comments from community members boards for comment has also been the subject of a public community forum that we held here last week we received many comments and much input which is greatly appreciated on our our next meeting is on monday at four thirty the agenda is the most prominent agenda item is to consider those comments and to see what revisions we may want to make it is possible that the committee at this meeting will actually take some some action on a draft that would be submitted to the state department of education state agency of education in the state board of education is also possible that we will decide that we need another meeting to finalize our decisions on whether to revise the document and whether to submit it to the to the state for approval and so tonight is a great opportunity for any board members since we appear to not have any public members present any board members who wish to make comments and provide suggestions concerning the doc story was that the narrative was a little more objective than the it was very much sales oriented and trying to get people into the frame about anything about any of the possible negative aspects of a merger which there are some and i think we need to present a balance here thank you in reading through some of the comments i was going to does here only be part of your discussion but many of them didn't seem to be relative to the merger as much  as some of the more specific functions that would occur like the movement of teachers from one school district to another and there were two or three and i thought i'd marked them but i didn't but that they were things that were really tangent to the merger as much as it was implement post merger implementation of it well i think that's true and  i think one of the things that's important for us to understand the question we're deciding is one governance and it's it's whether to have whether to continue our our structure now which has as the introduction recites it has as a separate boards fifty six separate seats were to move to a consolidated structure and there are there's been a lot of debate in the committee about the degree to which to specify what exactly the new entity it formed would do and i think the consensus or at least the majority view has been that for the most part those are decisions that need to be made by the new board and will need to be made by them over time if the structure is adopted and so questions like how one would actually handle the transfers of teachers among schools would have to be addressed at that point but having said that though i also think it's important for people to understand that even if we do go to a new governance structure it is not as if we would be cutting all ties with the past and there's a there is a very strong culture that has developed within our communities and within our boards in our government structures and that will not disappear i'm quite confident that that's something that exists regardless of what our governance structure is and so  notion that it will be some alien group making decisions not connected to what we've done before something that we need to address and help people understand because it perhaps what you just said would be a good opening introduction to the merger you know that there's a lot of information the detail isn't here because we would like it to come from the committee that puts it together but i think that was what it has the statutory step to stop and take it by statute the voluntary merger committee must make a decision whether to recommend a a a merge structure and if it does make that decision then it must formally submit articles with a report to the state board of education and that step has not yet occurred so when you say the next meeting an action might be taken that were included vote and then it is possible that at the next meeting the committee may actually take that statutory action it's also possible a committee may decide that he needs more time to to review and revise before it makes that decision like to see the report a little more clear that it's not really a financial gain for the past few it's we've got some initial tax benefits but that's not the goal the merge and a lot of people that i talk to say well you're really not going to save a lot of money doing it not like you're right now facts correct i think we should just be a little more upfront with that there's one point the other is somewhere in the report was written that the new group would not be able to close a school for four years we should be had not have that hidden have that up front cause those are where i hear a lot of concern about closing schools it's not the same money going to close a school it's in the report found that it's clear you know it and i did make a few comments and i submitted to i sent it to kevin campbell and i i copied john but i wondered how did those comments get incorporated into the draft and want to comment in specific was nowhere in the report does it say there can be if it's got fifteen member group but when you do the rounding it adds up to fifteen was not written in that there is going to be a fifteen member new school board and the way the rounding was done  unusual for example if you look at page thirteen of the report when i round one point seven i round that up to two and i have two point four around that down to two  but that's not the way it's around in the report so let let me address there's several things a lesson in this any bring me you know bring me back and i write address all year it's the number clearly allocation among communities is something that has been raised and again the committee is going to have to debate it but i do think the arithmetic you describe is accurate so i think that's probably subject to the committee's decision going to result in some sort of vision the financial questions i think it's very difficult to isolate the financial impacts of a joint governance structure and and and say definitively in a spreadsheet format that so many years from now x or y dollars of savings will occur because there's too many variables in school districts so now what we've done is we've identified some specific some fish and seas that can be captured and would be captured under various scenarios  but beyond that perhaps we need to do a better job of this is to understand the case for why this is more efficient and therefore by definition will either produce cost savings or more resources to apply to education or better education yes right that's right not to take too much time on this but one of the things that strikes me is we have we have our most senior people in the supervisory in who are supposed to be our most important education leaders who spend a disproportionate amount of their time simply coordinating governance decisions we invest a lot of money in those folks and one of the one of the benefits of having a governance structure like this is that those resources would be available for the things that not only drive educational excellence  but also produce efficiencies if you look at the student to staff ratios that are in our various elementary schools it's pretty simple to see that we have some some ratios there that are very costly but we don't have the ability to share staff at this point to to to try and address those simply because we have a desegregated governance structure now i would submit when people ask me that this will make us more efficient but have somebody saying the burden on the proponents of merger is to produce the definitive spreadsheet there and they're really ignoring what the questions about migrate the question the question is whether one can identify from the structure real efficiencies that will occur not whether one can quantify those to the penny that's what saying we should be more upfront about this is not necessarily going to save money but it will make it more efficient and will have our talented individual spending time think about educational issues rather than governance issues and i don't think that's clear that's a good point and the other thing of course that it's important to understand is that separate and apart from the financial question i think maybe the most important driver for proponents of this has been educational quality the sense that students staff community would be better served by of governance structure that can focus on the needs of staff students community from the start of the educational spears to the yet they can allocate resources among them that can make hard decisions that will actually improve their educational quality that will be making those decisions together as opposed to constrained by the budget limitations that one particular elementary school may have and i i suspect that if you asked some of the folks who really push us to get towards this process this time they would list that as their primary motivating factor and i think it's continued to be something that's critical to the members of the of the committee so i hope that answers your questions y could look younger every years but that would be a neat trick when they're now thank you ok yes the other thing is we have these tables for the various school districts showing education spending equalised people but i didn't see what it would be like if the new regime were in place now what would be the at spending per pupil that might be useful number probably go higher in some instances like go lower in some instances we presumably smiley's eighteen thousand dollars per equalised people would go down because there are fixed costs and so it at total number of life pupils do the division we'll come up with a number well i was thinking of also incorporating the reductions in the ministries of staff that might occur and so in other words complete some factor losers because that was one of the big issues you know when you had people that there equalized people go way down and others that it would go up in years and so they're trying to get these mitigate that and really  that you can eliminate it within the first couple of years i think that one thing that's important to point out i mean i'm talking about some of the reduced administrative costs that's more of a one time thing that's not going to be an ongoing reduction each year you're going to get that up front but after that point you know you're down to a new level and that's the new normal you know and people need to understand that anyway and i think it's really important people look at the big picture long term i mean i know our society so people want to look at things you know how can you come for me right now all those are some oh yeah you're going to save eight cents  you know on property tax bill but that's one year and then it drops to six important to so that i mean that was that was upfront but you know people need to look at this long term and you can debate you know also back and forth about you know you know the freedom in terms of curriculum across the whole district you know that has good and bad aspects for some schools that may create a instability in their teaching staff that they don't want because some of because their view that they have an excess you know their their ratio of you know teachers  higher than the rest and there's a need someplace else or suddenly they lose a teacher that they want to or they actively recruit for their school so you've got to look at the pluses and minuses it's not necessarily all good you know i mean and it does create a greater disconnect from the community to the schools because they don't have as many avenues of input as they do they won't have as many avenues of input as they do now because now i maybe they know the people on their five member scores and work for their elementary school but they don't know they may not know the person who's on the consolidated so there is there is a loss there in terms of hearing from the community and also the connection of community members to the schools in not necessarily just parents because you know there are people who are connected the schools who don't have children so i mean it it's not i think it's important to present both sides you know and in essence you know and we know you know because we have to project and project presented excuse me objective we can't spend taxpayers money trying to sell something we need to answer right i can't disagree more with just about everything you said i think that there is a negative side i don't think you mentioned any of it sides of the hike i'm having a yes or a response to administrative cost goes down that's ongoing if my paycheck goes down ten bucks to ten bucks an hour or whatever five but whatever it stays down it doesn't jump up the next year back to what the starting number was i for the first year you're not going to get that cost savings each subsequent year if you're talking about an administrative cost that's wrong if you're talking about a personal tax savings cost that's right so you're talking about two different things and i'm not sure which words you're using that are that i'm saying you're going to see the number i've heard initially was there was about two hundred thousand dollars savings and that sorry if you take that two hundred thousand dollars from that first year budget into the consolidated structure just say there is in your budget be two hundred thousand dollars more if we had done this in any future year your budget be two hundred thousand dollars more if we had made that change you could say that but are you going to say that fifteen years down the road you  that seems to be a disconnect from the way things are you know we look at things in terms of budgets we look at the previous year maybe the previous two years we don't look at what what things were ten years ago except in terms of like cost  but it's not like you're saving an additional two hundred thousand dollars each year you're saving it one time and then you go forward with the new normal that's what i meant by the new normal share and i get that i just think that you can't look at that as saying that that's a negative like that that i think it doesn't make sense to me to look at that as a negative as a cost savings as a negative because you only get a cost savings of one year until significant time so my other thing is when you're talking about teachers if a teacher isn't it isn't supported at that school anymore and that teacher would be fired but if we have a consolidated district then there's an opportunity for that teacher to have a job within our district somewhere else so i also see that as a positive as opposed to the way it is now which is a negative because we can't the teachers lose their seniority if they move from the i d f school to the central school and that's the part that i thought did you hear what i said about the negative  because we're going to pull a teacher from one school to another because why the only reason that teacher would leave that school the only teacher that teacher the only reason that teacher would be required not to be there is if there weren't enough students to support that  school in which case today that teacher would lose their job and i'm saying that that may be viewed in that particular community is creating some sort of instability in the parents he said where i really love this teacher for my kids ok legitimate viewpoint to say that the study committee should simply present of very dry report that has on one side of the ledger the pluses only other than the minuses and says here you  are but there's another viewpoint and at least so far it's a viewpoint that has enjoyed the support of the majority of the committee the point is that we're charged with a responsibility to make a recommendation that's just double check the state law it's there quite clearly and if the committee believes that there is a strong recommendation that should be made it would not be fulfilling its responsibility if instead it backed away from that and presented presented the viewpoint that said something else now there are diverse views on this on this committee and if we would not surprise me if in the end there is a dissenting viewpoint that is present which i think would be very healthy but i don't think if the majority of the committee believes after it studying its work that there is a strong recommendation that it should make i think the balance of the argument is in the in favor of that viewpoint that you really should make that recommendation and that's where when you read in particular the introduction to the report that's where you see that because that is the consensus of a majority of the committee this time but your viewpoint that that instead it should be something dry and you know you just didn't present anything negative in th presented that everything is just in to me that's not a complete view of the of the u s and it's just a different viewpoint of what we should do but i understand there is on  just bring it up if we can talk about it the concern that i've heard people have is that if we have a merge district teacher who is not needed in one school would have to right so so is a i mean that's a controlling those that's not accurate ok because number one for licensure you have to have certain indorsements to teach certain subjects in certain grade levels and then in the contract that we have right now there is some stipulation from there that says you know how people can be transferred and why they would be transferred from one school to another and in the last you know decade here we have transferred in maumee and shell which is two thirds of our teaching staff i hand full of people so we're talking maybe five maximum maximum ten but i can recall only five and i've been working at central office for a decade ok so that may be something that we want to clarify because i think that that's a real concern that a number of people have been bringing up about whether that's the case and i really didn't have the answer to that so it would be negotiated to me i think in a new there would be that would be part of negotiations is how do people get transferred and then if this if there was a unified board then they would be negotiating with cost savings because we have the current spreadsheet and we can term of this position we go this position we go we can make you calculation as michael points out it's harder to identify what cost we might incur down the road i think it's a little bit disingenuous to sort of say so we'll just talk about the cost savings we can identify but we can't really talk about the cost that we might incur down the road because now you have this imbalance in an argument so  i don't know how to get to that point but i just maybe put out an example if we sort of decide so you down the road in a unified district that we could increase educational opportunities by offering foreign language instruction for broadly than we do now would that be considered would everyone agree that that would be a cost that we would incur versus now if we have different we have a different school boards through some elementary boards might decide we don't want foreign language instruction we want to have that cost so would that be an example of a future course that we could occur yeah the thing is the to say what i should say you will have a board which will have more ability to pursue cost savings because it'll be a lot will be a lot more flexibility within the system you also have a governance system that will be more influence must document when you know it's like this maze of committees it's very difficult for the public to engage with with with a new governing system you'll have a single board you know you won't have this maze of committees you'll be able to go in be sure that you're if you're speaking to the people who can actually make the decision so what i say is that the community will have to get more of whatever its priorities are because it can elect people who can affect those things at the stage now what that board's going to do is the board going to prioritize school choice is there put borgen to prioritize cost savings is the board going to prioritize adding an arts academy for elementary school that's really up to the public to elect people who can exercise those things so it's really i think the answer is the public will be the citizens will get more of what they want because a little better government system and they will be more able to influence right i don't write i wasn't trying to suggest in any way that that would be some sort of action that a future board would take it was just to make the point that just a single unified board could work together to reduce costs but also have at the same time the ability to  is whether you are working in a desegregated governance structure that literally prevents certain kinds of quarter nation or whether you are in a unified structure in which those who are in charge can make good or bad decisions let me give you a great example suppose somebody had come to our public comment session today and made the following comment you have a you have a very good superintendent and i notice around this state board that we are turning over superintendent since bidding them out like they're nothing losing them right left and sideways what are you mansfield union school board doing to nurture and keep this fine superintendent you know the answer we would have to give is well we should go to that shit in the supervisory union executive board it there are just so many examples like that where we if we move to this governance structure we're not guaranteeing that we can make that we will make the right decisions but we're putting ourselves in a position where we have that capability somebody had the idea of some hate one we combine the building maintenance of camel's hump middle school richmond elementary school which committee where would you start with that idea and what would it take to get that done and probably never under what we've got now because you get a different set of taxpayers different boards you know and it's an idea which is has the potential for i think some serious savings yes but it's something we just can't approach ok this is the last thing i'll say would help the public decide on what they feel is appropriate i think if that input from the principals was missing our first murder attempts are well years ago and i was wondering if the committee has but i have to say that that i cannot support this because not because of all these things that you've discussed because quite frankly to me they're all penultimate concern the ultimate concern in my view is that the enabling legislation is seriously flawed many vermonters want the legislature to investigate other government structures besides the red the red has failed in a lot of states around the country and there's research available about that i've looked up a lot of things that talked to a number of people in different states i even talked to governor douglas who under whose watch this law originated in two thousand and nine now that the modified union came in in two thousand and twelve but his comment was well he learned that vermont had more superintendents per child than any other state in the union and he thought if we reduced the number of superintendents we could have more money to hire more teachers that was his view of it that's what he told me this whole thing right here is not going to reduce the number of superintendents that if anything it's going to divide the community i think the law is the way it reads because of the asset problems and that the voter incentives and all this and that i think the law is very unfair and unworkable and i wrote a letter two years ago to the executive committee saying that i thought it was unethical to even try to get a public vote about this legislation because we need to insist on a better law from the legislature one that maintains school boards allows towns to keep their real estate assets in the school buildings and does not undermine donor rights with temporary tax incentives there are a great many people thinking and intelligent caring people who regard these tax incentives as bribes and a form of corruption and in the room on state constitution it says that all elections shall be without corruption and i know that i represent a significant number of people who feel this way the incentives devalue the act of voting on the issue itself because people believe that a good idea can stand on its own merits the rearrangement of public funds to give advantage to people who vote for a certain agenda at the expense of those who don't vote for it could even be illegal and i know you're a lawyer michael but i've talked to a few lawyers and they say that there's a possible case for it that i think that the legislators are quite aware that there  a need for a better law and some of them are working really hard on it the age eighty three passed the house a few legislators who voted for it have frankly told me or friends of mine that they voted for it because they thought they had to do something and they didn't know what else to do now that's not the art of thinking and i know the senate was not in favor of forced redistricting that idea has already stirred up a tremendous amount of rain corps and they were trying to work on something but they simply ran out of time and i don't see why we need to rush into this i think we should put a moratorium on it because i think that the law may be improved to a point that we can with much less effort rancor discussion an argument that we can arrive at a better structure the good news is that i think this has started a big conversation all over the state about education and what we need and how we want to fund it etc etc and i think that's a very good news but in terms of this particular law at this particular time in this particular place i think it's wrong is it true that in five years that we are going to have a reduced number of supervisory unions by law and therefore we can either decide to do it our no aren't our own and have some control over how that will look or we wait five or five or six years that it's just going to happen anyways and have no control it is not true as not timely that's not true age eighty three for  proposed a moratorium on this whole thing and a series of public forums around the state to gather information from experts in tax fields and education and all things to try to gather the best opinions from the smart public that we have all over the state  even the lieutenant governor was on vermont edition long ago and he said that he thought that it was a good thing that that bill did not pass because neither the senate nor the house had it well enough worked out and my point to you folks is simply w due respect to the work that you've done and it's not a waste because you've looked into a lot of details and found out a lot of things i don't think that you can come up with a clear question for a voter to explain what they're even voting for are they voting for a red or modified red if you if you vote against the red and your town decides against that you've got a different structure but the modified read takes place somewhere else those people don't know how much money they're going to say  what are people even voting for i mean there must be standards of clarity in the election questions i think i'll ask the secretary of state about that but seriously this is this mark is not workable the legislature needs to improve the law and then we can we can take all the knowledge that that has been gathered about the things we need and the things we want we can go there and tell them what we need and want get a better law and then we won't open to hearing dissenting points of view and asking questions air expect from a courteous manner as opposed to some of the discord it's been reported in other neighboring communities so that i appreciate everyone's efforts to begin to make one quick comment to that end there are people one hundred can we still remember very vividly the comments that were out in local newspapers in the free press you know you know denigrating my town that has not been forgotten nor has it been repeated nor has it been repeated and i agree with the next there's a lot of interest in a lot of opinions and so well each i think every i think every year or m m u is our district we don't change any system then there are six elementary school districts i think everyone has we last year had shared that we were above the threshold which is five million dollars it's gone and bob did an analysis this year on could we manage our funds based on what happened over the past year or so that we can keep the dollar amount below four million and five million and we would be able then to take a loan and reinvest the money and then get some revenue and typically look at that come up with a net and pick the best the best for this year it's the merchants bank our own way in at one point four percent and invest in the funds at one point six percent and we get a positive there instead of spending money on interest and we're making a little by reinvesting so our recommendation is those rates guaranteed those can we need emotion yes last four years they've done a good job for us we're also recommending remarks there that they were the only one that they had and they're after a vendor and they have high quality chips talk to people who've managed property and they tend to move away from the flat rate pick up spur cell removals because when the if it's a one of those cab years and the company feels like they've already here they've already overspending at the end of the season and they still have to remove the snow sometimes they're less productive about it so i feeling especially changing to a new bender and doing all that i just want to kind in starting to work on thinking about orientation in the fall for the freshman we have a lot of i will sign up which is terrific and in the student life we have exams going on right student project even to paid it can just put me in skilled union high school and the sign itself without listing all of the activities that are going to and so i understand that that would be a difficult that's a difficult and hard thing to do especially when the weather and climate but just to keep that in mind it i'm sure that any costs would be underwritten by volunteers and i would stand  if you come up with any ideas for what we could do i'm sure we would be able to get a group of students who would be more than happy to make that change happen so just let me know if you've heard a couple of thoughts yeah  to how the budget is being reconciled and this being the last meaning this fiscal year it seemed like this was a good time to do that to touch base on some of those things to keep referring to our lake shore neighbor but the comments that are rife about a lack of transparency things like not having had a line item by check that was confusing to taxpayers and what are not things that necessarily character us characterize us we don't want y and we have run surpluses and mount mansfield for the last several years which has enabled us to put together i think a pretty healthy repair and maintenance on in case in in the case that there are of urgency sort of things have to get fixed so instead of having to go out by one for those we have a fund that we can grow on to maintain the buildings and react to things that are currently the other thing i wanted to mention to the board was we also took a look at ok and i really think this is the way we should be looking at the system because of volatility in some of the smaller budgets when you take a look at it in the east as a whole so all the expenses and all the revenue and we're looking at a surplus of about three hundred miles which is you know obviously less than one percent of your overall legit which is about forty three million but it is it is i think we're exactly where we want to be so that that doesn't come without attention to detail very good business manager and building base folks that are really studying and you know look at what the expenses are and what we need to do to make sure that we're  over the long term so health care coverage can change that like to some increased cost or an overpriced condition it was under spending on textbooks equipment supplies and item in that budget special education had some additional grant revenue that we received and of course that man means that we have the intentional expense is equal to that so we would see that as considerably to take those two factors into consideration going forward helping guidance is projected to have a positive variance for some savings in staffing health care coverage changes when we save money wages lower than budgeted health care coverage changes in a positive direction less costly as well small savings in post and supplies and travel secretarial services is projected to have a positive variance due to lower wages again but offset by some health care coverage changes that will be more cost physical services and board of education taken together like i guess come september take a more in depth detail look at the results for the year get probably more into each individual schools see what happened chris is kind of taken all together as one  i also attached capital reserve fund to show where i expect the balance to be at the end of fiscal year fourteen going to be about seven hundred three thousand dollars hard to say you know is it going to trend in the last few years has there has been a trend we've had more students over the last you know six or seven years i mean there's a lot of reasons for that  offerings are very good i mean there are students that are really interested in pursuing some of those locational opportunities in fact i think somebody told me i can't verify this but the center for technology is actually expanding them quite a bit because there's a there's a real lot and the motivation is to use to take advantage of some of those course offerings so how do we budget for the been a few more students and we're spending a lot of money on technical education and if you and again and not to go back to the merger conversation but you can see one of the cost benefits that we had put in there was we're spending over a million dollars a year on technical education i think we could if we had some flexibility in how we use our facilities and how we allocate resources we may be able to bring some of those funds back here and create some of our own innovative programs and spend that money here and potentially get some revenue there have been often times when we have put a portion of it into the capital fund and the rest of it goes back to the taxpayers what it does the political you start in the black right so it's money you don't have to raise  know one thing i'll put that in chinese cannot borrow money so we can't we don't have a taxi anticipation no so there's times when we're short on cash as well for a variety of certificate we're going to borrow one million one hundred forty thousand dollars from the municipal bond that we've already heard he had i think one or two motions on this already but this is the paperwork but i thought i'd just walk through and talk about some of the pieces that i think are most important the first section is just an introduction and i do think  graduation on saturday if you have or if you haven't been you should go it's my one of my favorite days of the year having been a principal year and i see a lot of kids that i know that are graduating and it's been years so long  across the state getting to meet them you know along the way has always been as also been really special and we're really i think the last such wonderful community and finance or finance committee met a lot this year and we literally started in september and we had additional meetings there was a lot of i think in death discussion analysis of just about every component of the budget we were down to talking about twenty thousand dollars in a twenty seven million dollars budget and we're going to do so it was a really i felt like it was a thoughtful approach to the budget and i very much appreciate the work of the committee and the administration for a lot of additional work and a lot of care to what they a subsequent discussion and several discussions and analysis and got a lot of community feedback as much as we do we we really did try every avenue that we could to get feedback you got some feedback and the planes committee once again deliberated in debated the different parts of the budget and in the end we brought one point four six increase to next year with the finance committee and just try to be as creative as we tend to get so if we assume that these financial pressures that really are making are going to continue over the next few years is there a plan for the finance committee or the administration to come up with maybe a long term strategy to deal with what may be an increase in these sort of close folks at all i mean are we going to change anything in the way that we do to make sure that you know we don't end up in the position again and it's not that's not me saying that we did something wrong it's just saying that the tenor of the atmosphere in these days maybe isn't as reasonable as it might be so we might see this increase in these sorts of things i think we should explain that forty percent of the state right tax  trouble in adding the corrections education spending into that tax rate increase to by seven cents and that wasn't legislative action it was an administrative action well that's what i mean we all agree with that we don't know  get my question is what will we do as a board to make sure that if that's the message that we you know we get that out there could be one thing that that sort of work i think we should tell i don't know the answer is just it is a great question and if i had had the answer i'd give it here but i don't but i do i do suspect that when you know we said we were still doing it when we get back as a finance committee and start start grinding away again next fall that we're going to be thinking a little bit about the long term as well as the immediate budget and how we communicate and  we might have at least some sort of contingency plan hard the committee work this past year and what they go through each year he doesn't have a clue in my book about how hard you guys work to over twenty thousand dollars in a twenty seven million dollars budget invite him say you want people to be sure it was our budget we'd love you to come and tell us where we're spending willy nilly because i don't think we are sick and i think john i think part i think the finance committee didn't excellent job this year and i think the vote in march was against the ford or our budget i think it was about the legislature and i think the second vote kind of proved that people realized it wasn't our our overspending it was work we're doing the best we can and people realize that you voted the second time in favor of it but i'm sincere i would really love the committee to send them an invitation to every finance committee meeting saying we're we should have the teachers the so union supporters in this process because they did a lot of telephoning the night before his second vote which i think made a difference you know in getting them involved in the process so that they you know a survey understand completely what we're doing in the survey can get more members of the community out there vote you know and they can promote it to vote could look vote for and also try to find you know i know we've done in the past with trying to find ways to get more people to attend finance committees and we need more members of the public to show up when we meet because usually there's hardly anyone in all the thirteen years i've been consolidating some redundant policies that were very very old and consolidating them into new ones that were updated in a political hole to where you are at this time we are going to revamp the website that's warranty by ten years and the life by a lot more than that it's a very good investment of taxpayer dollars the bond was one million one hundred forty thousand dollars and if there is some minor also  facilities committee review school base plans capital plans this year ask questions about what had been done what hasn't been due to budget constraints and and  conceptual design for the traffic and parking at browns river middle school and they're going to various talk a little bit in the next part of the meeting or in my superintendent report about  appreciative to work that adrian has done over the last you know twenty seven years she is incredibly bright person has done a lot of things but some she and she's done a very quietly and some of that work obviously you don't always see but she's just she's been a tremendous tremendous asset to the system and she will be sorely missed and you know not only do she'll one of the reasons that i support the teacher leader positions is because it gives away to the training nurture support people that may have an interest in going into administration and we have to do that very actively because and the quality is just you know there even when you've got lots of caveats there are very few that are appropriate choices even to interview what do you think that is you know there's there's a pretty good studies out there here's what one of them there are some findings that you know there are a couple one is the differential between you know some of the highest paid teachers and what some of these folks are making when you look at it over the amazes you know it's it but it's not all about the money but it's a factor and they are very stressful  well by the media and and for some i think maybe in vermont as much as any place hey this was a finding that i got from the e p a the study that was done that the folks that had either exit the principalship or moved around a lot they felt like they had a lot of responsibility and the authority governance so i think we don't they need guidance they need support they need problem solving you know right now we're just not able to provide as much is that as we should and i think you know get feedback to the board and when we need them dear they're here but when we don't know i think that would that would help a little bit but it's there the time commitment issue especially on i'm going to respect fully disagree with that and i have a very strong reason for doing that as a facility chairperson of the facilities committee we need now is a full board once a month the second meeting of the month  e i don't know what's going on in these buildings and if the principals aren't here at our meetings it means that i need to come to them to find out what's going on i don't have a problem with doing that but in the past some principles have had a problem with school board members coming to their buildings and wanting to figure out what's going on and i i don't want to create that so them being at our one meeting where it's a full board meeting when it's at their building gives us that opportunity gives me that opportunity as chair of the syllabus the problem is that if i give them a question about their facilit when am i going to see them next and it's two or three months down the road and i'm not getting the answers and as a committee we can't help them as much as as i think we could with their facilities the facilities are in great shape but you know it's things like this past meeting may twenty ninth where we took a walk out and see the bank just going into the river and it was on by chance a walk around those grounds that i took on my own that i discovered a dump a school dumped all those in the back there and was like this needs to get cleaned up so well there are there are pieces to it and i understand the time commitment i don't want to make it worse for them but we also have to find a way that we can stay in touch with them right and and learn what's going on so that we can support them right because you know i guess i'm not saying they should never come b should always just be a real purpose and they should be you know go on after that my guess the thing i would say about the dump is i saw two tone ministration should be cleaned you know i see that as my job for you to tell me john i need this information in for me to get it and get it back to you and if you don't like to say that i'm accountable and i hold them accountable but i guess what i'm not saying is they should never come but it should be really purposeful well and in my in what i'm saying is that sometimes there's there's a time lapse that if they come to a meeting we need help with x y z our committee isn't go meet for two weeks and then it's another two weeks you know there's just there's a big time gap between them and that is hard as as a nuts and bolts kind of committee to be able to support them and help them right and i think what i would say also is i don't think it's as much the committee meetings oh no because those are i mean i think the principles times have more of a  role in those and they're typically much shorter and much more efficient and the earlier and so people get out of it you know at seven thirty eight o'clock and they're going to go home and sleep and then get back to work at six thirty seven  it's i agree with you i don't think we're i think we're talking the there are times when they have to be there and i think that we could use the committee structure structure a little bit better with them as opposed to the full writing that might be that's the that will be a solution because then they would be there at that time to make an appearance there and then they go and then you know then the board hold me accountable and then i hold them accountable for getting things done that they need to do so i guess i would want to i would ask that next year we look at trying that model we've tried it this latest years of trying it next year where they tend to committee meetings as opposed to full board than in the principals do but that's our that's the contingency plan we do have you know we've got a few leads that we're working on right now but it's it's been difficult because you don't want to you  any questions for which i'm going forward are there any additions or corrections to the minutes of the previous meeting took out all the trees they made it more of a slow down to the river then what was the original there's if you want sort of the picture of what it will look like when it's done ok let the minutes reflect please that last had opposed the motion one the traffic flows terrible there's not adequate hurricane in the literally this the pavement is crumbling so it needs we need not going to get done so you could have a section of it that was done in the section that was rebuilt the library district they're going to put in money to this also they've gotten more and more perking and they're involved in the entrance the grass from that lot so they're raising any money for this is so you idea isn't the libraries it's all the library of the building in the park it's it's something that has been going bad for a while was repairing this in in our capital plan i believe it was there was it kept getting bumped down the list by previous administrators that were putting a higher priority on on other pieces the gym floor comes to mind that was one should have been maybe down further on the list but doors tours was kind of a necessary ones to be done so that there is a capital plan for their building and this has been on it i think they looked at it it's such a large chunk of money that it absolutely has to be done but it reminds me it's different but it reminds me of the debate we had were over redoing the had made new gym floor where it came to us  and emergency and then when we looked at it my concern i don't know if everybody shared how we did my cancer was it was it was not an emergency something that you could see coming and it seems to me that capital projects that you can see coming you should as part of your budgeting process make the hard decision whether to prioritize as opposed to when you happen to see a surplus say ok here is our opportunity and that's the concern i have now i think it's gotten to the point there where we're at this moment it really isn't working so we're really really it really is such a disaster that it's only a matter of time until somebody gets hurt just walking around out there and i don't think that's that's the kind of risk we can tolerate but i still think that we should be presenting foreseeable capital expenditures as part of our budget process even if it provokes a very hard conversation about bertie's rather than having it slip your know maybe my impression is wrong instead as to how it got here well and that's part of the administrators coming to the finance committee you know they have the capital plans they know what's there in their budgets they know where their priorities are and it might not be the same and i've asked in the past to to be included when they were there just to hear what their priorities are and where it falls with the plans but we can't that communication has to be more rounded and in everything it's like i know when in the past i mean we had we had plumbing issues that we had to deal with in this bill number of years ago and so that became part of the you know what we did in terms of capital expenditures and i don't view this is be unplanned i just sort of view it as this is something they've been looking at for a long time but it really wasn't pushed because the money's weren't there and now we we you know we're reaching the point we have to do something about it and there is some ability to pay for this so if we don't do it now you cannot get it done so that you know striking while the iron is hot i don't think it's a lack of planning i think it's just when the fiscal opportunity came  because i want to support this but i guess what really worries me suppose instead of having the two hundred forty thousand dollars surplus we didn't have that  in the parking lot would still be an emergency and so we would probably be debating whether take another hundred thousand dollars out of the capital fund and now no said you reserve a set of five fifty now you're down to three seventy and it's and it's really more in just a statement that probably we have to have the heart of conversation suter and i'm not questioning if this was a list of priorities but maybe we should have looked at it said  yes absolutely has to be done we're not going to avoid it with this the other one i'm going to interject just a little bit because the financing piece to it when joe bryant brought this to the facilities committee they were like ok how are we going to fund this you can bond for not going there we just went out on the roofs we can borrow it possibility is there some way we can do this without affecting our capital reserve fund and sending you know didn't want to send the finance committee into having to figure out how to deal with this is this some ask what the surplus was and came up with this way of not affecting next year's budget not affecting the capital reserve fund directly this year and and still having the funds to do the project so that was kind of where we came from with where we were going for the funds if it hadn't been in the capital reserve probably would have suggested borrowing the money would not have gone with doing the capital reserve because it is an emergency at this point but when that fund was created it was with the it was all an outside grant and as a parent we had a child in the school at the time it felt like the heck was going on and how did that happen and it felt very so and i haven't seen any requests for community input on this parking lot and from the people who drive it every day it's a very different perspective from the administrators perspective the parking is the route sorry the i mean i feel like so i feel like i want to make sure we don't miss that piece from the real nothingness there so that's that's my start and then my other piece is so the idea district doesn't have the money the worst part is the part going straight in to the idea just strictly that's the part where you got to avoid the potholes or you have to redo your suspension so this to me becomes a merger issue there's a downside to the merger when the schools don't have the money we as a district are required to support them right so it's for the good of the district or for the good of all of you know however it is and i'm personally having a little bit of a you know a struggle with this because it's it's a huge expense that is being yeah paid for by one part and it's not a pool of money assuming the merger even is voted on at some point so i'm kind of i'm looking at it from that perspective too and i'm not i don't have a coherent answer response yet but i feel like i just need to bring it up as you know we're talking about what the real downsides are it's a real downside that the distressed current districts with the money will be supporting the current districts without them you can see how the down from actually doing but i can see that it is stopping pears from happening too because true and probably one of the factors that pushed this to the bottom of the pile because one of the schools can't ever come up to me well that was one of the issues i mean you got really is we've got to separate districts and they're both a different flavor chilled conditions and even sometimes getting them to agree on something is isn't easy and so it does  for the paving and how much will be for the reader so that's the first question and then the second question is can you just gripe with the redesign entailed i have this is the picture that  we got from the engineers and the cost estimates and what they were the paving part because we were told that the subsurface was in really good shape you don't have to put new soils down total cost was just for that and then the until after the meeting or whatever come on over because it would be hard for me to try to explain to you what we've asked him to go back to the engineers with but it would basically be creating a loop where people would come in by the library the loop would go through the existing parking lot and they would go and sit back out by the library and the only traffic going over in front of the school would be the buses  from the community i agree when jericho elementary gets there people didn't have a chance and people felt blindsided by it i don't want to risk a mark on that and so when i want people to come i think the more till we get more information there's one i'm i'm not i'm not sure what the process is birds are crossing this i think it is is that this isn't just about the parking lot this is about the safety of the bus truck as well i think not so in this in the plan when you see it there's a there is some expansion of existing parking but it has more to do with the traffic flow in keeping cars away from where kids are getting off buses and and that sort of thing so i understand your concern and this notion isn't so much about this being a finalized this is isn't the real reason for this motion tonight the fall the for the second in motion the facilities committee present it like the following that unless the money is formally transferred prior to the end of work fiscal year and this is you could transfer the money the other option where we could transfer it into the capital reserve fund no it knowing that we we that that money at the facilities committees mine should be earmarked for this project but it has not been finally appropriated until final plans are presented that's that's the other option ok to make that motion  which i think that my mind i no longer make a did it run to the middle school but i'm familiar with having done that you've made it for those of you have a kid at the middle school you know that you pull in for the pick up and sometimes you left for the middle school in park on the grass which means you are backing into traffic and little kids when it's your turn to get out of to make the little kids have to run across traffic to get to your car  will bring in anything he was i mean well the plan is not finalized we're going to get him but we have it here to do it but it is important if this is this is an important project i think and if we can very passionate so sometimes you yell and be a small committee to make the final decision because you know otherwise it might never get done so i mean that's just my feedback all  good to live is about funding a plan and this may not be the plan ok this is a starting point for that discussion to get the community input to come back with the finalized pla pattern and parking lot shared by you id and be r m s this is contingent upon annual professional audit results and this is brought as a second in motion from the facilities  case pretty safe to me is there any further discussion hearing that those in favor of the motion as presented indicate by saying all right those opposed now are there additions are gretchen's to the minutes of the previous meeting i just want to thank john do you want to just in that statement that you made about the legislative date that the the will be no legislation didn't pass isn't going anywhere right at the moment seventy six in favor sixty opposed the bill was taken up by the senate it was tabled there was no action taken  in unless there is a question or an objection and the words will be approved as presented are there any announcements for other business i have one announcement we do have two vacancies on the board right now one from huntington