good evening and welcome i'm diane meyerhoff post for tonight school budget presentation with yellow bang the superintendent of the burlington school district tonight show is being aired live we welcome your comments and questions please join the conversation at eight six to us what we need to know all right so let me start by talking about every year you know a process and if you can see the slides here we start with the input process consultation with our committee members and we had about four public open forms and people came out and i bet they came out people do come out yes people do come out when they have lots to say loss to contribute we do ask them some challenging questions as well because we just don't want the the wants we were also talking about the needs and sort of things that will push us forward but some of the things we did differently this year is we targeted some groups that we felt the voices weren't heard in the past so we looked at we had some sessions for special ed in particular special people can always go on to the website and do on my submission if they haven't had an opportunity to attend one of those or go to a local school and just put something on paper or that sort to you and then i'll get back to you that all gets back out there and talk a little bit about that and move forward so just quickly i'm going to go through this slide quickly so one of the things we do is we synthesize some of the materials that we're hearing and you can see on this slide there's a number of themes that come through and some of these things are pretty consistent every year people talk about energy efficiency which is which is a good thing talk about increased support for social services and some of our social needs and of course things that will help our academic achievement right so that's pretty consistent  terms of some of the themes you can see a list of things that came through the conversation anything unusual or surprising for you actually nothing surprising to be honest with you i think everything everything that we heard that people with think what how much is the school budget to give us a sense of what the school budgets under eighty five billion over the entire budget ok and people get confused because there are two different sections there is the education fund section which taxpayers actually  to school budget the entire budget and you see the entire budget it's inclusive of grants and other things that we get so sometimes they see that hey your budget is going down right asking for more but what that just means is we're not be able to able to capture more grant we the it came out to about five actually really if you look at this is probably a little bit more based on what staffs actually more than that last year of the requests around five million and we're able to add one point five million and we still hadn't thought about tax increase so six million would make a huge young age so we will be doing all those things we will not you know those things but it's good for us to kind of reflect on that and understand that these are things that people are saying that would help us contribute the thing that we have to consider when we go through this and we talk with our board and can memorize about the budget pressures so was putting pressure on our in our budget for this current year we have some capital infrastructure challenges and fortunately last year people supported a bond to look at all our schools and we still have some challenges at the high school and things that we have to look at of course salaries and benefits we have eight bargaining units you know people's are often talk about the teachers but we have seven other units that we do that don't really get a lot of publicity around the actions but all those contracts have to be integrated into the next year's budget and terms of the increases and then health care was a big big conversation this year so there's a challenge about health care where the state put in some legislation that took money away from us r over about five hundred thousand dollars away from us which we couldn't capture but yet we still had to make up those costs of that you know challenges for us in terms of trying to find those pieces and then lastly on this slide the legislative environment to this fifty million we can actually establish and i'll skip through some of this quickly but you know some of the other things around retirement funds are things we pay to the city for for pensions and universal preschool investments that have to come in and the of some of the social emotional pieces is that we find that in burlington we do have agencies that support some of these so we attract people who come here for services and therefore students get into our systems and parents  trying to do is explain the budget process to our community in terms of the differences for us as burlington indifferences for the rest of vermont so especially the case that we do receive especially cation block grant if you look at this slide you can  averaged thirty four point five seven f t s those are like teacher positions for especially and the wage that we pay the average wage is about seventy two thousand now the average across the state for that same position is sixty three thousand so there's a difference for us of one thousand dollars so when we pay our staff for those positions we have a one thousand dollars cost to it but the state only gives us the average which is sixty three so at the end of the day you see calculations they're so those are some of the things sometimes people say well we get grants for that yeah we do but it doesn't cover everything so some of the things that when we started the budget there are strategic priorities that we look at so investing in our strategic goals and pars we spend a lot of time looking at what we need to focus on we can't do everything and do it well we have to focus on a few things we've established three main goals inclusive sustainable financing facilities a climate culture inclusive teaching learning are big big rocks we we call them are things that we want to focus on we also invest on some of us really priorities around students staff and program cuts and capital facilities things and of course sustaining the supports that we rea have we want to sustain we don't want to go backwards we want to be able to reach everybody that sustains and then look forward to move forward we're using data to inform survive decisions i think in the past sometimes we've just sort of like said it might be a good idea let's just do that let's do this this also want to use an equity lens around how we allocate staffing and things like that because we do have some demographics there are different in different parts of the city and also in terms of the staff allocation we have to make sure that we do that so we've had it was called consistently everyone in central office and ministration that's pretty consistent you know and i and to be fair that's not just unique to bronson i think that's everywhere at every district i've been to they've always said cut the fat at the top and one of the things they know and i came a couple years ago i think we want to lead with that because we knew people would be wanted to see that and we started you can see that we had about forty fifty thousand in reductions the first year in the next year we went two hundred fifty thousand so so we've ask central office staff to do the best they can to use and they're trying to manage with what they have but i think we have to set the example if we're going to look at other areas in terms of adoption so i want to make sure that people knew that yes we were aware that we need to look at that standards quality standards especially for class sizes and things there's a lot of conversations around teacher ratios and passages from the state this year and we want to make sure we stay true to the standards that we have established in terms of our case in other areas about increased social emotional support so i know you've heard from other districts in terms of that's a huge challenge yes that's a challenge for us as well to you i mean you can't get to learning if you can't take of sort of the masses hierarchy of needs right bills owns students self self belonging and their sense of wellness to start their  grants in the last year or so they've taken away dollars and these are dollars that we had and we need this resource so we can get it so we decided that was a priority that we wanted to shift some dollars we can ensure that we maintain it and of course our party go step by are our borders around closed even gap and reason the bars we want to make sure we allocate resources to that and restore the practices and that goes with the achievement gap and sort of the sense of wellness for our students in terms of being at the problem solving create environments that they're able to to right i know i'm going quickly here but i've got a ninety minute presentation i'm trying to get you know you're doing ok i'm doing great when i start to look that quizzical you'll know that i so i'll do this quickly the one of the things i want to talk about this year was around rome and right numbers so lots of conversations people look at different data sets and they'll say well we're increasing our numbers we should be getting more and this and that but brunton we actually haven't increased soon we haven't you secretly decreased slightly if you look at a chart a graph of ours we look like this we go down up down up down up down up what kind of plot towing a little bit and slightly down but nothing x it could come back but you never know so but we were kind of pretty much stayed the same if you look at this chart here in f y seventeen we budget for nine hundred eighty six students at the high school but we actually had nine forty six right in the following year we kept the budget at ninety six so we actually had nine thirty seven yeah and then for next year with that number they have ninety six or ninety four so yeah we're actually been under you know i know we've had some challenges at the last block where there's a share allocation of thirty nine percent it's one percent and that's the factors are because of the year number by the poverty count that we have in the account right so you can see the different numbers in there  is that gives you the share so then we have side ok we need to add this many more resources to that school because they have a sixty percent share rather than thirty nine percent right so it's not a equal it's not like everyone gets one right based on your needs because some some areas have more  but because that is going to have to learn as well too but these are our goals are big goals that we want to achieve so the first goes around sustainable finance and feels that's one of the goals anyways sure and there's we have good rationale around and we know there's lots of literature that you know if you have good spaces or you have good learning and we tend to have older schools is that fair we have all our schools need work and we published a document you can find on our site as well in terms of some of the needs we have in our schools and you know what it's pretty much systemic across the country when districts some boards are looking at saving money they have to make a choice sometimes it's between either people or you can not repair that ceiling you know where they usually go to some bus drivers for special ed buses and looking to develop an international program nice and brunton which is going to be great culturally in terms of bringing in immigrant students from other countries but these are two things that actually are might be a little different than the traditional you have because they come with the different different different set of assets so they become families that kind of can maybe afford to send them away for a year and i'm back now looking to go into postgraduate here at the same time because of the cultural exchange is going to great for and then the other big rock that we have is accountable climbing culture and this is sort of the belly the foundation that we talked about some of the around some of the real social emotional and behavioral challenges that we we have that we need to set our students  before they can actually prepare for learning and you can see a list of some of the things and this is you know i wish we could add much more so you know we have to balance between what we believe the public can afford and willing to support and what  we what's critical in terms of needs and so we do quite a bit of analysis with our staff and we've got it and then we'll make some decisions and then finally to the board to say hey this is what we can do with can we can we can we add more yes we would love to but you know right  reasonable and you can see a range of things we talk to the multi lingual e zine special education supports we definitely that social workers in our schools in light of some of the things that happened in florida and things like that that we need to the mental wellness for kids and be able to identify and support students before they get into a tragic stage is that we need to stay ahead of that curve the board has put forward equity recruitment hiring initiative want us to look at diversifying our workforce and of course with the strategies and resources to do that and a number of the things around summer schools keeping learning for students all year round we hold our summer schools which is an excellent program by the way were students get an opportunity to get some academics they get some recreationally get some need to do in terms of improving achievement for our students and do you know we've so we've we've identified achievement gap as a goal closing the gap and raising the bar and i'll take a moment to talk about that just quickly because one of the things that people sometimes will assume that if we work on achievement gap there were only focused on certain course students who are under teaching but we're talking about closing the gap while raising the bar so that means that the students at the top we expect them to keep pushing up to this tragedy we're looking for a universal strategies that help all students and then hope to have fewer students to do the intervention pieces and the literature out there and research out there and schools that have found success can show in their data that they close the gap and the together and we're and we're making some good plans and and i'm looking forward to a gradual process this up does happen overnight of course but we're going to put the wheels in motion so we can get there a lot of other supports around you know last thing middle schools we have some challenges they're looking at professional development for a period caters to something that they've asked for they want to be included and in we think they should be and so we have to find time and resources in order to support them to to be included  year we've actually done it again done again about close to about four hundred forty thousand dollars ok that we've been able to reduce to put into the pot because our central office said the things that we're going after and will be important in a willing to try to find ways to work differently in order to support our students so kudos to our stuff because you know probably because it is i asked them to but you know a lot of them really believe in what we're doing let me slide forward to the tax impact that's i know what people would want something spending right so this is the education part that i talked about like this to the eighty four million but then there's a sixty one million but we're all budgets actually increasing less than one percent so that's really marginal and equalize people which is in the calculation  that is declining as i said we're declining but not significantly so and then our homestead dollar it does that that's the yield that we get for each dollar that's spent which is also declining so all these numbers are working against us again but the one that's really hitting us hard right now is  you look at the the other trends from years past you've seen that some of the numbers are change afterwards so people vote on one number and so that's one of the things a frustration around the process was having been from august i guess we start our budget in october needs as well to instill supporting our students well thank you that was that was a lot of information but i guess you know this is kind of the takeaway at this point anyway what you're looking at in terms of and how it will affect an individual  homeowner and really a big difference between those who pay help me out with the right words who pay the full amount versus the incomes and income sensitivity amount i'm not sure that's what it will say it but that's pretty dramatic i didn't realize  to be that much of a difference so that's i mean from three fifty eight to twenty four dollars that's that's an annual number to i was like try to vent remind folks of that right and sometimes people don't realize we pay a million quarters or something so and i think some of the propos out there are just the levels to look at restructuring that in some way ok so we'll see what happens with lots of conversations and lots of dialogue around what needs to happen but this at the same time hope to come up with something that actually puts money into education  yeah absolutely well thank you again you know bang superintendent of brunton schools thanks so much for coming out and remember the information is available on the web site and all the budget information and where to vote and all those things are all available  d town meeting day tuesday march sixth don't forget to vote you don't have to vote that day as i'm constantly reminded you go down to city hall and vote any time with early voting so we hope you'll take advantage of that and stay tuned child seventeen for more town meeting coverage thank you and