##VIDEO ID:lnHbiqAwKQc## like to call the weightly school committee January 8 2025 to order uh it's 602 and first thing on our agenda is to uh review approve the minutes from uh November 12th I move to approve the minutes for November 12 okay I'll second okay any second it all in favor I find statement please all right so uh I did email you the expense reports uh we do have some budget line overages things that we've talked about in the past were still in good shape for the year and there's no major concerns right now um 29 warrants were reviewed and signed electronically totaling $11,250 two and on the school choice report um just a reminder that we do have a student student who is school choiced into the district that does have some special needs so those are being paid from school choice and will receive that reimbursement back um almost dollar for dollar so those accounts that are over there um that'll write Itself by the end of the year on the general fund there's nothing major really to go over but if you have questions I am certainly happy to take them anything no Andrew you have anything for the okay thank you um princi report please um I I'ma later but I wanted to thank in handle for Their donation to weight Elementary School are always appreciative of their support um Monty's march on November 18th Monty Bel Monty came to wait for an assembly about food insecurity this year was the 15th annual Monty's March not here but his March Monty a radio personality who begins a 43 mile Journey on foot from Springfield to Greenfield to raise awareness and funding to address food insecurity in the valley for several years now Mrs Appel and our third grade students have followed his inspiration by planning our own Mont march on November 26 the weight Le Police Department once again partnered with us to allow us to fill the cruiser with all the donated items um I think that's maybe the kids favorite part is loading stuff into the Cruis um this year we filled it to the brim and then on March on November 27th the entire School marched on the perimeter of the school which if you stick with the perimeter and you do it twice it's a mile wow holding signs and Ching about food and security uh I'd like to thank Mrs EP and on the fourth graders for all their hard work and I'd also like to thank all the families who support this and our other Service Learning initiatives that our students engage in and on December 9th we held our weightly Winter concert we treated to performances by students in every grade under the instruction of Miss Gibson our general music a teacher our strings and band students also put on an awesome performance this is the first year since Co it feels like we're back to full strength with our strings and Band program so it was wonderful to see that was good yeah um for the last few years we lost quite a few kids because during covid people return instruments because you're not going to keep renting an instrument and then kids never got back to it so those first couple years was it was a little squeaky and there were not a whole lot of Tears on the stage but it was nice to see we had a hard time getting a out there so that was great we have really a great music program yeah really sound any ideas what we GNA what you guys are going to do with the $4,000 from Yankee Candle any ideas yet not sure yet okay you guys could accept that donation now while we're talking about it if you want to rather than come back okay I make a I'll make a motion to accept the $4,000 donation from Yankee Candle second all in favor Henry yeah sorry my mic froze y with that knife in your hand very adamant about that that was perfect okay um uh I don't see any public on tonight no anybody new okay um I guess we're going to talk about the budget yes FY 26 budget are you going to the 615 so I'm going to um Henry as I mentioned earlier because you were in the room but I have to leave at 6:15 just to do uh to run over to a meeting virtually to in Deerfield for CPA so I just G to do my quick I'm gonna jump ahead to do my quick thing which is the desie we are doing a Desi review District review I did send out the F AQ which I thought does a good job of answering the questions but desie basically picks about a dozen districts in the state which is a very small amount the fact that we were chosen um is an honor not really it's a lot of work for us um and Jesse uses a third party um contractor to come and actually do the audit it'll be the first week in March and when as that date approaches they will be asking for school committee members obviously there's 24 of you so not going to meet with everybody but a few of you um it's all set up the schedule and then you guys can play plug in um but I don't know what days yet just I know it's that first week of March um but meanwhile they're looking at everything from you know I showing to prepare you know all our budgets from the all of our all five of our districts for the last three years plus all budget presentations plus so they're looking at everything and for us the uh the amount of the uh multiple five times this five times that five times that plus all of our you know curriculums all of our our professional development plans what we did you know our ilt meeting agendas um you know everything um um they're looking at everything that we do so um it's a lot of work pulling all that together um and last year Pioneer did it I looked at their report and I probably you know it's one of those things it's an audit I probably you probably tell us where probably tell you the majority of things they're going to find even before they do it but um this is um was not something we could opt out of okay so that's what's coming and if you have more questions I read the fact FAQ I handed out and kind of thank you do you have anything in superintendence report you want to touch on first um yeah uh the only thing I'm gonna add is so um you know we're in talk about that kind of stuff I do want to add I did just send out a a alarming email that we did have a data breach um so this is not on the agenda it normally would be on the agenda this kind of thing um but it was literally today I found out about it they sent emails yesterday which started us investigating are we one of those schools um it's from you know power school so you can check you be able to see that they apparently um were able to um they're not saying they paid Grant somewhere so I don't want to miss say that but somehow they were able to get the person who took the information to destroy it so um so we are monitoring with everybody else who uses it it's a nationwide system um to see if that's true of people's data um that's out there we do not store financial data such as Social Security so employees are listening um Social Security or other financial information however names addresses and phone numbers were pulled now there's no um information that that information that was pulled was then sent out but you know we're relying on a company who I mean I'm BL they're going they're doing PR as well um so we're going to keep an eye on things and make and kind of work with our other schools to make sure that the information didn't go anywhere again they didn't go into our servers they went into um the tech help desk of their servers or something of that sort so um should we be worried about the power school emails that we get I get Emil no so those are originated from us sending them to you it really is about you know the concern is you know people are sensitive information a lot of our information in life is out there but nobody likes that to be um out there there is you know things that could be considered sensitive you know um a students you know students age and like basically their classroom assignment is in there like you know so like some of that stuff you wouldn't you know you wouldn't go and share with everybody um it isn't for far as we know isn't out there in the world it was taken out and then destroyed right so it wasn't distributed on the internet as far as we know at this time and so you know we are obligated to share that to you as soon as we find out that changes and so are they um so that's kind of where it stands again that's hot off the press I just finished writing the letter about two hours ago or even less um so I'm sure people have a lot of questions and I might have to do a clarifying email in the next few days if there are um more information it feels right now it's buttoned up but I'm just telling you I'm not be more I'm going to I'm going to keep an eye on it and Scott Paul is keeping an eye on the AR Tech director you sent out an email to the entire Community yes you got both a school committee email and then you also got one from the entire community and such so thanks check the last two hours all right so if you want to go so I'm gonna just be in the other room okay and ch's going to talk about the our wonderful FY 26 budget I am G to talk about our budget it's wonderful need to go serious fine I can take the brunt of this for right now so um this is just informational tonight obviously we can share thoughts and ideas but we're not making any decisions so I'm presenting to you what has been discussed with um Administration so Chrissy Darius and I and then Chrissy solicits feedback from you know whoever she needs to within the building to present principal's requests you'll you'll hear that they're very minor um in quantity but not necessarily dollar value um and we will have some decisions to make moving forward in the February meeting uh so what we're looking at right now for level Services is an 11.07% increase over FY 25 uh some of this should not be new information most of it should not be new information because we talked about this when we made some budget decisions last year so we used $40,000 of our remaining Esser funds to offset fy2 those are no longer available so we're automatically starting off the budget season with nearly a 2% increase over the prior year just because of that we also used 40,000 of our rural aid from last year to offset this year's budget so that's another 2% so just the grant adjustment alone is almost four of the 11% do we expect to get that um eight again 40,000 Beth's question was was similar to mine yeah so we do have a rural Aid allocation we won't have any more Esser money but there is rural Aid so I will talk about that as one of our options to reduce what I always do when we start the budget process and actually when this was started in October we did not know our rural Aid allocation yet so what I like to do with funds that we don't feel um 100% secure about is add them then back into to start and then we can back off so um it's not quite the same amount you'll see as we go through the process but it will help bring down the 11% can you remind me what the percentage increase ask we had for this current budget season was here yeah let me just look it up really quick um the other thing with rural Aid and right now we are feeling pretty secure about it but there was talks at the state level uh early fall about Revenue Decline and 9C cuts and Rural Aid would be one of the things along with regional transportation and circuit breaker that could get cut so while we're talking about yes let's potentially use our rural Aid there's still six months of the fiscal year to get through from the state and there doesn't seem to be concern right now so I certainly don't want to alarm anyone but it's not a fund that we should really get in a habit of relying on a specific amount um if it comes through it comes through uh let's see Henry what was your question here we were at 5.57 over FY 24 thank you you're welcome all right so uh the next adjustment that I made uh involved Early Childhood revolving account uh if you'll recall from our conversations in the past we have seen a decline over the last several years in tuition coming in and that is not because our our early childood program is not full it is because we've seen an increase in Special Needs um which is great that we can service those students at the youngest age to hopefully um catch some of those things moving forward but it also means that we're not having as many families actually paying tuition for students to be enrolled in the program so that was roughly another 2% adjustment I basically moved an IIA off so that we could maintain some revolving fund balance um I'm anticipating that it will be minimal um moving into the next year like maybe $15,000 which isn't a lot of money if we have an emergency come up for particularly special education Early Childhood needs and we don't know what next year's early looks like at this point unless you have info from cam we always end up full it's just the piece we don't know about is um how many students would be tuition who has needs and who doesn't do you know how many places you need to fill in that like who's moving on to kindergarten and how many you will have open there are um we have a record number of preschoolers moving up there 12 kids moving School up to so that depending on needs that could help a little bit it's also great like to have that many kids who went to preschool here and St into kindergarten that's awesome F and we'll have fewer students who haven't had a school experience yet so it's helpful as as soon as we have some rough enrollment numbers which we should have in February because I believe enrollment is already open I think I saw that on my website um so as soon as we have info you know we'll take that into consideration it might be able to help us if we did have um all those slots filled with paying families um so another significant expense and again this is repeat from prior years uh we have reti IR expense which is a sick buyback which is contractual based on the teacher contract we are anticipating almost a $60,000 sick buyback next year I believe it's two yeah um $60,000 we're looking at you know roughly almost another 2 four six% right there so um all of these pieces are outside of our control at this point uh and I I think it's important for us to recognize that we're starting off the year in such a significantly difficult place before we even get to the actual expenses of the school and the sick buyback has to be done in one year yes there's nothing in the contract that says you know uh employees can defer or if we can't afford it budgetarily that people will be put into another fiscal year it says that they're paid out in the next fiscal year if they let us know by a certain date the date was remember it's usually early October yeah and these are actually I think one of them was a retiree from last year that came in late in the year I remember submit her paperwork by October 1 so she had to wait right and then the second one is someone who's retiring at the end of this year who did get their paper can we find can we know who that is on Tamera or do we I'm just asking I think so I think it's full ackn I mean it must be if they they're going to re PA oh really a tough shoes to fill okay so with that said um moving on to regular budget expenses we do have a cola increase in for all employees school-based central office custodians cafeteria workers and then we also have a placeholder in for um negotiations so we are negotiating currently the teacher and IIA contracts um we have a number in there that Darius and I hope will be agreeable to both sides um I don't I don't want to disclose what that is at this point but we do have a figure in there uh so that's been accounted for I did make a wage adjustment for the retiree that we're anticipating this year um it was a veteran teacher so we think we'll be able to bring someone in at a lower amount and we saved about $20,000 there based on what we currently have budgeted uh the other difficult part is always when enrollment goes up it impacts our cost share percentage for central office so weightly did have a little bump in enrollment um whether it was here or at Frontier and that is impacting the cost share so we're about a half a percent up in the cost share for expenses that we split five ways between all five schools and then almost a full percent for things that are just split at the elementary level so that would be like the curriculum director The Early Childhood director and expenses related to them so that does have a pretty big impact when you're talking about a percent a half um in the cost share calculation other expenses are minor increases I had to increase the transportation based on the contract for Cola um we're now paying for water and sewer which we have not paid in the past so that's been added into the budget um and then we increased some it expenses based on contractual agreements for software that we use so that was about an $8,000 increase not really significant if we did not have all of those other factors that we previously discussed the budget would be in really good shape if we were just looking at Cola and then these minor expenses why are we not paying water and sewer um I would have to pull up the email for the exact details and I do have it I just don't remember off the top of my head exactly what happened but there was some agreement at some point between the town and the school that we were not paying a water and sewer e so we've never not in my time here at least somebody from the town realized it and now we're paying like what happened I can't imagine it's a huge it's about $2,500 well it's just water right I think there's probably um there might be some rate on there for have to look at the actual the sewer we and that comes out of the maintenance budget that we pay for I'm just asking had here last week this 2500 is just water the sewer is already in that se that'd be a good question to ask somebody so we definitely did talk about it I don't have it in an email I have um I remember frer so from Dan Dene uh it went to Wayne water commissioner email um Paul Ana and the charger collector Amy Shader so it says as I recall the water department plan was for the elementary school to receive water usage bills this year for the first time since it was built it does not explain why though the school's finalizing the budget blah blah blah blah blah um and then they Wayne responded back that he would guess between $2,000 and $2500 so a we must have a water meter out here somewhere that they can read then right sure yeah no idea so I can definitely try to find out more information and you know if you know anyone in the town that maybe might have more information to absolutely currently they granted Us free water for 35 years because that's this next year will be 35 years go to school so some sort of like start just wrap my head around that whole thing yeah the it expensive um so there are software agreements that we have for some of the things that we use in support of curriculum as well as like it could be Power School it could be um School spring is it school spring no um parent Square parent Square um the charges from these compan exactly so there's been inflation factors every year their rates go up and Scott Paul is recommending that we adjust the budgets to meet contractual agreements do you know roughly how much that um it was of the 8,000 to four maybe 3,000 um so the only other thing I want comment on in level Services is that the level service budget does include the 0.5 full-time equivalent math interventionists that we added last school year that we talked about being a one-year position we kept it in because we want to have that conversation as part of our budget process so that is in there currently um I want to say it's about a 38 maybe 36 or $38,000 salary so almost 2% you know 1.75 probably that person's working out well okay so that is the gist of level Services any other questions before we move on to principles request okay uh so the only thing from uh Chrissy requested this year is the need to add two additional IAS and that is to cover anticipated student needs um based on IEPs uh that will probably cost us about $66,000 which is slightly over 3% so when we take in level services and those principal office requests our total budget first draft is 14.28% over fiscal year 25 you hear that Henry all right oh with the two IAS requesting goes from 11 to 14 yep can I ask is this one of those IAS going to be for the new student coming in they're both for anticipated students okay okay that's then we we need them at this time say but at this time it's unclear what the program will be it could be five days full time and could be less we're trying to keep it in house correct with the extra I I mean the IAS are here for the services that they need right yeah yeah okay this would be an extra I in these classrooms individuals it' be two yeah they'd be one to Ones based on student IEPs okay all right so let's talk about this last piece here in the report so you asked about the relate allocation you can see on the bottom of the sheet currently the rural Aid allocation is $35,790 um and I did not update this sheet so that's on me so we might be somewhere around 33,000 but you can see we we dropped we went from 40 to 33 um the reason for that is that they have a formula based on density your population and your student population and they must not be considering us as dense where we fall in the um calculation compared to everyone else in the state if we did apply that to the budget if we had no other unforeseen expenses come up this year the budget's in really good shape as it stands you know we have no you know surprise special ed needs then we could use those funds to offset which would bring our number down by 1.7% so just under two um the next thing for us to consider is that we could request that the town help us pay the SI buyback expense out of outside of the budget so on a separate warrant article or if they had free cash available from this year uh or if they had other means in the past um they have paid for retirement benefits last year they paid for either it was last year year before they paid for one out of a special some of the money of money yeah uh so if we pull that 58,000 off that would drop us another 2.82% uh I did want to point out that we have had retirement benefit payouts in four of the last five budget cycles and the reason I want to point that out is that might be a conversation that we want to have with the town about putting a placeholder you know inflating our budget a little bit more um and I can look ahead to see where our staff is as far as longevity uh within the district and see if we think we have any upcoming retirements but when you have people year after year after year after year it makes sense to have it be part of your budget so that you're not always trying to find extra funds my understanding um from a message that we received from the Town Administrator is that weightly does not have a significant amount of new Revenue growth this year so it's going to limit what they have to go towards extra things when they certify free cash and figure out their budgets so um I'm not sure what position they're going to be in so either we're looking at asking for it in another way or we're talking about putting some portion of it on budget either way we're going to be asking that town to cover the 2.82% it's not like we're taking it out and it's going away it still has to be paid so um so just a comment here there's little room for additional reductions at the level service budget outside of the above mentioned options um and even with those changes level services will likely be around sixish if not a little bit higher percent increase if we were to AB rol and pull off the sick buyback so we're still at a number that's pretty high um and we might have to talk about how we be creative so what I mentioned in the next line is we talked about the need for those two new IA positions to cover anticipated student needs those would be oneto ones right now um the students aren't even enrolled yet so we're we anticipate they're coming but it might be a conversation that we have to have outside of budget season pull out those two IAS and then find ways to fund them later or having to be creative which would mean you know Chrissy has to do some magic and well during Co you were in the classroom all the time I'm not asking you to be in the classroom it would it would impact I in the classroom um but that's definitely something that we're going to have to consider because you know 66,000 is over 3% we we cannot present a 14% budget increase to the town even 11% is is way too high um and then the other thing that that I wanted to mention is that I am watching the school choice funds really closely our expenses do currently exceed our Revenue I hope that this is not a new message and this is districtwide um we're seeing this across the board that we've relied on um school choice a little bit too much I didn't make any adjustments for the current year um but we're going to need to think about that as we go through the budget cycle in terms of that and this is jumping the gun a little bit um typically my goal is to be sure that however many sixth graders leave us that's how many k gardeners school choice wise join us and I will not have the ability to do that this year because it's during R we have a high number of Resident kids coming of age to be for kindergarten this year so very few scho slot so this is not a great year to also be that way absolutely that'd be an interesting thing how many parents before four towns when they decide to send their kid to kindergarten or preschool or whatever it it starts off there but if they start off at another school and they want to bring their kids over here for first grade or something like that it it might be you know long pretty long before they can get in if there's no slots if we're filling them all if it's if it's school choice if a student goes to another school but they're weightly resident it doesn't matter how you have in a class that weightly Resident gets gets registered whenever whenever they choose yeah um yeah I wish I had a lot more room well I heard what Darius said last night at the frontier meeting about it's first unless I've heard it before but the first time I've heard it where the kid that in one of our four elementary schools not guaranteed to go over the frontier that that blew me last night because I I it's probably been in a work so it's been a while but that's the first time I heard about it like I always remember hey long as you get in one elements you're guaranteed to get in our of high school but that's the that's the policy well the St L yeah it's not it's not our policy it has to be a lottery come down to has it come to a lottery he George turned some seventh graders away I don't know that they were I don't know where they were live but we definitely kep the seventh grade class oh eighth grade was there was no room in eighth grade right didn't they say last night I think that's what he said last eighth grade is no room for Choice which is really difficult decision to make because come ninth grade we lose a good chunk of kids that we turned you know we turned away seventh and eighth graders and then the class size drops again in ninth grade so it's you almost wish you could but exactly but you can only have so many sections for the middle school you know we only have so much face we only have so much teachers and you don't want your class sizes too big so especially negotiation um so that is all that I have for today what I do want to say is that you know the numbers on here like these are actual budget numbers this is not we've asked for the moon and we're presenting a 14% budget we've we have a budget based on needs of the school and we have other outside factors Grant adjustments revolving fund adjustments retirement expenses we do not have control of those pieces so um we are going to have some work to do and we're going to have to be creative in how we bring things down uh and hope that if we are at 6% it is palatable to the town which is really not ideal I know that so can I ask we know there's no planned renegotiation but we can barely hear him hold on Henry we can't really hear you that's a first no one's ever said that to me I'll type it no we got you now all right I just wanted to as far as you know there's no planned renegotiation of the busing contract remember that was such a wallup that we took when that happened but it's it's is it locked in for a few years or is it fiveyear contract okay all right thank you y thanks you're welcome you have any other early questions at all I to take in my comment is whoever decided on the sick buyback thing out of their mind well we changed that just I'm one of the ones that were there we had is this part of the Lexicon plan still these these two people or this regular buyback at one day for every year service you know what this yes it's um no it's two days for every year of service oh was that the high school that we went to the high school has a different yeah there's some different things like if you elect longevity at the high school you know there's some different things um and I'm sorry Lisa and Jody if I'm getting that wrong because sometimes it's confusing um but we've changed the sick buyback so they still get it in the contract for new hires but it's not at the same level people are Grand some of right we saw people and it'll take it'll be a while a long time before except when you're in a small school like this and we had one last year we got two this year I mean I think it's hurting all the schools yeah at some point or another yeah so next steps for us will be uh Dari Chrissy and I will go back to the drawing board and sort of see what we can do uh we'll apply the rural Aid and hope fingers crossed that nothing changes with that before um budget is finalized or even before the end of the year after it's finalized and then we'll have to talk about you know how we handle the new requests for new Staffing and see what other options we have I will continue to look at revolving funds to see if there's anything we can do there um and then come back hopefully with a reduced number in February I think weight Le town meeting is usually in May right I'm not sure if they have the date set but we have some time technically our public hearing is in March and our goal is to be done by the end of March but if we need more time we can take are we gonna meet with them before that I'm sure we'll have a request me especially we haven't got any yet or anything like that no and one of the things that I'm looking at is um I had Mike DeBarge who's our assistant business manager I had him run some data for me so that we could look at a three-year comparison of um budget versus actual to see if any of our expense accounts can be scrunched down you know we don't want to get so close that we don't have a buffer but if you know electricity has been underspent by $88,000 for five years then let's reduce electricity by three or 4,000 so that we have less of a a cushion so we are going to prepare those documents because I'm sure the town's going to want to see greater detail um you know there some lines you can't predict I mean if we have a goodier building repair wise then there could be some funds left over there but you don't know that until we hit the end of the fiscal year and well and I think this building is starting to see some needs for deferred maintenance that our budget even if even if you had no unforeseen repairs like the roof itself is something that that's another story whole another topic but yeah and like substitute coverage you know some years we don't have as many Subs in the building and other years we do so sometimes there's money left there but um anything that we can concretely try to reduce we will certainly do that we're going to have to at this point so thanks more to come okay um I have nothing collaborative I heard they were just talking about money oh H Oh Henry yeah sorry I had to close my door that's how collaborative um they continue to be the largest educational collaborative in the State uh they released their annual report and it was a challenging year but they met their goals the juiciest tidbit um from the last meeting is the money that was stolen is in the process of being recovered so that is exciting for them thank you that's about it thank you um superintendent uh we're gonna be going into executive session and we're not we're not going to come back into regular session correct so you could stay on everybody else yeah Henry can stay everyone else before we there there was thing in here about a student that I think Darius was probably gonna read oh on the superintendence report Sasha yeah sure um his words it is with great pride and admiration I present the frontier Regional School District's 2023 24 superintendent academic Excellence award an extraordinary senior who truly symed excellence in academic leadership and character Sasha Malo she not a I don't think she's a we kid but she she she was supposed to come last night to our meeting I'm not sure what happened but she didn't show up with her parents usually we you know presentation and stuff she got her her thing back at in December I think at the superintendent's meeting or and U but good for her okay hry you could stay Lisa Jody and Sally see you guys later e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e for