five elementary schools that this question is covering to middle school high school central office over twenty five hundred students which incidentally adds up to making us the third largest school district  idea school ok so hopefully at this point you understand each of those schools is included in this project so all the all the services and programs each of those schools is going to be in students took at least one a p course last year  rate lower than the room on average by about half a percentage point and last year sixty four percent of students pursue higher education which compared to the rim on average is higher well  will correct me if i'm wrong but this data does not include any one who assumes it for your graduation rate so you know you look at the difference between graduation rate and dropout rate it doesn't add up to a no i meant the bottom one going on pursuing higher ed if they take a gap year you don't know if they're going to go on a trip i believe that's true because yeah they're not included in the sixty four percent so it might be higher it might be higher here it is already three out of one hundred points several indicators were used to come up with this overall assessment certainly don't have the time during this presentation to dig into it too much  but it does look at things such as those higher level categories that are listed there and gray categorized as a chance for success which include things like early education i don't outcomes  i'm free and reduced lunch so income equity up or down that we're looking at this year so the district merger is one major vital driver that we dealt with in preparing this pledge and we also looked at preschool partnerships and then our staff wages and benefits student enrollment trends the state like property tax rate and finally last year one time budget cuts so i'll go through each one of those now so the district merger introduced a couple of different items on the first one here is the tax incentives so for the first year of the merger those districts that voted in favor of the merger would benefit from an eight cent reduction to the tax rate and we'll see how that plays out in a few more slides in the future the second thing is transitional funding the state made available about one hundred fifty thousand dollars to our new district and i'm to use through the training to help with the transition going from seven or eight districts to one so that funding has available to us which we don't have to include those costs in the budget and then finally the policy things we've identified several areas where we were able to reduce the cost in the budget as a result of the merging of the disks and i'll talk to those specifically later on second drivers would preschool so universal preschool became law last year and then over the summer some clarification was given by the state say for the year that we're planning now it's optional to implement but for the following year a forty to twenty seventeen it will be mandatory for school districts to implement if we were to implement it this year there are actually tax advantages for us to if we were included this year and since universal pretty pretty cool pre k i should say has always been a goal for our supervisory union the board has decided to include one hundred nine new partnerships in the budget some people might ask what do you mean a partnership partnership is another way of saying it boucher which is another way of saying it's a thirty three thousand dollars now i'm sure that we will give to parents of anybody who has a eligible student three four five year it's not eligible for kindergarten to take to evolve my preschool for up to ten hours a preschool probably so it's a partnership between the public and a private  budget a three percent salary increase and a four and a half percent health care premium increase that is not necessarily what will be negotiated but that's what we've included in the visor because the budget will likely be approved historically this is accurate for all the individual school districts and where we've lost about thirty students from twenty thirteen to twenty fourteen and this is this way of counting pupils is called average dail membership there's all different couple different ways of counting pupils this is the most accurate in terms of actual students in the school all right now other drivers the statewide property tax rate this is the rate that the state sets for all school districts they provided an estimate for us to plan around and communicate to set the increase school budgets were defeated and there were cuts made to those but i think some of those cuts continue some of those cuts were unable to continue in this year's budget the most significant one there is a bus replacement we like to have  standard provision in the budget to allow us to replace three buses every year last year we only had in the budget two buses so we've put the third bus back in the budget that similar kind of thought process wise to these put this budget together it was likely done and actually it was done with a lot of extra support we had different school boards collaborating together over the course of the fall  through december so a lot of prep work was done even before this core established even before this just first was approved the individual elementary schools and the end of the useful for  ok so without further ado the budget that we're proposing is forty two million nine hundred four thousand three hundred ninety one dollars which is up just under three percent from last year's budget now so here's a tally of all the major increases and decreases some of these i've already mentioned so i won't repeat them in detail again but you see the top one in their estimate of wage increases for her forty one thousand dollars you see the cost of increasing costs into the light and then based on historic performance was underfunded around long term substitutes increase support for the food service program which was needed based on would bring that brings it up but down for two thousand dollars so i account for the vast majority of the ups and downs as another seventy thousand dollars increase radically spread throughout the budget which accounts for the whole one point two million dollar thirty nine thousand five hundred dollars is the result of several of our food programs that are being run presently as independent food programs are not what are called soft or not the revenue of those  we do feel like that is not a long term issue so we have a couple of things that are in the works where we're going to be able to manage that those costs one of the things we're looking at consolidating the food service programs at our up to the administration to figure out th again the physical services line i mean it's not the sort of budget expense as much as it is carry over deficit but yes but only to drive that number down lower next year or a l all right you charles so historic comparison of car expenditures now these are these historic numbers are getting the addition of several budget tied together because you're only  we're looking at a three percent increase to the overall  administration is committed to doing that just take time to implement so these are the ones that we feel we can implement starting the first of the fiscal year so we've talked about consolidating food service and the assumption we've already started implementing this where we're going to give limited opportunity for parents to choose which school they're going to send their kids to gardner to so that we can right size looking at you know a limited amount of moving from one school to kno actual hours that i haven't really got that far but there will be some we do have to keep the five hundred separate for purposes of doing the tax rate calculation for you so we some kind of yeah i don't know the exact details but we will have ok so that's the expenditure side will shift gears to the revenue side where's the money going to come from that's where we introduce a wonderful term called education spending that's the number which we have to raise through taxes or the state funding both of those items are dropping so that's the alternative source of revenue when that goes down and used to be raised through property taxes which goes into that line called education spending one of the primary drivers for the loss of local grant funding i believe is our updated estimates for tuition students coming into our district the combination of all the distress and you out of there their actual performance together was just two hundred dollars under the total budget and that's such a small percentage sort of basic level of management what do you offer those budget can't so when you see a surplus of five thousand five sixty five including you know like that's a carry over from last year  we use to to do exactly how many pupils we have in our school it is a calculated number some students are counted more than others our number across the district is down very those are the factors that try to equalize the property values over houses across the state so if your common level of appraisal is going up that would reduce your tax rate and if only a little appraisals going down from last year through how we calculate tax rate we are two of these charts this chart is showing the tax rate calculation for those school districts that are members for pre k through twelve so all with those thirty three million five ninety nine we take that in spending number divided by the equalize pupils and we get a number that's called spending per week was futile fourteen thousand seven hundred  ninety nine dollars now it's up about three point seven four percent and that's that's like that's what we have control over that's the number that our budget drives and we take some numbers from the state first from the other base education  multiply that adjustment factor by the statewide tax rate there were tax rate is already going up to six and that creates equalize homestead tax rate one important five secs if there were no tax incentive for the merger eight and that's approximately one point four percent lower than the comparable scenario run in the year prior that one point four eight is the district rate then it has to get subject to those current level of appraisals to make it a little bit more interesting and we would put that into another chart before we do that we just want to look at the  the u s d portion of the tax rate it still needs to get weighted to the elementary school but it's tax rate combined together we're not going to look at that already paid out already there are a bar represents what the tax rate would have been if the merger didn't succeed and the green bar represents what our estimated tax rate is based on this budget and guidance from the  districts that are getting the tax and said you can see you know the impact of that tax incentive as well as the merger benefits are shown you know six and five or six cent and then there's one tower in here underhill which is the only town showing a net increase to their tax rate from the prior year and that's the answer to that this is just one example if your household income was fifty thousand dollars and your house life was two hundred thousand dollars you if you would save approximately fifteen hundred dollars depending on which tell you what if you file for th mean i don't think there was a big increase in the cost per student you know in other years with declining enrollment and i think often large increases in the cost  student get buried in more increases in the overall budget and i just think we need to disclose what's going on with the cost per pupil for people and i'm not saying that it's a problem this year i think it's just seems like and the analogy i would give this is if i was running a company that made with chips and i presented a budget that said this is how much money i'm going to need merger process with the potential of investigating and researching innovative new programs that we might break into a new system and so really b or what are her some programs that we'd be interested in investigating and i want to right now there's two that we're we're really intrigued with and interested in taking a look to see if they might be vol so we came up with the framework of how we would be investigating and researching new programs and that's what i wanted to share with you and i also didn't want you to be surprised if you her death there was a committee that was investigating a language immersion program or a stem program so i wanted to share the framework with you that we're going to be using to investigate new th business may have a woman in the community and then we create a workplace really looking at developing research questions talking about the methods of the research putting together a common template so that we could black that out in a life that effectively and create a timeline for that preparing that document and that information step for more research say this is taking a look at different pieces that we've learned along the way so additional research that might include interviews communication with district set of implemented programs and more meetings around in small groups of people tension in the community the word would be interested in these programs then step five would be to coordinate for a court findings so the team needs to further determine how  complete the position paper the way paper and team will set times and dates to check and approve the plan present patient then step set present this information some of the other steps that are in the framework and hopefully be able to present something to the board so for of next year probably you're allowed same time we'll be looking at  questions and certainly some administrators are you know we want to take a look at this and that we don't want to squelch any of that or be dismissive of we do want to make sure that we have framework that's going to work for everybody pretty clear probably ask you know are you interested in being on the committee or board members and community members i think would want to ask why group of people seem so interested and then get some names but it might circulating in it and and i wanted to highlight the fact that governance is still a hot talk to feel here and there are there is a draft bill out there and it would require  supervisory unions to become supervisory districts now there's some within that but there it would give a lot more control of i think decision making power to the state board of ed you know under that inequity in the state of vermont around the wishing student and if you're a a system that doesn't have a high school there are many that are in their students the independent schools the private schools that is state schools and that is driving up the cost of education in vermont and it for me personally is fundamentally not equitable in some cases so there's definitely some discussion because eight thirty eight where there is like taking a look at putting some parameters around that we were at a meeting last week where there was a  person that stood up and shared that about two thirds of the children in this school district are tuitions to an ad a state school in massachusetts for seventeen thousand dollars  get the amount of the public dollars to support sending their child out there what they wanted to do was keep intact the interstate and possibly intercountry arrangements that allowed all the children from that town to access the grades in that other school the ones in the towns are trying to change it for it's not equal across the board in other words it's an option that the wealthy can access and get public support for that private tuition but they want to be able to make sure that anyone who's got that interstate agreement in new hampshire new york massachusetts or even up at stansted across the border where they send all the sixth graders there it's an equal access have been spending a lot of my time in the house committee room so just on that one topic for that the concern is exactly the parents who are sending their kids to school in switzerland and the concern that our money is going out of state rather than in state and hiring teachers who hopefully live and work here but there's a ton of a ton of exceptions to interstate school districts are actually considering the statute to draft of a bill and i don't i started to go through all the details and i got two pages that probably weren't interested in all of that in the beginning they talk about the purpose of the bill the general assembly is tending to move towards pre k to twelve districts to me the importance isn't so much to us but i think that's going to make a pretty big statement posts in other parts of the state  ill be interesting to see how that happens i don't want to talk about the details but there's a in the in the bill of the chairman of the house that committee wants to change the way they present the numbers for property taxes instead of having that base them out that's a fantasy number and then the tax rate they want to go to something called the deal the dollar this is the year to do it because it's because the tax rate is a dollar  they want to give one number instead of two and that and basically what that number would say to the town to a locality is if your tax rate weren't dollar you would be able to raise exports to and since you spent why this ratio and so that's why you raised one school that qualifies for that to not only be geographically isolated but to also have twenty or fewer students who are great so they face those out there some different plans depending on whether or not to merge or you don't  one of the interesting things in this proposal you have to do a small school grants is to tie that grant to perpetuity to that school building so i don't think this will affect us and they're trying to i think you know say that this district mergers we've discovered through changing supervisory unions to be supervisory districts isn't necessarily have about squashing small schools and making them all close there they're trying to small somewhere where half the students are fans because they have forty students and now they have twenty and the way the current was written is they can only lose three and a half percent per year so they get from forty down to twenty three and a half percent is going to take forever yeah that's a big number and we're not really spending the money but it's redistributing the cost so we don't have any failing students our tax rate is slightly higher to subsidize to make sure they're equal treatment you're going to do it for one you should do it for the other i think the that would probably be considered an oversight because they're just as interested in what we've done as they are interested in right in terms of  and i did want to point out also that we're talking about that we've i think i am very appreciative of we're finally addressing the issue of the approved independent schools which is different than those private schools which has been an interesting teachers we've just glossed over that and certainly engine and county other than quest for it we don't even have that option every school that is there and approved independent school this is a private school so you can only access it if you have the disposable income to do that but then there are these other towns where the has traditionally been just another choice for public school and when we're trying to change our entire system focused on equity and opportunity i just think we want to give everybody a choice and nobody wants to take away choice from the folks who have it which is going to create some interesting questions around making supervisory unions into supervisory districts because you cannot have a supervisory district some people are treated differently than others right so there's i think there's going to be some creative writing to try to get around that to make the districts that have all choice currently be in some other configuration so so they'll be a lot of arguing about that like i said if you're trying to secure an entire system based on equity of opportunity you have to address well yeah that's right they don't you standardize here you don't have to do reporting there's a whole list there was a regulator of all the things that they don't have to do an independent approved school which gets your public tax dollars all you have to do is be special her services and so there's a there's a some folks think that there's a built an incentive to add services or make students eligible because little you great now that's only way  they can get funding to get the elf it is so there are many states in the northeast and across the country that they take an approach that is more what's your role model or with your percentage of special might look at a little bit differently or somebody if you have that's presented some information that would lead you to think that we may be overusing here educators and that's one of the specific things that the draft bill directs the secretary to look into doesn't mean that this board can't make their own bylaws so because of this i don't really see this is the step to end creating the method the triple m charter right there can be revised at any time but it's a first step in creating some of the structures and some of the expectations and responsibilit some general course and i don't have any objection to this at all but i'm just sort of curious if we're getting down the road terms of deciding what committees are going to do before we actually have the discussion about how it is we want to be i look i love the idea of being able to look at how communities and the structure supports our work overall and having a better framework of what we're trying to achieve by them i think that's and silver discuss things that night school choice and school choice policy is needed for a couple of reasons first while the three am articles did stipulate for the first year following the merger students who attend schools in their town of residency the articles did not explicitly prohibits choice well we're not prepared to offer full choice this year there may be some voluntary opportunities to make art classes in the north end of the district this policy would provide an umbrella under which to start that conversation guidelines and a process would be developed by or administrators secondly in the future that this policy will be useful for the process of choice of academic venue which was touted as one of the benefits of a larger unified district so we need to state our overall beliefs on the subject and then have explicit guidelines to ensure that all are treated fairly the policy and guidelines may change as we move through our years as board we may make decisions on great configurations alignments which could change the choice we may create magnet especially schools which again would change or twist options the policy is designed to be general enough just to get us through a couple of years while the guy while the guidelines and process make changes via the administration and that's just like my thoughts on guidelines or indorse world made aware of them when they come out so we would be made aware of that when they are final for this year and i think that that is generally the process on  that's how it's generally done school districts and i think there's been conversation and i felt like this would be the kind of wealthy people would be really concerned about knowing all those details and i think there's a point where we have to trust that well get something out there and if it doesn't work we'll hear about it and we will have the ability to trust that really the guidelines are based on what the priorities are wanted to introduce them they're not they don't have the time sensitivity we can put them onto it later but i could open up for any discussion or questions anyone from the material that i had sent and he did not get the from our roles we needed to update and come in with more clean policies more recent policies and many are actually hindering us because they're they're out of date and they've been superseded by other legislation reason why this other one was here was because it's only for the big three of the board so in general will do that it will have this list so if everyone anyone has any questions please feel free to tell me your concerns so i can  because we're eliminating all of the individual policies that have been addressing pieces of school you know on the elimination so we're just getting one policy that talks about school services and all that maybe some of those separate education committee that some of the other proposals by other people so and they're still predicated on the idea of taking both systems but with a lot more flexibility so we'll just have to continue to see what's going on i don't think there was are serious oh