bearing with me through almost thirty slides and i think it is worth going through them again a lot of them you've seen before so i will not go into great detail but again i think it's important to tell the entire story of my finances decisions that we make we realize have academic and community impact not solely financial decisions when i go back through with r and r and roll meant in two thousand and s five hundred students greater than we currently are right now and i think that some light on that we are a district that continues to grow we're told that by professional consultants we hear it again and again i think it's important yes the only one that we have our eye on and again we're going to be a what we can be pleasant valley we will we have enough staff members in there to move it back and forth because you can see that twenty six point five although that's very respectable very respectable and again this is just the documentation i do want to point out that when we get into this issue where our expenditures are increasing and revenues are declining you can see that ranking and thirteen fourteen state ranking of three eighty four last year we were and you want to big number you want to be up at the top last year we were at four seventy seven we would drop considerably again because our expenditures are rising this is dropping numbers very very sensitive i just made a comment about the milage rate to when you go back even though peters is five and i know i mention this all the time and so i'm not going to pass up an opportunity to say it again in all of those washington county schools we get less state dollars per student so when we go and if that data is in here can and makea it's well over a thousand dollars more per still have a lower pupil cost than all of our comparable districts in all the districts that they love to hold us up against to a performance and yet we still have a lower cost and rank higher which is better for us in the states is intimacy point is that was funding is one thousand one hundred ninety dollars you look at our neighbor to valid there's a seven thousand four hundred seventy nine a very significant difference and i believe the average in washington county when you average all of our us doing business falls largely on the backs of our community and i think that's where that's really important really important to note and i think it's also important to note that following the reassessment it will fall more externals we make decisions we have to balance the being responsible to our tax our tax base who around forty percent and not have children in this district although they benefit by having a great school district in terms of the real estate again we have to be mindful who want to balance making sure their children have everything that they need with the fact that we are not fully subsidized in any way from outside funding and i made a point at a recent meeting that in college textbooks today teaching to be teachers about funding you'll see that most textbooks refer about a fifty fifty split between state and local funding peters township is above seventy percent i think seventy five maybe seventy three some around there six point five seventy six that were funded locally by the taxpayers so that point that you made is a significant one to those viewing in the community because historically it has been it flip flops if you look at the historic charts state local go like this over history fifty fifty forty nine fifty one but we're starkly different at seventy six percent and that number is such a stark number for us to realize because when we deal with where our money comes from it's local we can't depend on state we can't depend on federal and so when the average taxpayer complains about our rates they need to understand why it is the case it's not a decision we make it's a funding formula that we're given not a hearty yes whenever people look at this chart i want to point out as i have in the past california it's approximately ten mils of taxes from the university of california so it is not in this document but their actual is about one hundred and three mils of taxes versus the ninety three that's demonstrated but even with our increases we still hold the bottom third of the overall chart in any  another fact in revenues is looking at our construction starts you can see we've had fewer construction starts resulting a lower rates of revenue increases and when we're looking at what's happening currently in two thousand and who is mentioning how peter's township is growing so rapidly it looks that way because of what they see visually but as you talk to mike sylvester in the township folks they're right on par with their estimates and it's as you see here drastically down from five in zero six and another point i would make is the homes that are being sold are not being sold to families they're being sold to active older americans i don't want to be politically correct on that with active seniors which entails no students which drives our per pupil cost up because it's not pre and here's just interesting graphic of the revenues on laying when we have housing starts begin the decline of the same time when our interests earnings are flat and los when you have multiple revenue sources beginning to tail off that's a little it's a bit concerning services people expenditures you can see our history here i do want to because one number does not look like the others in our increases and thirteen fourteen you see that fairly significant that's where remember we had a multimillion dollar settlement so there are memorable were heading this way and this is heading this way that that also dispels danger that we have to be very credibly fiscally responsible now and i'll go a step further reminding the board in the public that a mail increase only generates three hundred thirty thousand dollars just looking at twenty twenty twenty twenty one that's a three mil increase just to cover the vat section of the bom step and not any other salary increases or benefit cost increases and this is this is one of the messages that i wish the public would really pay attention to because these simple things add up very quickly with what dr french's said with declining revenue and increasing expenditures people look at everything based on their own lenses and do not look at the big picture this is a startling that we've got to deal with the board has to handle this because if we do not deal with this in five years we're going to have major financial issues not because we're managing things improperly just because the gap will get wide on its own accord and we've got t step is and natch just that our current salary scale for teachers starts out a step line and that is step seventeen and between sixteen and seventeen that's called the bomb stat because there's a significant increase in salary between that sixteen and seventeen so when you say see and fourteen fifteen six hundred fifty nine thousand two hundred that means sixteen teachers are going to transfer from step but the impact and we did this even with the staff reductions that i'm going to speak to you about shortly so even with the riposte staff reductions because remember the more staff you have the more retirement that you're carrying obligation you in the recent history and to the public and to those who don't know that number is mandated to us by the state we don't have a choice in how low it is or how high it is and because of that now that the comment was made that if the district would have just put in more money back in zero seven zero eight that we wouldn't be in this position today the fact is there was not the best management of the invested dollars and so the rate of return diminished drastically thus underfunding the pension program and it's not just for teachers by the way if you paid attention this is all state employees not just teachers and just to be clear it wasn't mismanagement by any school board at the just normal state and even at the state level and nobody wants to talk about that you know risky investments volatility investments and then there was a point where the state declared that the pension was over funded or fully funded i guess this is the verbiage they used well maybe that was the case for time and date but you can never you can never use time and date on investments as a declaration and they did it and that's one of the problems too i would also i'm certain yeah i can i can only speak and write i can only speak to my only tracked since about zero seven but yeah i'm sure it started way before that because the snowball effect is the other way as inspectors expenses increase in this case because they declared that early on their money went down quicker because they're the investable income gap and it's a problem and people in the public don't know this they just see that it's under as to what the increase would be and i would be absolutely shocked if it isn't substantially higher than this and these are very conservative increases and one thing that i wanted to note is if anybody has i  don't think i said it in a prior meaning if i did forgive me but in has been legislation proposed legislation to to change in the head and i thought that that would significantly reduce if it were passed the school districts percentage obligations and there was an independent government it's a government agency that looks at the financial aspects of the legislation and costs it out to see how much it would save and they provided a schedule of proposed rates that we would have to still submit as our portion of and i was really surprised that at least for the next three years it stayed to what it was projected now and only reduced after like maybe four or five years down the road so if you look in the near term even if there is legislation that attempts to fix it i would expect that we should you know accept these rates as being what mrs bowman says as a minimum insurance and the board should know that one of the biggest issues we have with the health care is on the family coverage most employees only contribute eighty eight dollars to a family coverage of almost four hundred dollars a month premium that's a that's a major financial gap that we've been floating for a long time and it's standard in many districts but it has to stop it has to stop because that gap is way too wide it cannot continue this way and it's  special educational look so we have it in here because it's slightly over ten percent of our budget so it is a large obligation for us although it is a large obligation it's lower in line with our comparable districts special education costs continue to rise  deliver service but we have very little choice in the type of service where the range of service we provide service and so that's why we do not have discussion and again we can have  it becomes a choice in like even if we wouldn't have these constraints we would want to have these service and isn't do these things for our children because it allows them tax or education in the same manner that other children do and i mean we certainly want to have the best service we can provide and i do believe we have great service for children but the reality is is that it's it's it's a ten percent of our budget in terms of these services and the issue here is not with that we have to provide  service the issue here is that the funding does not keep up with the services that we need to provide to our children to access education and that's where the glitch is it's not that we have to provide the service it's that the state funding does not keep up in any way and we'll see that in a later slide with the demand and in the financial debt on the on the obligation on the district and can i add something to that because it was something that and i apologize if any one knows the specific agency that governs special education funding please you might know is that there is a i think law or a standard whenever we look and many times to administration will say see the areas where you can cut but in special education it's unique because you cannot reduce your special education spending from year to year only by a number of a very few exceptions so i can say to dr french hot special education funding because there is a standard by which you are not a lot you have to spend the standard is did you spend as much as last year and if you didn't what happens is there a fine or something i know that there is child who had significant expense that moves that you could yeah exactly you can demonstrate specific instances that would have an effect on your maintenance of effort requirements but if you cannot show that specific example say you had somebody with multiple disabilities that required a you know a specialized approved private school placement you were spending almost seventy five thousand a year on that one student and they graduated or moved th you can show that you were allowed to make that reduction because about one student but if if you don't comply i mean you're violating the id and you're subject to the federal government taking away all your money is really their recourse  but that was something that i was surprised to find out that you can't save in there so whenever you see that we're spending you know this many million in special education because when they impose standards and then they don't give us the capability financially to impose those standards on locally we have to come up the money somewhere and that's a very difficult and it's not just an education it should be noted it's across all all seven point eight percent of our total budget and the public dollars should be noted that we have very low cost of funds in our borrowing which is very good management sure we had a little bit of a reduction this year and curriculum if you remember we didn't adopt necessarily a curriculum like we did last year with k six we did do a k to twelve world language adoption which for the textbooks was about one hundred thousand dollars really was like ninety two zinc and then the writing for that was twenty six thousand dollars so we've invested over one hundred thousand dollars in new curriculum and writing for world languages which i think is important to call out because we often get noted that we only invest in tested areas in thing in foreign languages attested area but showing our value for having students have a well rounded education and an opportunity to be able to learn a second language and had children who graduated from a p foreign languages our textbooks were embarrassed well these are not a p as well but i mean although we'll be coming all the way through the language yes this is a complete redeveloped k to six in spanish and then using k twelve spanish and then six to twelve for french and german because you know the kids cycle through and choose their language going into seventh grade or our german books were covering boom boxes they were these textbooks i saw today we had actually the textbook publisher come in and present the super site which is actually kids will be able to click on the book at home and the clarity of them so if there's any concern about online texts they look better and you pretend like it flip the page you can click on words and highlight and do things with an online text and it says the word in the for foreign language it made me want to take the point six french teacher that's come in and marry position because they're really coal  resources that's a big chunk of our budget we're also shifting and looking at will be reconvening the literacy committee committee next fall so some of the things that we're doing are mcmurry and mr fisher can chime in on of this constraints around teaching books became that we only had a class set say of tuck everlasting so teachers could never collaborate plan together worked kids couldn't be reading the book if they didn't live next door to each other and be talking about books and talking about texts so some of the things we're looking at doing it's getting one to one which cut doesn't sound like a big idea but at the teachers were overjoyed today when we said if we need two hundred copies of tuck everlasting we will buy what we need to have one to one ratio for novels because it's helpful when all of sixth grade is reading the same novel at the same time it helps planning it helps assessment and it's just the better decision for kids than shuffling around boxes of books from this teacher that teacher this teacher that some of the things that we spending money on we also have this year used quite a bit of our excellence grant seventy five thousand dollars to invest in a lot of professional development with really high quality professional development from the university of pittsburgh they worked closely with our kate teachers and we're going to continue that work into next year it's funded through october from last year's grant so we're trying to be aggressive with continuing that kind of funding and then you all know about an mc so that's the biggest chunk of why you'll see an increase potentially in staff development because we really want to invest in our teachers and i've talked about this not just learning pedagogy but learning how to write curriculum there's a shift from being able to teach it to knowing to make good moves with when you're writing it and that's some of the stuff we did today just with our sixty eight teachers at the middle school library i think that's wonderful i have i had a question like when i looked at the curriculum budget and it did have some cost for some social studies books in the middle school and the high school is because originally social studies was online only are you planning to purchase more the high school books most of that is around the american government tax that are on display over there for both academic and honors they are writing that as the last cycle of this was several years ago we decided to shift around the curriculum for social studies this is the last one with american government so that's a chunk of it and then the middle school wanted to get enough books to be i think it's for the eighth grade to ensure they have a next enough text to meet the increase of kids coming in and out of the middle school as well but that's predominantly that twenty that's predominantly those text but some of it is for increase in roman or replacing text for the the middle school eighth grade so for social studies do they that for classroom sets because i know i thought when it was first that that really right first occurred there were only classroom sets of books and then online access is that how there are classroom sets but they purchased above and beyond for kids that want to be able to take in check them out in essence almost like a library from the main office to be able to take a textbook home to the online text the quality of them is superseding what you've been used to i mean when i took the text today were absolutely amazing  we've done a lot is right sized our department for our needs and our buildings if you take a look at the budget that was submitted to you by mr bell sic we tried to itemize everything as best we could and under the very first tab for the district details you will notice tech technician services is now for technicians as opposed to five based on the information that we got from teachers administrators and our work or support system we just didn't need that fifth technician at  our tickets are pretty low our average ticket times are an hour to two hours and our load is between four and six in each building our high school has the most but it also has the most amount of students and teachers in it but even at that we averaged under twenty s agreement we were able to bring a lot of those costs under control and we were headed towards the seventy thousand dollars mark based on our printing it out for capacity but by switching service providers and implementing systems  d items you see there i don't necessarily think we need to go through every single line item but what we are going to do is we're going to change out our web hardware to use a system called eyeballs that will allow us to filter but also shape a lot of our traffic to allow important endeavors in class to take precedence over those that are considered thank you so allow us to do that other contracts as you see th those are the cost of doing business for i t firms its support contracts for our power school subs it support contracts war on hand school sims which we were able to save some money as well by taking our curriculum system and actually moving  hand school system and we did a lot of work on that today so we were able to eliminate an expenditure there that way we've got support for wiring and cable services we have infrastructure development services that we have here and those are based on what may happen throughout the course of the year a failure of a switch in in a data closet can cost anywhere from two to five thousand dollars depending on what what that's so it's important for us to be to be proactive and be  an hour or so arse our students on our staff members are still able to to use their systems as intended and the microsoft e s program is an agreement that we entered into last year and the rate has not changed but it has saved and saved  significant amounts of money moving for through these past two years for instance we just migrated our staff members to office two thousand and thirteen from two thousand and seven before they left for the summer to do this alone would have cost us twenty thousand dollars if we were under the so if things go down or are there for their code upgrades where we have those available to us and if a piece of hardware fails its next business day we get a new the cost of the support contracts are significantly less than the cost of having what we call a cold spare sitting on the rack in case we have monies in there for recycling and are our ones are when subscription are our way and subscription is our internet contract that we use mainly and we have increased for the fifteen sixteen school year that increase is going to take us from one hundred meg circuits to a gigabit circuit because of all the traffic that we have because of all the utilization that we have throughout the day we constantly fill up that internet circuit that we use we have approximately of anywhere between five and six thousand devices on any given day and it right now at my house fires i have one hundred make circuit to my home that's if we have shares throughout our district so we're really starting to pump th as we move down again gover lan support this is a way that we support our teachers and students remotely so we are able to further reduce our response times for teachers to install software or support them via remote control on their desktop features really do love this application the in this to initial cost was about five thousand dollars but maintenance moving forward is about two that's where we take over their computer we give them fair warning and everything is audited so no one can remotely do it without anybody's knowledge there's a big a you'll see there for alexandria that is our that's our library system big website big web apps is our current work order system and we're going to be funding that for one more year and purchasing base licensing for a new system called web help us start to confuse the two because but big web apps is a host of service so every year we pay between seven and eight thousand dollars depending on how many users we have the web helpdesk system we would actually purchase the same licensing with a slightly higher price tag for the initial year but after that after that the software is stored on site so it's stored on our service and we pay a minimal cost service contract and anywhere between us so after a two year period the system occupations you see miscellaneous office supplies we have network upgrades that we do all things to just work throughout the year for ah just to be able to keep the lights on and that's basically the district any question connect to another device we looked at two different solution one being a full scale enterprise grade solution which is significantly higher than we would pay for a computer that comes out of the boat which is just not there for education and we've looked at another one that has a lower level system but it still gives you the concept of you know thin client environments unfortunately when we ran it through its performance degradation so the more users that actually jumped on to this ystem the worse the compute we thought this is really going to be a solution for us but it turns out as of right now the tech isn't there really for us moving forward operating systems and devices like and one of the things are really putting emphasis on as well is by next year's really having our infrastructure down pat and all of our buildings be it wired and wireless and what will be able to do is stop pushing our resources here in our local budget that way with an option to do and i largely did and one thing that mr swan shot made a presentation at a p t a meeting and the question was asked is i've always seen you know buildings where everybody has one to one i pads or one to one  or anything and you know i said you kind of get you know device and be or whatever you like why can't we do that for our students and he brought something up that just stuck in the back of my mind all this time is that when your students get to use different devices it's actually better for them because if everybody had an i pad and all the software was apple and you went to college and they weren't an apple school you know it didn't replicate real life or when you get your first job you know you want to have the opportunity to work on a lot of different devices so that's something in my mind that has stuck all this way and i kind of really like now when i see a lot of we going to need a bigger one or what it is being used by mr burns currently and in this budget we actually have a request for two additional three d printers and moving it down into the middle school so we can expose those students to rapid prototyping at that  couple schools got together and they actually invented an arm for a young lady who in fact did not have her right arm i mean there's no i was a technology i mean who would have ever thought we'd be doing this kind of thing in the very high school or college but apparently it's being done our revenues and expenditure of what i like to call what we've been doing since february and again i want to you know school district budgets are very different than businesses we just cannot work harder and get more money so it's not like we can invent something and more money comes into our action is to really bring our expenditures in line with our fixed revenues so the first thing we looked at was department reviews and we've had a good sample of the discussions we've had with  chalk and with dr murphy and mr fisher and with mrs kelly it's going through departments in finding out how can we be more efficient and asking ourselves what do our children need a good example of this is a dollar spent in one place is not  subscription when we log in and find out nobody is using it that is a no brainer we'll stop doing atlas find another way to do it because alice is about adult books are for kids we're going to take that money we're going to put it closer to kids so the team you know i have to congratulate the team worked incredibly hard including the school principals about trying to stand in the shoes of our children and make decisions on what's best for children not what's best for us it was a lot of give and take looking at contract reviews you running the analytics if someone says no i can't give this up and we go in and run the run the analytics that you should reports and you've only used it once well you're not going to have any more to or stop paying for things that we just don't get we don't need some people can sometimes be sad about that but again a dollar spent here is taking away from a dollar spent in a classroom the last thing we looked at was staffing based on programming student demand we built a high school schedule and said ask the children what they want and we will not say that courses are closed or this is happening we will shift our resources to give our children what they want same thing with our other schedules it will be based on what children want and need and that's how we will we will say about copy machines mr belcher can i have a meeting tomorrow with our banking services to determine whether or not we are realizing the best savings in competition with other banks out there for having our banking business we did this when we did the bond review we put our calls and whatnot so we're sweeping every single contract that we have to realize as many savings as we can and the public needs to understand and this again i just a summary of our expenditure reductions you can see that at first we had the impact of our retirement with replacing all the staff and that they came to you in what we've been doing since then is the apartment staffing changes i'm not going to go through each of them but you can see the reductions and board for not shying away from decisions dollars spent here does not have the same educational impact as a dollar spent another or that we're moving with these resources we do not have unlimited resources we're moving them in a way that we can maintain a low class sizes maintain all the program we've not had to make the cuts that other districts have had to make what we've really done is just eliminate inefficiencies in this budget and so you can see we are we are we work and we'll just reimburse the the general fund so i really want to thank the team for working very hard to close this gap in a way that makes sense for children and i believe will be allowing us to be very competitive moving forward and provide really good educational continued good educational services for can i ask a question for the hundred thousand dollars i mean we all know that there's many more capital projects that we've talked about so many times is there reason or a better reason why it would come from capital projects rather than the reserve well you know there is an even go so far as to say that this number is a very very conservative number we could probably easily quadruple that number and justify the expenses that we spend out of the general fund right the four things that could be paid for the capital projects and so it's more of an accounting thing but the point being made is that we're only using one hundred thousand when we probably could claim as much as four hundred thousand and transfer capital monies into the general fund to pay for those things and so this is it's a very conservative number that we're using here because it could be much higher and we would be within the bonds of doing it and so that should be noted but what i'm saying is is there some reason why you  reserve i know that there's justification for it but there's any use i mean so much expenditures down the line and i see for capital projects to leave it there let's be clear this hundred thousand dollars is reem basically reimbursing right the money this hundred thousand dollars is being spent is on capital projects right there just capital projects that are within the budget rather than just capital projects budget so it's a it's not same same number right on the right this is this is not only a better way of doing it i think it's more accurate way of doing it for the public right we're not taking from the fund balance because we're actually spending capital projects money  and then in your medical insurance rate savings is that because our insurance rates are going up but are you saying because you have a lower number of activities there are actually going to be savings is that that number actually this represents the decrease from a five percent increase because the last one had a five out of five got a two point five in the number might not be as high as you think it would be but whenever you're replacing that may have a single or husband wife coverage or even just a contribution to a t s a with someone coming in that we have to budget for a family coverage differ that would use up some of that savings as well  know you have fixed revenues and you also know that moving forward there's no relief for the increases and again you know over three million dollars just in contractual and retirement obligations in your fixed budget year after year after year you lose the ability to keep finding efficiencies like we are what we did now was we are almost as tight as we will get without dipping into eliminating programs and so our next thing will be to start taking it out of out of our reserves and with a balance of slowly taking away from programming if we don't get relief and there will come a time in what a lot of districts is then you no longer can outlast the funding dilemma that we've been put in by the state although i do not see any any good news on the horizon in matter of fact we're talking about fair funding formulas it's really about  giving more money to high poverty districts when you look down at what we get eleven hundred dollars per child compared to seven thousand dollars per child what they're looking at is that seventy over seventy they want to change that even more unfair yes to make it less fair than it already is because of the wealth of this community this community will only be able to tolerate supporting this district so far we will end up like  taxes like upper st clair in mount lebanon because they're in the same boat we are but what they're dipping into their community in their taxes is far greater than what we have and there will be a line limit so i want to find every other means before going into you know my personal opinion i think mr ignore would agree with me that's why we're doing what we're doing that's why we're we're trying to find savings in every aspect of our contract to obligations because if we don't weather the storm all the great praise that we get for being a high performing district in a well ran school is going to go by the wayside and if we don't make those decisions now and that's why i don't want to see is going to the fund balance right now because there might be a day you know we saw two thousand and seven two thousand may come and go but people don't understand is if you come again tomorrow individuals in this community school system so the same time we are trying to be responsive to people who want everything and they should want everything for their children and they should add advocate fiercely for that we are the same time trying to be responsible  that's the only people paying the eight dollars is one bargaining unit of about one hundred twenty seven employees and i know those hundred twenty seven employees only about a quarter of them qualify as full time employees so that's less than twenty five employees are paying the eighty eight dollars on the family zealous you're speaking about your bargaining unit and that's not a true statement because the teachers also look at their contract real obligation they're not paying that they're not looking at your actual obligation they're not paying eighty eight look at it they're not paying eighty eight there at one forty five your point my point is if you said most of the employees are paying eight dollars on family medical coverage and that's not true there are less than twenty five people that are employees that are full time employees that are paying the eighty eight dollars that's my point