collaboratively
to solve real life problems exposure That's a three minute and exposure to adult mentors. Okay. You're good? Yep. Alright. Well, first, I hope that everyone had a relaxing and rejuvenating spring break and that your return to the normal routine has gone smoothly. And I hope that our Muslim families had a wonderful Eid al Fitr celebration marking the end of Ramadan. Since our last meeting, I attended North Hills PTA meeting and Rochester Area Youth Assistance monthly board meeting. Raya is sponsoring a water and boating safety class on May 13 from seven to
8PM at the Calf Barn at the Rochester Hills Museum at Van Hoosen Farm. The program is by the Ashley Iseman Boating Safety Foundation and the Oakland County Sheriff's Office. The class is free, but you must register by emailing rya@rochester.k12.mi.us. Please see your email or the rya website for more information. I also attended the Oakland County School Board Association that trustee Alspott mentioned, held at Oakland Schools Technical Campus in Clarkston. RCS Students have the ability to participate in any of the 17 programs offered.
RCS students usually attend either the Pontiac or the Clarkston location during their junior and senior years, splitting their time between their home school and Oakland Schools technical campus. Some students leave Oakland Schools technical campus with certificates or licenses that allow them to go directly into the workforce. Others go on to a trade school or earn an associate or bachelor's degree. They offer tours of their campuses and programs and I would encourage anyone with interest in one of their programs to check it out and see what they offer. The Community and City Connection Subcommittee of the District wide Wellness Committee is partnering with
the PTA Council to host a family health and wellness fair on Saturday, May 3 from 9AM to 1PM at Rochester High School. There are free heart checks for students aged 13 to 18. These require preregistration, so please be sure to do that. There will be bounce houses, healthy food trucks, comfort canines, sports and fitness, interactive demonstrations from local sports clubs and nonprofits, and health challenges. There's really something for everyone, so we encourage all ages to stop by on May 3 from nine to one at Rochester High School. The highlight of the last two weeks was being able to attend the district wide
RCS Orchestra performance. This was a celebration of the first graduates of the RCS Orchestra program that started in 2018. Over 500 students performed in the gym at Adams. The students were broken into three groups, the sixth graders, the seventh and eighth graders, and the high school student. Each group performed renditions of Ode to Joy, and then they joined together in a piece composed by our very own doctor Brandon Ullrich called A Woodland Chronicle. It was hard to believe that this was a school orchestra. The students were amazing, and that is due to their passion and hard work as well as to our
talented and caring orchestra directors and their supportive families. Last but not least, I wanna wish our middle school and high school students good luck this week as many of them will be taking their PSAT or SAT and the M STEP. Thank you. Next, we're headed to the members of the administration. These are also limited to three minutes, but additional time may be requested. These comments allow members of the administration to share information that they believe is valuable to the board and or community. These are comments and not discussion items. Mister Russo? Thank you,
madam president. Mister Murphy? Oh, thank you. Miss Gauthier? Miss Hampton? Thank you, mister Russo. I would just highlight that, today the window opens for the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress or MSAP, that our students in grades three through 11, experience that's over the next six weeks of time. We recognize, areas of math and English language arts for students in grades three through seven, science and social studies for students in grades five, eight, and 11. And while this is a high stakes assessment, we we give thanks, for the educators who bring the the tenor down in their learning spaces so that
students can recognize all of the areas, that they are very capable and brilliant as they take this, particular assessment, and also recognizing that what we're asking for them is the best that they can do in that moment, and and and that's good enough. So, we we appreciate the scheduling dynamics that occur across schools where these assessments are concerned. As you can imagine, particularly in an elementary space, when you're talking about six weeks of time, there's a real impact to educational programming, and and taxes, much of of what that community experiences prior to that window opening.
And so, we give our appreciation to the leaders and educators that are pulling those that all of that off in their spaces in these coming weeks. Mister McDaniel? Sure. Thank you. I'll I'll try to be brief. I I appreciate the board's attention tonight to the budget presentation. I know we shared some numbers, with you and you guys did some math, but I I wanna try to paint the full picture. There are about 12,000 different account numbers, meaning 12 different 12,000 different numbers that make up this general fund budget. So while we didn't provide you with all the numbers,
you know, just a few, there's a lot of work that goes into creating this full picture. So, I don't think we'll ever be in a place where we share every single one of those 12,000 account numbers and and dollar amounts, but wanted to give you guys a a heads up and a full picture of, yes, we brought you some large ones, but there's a ton of work that that goes into this budget. Thank you. Thank you, mister McDaniel. Doctor. Deluca? Thank you, mister Russo. Today, we, tested our Syntegix badge system for the first time. It was a a huge lift, from our technology team. Today, we had, members of our law enforcement,
the greater area, Rochester law enforcement, fifteen law enforcement members for the administration center. We tested the, batch system to where the call center then in Atlanta was was dialed in, and then our 911 dispatch was organized to where then it activates our strobes in our in the building, our PA app application, and then alerts in our computers in our in our our phones. So it's a big moment for us to kind of actually roll the system out in a test phase. Future dates that are coming up for us are, rolling out to, train our buildings in late April, and then our badges will be issued to all of our staff on May 6.
Thank you, Doctor. Luca. You know, I I had a few messages today that, I wanted to share, but most of our board members hit upon them pretty well. But what I want to, accentuate is Trustee Blake's, comments. I I realized that, you know, in the in the new administration at the federal level, there seems to be, it seems to be guarding a lot of uncertainty, whether we're talking about how it applies to public education, whether we're talking about the stock market, whether we're talking about any of his executive orders. Whether you believe in them or not believe in them, that's not the question here. And I'm not this is not a political speech. This is about the uncertainty that's felt by the change in kind of process and
the change in tenor, in the last sixty to ninety days. And, I wanna be very, very clear that what what the impacts are of decisions made to that that impacts or changes or destroys the federal department of education, or any executive orders that come out, or any changes that we have to make because of that or not make. I wanna be very clear to to trustee Blake's point that we will always be of service to students and their needs and their families here in the community. And I hope that that that resonates, with our community members,
because in the level of anxiety and certainty that this is creating for folks, especially those who hear about, you know, if you have a student, if you have a child with an IEP and you hear that federal funding might be pulled or the you hear the next week that, there's a new edict out about some other DEI or whatever the whatever the flavor of the week is. And I I say that little tongue in cheek, but I mean that wholeheartedly. Whatever anxiety or questions that that that brings about for you as a parent, please reach out to your to your buildings teacher or principal with those feelings,
you know, and and and start talking to them. Have an open dialogue, because I can I can assure you that he or she, that building principal, that teacher, will be executing exactly what I'm saying right now and that we are gonna be of service to families and and of the students? And that would be all for me today, madam president. Thank you. Thank you. A couple of an announcements here. On April 9, there is no school for sixth, seventh, ninth, and twelfth graders, and eighth, tenth, and eleventh graders will go in the morning. On April 10,
there's a half day in the morning for grades nine and eleven and half day in the afternoon for grades ten and eleven. April fifteenth is the Pack Sparkle Awards. Those are in the Adams High School Auditorium at 6PM. I think it's actually at six is the first one, and 07:15 is the second round. April 18, there is no school. April 21, there is no school, but there is professional development district wide. We also have a board of education meeting on April 21 here at Hart Middle
School in the Media Center at 6PM as well. And with that, if there is no objection, we will adjourn at 08:13PM. Seeing none, we are adjourned. Thank you all, and have a good night.