good evening welcome to channel seven teens town meeting day coverage so that we have the we do ski school budget presentation with me i have sean mcmanus cameron who is superintendent of the risky school district and mike caro who is school board president john what can you tell us about the school budget this year well at the outset we really wanted to highlight some of the outstanding programming that's going on in the school district and specifically this year we've made tremendous strides in our middle school and working in within a learning model which is called expeditionary learning and so we have our middle school students working in teams working on relevant projects expressing their learning in a variety of ways and this is the second year that we've been doing that and we're just seeing the levels of engagement in our students is just going up dramatically another area that we're really excited about is our partnerships with local businesses and any time with questions eight six two three nine six six numbers may also be on the bottom of your screen six two three hundred six six well you have a presentation to talk about what the what the budget is going to be like this  yes after sean and administrate of team in the and the staff go through what they need based on all the opportunities that they they have going on they present to the board the needs for the one to fifty in that area so needless to say one to fifty with can't be all that effective if you will at that at those kind of staffing rates so the need for another teacher and then a communications and development director in the school we have some work we're going to be doing with our capital project that we have we're in the midst of presenting so this particular position will help us do some fund raising and communications work so in total what we have is  about ninety eight percent of this particular budget is salaries and benefits our benefits from year to year have got up nearly twelve percent eleven point eight percent just the benefit piece of it and salaries were still in the midst of negotiation but we plan on a one point one five million dollars investment in both salaries and benefits which ends up being about ninety percent of the total so as past five or six years is right around where we have been and over the past this is about ten years now average changed about four and a half percent increase in spending so  the tax rate change we're looking at here is about nine and a half percent increase but that's very differentiated in in town with income sensitivity from the way the state funding is done and the based on household incomes household incomes are under ninety nine thousand level it's based purely on income and that'll be about a two point three percent increase and just for a reference point for anybody that we have a lot more information we'll have it on a website for anybody it underneath the ninety nine thousand household income rate right at the ninety thousand it's about one hundred dollar increase in taxes for the year for that piece the other and on the other end from an income sensitivity standpoint is over  hundred forty seven five ends up putting you into based on purely property value and at that point somebody i think what was what did we figure was standard about two hundred fifty thousand dollars house is kind of the the market value the assessed value is about two hundred fifty thousand dollars so the increase is about three hundred fifty dollars right for those that don't meet the income sensitivity under the ninety nine thousand right then you're looking at the two point three and in between those two is a mixture of the two depending on where you are it's graduated in the middle between income and property value and this will be on the school district website at some point so voters will have a chance to see what it is they on february twentieth a community breakfast down at the o'brien community center where the budget will be presented and that starts at six pm that's the city in the school doing a budget presentation so definitely ask folks to come out and join us right and the annual meeting which is always the night before town meeting day on monday night at the performing arts center starting at six o'clock with the city budget presentation and then at seven thirty in the school budget would be somebody who's in charge of fundraising is that what this kind of position is that is definitely a portion of it we want to take on the thought i think the we have been looking for in the past few years  communications position so that we could really shout to the local community but also regionally and statewide all the amazing things that are happening in the windy city school district and during that time we also have begun to embark on a capital project and so the board and the administration decided that this position would be really beneficial and have a great return in many ways so not just in communicating the great learning that's happening across the district but now we would really be dedicating this position in the first couple of years primarily to the development side of the role so that they could go out locally statewide and nationally to try and raise money to offset the cost of the capit do want to talk about what the with the bond issues going to before that's still we're still in the middle of developing that piece we haven't we didn't come paired to talk to deeply about that but one of the pieces that we've been showing the community so far is just the infrastructure in the school itself we've been wrestling with a laugh for the last three weeks we had a water main break about three weeks ago had it repaired but the repair was to a pipe that wasn't willing to be repaired it was rotted so badly but they filled it back in hope it would last till spring we had another main break just down the road which caused some water pressure fluctuations broke again so they went back in and just stopped it at that point we decided to repair the whole thing we had to go from the city back to the school and replace the whole thing in the three hundred fifty feet or whatever they've done they haven't found any good pipe in there at all so we've had to take that hit but in the school the boiler system you walk into the boiler system the electrical panel in that room i'm told the only way to get parts for it is on e bay and the only people that have the parts are people that have ripped it out put it aside and put in new electrical panel work so there's a lot of the infrastructure not to mention the roof a total overhaul whole as well a growing student population different needs we're in a very different place from from an education standpoint when the school was built it was built for a class of twenty five looking at a teacher in the front one one subject matter one test for all now it's very very different to shun mentioned the expeditionary learning to project based learning i go back to a day discussion we had i think it was four years ago now we invited in at our board meeting champlain c c the albany college of pharmaceuticals and we asked them what does it look like to you when students come out of  out of schools what are you looking for interesting lee the straight academic piece how are you in math and physics was third or fourth on the list it was can you work in teams can you problem solve can you if you get knocked down can you get up the grit piece of it and then it was the the the subject matter and in order to do all of those things in a project based learning in a team you need the space to be able to work in  smaller groups and so in order to do that and accommodate that in the school there was a restructuring that we did in a couple of smaller additions in a couple of additions and in each building to accommodate the  space needs one do you work in an office ok we have one office space for some special ed folks and special ed with the confidentiality of the reports and and what not i walked into this room i have an office do i can i always complain that it's small i walked into this space and you literally have to back out to change your mind it is that small there's there's three small desks that they've made to fit and three chairs but to accommodate the growing need as a smaller lot of individual work in the in the special ed in order to accommodate that space we need to grow it that we put people in closets we put them in spaces that are not meant to be offices and we need to get the staff the space that they need to do the job audiologists working in all ways that's not a place to do that so we definitely need  need the space and that's pretty much the the net of the capital project i think i miss anything on the basic needs you know and there's plenty of information on our website about the capital project and we just  out a new promotional video that's that's out and about on social media and on our website so people can check it all out there what about the the question for the school board can that it's going to ask you is the district using it funding effectively to address the opportunity gap which is the disparity in access to quality and education and the resources needed for all children to be academically successful yeah that was an interesting question i certainly wouldn't want to be a new school board member trying to answer that question they're going to have to yeah you know i understand that but i think mine is more along the lines of having to be a merced in it in order to understand a the opportunity gap itself and then b what the school is actually  but i think they've done and then credible job understanding what it is this year one of the teacher out of the multitude of things we could have had and the need based on one to fifty ratio was brought forward but it's not we need eight positions of this we need six of that they bring back the very basic needs of what we need in the end each year over the last four or five years and that's exactly what we've hit a special ed need because this piece is growing  has come up a couple of times over the past four or five years and i think that is all aim with the with the poverty as well i think you need the extra one on one time and i think that they've done a tremendous what is it that we need to close that gap as well as you know what is it going to take what is the commute what can the community handle as far as you know the costs to do that i imagine everybody knows what stands for but for the record we've got out yeah i think i would love to answer that question because a lot of places still use e s l english as a second language but i think knowing what i've seen over the past four or five years the acronym is english language learners a lot of the folks that come to us anguish is not their second language it may be their third maybe their fourth the home language the camp if they had come through a camp but a lot of these folks speak more than more than one language so english is a second language is a little in some cases i think a slap so english language learners are the is the term that we use so i have to imagine that one teacher for fifty woefully inadequate it doesn't get it done at all in any environment that is way too many way too many students to try to keep track of and keep moving in a positive direction  yeah that's and so i think i think they addressed the opportunity gap extremely well ski right with the it started years ago with the redevelopment of the of the rotary and we know what a popular destination that has become and main street is starting to be revitalized and you know six or seven years ago beginning with the nelly may grant that was shared by burlington high school and when you ski high school a lot of work around student centered learning and just as an absolute  excitement i think in the city of new ski around the city and the school district and we're at a time now where you know this capital this capital project and continued resourcing of the school are really important  he school district has traditionally been in the bottom quarter to a third of spending per student across the state and this board has worked really hard to provide the resources to to us and to the school so that we can serve kids well and as you heard you know a lot of that investment is in licensed folks to do highly skilled work with our students and to meet their needs and so i'm really excited about continuing the work in the school district and in the city so that we continue to create a place that people come and they want to stay for long term and our families being able to stay in a pre k twelve learning continuum in a single campus as is is fairly unusual in vermont and particularly in china county and so i think we have something really unique to offer in that respect and we want to make sure that we not only kind of take care of what we have but that we continue to grow it for the so that you continue to make the school district an attractive place for young families to move to and their children too i do i think you know the housing is one piece of it but i think that we at the school district we have something unique to offer  know having a absolutely multicultural environment for students and we are the only majority minority school district in the state of vermont and so the the the multi linguistic experience multicultural experience that all students get really prepares them for the broader world in a way that most schools cannot cannot offer that and so i think that you know part of the communications position that we're talking about earlier is how do we  get that word out so people know that we have something really interesting to offer and we're seeing parents who have said that they've moved to a new ski because they want their children to have that experience and they know that it's going to prepare them for the broader world in a much better way carol another question for the can but it's good to be here tonight the evidence of the most successful interventions in the drug and alcohol crisis are coming from community based solutions so i'm going to ask you if you don't mind if you think learning that certainly seems like one example yeah take take it at the top and if you can maybe taken down a little bit deeper but one of the one of the things that we've done and went to school over the last five or six seven years is to ensure that  city and the school are on the same page we very regularly to make sure that programming that the city offers is aligned to what the school is laying out  so you know the we've moved a lot of the programming for the kids from the o'brien center which is on the mallets band of the southwest end of town we moved it into the school so that the kids don't have to afterschool travel so that continuity of the kids no matter where they are in the care of adults around the city they're in a school or with the city is the same to the point of even training the staff in the city as to what the school is doing so that they treated exactly the same way the kids hear the same words so i think that helps a lot for the kids knowing that there is a support group back to that taking it back to drugs a lot of that helps to have some of that support embedded in the system know i think you know the school's role the greatest leverage that we have in that question is prevention you know as the hub of the of the city and having you know eight hundred fifty to nine hundred students in and are in our building every day and so at the heart of the prevention is is making sure that we know students and their families really well so that when something comes up we know about it and we can we can support them so we do things like in the elementary we have what's called responsive classroom so there's classroom meetings every day there's tremendous communication with parents on a weekly basis from classroom teachers from the principal so that there where of everything that's going on in the middle of the high school we have what's called an advisory where every teacher has you know twelve to fifteen students that they stay with for a couple of years they meet every day so they get to know each other really really well so when something comes up they're there to support in addition to all of the more traditional instruction around prevention for drugs and alcohol that starts happening at the elementary level and you know that's all very important and then working with the city to provide activities so not just the school based activities but community activities so that we can foster developmental assets because the research tells us you know the more activities that we have for students positive activities we have students to be involved in and we can kind of enrich those set of developmental assets the less probability they have of either you have conferences with the parents and you bring the men you know to have some discussions if you have problems with the population and the new americans that we have we actually have i think it's four interpreters on staff to help us with that engagement of the new american population as well when needed for for anything so that helps how many languages are spoken there's over twenty languages spoken across the district  have we have six what we call cultural liaison's who's who speak at least ten different languages and then there's lots of dialects within those languages that are spoken in that we can send them out over voice they can do written translations transcriptions for us and they also just do a lot of word of mouth in the community when they're outside of school and build trust with  with the school through those communications and also introducing a lot of our new americans to the u s educational system which is oftentimes very different than what they're used to  talk a little bit about what the projections are for student roman and how the districts for the dress those population trends you mentioned there were some a little more than eight hundred sixty students k through twelve in the district and yes so we've  work with the new england school development council little development council they do a lot of work with the state and projections for increases ours look to be about ten increasing about ten students a year for the next eight or ten years which is contrary to a lot of what you hear around the state for losing students are declining populations ours is actually increasing and it has been for the past few  years growth is a good thing yes radical growth can catch you but small growth and that's that's part of what we're trying to plan for over the next ten or fifteen or twenty years with the capital project as well as to accommodate the space not only the space in the needs not only now but as we move forward you know that's that's asking the staff one of the things we challenge the staff with is what is the school look like in twenty years why do the work this year to what you know you needed last year if you're going to have it there for twenty five thirty years so it became a discussion of you know some interesting for me that i always think about what does a library look like twenty years from now what does it look like when all the books that you could possibly have are probably electronic and you know so the thought that went into the to this capital project and what do we have for a population what is the growth that we're going to do and just from pedagogy what does that look like as you get out bunch of years so that it's still useful as we get out even toward its end of life lunch at the senior center is an opportunity and then february twentieth a community dinner sponsored by the when you ski partnership for prevention at the o'brien community center and that's starting at six includes if those can't be reached by all means reach out all or information is contact information to contact me if you need to welcome the calls all right  how many candidates do we have many people around the on the school board you know many candidates that many people are running this year so we have a we have a five person board and each year we have two people do three in a two year see we have matt mcneil running again comes highly recommended and we look forward to her or her presence on the board we have a we have an interesting board we have a great variety of opinions which i think helped our discussions greatly when we when we work through issues policy whatever else we've got a very broad broad group for discussions is worked out really well well thanks for coming to talk about the music school budget