Agenda. There was no one that's signed up for public comment, guys, for h two twenty five. So that takes us to your consent agenda. It's beyond the, blue sky portal. You got board minutes from the twelve eight meeting, the twelve eight executives, And then you have the AP vouchers with four payroll vouchers as well as the claim vouchers for January 2026. It does require a motion and a second from the board. So moved. Second. Motion by Hansler and a second by Lockett. Any discussion? All in favor signify by saying aye.
Aye. Opposed same? She carries. Thank you. Okay. Do a 3.9 and then I'm a pain in the gamble, though, graciously. We should do this as three separate pieces. I'll entertain nominations for the position of board president for 2026. I move that we, what, Brooke Lockett as president. Nomination. Miss Lockett? I second. Any other nominations? As you are now, I'll close the door for nominations. All those in favor of Brooke repeating who's the board president of 2026, sitting five by saying aye.
Aye. Very good. You're in charge. Starting right now? Yeah. Starting right now. Alright. Well, we will You're gonna hear plenty from me at the moment. Okay. If you remember from a year ago, this is where I really got things sideways, and, hopefully, okay. So now we will move forward for nominations for vice president. Nominate Travis Enslidge. Nomination for Travis Henseler. Second. Second made by Shay. Any other nominations? Alright. We'll take it to a vote. All those in favor of Travis repeating as vice president, signify by saying aye.
Aye. All those opposed? Congratulations, sir. Alright. We will move down to secretary. Any nominations for secretary? Dave, do you wanna do it again? I can. Nominate Dave. Nomination for Dave to repeat the role of secretary, second made by Karen. Any other nominations? Seeing as there are none, we'll take it to a vote. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed? Motion curious. Congrats. It's like getting picked last night. Is there anybody else? On allheart. Okay. So, you might have to hand help me here.
K. So I would submit for consideration that the attorney, CCHNA, attorney Smith is miss Matthews, treasurer missus Offenroll, board assistant missus Sadler, and the banking deposit key bank. And then All remain the same. All remain the same. Balance of these are appointments made by the president. Right. Which we now know is you. Right. And we can vote on this all as one? You certainly vote. Okay. You don't have to vote on your appointments. I don't have to do this. For argument. You should probably vote on the top four.
Okay. Let's do that. Matter of record. Yes. So let's do that first. So, in keeping attorney the same with Churchchurch, Hittle, and Antrim, with Amy Matthews as the lead attorney, treasurer the same with, Tannick presiding, board administrative assistant, Michelle Sather, and the bank of deposit, KeyBank will take a motion and a second to approve those forward to keep the same. So moved. Motion made by Dave. Second. Second made by Travis. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries.
Wonderful. Can we have discussion on this since This is your deal. You can run this anyway. Because of how we set things up now with Blue River, does it does it entirely make sense, Karen, if you weigh in here to have a person appointed? There there should be a way that would be awarded. It's less it's less critical because of me being primary. Okay. Right? Yeah. K. Yeah. Do you have a feeling either way, Karen, about being that backup? I I can do that. Okay. That would be wonderful. Thank you. So area vocational services representative, Karen, will be our rep and then the alternate, even
though mister Hope will be there anyway, will be mister Hope. So moving down to the Northwest Shelby County Regional Seward District Representative, it's currently mister Plug. I was gonna, I don't know how you felt about it, Sam. Crystal. Yeah. Okay. Because you've served on it for a while. I think it's great. Yeah. I have. Okay. Alright. So it's gonna be, mister Sam Allen. The ISBA legislative liaison. I have served in this position the last few times. I was going to open this up to Shay if you felt so inclined. Sure.
Awesome. And then moving on to make sure your order's name is mine. Okay. Going to personnel committee, I I think I'm just gonna leave that the same. So that would be Shay, myself, and Wilson. And then moving to facilities committee, same for Sam Allen and then, mister Floyd, are you okay with that one too? Facilities. Yes. And then, Wilson, would you be interested in serving on that?
Sure. Awesome. And then am I going too fast? No. We're good. Okay. We're good. Policy committee, mister Hensler, and then Karen for policy. Okay. Yeah. And then, mister Fluke. How do you feel about that? Is anybody else willing to? Yeah. Anyone else wants to. I'd be more than happy to do that. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. See, she's great for patients, for each other. Yeah. We're doing that. It works. After that. K. Good. Alright. I think that's everything. And now we need to oh, now we're moving.
Okay. So It's all the. Yep. Just my computer log in. Alright. So now moving on to the, trustees meeting calendar. It is on Blue Sky, The proposed dates, if anyone you guys pull those up and have any questions on those before we take a vote. I believe when I was putting them in my calendar over the weekend, in case anyone's wondering, we do circumvent fall break because it's the October this year, and we're
after that. That was the only one that I, like, had a question mark on, but and we're good. Does require motion to second? Yes. So moved. Motion made by Sam. I second. Second made by Wilson. All those in favor of approving our board meeting dates for 2026, signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries seven zero. Guys, I think I have that a little bit better. K. Okay. Recommendation of personnel, 6.1. Under 6.11, we have a resignation. Caleb Brown has submitted his resignation as a high school business teacher.
Under six one three, Loris Trebel has, submitted a resignation as the title one assistant at the elementary school. You'll see Loris show back up under six one four here. We have a couple of, items. Tony Fields is a recommendation to hire, missus Lovie Routing, trip bus driver, Sarah Locke. This is a return plus. As you know, Sarah drove the course once before, this is a hire. Sarah is a route bus driver. Shanna, Breininger, hire as middle school ECA treasurer. Again, Laurie, a recommendation to hire as the elementary school special ed IA, and then
there are, a memo attached to the personnel sheet that is with regards to the stipends for the four staff members in Central Office taking on the operation the business operations for Blue River Career Center. That would be prorated from January to June 30. Right? Because it's we're gonna do this on an annual basis and then it'll reactivate to a lot of them. And then I guess we should go to six one five shortly. Yeah. Kevin Jackson is resigned as the eighth grade girls basketball head coach and then under six one six.
Recommendation to Bailey Stamper, hires an eighth grade girls basketball coach. You guys might remember Bailey played for several years ago and just finished school at Franklin. Nicholas Silveira, recommendation Hire as a volunteer as a sixth grade boys basketball assistant coach, and then there are a number of non athletic ECA club sponsors that are in the spreadsheet that is attached to blue sky. Look at tonight's date in red. Let me show you which one of those are. So that's like academic, small bowl, etcetera. Can I ask a question about that? Absolutely. Am I not able to answer that? What about the ones because it says who was in the role last year?
All the empties. What does that what does that mean? So those are clubs that were not actively run-in either one of those academic years. They didn't meet. So high school speech club didn't run-in '25. So, like, we don't have a plan to run it for '20 Not at the moment. I'll just wait, mister Chang. I'm just looking at the whole thing. Yeah. If we find the sponsor Okay. It it comes down to the sponsor. Yeah. If we have additional kids in the sponsor, then we can run it. But as of right now, It should look like it has a whole did it for a couple years, and then, it dissolved.
Yeah. It was in a case to keep it going. Yeah. I wasn't looking at that specifically. Only, like, when I look at 2526 versus 2425, there's a lot more empty spots in spa or, yeah, sponsors. So I was just wondering, was it that just lack of interest or lack of interest in sponsoring? So this look like a lot more. Because, I'll I'll put it out in front of me. Photography club, the speech and debate club, the Spanish club Mhmm. Two foreign language clubs.
Yeah. Two foreign language clubs. Those are, you know Yeah. Like, bring and then, like, middle school kinda the same thing. Academic Super Bowl, math bowl, science bowl. Just random manager that I got. Thank you. And the Blue River, does that pro I know you said it's prorated, but is that front loaded or is it currently reimbursed? It'll be a part of your biweekly pay. Okay. It'll be divided up over 26 pays in the calendar year. Okay. Yeah. So that The reason why prorated is because we started January 1, and then we
got we got a six month period. And then it runs July 1, June 3027. At that point, both Blue River and us will reevaluated. So it makes sense to prorate them through Okay. The first six months and then reload it for twenty six days in the school year. Yeah. I was making sure it wasn't. It goes in their bible paycheck. So they'll see that as a part of the bimonthly pay. When does it hit our funds to them? Or In this next payroll cycle. So yes. Your question is is their back pay gather or be it small?
Back pay retro back from each other. Is it coming out of I know it's coming out of our funds, but when it's when when are we getting that? Yes. When we got it? Yeah. Yeah. It's a cash flow issue. Yeah. So they pay us in June and they pay us in December. Okay. K. So in essence, we will float the cost of freight on doing the job for six months until we get reimbursed. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We're fine. We got cash to do that. Okay. Thank you for that. I see what you're asking. Sorry. Yep. Other questions about personnel? I'm just happy to answer whatever is appropriate in this photo.
So did we have someone to cover Kate Brown's resignation? We do. Mister I don't know. West, I can't ask you. We got conscious of this environment. Mister mister Brown was on leave from the beginning of the school year, and we've had, missus Scott has been in the in that position since the fall. Oh, okay. Yeah. I I guess probably the one out of what I can go into. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. I'm sorry. No. No. That's fine. Other questions? Does require motion a second? Move to approve. I have second. Second, make a Travis.
All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed? Motion carries seven zero. Thank you. Okay. Donations. There are three. The first is to Trident Central. Archery program from Caitlin Ward in an amount of $100. There's a second, from Knoff. Excuse me? Oh, there you go. I don't know if it's broke. Okay. Okay. Knopf has generously donated $2,500, to support our electric Grand Prix team startup. And then also from Knopf, a donation of $500 to the Treadon Central School wrestling
program. And I would say recommend that we graciously accept all three. So moved. Motion made by Dave. So That's true. All those in favor signify by saying aye. All those opposed, motion carries seven zero. Under 6.3, we have, one field trip that is both out of state and overnight. At the end of this month, our cheerleaders have the honor of going to Florida to cheer in the UCA Nationals, which is, I think, only the second time in school history. Correct? And so it's out of state.
It's overnight and, requires board approval. We obviously would love for our girls to go and represent and compete. I'll move to approve. I think it's your opportunity. I second that. Second name for Travis. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion carries seven zero. Very good. Okay. 6.4. I'm gonna turn it forward, missus Offenbaugh. She's gonna talk to you about our 2026 budget notice that has come back and then approved. Yes. This is our 1792 that was approved, for the 2026 budget.
We're gonna go through debt, and you can see the levy stay the same. That was our goal. That will accommodate, the new bond payment. We got that amortization. Everything is in alignment with that. For the ops, we have our levies a little bit higher due to the excess levy and that's kind of like it's a combination of things when they trued up. You know, if they were some delinquent taxes, it goes into our excess levy, which
gives us a little bit more. It was about $61,000 more in the ops. Total rate is point eight seven eight five, which is still 20¢ less than the state average. So, You wanna go to the slides there? It's alright. It's alright. And this is kind of a past history, where our rate has been. You know, we've always been kind of a rate driven with our budget and now with the SC 81, it shifted to the levy.
So, we're still in alignment. We are, we knew that's kind of where we would be. We've kind of expressed that with you guys earlier, and with Vice Miller and Stifel. Everybody kinda was on the same page with that. Please add anything. We talked about levy. Yes. You could see the history of the levy, for debt. The levy did not change from '25 to '26. Operations went up at 60, 61,000 due to the excess levy.
You can see we got a little increase on the final number. You know, do more with less is our philosophy. We anticipate that to go down more, don't we, for future? Yeah. We'll talk a little bit more in the board of finance meeting on this and dive a little deeper. Probably one thing that if I can would mention, this is a this is about a $50,000 increase. So this this look. This represents what we're truly asking them what we need to do. It's extra dollars.
That's less than a 1% increase. So that's far below, inflation. If you look at, you know, a $600,000 increase over four years, that's about 3.2% on average. So again, that's on par with inflation or maybe slightly lagging. So, I think very explainable, very defensible levy increases. That's the ask, so to speak, to our to our community. And, again, we'll dive a little deeper in that here after the regular meeting. We get into the board plan.
Thank you. Yeah. This is the final report for December. Education, we ended in a slight deficit about $50,000. Still in range of our benchmark, this is kind of where we anticipated we will be. Debt, you can see the bond payments were made. The good news is our twenty ten bond last payment, so I'm very happy about that one. Our cash balance, you'll be seeing that kind of decrease as old debt drops off and new debt comes on. We can only carry 50% of cash balance for bonds that are prior 2014 and
right now we only have two. So everything else is we can only carry 15% of the cash balance. So we will see a change in that moving forward. Operations, we actually ended up a little had a little surplus, by a $100,000. We ended up I know. I'm not even looking into the audience. He's giggling like a little kid on Christmas. Not even looking. So yeah. We we did what we were intended to do.
We said no a lot as anybody in this audience could tell you. But it was good news because the three accounts, we ended up with just about $50,000 more if you take what we lost in Ed at it from ops. Rainy day, no activity. School lunch, we had, you know, our state reimbursement and normal expenditures. We did have a freezer. We lost about $500 worth of food, which wasn't enough to claim insurance.
Our freezer went hell over great. So I know that expense is coming. So, you know, they build up the food for January because December was a short month. They tried to get rid of everything, hence $500 of food is minimal compared to what we normally have. We are we are maintaining we're doing really well in the lunch. We are not losing. We're a slight gain, but every time we do, then something goes. I think the dishwasher went down today. Is it all in the same building? This one, the high school freezer, middle school.
This was sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry. Is what? Evans Creek. Elementary. Sorry. I hear break. So anyway, we're we're maintaining in school lunch. Any questions? Thank you. No. Thanks. Okay. Bye. Okay. And the for board members, who wants to be the first one on the end, Pat? Happy New Year. Good luck for the rest of the semester. I think we're off to a great start for this, twenty six school year. I wanna congratulate I wanna say all of them. I wanna congratulate the boys and the girls, most of the basketball teams on their
county championships. So congratulations to those. Happy New Year. That's all I have. Happy New Year. Keep with the trend. Go up to the cheerleaders. And, Brooke, thank you for serving as president past year and and being willing to take it on again and lead us for the next year. And happy birthday to you. Thank you. Thank you for your birthday. Just congratulations to all of the folks up here that have decided to stay in their positions or switching to other areas. I have had a chance, to watch the wrestling team. And I know when, years ago when my kids were in wrestling, it was a
really big program. And it's so nice to see, you know, the the wrestling, program advance to where they're at. I don't know what their record is as far as, you know, the teams or or anything like that, but it's just nice to see. It's it is an individual sport, but it is also a team sport. And I know for my kids, it made a huge difference in the way they look at things, so I'm a big supporter of wrestling. And then, thanks for your donations.
It's great to see you come off to contributing to our school, and I think that's it. Happy New Year and great invitation. I'm so glad you're here. Yeah. Happy new happy New Year, everyone. Congrats to Zoe Gray on, winning, girls regional champ in, wrestling, and then she is going to be wrestling in state on Friday, I believe. So, that's amazing. And, yeah. So Yeah. Just echo, I think, everything else that everyone said, with, county champs last weekend.
We love for cheer. Thank you for the donations. I think we're blessed to a good start of the semester. I would say whatever at least for a month. So now and, and, yeah, thanks for calling to serve again in various roles. We don't have that really pulling you without. And for all of you for all the time that it takes to be on these various committees because I I know that it takes some extra time that's not always seen. So thank you for being willing to serve in various capacities. Oh, and thank you, Tammy. I wish I had your brain.
You're just so you're so good at what you do, and we're really blessed to have you. So thank you so much. You've captured it all. I wanna speak one in that next section. Okay. Great. You like to adjourn this. Alright. We'll take a motion to adjourn the regular meeting. Motion to adjourn. Motion made by Travis. Second. Second made by Dave. All of the commissioners in the back by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? You bring in a meeting in your seventh year. So then we will open the board of finance annual meeting. Yes. K. And then we need to say not only is the president of board of finance,
which is typically Historically, this board and previous boards have done the president and secretary of board of finance are also who serve as president and secretary. Is everyone good with that? And we can just vote on those together if You you can do that, everybody. You can do that, man? You can do it. If if anyone has any suggestions otherwise, then we can do that. Do you want me to be you're way Oops. Sorry. Much smarter and the the monies than I am. But it I think I I feel like that was last year.
Yeah. We we we broke tradition. Oh, yeah. You guys can do it already. Yeah. So if Shay wants to stay, then we can just keep the course as is if everyone's okay with that. We'll keep those together. Doing all of my hard work. Yeah. That's fine. I got you today. Okay. So what we'll do is we'll just vote on these together. Yeah? Alright. So, gonna take a motion and a second for myself to serve as president of the board of finance and then Shay to serve as secretary of board of finance. Or is the motion a second? So moved. Motion made by Sam.
Second. Second made by Wilson. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed. Motion carries 07/00. Of 2025 to the end of the year. The top part is out of our main account number. It shows our monthly interest of $94,008.53 69. And then we have our $1,000,000 CD, and we've been running it three months. That's been the best interest rate. And you can see we got about 39, almost $40,000, and the total is $1.34
$4.50. I did look last year. In 2024, we actually made we hit $1.93, and it was mainly in the top half of our account. So not the CD kinda stayed the same. But in 2023, we only made 80,000. So we are moving in the right direction. And once we get through the audit and being settled down, we're gonna reevaluate and see if we might be able to do some more things. So, try to be creative and earn extra money.
Any questions on that? Is it still trending that in a, CD, the three month is still the highest or is it far? Okay. Yeah. And that's the only time I really look at it is every three months because I can't do anything out with them. So, and then I checked a couple other things, and I wish we could go longer because we had to fill out all that paperwork just for three months. But, like I said, I it made me feel better looking at 2023 when we're not we weren't making anything.
So thank you, mister Hope, for forcing me to look into that. Alright. We'll reevaluate this top piece. We'll do a cash flow analysis. I think that there is the ability to move some of the money that we hold, you know, liquid that's forced here and move it and tie it up a little bit longer range and generate and generate some higher interest off of it. I think I think we've got some excess cash sitting in that earning what it could. We'll let the data take us to where it takes us and not assumptions, but I've got a pretty good feeling with that.
We'll do that in this first quarter. Okay? Anything else? That's all I have. K. The next part of this, is is geared by statute. There's a the DUAF, the Distressed Unit Appeal Board was created, several years ago. I'll give you guys a little bit of history on this. And Muncie Community Schools and Gary Schools went through their troubles, I'll say, and the state took them over. There was a an effort made to codify best practice as it relates to financial
reporting from administrations to the boards. Right? And so out of the DUAD, the Distress Unit Appeal Board, came fiscal indicators, which are simply just metrics to use to gauge the financial health of the school district. There isn't anything, revolutionary about the fiscal indicators. In fact, I would submit to you that responsible school districts have always done this to some degree in different fashions. What this did is it standardized it across the board for the state, and that's a fundamentally good thing. So we're all speaking the same language using the same nomenclature.
Right? So what I'm gonna show you is what is prescribed to us, by state statute to do once a year annually, the superintendent will designate, needs to do your financial report to the board using the fiscal indicators. If you go to this website, you'll see the indicators for our district. What you won't see is 25 data. Okay? Because we've not had our form nine or your end report approved yet it's under review. Correct. What missus Autumn all might do for the purposes of this meeting is we go
in and we take our 25 data that we've submitted, and we update the fiscal indicators manually to show you tonight. Okay? So what you're gonna see is 25 fiscal indicator data. It won't show up on that website until our four lines approved, but we we know we know what our numbers are. Does that make sense to you guys? Okay. So we're gonna oh, what we're doing there? We're going to the fiscal indicator website. That's all we're doing. Okay. Chris. Yeah. Aaron, how do I blow that up? Like that?
Yep. There we go. Tech savvy, man. Okay. First thing, you guys have seen this. This is, this is our ADM. This is our enrollment trend. This is dated back to 2008. For some of the longer serving members of the board, you'll remember that we had, our demographic study done in 2021. Okay? You guys heard me talk about this at various different times. You know we are seeing and experiencing an enrollment decline. There's nothing surprising in this, it's baked in the numbers when you look at the 2020 census numbers.
That's true for us, It's true for every school in the state of Indiana largely. It's true for every state in this country and frankly it's true for every country in the Western world. Replacement values, birth rates are below replacement values. We have fewer child living age women having fewer children. Okay? In our community, in the state, this country, and in the entire Western half of the globe. Right? In fact, our experience is actually pretty good in comparison. So what we know is we are going to continue to downtrend and enroll in
about two percent a year. Here we said this is the fall of this year, 1932. Here's where we're headed, you guys. Now this becomes critical when we start talking about our education fund revenue because that is based off the number of students that occupy our buildings. We are blessed in that we have the benefit of a high out of district transfer rate that fills in the gaps. So that that it doesn't offset this. Okay? But it doesn't mute the the impact of it to a degree like Hickey. Okay? Now and she and I will talk about this as we go through, but this
is not a revelation to us. This is not a surprise. We've known this for many years. We plan strategically for it. It's why we've been able to make moves two and three years ahead of the game because we know that this is who we are going to be. You'll see we'll hit a low mark in 2029. That's that's gonna be below water point. And then there will be a little bit of an uptick. Interesting that I don't know. Maybe because it's just from here. But this year's kindergartners were born in 2020. During COVID. Right?
Now if you're of my age and you remember the blizzard is '78, there's always a joke about Russian babies. Right, Rhonda? There were no COVID baby booms. What you see in the data is very clear. There were fewer births and divorce rates went through the roof. Mhmm. Because people locked together for five months figured out they didn't particularly care for one another. Okay? So our kindergarten cohort is small compared with what it has been traditionally, and that's true for almost everyone around us. Okay? There was no baby boom coming out of COVID.
There was a divorce boom. Mhmm. Right? So we're not gonna see, like, this huge, you know, uptick in the next couple years. We're just we're not. Alright? So, you know, we are who we are. The this is us. Questions about it. We've talked about this in in the past. For this year, woah. That is our number for this. 1332. What what does this project do? You remember? Because we we went up. Yeah. We we we were projecting 1327. Yeah. Yes. I we gained it by five kids. Yeah. Eight. Yeah.
Five. 1330. Okay. We thought it was gonna be 1327. Yeah. Yeah. It I I get Jared credit. He's he's pretty good with math, man. Like, he's on, you know. And and it's a little there's a little bit art to not science in it with the transfer piece. Right? Like, you know, you know, how do you how do you capture that? And it's it's a swag scientific guess. Like, sounds but it's pretty accurate to be honest with you. We've seen some houses for sale, so hopefully they're having they have kids. Yeah. I mean, I don't wanna digress too far from this, but just to remind you
guys, and when we, you know, when we had that done, had that strategic plan done in '21, one of the things that doctor, Sabinski talked about is we have to take a morning pronged approach to managing it all, you guys. Okay? So it's a it it's not accurate to say that we could build our way out of this. Okay? So you could have an influx of residential development in this district. And the truth matters is we could not build even if you wanted to. And there is a debate. Right? We know this in the community about do you even want to do that. But the truth of the matter is is you can't build your way out of
it. You can't build them fast enough, quick enough, and enough numbers to really move the needle appreciably on that. Right? You just couldn't do it. It's not feasibly possible. So you can't build your way out of it. Does that mean you shouldn't do any kind of residential development? No. That's not that's not true. Right? It's disingenuous to say that it's the only thing that matters. It's equally disingenuous to say it doesn't matter at all. It's not that's not true. Scoldy locks somewhere in the middle. Okay? So there is I'm gonna have to do this without sounding important, but I'm gonna sound perfect.
There will be an uptick in the change in ownership of in district homes about 2031, 2030 timeframe. And again it's built on demographics. What's going to happen is the last batch of baby boom generation homeowners are either gonna go into assisted living or they're gonna pass on to the great beyond and their home will be sold. And so in 2030, there will be a slight increase in the sales of the
industry homes. If we're fortunate, it'll be young families with school aged children who can afford to buy in our market. And we all know that buying into this market for a young couple is extraordinarily new. K? But there will be in 2030. Will it fix our problems? No. And anyone that tells you it will is either naive or they're misleading. Okay. They put they will not. There will be a slight update. That make sense? K. So we can't do our way out of it. Right? Maybe boom things are gonna turn over eventually, but long short of it is we
plan strategically based off that reaction. K? Other questions about getting here? Would there be anything that happens that was out there, that would make us want to redo this analysis in the future, like, to see if it will change in a big way? You sense it's gonna be there in 2030. Right? I mean, because that's not speculation. That's hard numbers. I suppose if there was an explosion of residential development, a la Mount Comfort, Hamilton
County kind of thing in between census taking my behooves to do it. I don't foresee that for a number of reasons. So and I think I think this is pretty accurate. It would be this it's close enough. Is there like, what about some of the other smaller school districts that are not as in good financial standing as us? But would that even require I mean, we would have enough interest. Right? Like, you could just bake that in pretty easily? You mean if some of our competition went out of business?
Correct. Some sort of Yeah. I mean, it would depend who and and how far from here. You know? We talk about this amongst our leadership team. Let's not delude ourselves into thinking there are geniuses in their run because starting with me can assure you there are none, including and starting with me. Right? Dumb luck or good fortune in 1962, 1963, someone had either the wisdom or the good luck to build a single campus in exactly the right geographic location that allows
us to compete and win with our near neighbors. You move us five to 10 miles to the Southwest, and we're not nearly as smart as people seem to think that we are. Okay. So, like, let's let's let's know who we are. Okay? We're the benefactors of unintended decision making sixty years ago. Not smart enough to understand that and parlay it into a competitive demand. Maybe is the answer to your question. I think we're a long way of edge in that happening on any kind of
scale that makes it down. I think it's coming. These guys have heard me talk about that. In the next twenty years, there will not be five high schools and four school districts in Shelby County. Our enduring challenge is to make sure we're one of the two or three that remain stable. Most likely, everyone in this room will be gone. And I think that's a long way down. Alright. Other questions? Okay. Let's keep on. Okay. So, look, ADM figures into my direct like, it correlates. It's not one to one in education because there's some miscellaneous revenue, but it's about
as close to a one for one correlation as you're gonna get. This goes back to 2019. This is the state funding per pupil, right? This is dollars per head. So you can see on an annual basis what's happened, then you can see the average over this time frame. The state and the representatives of the state are quite fond of talking about historic investments in education, and and that and that is true. That is true. Now are the historic investments in public education? Well, the devil's voice in the details, isn't it?
So when we talk about this as an industry based on baby boom generation numbers that no longer exist. Right? In other words, like, the customer base is smaller. Well, it's true that the support of this is larger than it's ever been as well because you have public money, private institutions that didn't exist previously. You have virtual and online. You have homeschool. You have traditional public schools. So we have a lot more people competing for fewer customers than we ever had. Yes. There have been historic investments in education, but not necessarily in public education.
And when you look at us locally, which you can see is over this period going back to 2019, we're keeping pace at best with inflation. Yeah. So there's no great windfall for Trident Central Schools. We certainly appreciate it with the state's efforts. I'm not gonna imply it or not, but I also think it's nice to have the truth to say that we're getting bankroll. And, you know, we're not an IPOB, just like I said. Okay? When you look at our actual revenue, you see this. So this is our actual revenue into the education fund on that 2019. It's a very modest 1.68%
interest over that time period. And you can see it fluctuates. A lot of it has to do with the ABM, you guys. You can see our ABM up, down, up, down. And so, essentially, what was happening is the per head increase in funding and the decrease in the number of heads, it's just about wash. It's about it's about wash and so on. Okay? To where we're just a little bit ahead of the game through this time period. And that's who we're going to be for the foreseeable future. K?
So that's us. That's who we are in. In the screen, for example, they're they're really talking. This is us. This is who we will continue to be. You can see those numbers distilled out here a little bit easier for me. So, you know, '25, we saw about a 4% increase per bed, but we saw a decrease of one and a half percent. So when you look at total money, you're slightly behind. Questions about that? Again, predictive, measurable, repeatable. Right?
We know this. We know where we're at. We can plan it accordingly, and that's exactly what this is. Alright. So What about today? Just real quick. Any recent updates on money, the revenue following the kid? Transverse. Transverse fees. Yeah. Are you talking about property tax dollars on the kid? I don't think that's probably, that they're more and, well, this is a short session. So, I mean, they're they're out in the February.
It's a non budget year. Right? So probably not because there's not the ability to fund such an initiative, initiative, and there's not time inside the legislature to to give it its proper due. Could could you see that revisited? In '27. In '27? Yeah. I I think you'll see that. All those other things because they, they do it in the budget years usually because it takes money to fund these issues. Right? They're not gonna open the budget up for sure. To be honest with you, and with the camera on, I'm probably buying a ton,
but their focus is to get back to the home district, try to run for reelection, To to be clear, I mean, like, they're trying to run for their primary is in Mac, so they wanna get done in February and get home start all day. Alright. So, again, I think you're yeah. I don't think you'll see it this year. I think you will. What about the federal education closing and moving that to the state? Is that anything? Yeah. It would help us. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much money doesn't trickle down because of overhead. I would much rather go to DOE traveling, but state government agencies do as opposed
to bureaucratic behemoth in DC and then have the old office go. And then try wanting to hire a person to facilitate that. Is that what I'm interested in? Yeah. Towards it would be more towards the administrative. You're talking about from the state? That 1423 bill that they had put through. Yeah. I I I can't speak to that, Karen. I don't know. Okay. I think there's a world that exists in which moving federal monies down to the state level via block grant and acknowledging that home rule and local control has a
long history of being very successful is probably a fundamentally sound move. Shall we see that? I don't know. Maybe other questions about that. No? Okay. So, you know, that's the one side of the fence that's state money. That's state collection of sales tax trade, and it's given to us per kid. And then we've got this whole other mechanism of funding that's our local property supported dollars. And and that's what pays for operations. Okay? That you're gonna talk about and our debt service. That's money that we derive from our local property owners.
So one of the fiscal indicators is what you see with certified net assessed valuation. Right? So you can see our district's past history going back to 2011 of certified AD. What we're seeing here is why SEA one was enacted. Right? You saw this exponential growth from 2022 to the current year. What we are going to see in the coming years is a decline going back
to these levels. And we are actively planning for this. If you guys remember when, you know, when we're talking about the the most recent bond issue. Right? Blue program and and Eric from my son and Barry, Greg Gardner talked about what I see a one's gonna do. That's why we had them project. Our AV is gonna trend down. That's largely out of our control, and we'll talk about that. Right? We'll stop them all here a little bit later, like, why we should really move the conversation more towards the levy versus rate because we don't really have the ability to control it anymore.
It's controlled by state level decisions that may be how much money we ask for from our public levy. We have direct control of it. Okay? K. So we're gonna see this continue to trend down over the next several years. K. So let's talk about levy. This is the actual dollars that we've asked over time from our tax paying property of income. This is what the ask is. Right? We're we're fundraising, which is what we are doing. And you can see that what we've done is we've tried to keep that that
levy, that request fairly level. We can't do it at zero. Like, that's not possible. Right? But we've tried not to have it ratchet up. That's conventional. You can see going back to, like, 2021, 2022, it has increased. That a lot of that had to do with AB. Again, our rate on shifts. Next, our rate stayed pretty level. We were rate focused. AB was going up. And that that's when they changed that formula. Right? Yes. Yeah. And they changed how things were categorized. So assessment practice Yeah. Is is dictated by the state.
And probably the one that, you know, I think if I can remember back, you can help me out with policy analytics number. But, like, 13% of our property mix is is ag. Right. K. So agricultural assessment is based off a number of things. One of them is is get rid of grain pricing. Right? And so when grain pricing is good, right, you see that trend up with a b, and that represents a little bit of this time frame. When you look at our rate, you can see that during that time frame, we tried a whole rate level.
And so those levy increases were not a function of our rate. It was a function of the AP going up. Right. We were managing to rate back in those days. What we're doing now starting with this current budget that you just got to report from the softball on is we're not managing to the rate as much as the back as we're managing to a levy. Alright? This is just good information to have even for us to be able to articulate this at the stock. Points. Yeah. So the our rate our rate will go up.
Everybody's rate in this entire state of Indiana is going to go up because the 80 is gonna go down. Right? So, I mean, I think the example is two times six is twelve, two times four is twelve, six times two is 12. There's a lot of ways to get to 12. Mhmm. Okay? And if you don't control the first number, would you control the second? Right? So we don't control a b. We control what the rate is to a degree, but what we really need to control, like, whether it's 12. We're trying to get 12 or not. And we need to start talking more about, hey. We wanna be at 12 versus this is what the rate is.
Two, three, four, whatever. K. Did you track them with me, guys? Yeah. K. Questions about that. We're gonna move to cash balances. K. I don't wanna defer to you here. You're gonna run us through our historic cash balance. Is that right? Okay. So this, shows going back to 2011. You can see how we've grown 2020. They pipe this spike there. COVID money, We got all that and then, started spending down our cash balance. And we're gonna maintain between, '24, '25 that area, which is what did you say?
24%. Yeah. Let me go to the next slide. Yeah. Yeah. That I like this one better. With the spike in 2020, it shows the 37.1, and we've been, keeping our cash balance at 24. 25 would be the max. Can I get Yes, please? That's that's showing you cash balance as a percentage of expenditure. Alright? And so to your point, we wanna try and live in this world Mhmm. Not in this world. Yeah. Right? That that's too too high.
It's too high. And if you go back to the last one, that kinda backs up the, since this is Ed, Ox, and Rainey, you can see last year, 2024 was $3.07 $0.03, and this twenty twenty five three, there's our 50,000 increase. Kinda backed that up. It's kinda good to see where we we've been to know where we're going. And I think, like, the ABM, we always estimate all on that when we're doing all this. So when we get those even if it's five extra kids, it's it's a bonus.
So And that 24% was these three combined? Yes. Okay. So that was yeah. Yeah. So this is the total expenditure in the three accounts, which is for us because we don't expend that or any edits, only on the Edmons. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see the expenditure history here in the chart. So we spent less Mhmm. In '25 than we did in '24. Oh. And that's that that was intention and what was intention again for what? Because we have to know what's going on with Adrian. Right. And we know what's going on with Adrian.
And so we're we're happy to to live smaller. Almost. Yeah. Yeah. Questions about that? Anything else you wanna have for me to the last slide? Okay. So let let let's talk about who we're gonna be. Because we know who we've been. Right? We know David's right. Who we gonna be? We're gonna we're gonna continue to decline at a 2% rate on 8AM. We're not gonna end up getting it. K? We're not running that classrooms anytime soon. We're in a tremendously better position than many of our near neighbors.
And, again, because we have the good fortune of being located where we can go out and compete for families in a in a way that's meaningful. Not everyone has that advantage. That being said, we're we're gonna continue to get smaller as you saw from the chart. Basic grant funding, probably at best, modest 2% increase. There's not gonna be tremendous windfalls of funding in future years from the state. They're not gonna have the ability to do one, but I also don't think they have a political will to do it either.
Their initiatives are elsewhere. So we're Modest at best increases, probably 2%. Max levy growth quotient. This is the maximum amount that the levy for operations is allowed to grow on any year to year basis. We're gonna go on the idea that it's frozen at four. I believe in the next session, we'll see an effort made to lower that. I think there's a very clear effort, intentional effort to restrict property tax levies for operations for schools, the ability for schools to bond and borrow money.
It is undeniable. The intent of the powers to be is to restrict that. And so we're gonna see that that's harder and harder and harder. 4% might be optimistic. It may be something more like three or three and a half. And then what we know is that our certified debt evaluation will decrease noticeably, which means our education operations revenue is gonna lag inflation for the foreseeable future. K? So we're gonna we're gonna have to be smart. We're gonna have to be intentional. We're gonna have to be strategic to be able to do what we do.
And I I have no reason to believe that we can. Again, because there isn't any mystery to any of this. We we know what our circumstances are. We know how to operate the place given that and provide opportunities to our kids that we want them to have and deserve. But it's gonna have to do with intentionality. It's gonna be very well thought out because the margin for error is very small. Mhmm. It's very small. That's quite what feels good. Yeah. So we we we are in considerably in the better shape than me.
And and I'll I'll submit this. You and I were in the summit not, like, a month ago. There will be somewhere on the vicinity of 45 to 50 school referendums running the next general election. K? Because they can't do anything else. We're nowhere near having to do that, nor will we ever be. Okay? So many of your neighbors are gonna run. They're not going to be successful. You cannot run it again until the next general election. So if you run it in twenty sixth and fail, you gotta wait till twenty
eighth. A lot of people are gonna run on the '26 knowing they're going to fail so they can rally the troops for '28. If you wait till '28, you bomb her out. Right? Now you're sunk till thirty. Maybe turn the lights out because the party's over. Okay? So, like, it's not as great as this feels. We're in way better shape than almost anyone around us because we're not for that point. We gotta be smart in our local decision making. K? These guys have offered that, had to be into them in that one. But it's not kind of rearrange furniture on the Titanic.
Like, we're good. We're fine. Okay? Can't believe ourselves when thinking the situation isn't the situation. We just don't respond about it. We're not gonna have to run a referendum, though, not many times soon. Many others are. Any other questions? K. Thank you. Thank you. I think that's I think that's it. Do I have to motion to adjourn? Yeah. Yeah. I actually try. A motion to adjourn anyone? So moved. Motion made by Sam. I'll second it. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed. The board finance meeting is here. K. So, you got it, doc.