[0:04] Okay, welcome everybody. Today is Monday, March 30, and this is a special meeting in the

[0:11] Parliamentary River Regional School District. And tonight we have an unusual situation where

[0:19] a good number of our school committee members are participating remotely. Hello, everybody.

[0:27] And they have asked another school committee member who is here in person with us to chair tonight.

[0:35] And that's Stacy Schultz.

[0:38] So Stacy, if you want to take the lead and take us through the agenda tonight.

[0:44] Sure. And so you called us to order and we are in public comment now.

[0:50] how often you have any fellow comments?

[0:55] You guys seeing that?

[0:56] We can move on to number three,

[0:58] our school district budgets.

[1:00] Okay, thanks everybody.

[1:04] Just before I'm getting started with our work

[1:07] on the budget tonight, I just wanted to take a brief trip

[1:11] to our school budget calendar this year,

[1:14] tell you where we've been,

[1:15] where we're at, started this work back in November,

[1:20] starting to look at preliminary expenditures. By early January we had a draft

[1:27] expenditures only to the school committee. Mid to late January we got some

[1:32] information from the state about our insurance rates, fiscal year, and some

[1:41] other important information involving chapter 78, local minimum

[1:46] contributions, et cetera. We were able to start calculating projected revenues and offsets to

[1:52] the preliminary budget. So, first Monday in February, we did start including some of that information

[1:58] in our preliminary budget expenditures and revenues that came to the school committee. We set a date

[2:04] for the public hearing that being the 11th of March last month. And then on the 11th, we held our

[2:12] we held our public hearing and here we are not at the second Monday of March but at the end of

[2:21] the month March 30th, actually a special meeting of the school committee to process where we've

[2:30] been since the last, since the public hearing of the budget back on March 11th, I have not received

[2:39] any feedback or input from those attending or from our staff or public

[2:51] studies. And I wanted to just give a moment to see if our school committee

[2:59] members might have heard from their respective public bodies in Otis or

[3:05] for Santa's field, any input or feedback on our proposed budget that we discussed on March 11th.

[3:14] I have not received any feedback from any residents in Otis.

[3:25] Santa's field?

[3:26] No discussion.

[3:27] All right.

[3:28] Very good.

[3:39] I'll address it as we talk about the budget, but they're not requesting any feedback on the

[3:43] any changes in the budget you propose,

[3:45] but before we vote on that,

[3:47] I want to discuss something that would help

[3:50] Santa's field out a bit.

[3:51] It doesn't change the budget,

[3:53] but we'll come to that.

[3:57] All right, so just a little review.

[4:01] You put that slide show for a second.

[4:07] So?

[4:08] That one, yep.

[4:10] Oh, I think I'll be into it.

[4:12] Oh, I'm sorry, Carolyn.

[4:15] That's okay.

[4:15] Of course, I hear a lot of graces and graces.

[4:19] All right.

[4:20] So, Carol, would you like me to keep going or?

[4:25] Well, I can talk about what we're talking about tonight.

[4:28] So, we did receive some new information about the prison grant

[4:34] that Tim will address.

[4:37] And based on those changes, he and I took a look, a deeper dive into the budget

[4:42] to see what we could do to reflect those prison changes, so we'll talk about what we needed to do.

[4:48] The budget assessment is a handout. It really has not changed. We made sure of that when we

[4:53] went through the budget update, and then ultimately tonight we're going to vote on the budget.

[5:01] All right, so thank you Carol. A little bit more about the prison grant. First of all,

[5:05] prison is a pretty major state grant that we're involved in. It involves early literacy. Our funding

[5:13] level this year was a little bit over $100,000. We used the money for staffing, materials,

[5:20] assessment, professional development, a whole host of things related to early literacy

[5:26] pre-K through two or some pre-K through three. One of the things that there were a couple changes

[5:35] that we learned about that Carol caught that I dug into a little bit more did some research.

[5:42] One of them was we learned that our principal ward for this year was a little bit less than what we thought it was.

[5:50] So the total grants award that we were looking at was not $100,000 that we budgeted.

[5:55] It was more on the lines of $75,000 to $80,000.

[6:00] And that amount being the reason that amount is reduced is because the intention of the state is to have local education agencies

[6:10] gradually take over the responsibility for the prism efforts, so they to provide

[6:18] incentive for that, they reduce the funding by about 25% each year. My

[6:25] understanding previously had been that we were currently in year one, and now

[6:30] we're not going to see that step-down effect happening until year three, and my

[6:36] mistake was, we are actually entering year three next year. Year one was a

[6:41] development year with very little funding, so actually the current year

[6:47] that we're in is two. Next year being year three, we start to step down of

[6:51] 25%. Another thing that we discovered about the prison funding was that digging

[6:58] into it a little bit more, asking some questions of the grant managers. We

[7:04] We learned that the purpose, the intended purpose of the grant is to supplement and not

[7:11] supplant local efforts.

[7:14] So that meant that where we were paying salaries and using our prison funds as a wholesale

[7:24] offset for our staff and literacy initiatives at the school, we couldn't quite do it that

[7:30] way.

[7:30] So we did, you'll see when we talk about it a little bit more, there still is some money

[7:37] as an offset for prison, but that's been reduced from $100,000 down to $30,000 based on our

[7:44] understanding of what the allowable costs are for prison going into the next year.

[7:50] So after learning this, of course, we had about $70,000 that we had to make up.

[7:55] And the way that we did that, Tim, yes?

[7:59] I just a question before you move into the action taken.

[8:04] So the difference between the $70,000 and the $30,000 we can apply on salaries, that $40,000,

[8:10] what will we spend that money on?

[8:13] Like how will that money be spent?

[8:17] So let me get into that in the next section but actually Carl's difference is between $100,000

[8:24] that we budgeted and $30,000 that we're putting in.

[8:27] No, no. I understand that. That's the whole that we have to fill in. But I was just curious if we can't

[8:36] like that the difference between the 70 and the 30,000. It has to be something. I'm just curious as to

[8:45] what it's going to be spent on. That's not a part of our budget. Oh, okay. So here's one thing. So

[8:54] So the position of reading interventions, it's a $46,000.6 FTE position that is not in

[9:06] our budget.

[9:07] Okay.

[9:08] In fact, there are other expenses in professional development that are supplemental.

[9:17] It's an important work with these grants, supplemental to what we had budgeted in our sort

[9:23] $4, $9,000 TD line, the ED, okay.

[9:28] So it's supplementing what is not in our budget already.

[9:33] Right, but the main thing I took away from this

[9:36] is there's somebody that we outsource some support to

[9:40] that's not in the budget.

[9:41] And that's what the difference between the 70 and 30

[9:44] is used for, you know, in a large part.

[9:47] Yeah, that's correct.

[9:49] Okay, I got it. Thank you.

[9:50] So, let me just talk about how we made up the difference.

[9:56] We might have talked about this in a prior meeting, but one of the reductions in our FY27

[10:07] budget was the reduction of a 1.0 FTE paraprofessional that is resigning at the end of the year.

[10:16] And what we went ahead and did was on top of reducing her salary, we also reduced her

[10:24] benefits amount, which is $30,000.

[10:29] Another thing that we did was we took a look at what we were budgeting for a specialist

[10:35] teacher position.

[10:38] And we have a teacher that's resigning from that position and will likely be replaced

[10:45] by someone with a lower salary, so we were able to reduce that line by $10,000.

[10:53] We did tap our school choice revolving fund a little bit more, drawing $20,000 more

[10:59] to a total projection of next year for $370,000.

[11:06] You might recall that we had originally intended only to use about $70,000 of rural aid, with

[11:14] we're going to get at least 80 next year, so we upped that number by $10,000 and that brought us to that $70,000 target.

[11:24] And then we had the $30,000 that we did feel comfortable using still as a prism offset for those expenses within our budget that are there supplemental, but they are existing line items in our budget.

[11:42] And one of them that's coming right up to my head is curriculum purchases, another one

[11:49] that I know about our assessment programs.

[11:52] So with or without prism, we would have an assessment program.

[11:58] Some of those funds, some of these monies are used to pay for that.

[12:03] So that would allow us to get to a place in the budget.

[12:09] So I want to pull up the assessment sheet real quick.

[12:18] Thank you, Carol.

[12:27] Carol, do you just want to walk us through this a little bit more?

[12:32] Yeah, I won't necessarily go through it in great detail.

[12:36] But our total budgeted expenditures went down.

[12:41] And then we adjusted our offsets, as we mentioned in the previous slide.

[12:46] $20,000 for school choice, $80,000 for rural aid, or grants down slightly by $70,000,

[12:54] that's $70,000 from the prison grant, so the grants went down, but we still got to

[13:01] the same number as we did the 4.65 for our adjusted operating budget as you saw in our last

[13:12] assessment review. So ultimately the bottom line, Otis is still at an assessment, total assessment

[13:21] of 2.6 million or 7.53 above last year and Sanis feel that 1.3 million or 4.85 above last year.

[13:33] Yeah thanks and Carol and I kind of, Carol discovered this or actually raised the question

[13:42] And a few days after the public hearing,

[13:44] when we spent so much time with the numbers

[13:46] and learned some more about the prison brand

[13:48] and got some news from the prison people.

[13:51] And we thought it was important

[13:53] that since we had shared with the public already

[13:55] that these are going to be our assessment increases

[13:58] for our two towns, we thought it important

[14:01] to adjust in such a way

[14:04] that we kept the assessment increases the same

[14:07] as we presented to the public.

[14:09] So that's what we were able to do

[14:11] and that's why we're targeting those reductions in those amounts.

[14:21] Questions from the committee?

[14:25] Jim, do you think this is a good place to discuss what I wanted to discuss?

[14:30] You bet, Carl. Okay, so Santa feels not requesting any changes to this budget. They feel that

[14:37] the school committee and the administration did a good job, but they do have a request to make,

[14:43] which is this follows and I'm going to put my spin on this in terms of the way I think

[14:49] it works out and how we'd execute it.

[14:52] I think we should approve this budget with a provision, the provision being the following

[14:57] that we hold our funds submitting to...

[15:00] The town, I mean, the towns are aware of these numbers, and we say that there is a chance that they might go down. The assessments for both town might get down, go down. And we hold off on finalizing it until the date at which the towns need to have the info to be able to publish their warrants on time. The reason I'd like to do that, and Sanders who would like to do that is, and I've discussed this with the Sanders field folks.

[15:29] It's a very tough budget year for Santa's field because of all the stuff we went through on the fire department and also we're paying close to

[15:41] $350,000 for two vocational students just to and it has to do with us getting

[15:47] whacked on the transportation and to put that in perspective every $100,000 in the

[15:54] Sandesfield budget is a three-point increase in the levy or the tax bills, so it's pretty significant.

[16:02] So because of that, the reason we'd like to hold off a bit is to see if the state transportation aid

[16:09] comes in higher than what we're currently carrying. So, Carol, can you point to the regional

[16:16] transportation aid line on this slide. It is right down here and step 11. Right, right there. Yeah, so so you say 180. Yeah.

[16:27] Two years ago it was 190 almost 197 that it was almost 205. Ignore this number because we used 100k that we had left over in the regional transportation stabilization fund.

[16:41] But I think it's really very, very likely that this preliminary estimate will be bumped

[16:49] up by the state.

[16:50] They always give us a low number, and then it bumps up.

[16:54] And that number could increase by, from the 181, it could be increased by 30K or more.

[17:02] So what I'm saying here is we approve this budget, but we give approval to Tim that, you

[17:08] Now, if the state updates this number, and that transportation aid number goes up, that

[17:14] he then reflects that in the budget, and it will only change the transportation assessment

[17:20] doesn't have any impact on the capital assessment, or the adjusted operating, and the assessment

[17:26] would just go down a bit for each town if that happened, because everybody understand what

[17:32] I just said.

[17:39] is Brandy still on?

[17:50] Brandy?

[17:53] Can you just give me an idea of when does he come here of when the she's in a feedback loop?

[18:01] Oh, she is.

[18:03] Okay.

[18:03] Oh, she is.

[18:05] Yes.

[18:05] It's very soon.

[18:07] Regardless.

[18:07] Yes.

[18:09] Excuse me.

[18:10] It herself.

[18:10] So you're fine.

[18:11] Brandy, can you give me that idea?

[18:13] Brandy, can you give me an idea?

[18:18] I'm just going to say it.

[18:20] The drop dead date of when you need the final budget figures from us.

[18:24] Again, it's only going to go down following Farrell's proposal.

[18:41] That would be April 28th.

[18:44] Okay.

[18:45] Thank you.

[18:49] Okay, so based on that, and you can get the same, you know, the date from sadness field,

[18:55] but I think it's likely it would be the same, and they'd be motivated to wait as long as possible.

[19:02] So, you know, if nobody objects to this, and again, we're proving this budget, but just

[19:08] giving him the authority to make a change, if we get in time a revised number from the state

[19:16] on the transportation aid, and it goes up.

[19:20] Is there a way for us to frame the motion so that it covers all of that?

[19:28] Yes, there is.

[19:31] And I'd like to know if Brandy has any other thoughts about it besides the April 28th date

[19:38] from the Otis perspective.

[19:44] No, I don't.

[19:45] Thank you.

[19:46] Thank you.

[19:47] Thank you.

[19:48] Okay,

[19:54] so are we ready for a motion?

[19:59] Is that all the presentation, Carol and Tim?

[20:02] Yes, it is.

[20:04] I have one question.

[20:06] Are there any numbers that are not yet let solidify the size transportation from the state?

[20:13] Really, it is not.

[20:14] And is there a chance that that might go down from what we anticipate?

[20:20] There's always a chance.

[20:24] So what we have put in as a guest for what our rural aid award would be is less than what the governor's budget would provide.

[20:35] So the governor's budget if funded at 22 million for rural aid would have our award probably a little bit north of $105,000.

[20:48] and again we're counting on 80 as our rural aid receipts.

[20:54] And we typically don't find out about that until really late.

[20:57] It's well into the fall, sometimes November,

[21:01] when we find out what rural aid is going to turn out to be.

[21:15] Good.

[21:16] So I guess the question is then between now and April 28th,

[21:21] will we have, so we will have new or additional information

[21:27] number about rural aid or or not.

[21:31] Rural aid, you definitely not.

[21:34] Farrell, I think, is asking mainly about transportation, regional transportation aid.

[21:41] Which honestly, Carl, I'm not optimistic that we're going to hear more in the next two weeks about transportation aid.

[21:49] But we could.

[21:50] I don't know, Carol, do you happen to have an idea of when that solidifies?

[22:00] I do not.

[22:01] Tim, I know that there's a chance we won't hear anything, even if we went to the end

[22:06] of April per the date that Brande gave us.

[22:09] I know that we might not get any update, but I just think we should position this where

[22:14] if we do get an update in that period of time, we're reflected in the budget.

[22:19] But we also, is that cutoff date just the date that you're going to be posting the warrant

[22:28] or is that an extended period for review?

[22:33] Because I'm trying to figure out, because San is the last opportunity to post this one.

[22:43] So it's based, so it's going to be about this, I don't know.

[22:49] Our meeting's the 19th.

[22:50] So it's three days different.

[22:51] Right.

[22:55] All right.

[22:56] It doesn't need to be reviewed.

[22:57] It just has to be added before it gets posted.

[23:00] Okay.

[23:03] All right.

[23:05] So is anybody opposed to what I proposed?

[23:08] You're going to make a motion.

[23:09] That's when we'll find out, right?

[23:11] Well, I was hoping we could only make one motion tonight to save us all some time.

[23:19] I mean, I can make the motion, but then we'd have to amend it if there's

[23:24] That there's no support for it

[23:29] except the way that if I understand Carl the way that you

[23:33] worded it is that the amount is only going to go down if we hear about more about regional

[23:43] transportation aid prior to the time that the towns need to know.

[23:48] Correct.

[23:48] And that, you know, the Carol and I have discretion just to reduce by that amount when we learn about that, if we learn about it.

[24:00] Correct. That's exactly correct, Tim.

[24:03] Okay.

[24:04] That's just one motion.

[24:06] Yeah, I can make that motion, if you'd like me to.

[24:15] So I motion that we approve the budget with the following provision, if we hear from

[24:25] the state that our transportation aid has increased from what we're carrying in the

[24:30] budget, then Tim and Carol are authorized to reflect that change in the budget to lower

[24:37] the assessments for both towns.

[24:40] second. Any discussion?

[24:49] Should we do a roll call mode?

[24:54] Sure.

[24:55] Okay.

[24:56] Douglas?

[24:57] Aye.

[24:58] Denise?

[25:00] Aye.

[25:01] Hey.

[25:02] Hi.

[25:03] Carol?

[25:05] Aye.

[25:06] And my goal?

[25:08] Aye.

[25:09] We.

[25:16] And I think we're now on to number four in our agenda.

[25:20] Yes, we are.

[25:21] We have a motion to adjourn.

[25:23] I don't wish.

[25:25] Oh.

[25:27] I'd like to make a motion to adjourn.

[25:29] Okay.

[25:30] That's all in favor.

[25:34] I want to thank Carolyn Tim for working continuing to work so hard and know so much about the

[25:41] budget and sharing it all with us so transparently. Thank you so much.

[25:46] Our pleasure.

[25:47] Yes, I echo that these budget seasons just get less and less painful each year.

[25:55] And I'd say there's been no pain this year at all.

[25:58] It's gone very smoothly, very professionally, very well done, guys.

[26:04] Thanks, Carl.

[26:05] Thank you.

[26:08] And the fastest meeting in history.

[26:11] Have a good night everyone.

Untitled meeting

Transcript