School Committee - February 28, 2024
School Committee, 2/28/24 - Meeting Summary
Date: 2/28/2024
Type: School Committee
Generated: September 13, 2025 at 07:00 PM
AI Model: Perplexity
1) Meeting Metadata
- Date: February 28, 2025
- Body: Sharon School Committee
- Location: Not specified (likely virtual or town hall setting)
- Members Present: Avi Shemtov (Chair), Alan Motenko (Vice Chair), Julie Rowe, Jeremy Kay, Georgeann Lewis, Adam Shain, Dan Newman (Secretary per official roster)
- Meeting Type: Regular session including FY25 budget discussion, financial updates, contract awards, routine votes, and executive session for collective bargaining and litigation
2) Agenda Overview
- Extensive discussion on FY25 budget proposal focusing on reductions, particularly cuts to teaching versus administrative staff and fee structures such as athletics and full-day kindergarten fees
- Presentation of FY24 Q2 financial report and contract award for transportation services
- Routine procedural votes including approval of minutes, donations, and field trips
- Executive session on collective bargaining and litigation matters
3) Major Discussions
| Topic | Avi Shemtov | Alan Motenko | Julie Rowe | Jeremy Kay | Georgeann Lewis | Adam Shain | Dan Newman |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY25 Budget: Cuts & Fee Structure | Interested in revisiting $1,250 family fee cap for athletics; stresses fee-balance; defends curriculum coordinators but open to further options. Quoted urging for a $3M override due to contract realities: “…you better ask for three million dollars because you’re going to need another million and a half minimum next year…” | Emphasizes lack of admin cuts; opposes rushed vote; calls for additional hearings and community feedback; supports clarity on teacher contracts | Requests contract bidding clarity; supports existing fee structure; views curriculum coordinator as a luxury compared to preservation of class programs | Protect teaching positions; criticizes minimal budget creativity; urges detailed admin staffing data; agrees a special meeting is needed | Strongly defends teachers; criticizes large teaching cuts; rejects curriculum coordinators as a “luxury”; stresses ownership of tough decisions; advocates prioritizing teachers | Frustrated with process; demands breakdown of instructional/non-instructional cuts; supports symbolic admin cuts; requests transparency and options | Calls for priority-based budget with clear essential vs. non-essential roles; warns of risk to essential programs; insists all admin roles be considered for reductions |
| Budget Presentation by Dr. Patello | Supports contract realities and fiscal constraints; explains 85% budget in salaries, 75% to teachers; acknowledges challenges balancing level services and town target; proposes 5.97% increase vs. town 3.12% target | Questions omissions of admin cuts and lower budget options | Questions the role/cost utility of curriculum coordinator vs. department heads; seeks shifting funding mechanisms (e.g., community education) | Critiques presentation as fear-mongering but notes valid teacher need indicators | Criticizes presentation tone; labels it as fear-mongering/disrespectful to teachers | Argues for alternative scenarios retaining at least half of originally proposed layoffs | Engages in routine procedural votes, less vocal on budget specifics |
| Teacher Contracts & Workloads | Clarifies workload vs. staffing; highlights contract limits on prep time/caseload | Defends teachers; stresses understanding teacher duties | Supports teacher workload concerns | Emphasizes teacher needs and post-COVID challenges | Highlights contract language’s impact on duties vs. prohibitions | Supports clarity and support for teachers | Participates but less vocal in detailed discussion |
| Special Education Out-of-District Placements | Acknowledged as large cost; no direct stance | Supports review and cost reduction potential | No specific comment | Notes rising student behavioral needs | Highlights opportunity to reduce costs by bringing students back; questions number of out-of-district students | No specific comment | Suggests prioritization of essential services that may include special education |
| Fee Structures and Equity | Supports revisiting family caps for athletics fees; balances fee levels against budget needs | No specific comment | Supports the current athletic fee structure and family cap | No specific comment | No direct comment on fee structures | No direct comment | Supports gradual reduction process on kindergarten fees (not full elimination) |
| Public Comments & Transparency | Emphasizes transparency; open to special meeting and exploring further options | Strongly demands additional budget hearing and input | Agrees more time is needed before vote | Favors special meeting for comprehensive review | Advocates collaborative decision making and more options | Insists on transparency and clear options from admin | Supports forward-looking budgeting and comprehensive discussion |
4) Votes
- Key votes on the FY25 budget were deferred, with unanimous consensus that the scheduled March 6 vote would be premature without further details and community engagement
- Routine votes, including approval of minutes, donations, and field trips, were passed unanimously by all seven members: Avi, Alan, Julie, Jeremy, Georgeann, Adam, Dan
- Transportation contract awarded unanimously to Conley Bus Company, sole bidder, with acknowledgment of a 10% rate increase between FY25 and FY26 due to bus purchase, insurance, and labor costs
5) Presentations
- FY25 Budget Presentation by Dr. Patello, highlighting fiscal constraints, salary distributions (85% salaries, 75% teaching), proposed 5.97% budget increase, challenges balancing level services, and mandatory cuts to meet target reductions primarily impacting teaching staff and electives
- FY24 Q2 Financial Report presented by Ellen, summarizing $52.4 million appropriated, $22.3 million spent through mid-January 2024, $28.3 million encumbered mostly for payroll/transportation, and $1.77 million unencumbered but not surplus due to expected remaining expenses
- Transportation Contract Update detailing the 10% rate increase and contract award to incumbent vendor, with explanation of cost drivers and negotiation attempts
6) Action Items
- Schedule a special budget hearing/meeting for full presentation of all cut scenarios including administrative and instructional staff before any vote on the FY25 budget
- Administration to provide detailed breakdowns and transparent options for cuts across all categories, including administrative roles and special education placements
- Explore possible revision of athletic fees family caps and a gradual reduction process for kindergarten fees considering community concerns
- Maintain communication and correspondence channels to allow community feedback as per Open Meeting Law requirements
7) Deferred Items
- FY25 budget vote postponed from February 28 to at least March 6, pending additional information and community input
- Further discussions on possible funding shifts (e.g., community education programs) and potential reconsideration of administrative positions such as curriculum coordinators left open for future meetings
8) Appendices
- Full verbatim quote from Avi Shemtov:
“…you better ask for three million dollars because you’re going to need another million and a half minimum next year based on what the contract you signed says…” - Key verbal contributions from Georgeann Lewis criticizing Dr. Patello’s presentation as fear-mongering and advocating for bringing back out-of-district special education students
- Julie Rowe’s explicit framing of the curriculum coordinator position as a “massive luxury” compared to stipended department heads
- Adam Shain’s call for maintaining at least 50% of originally proposed layoff teaching staff in any budget proposal and demands for transparency on financial encumbrances
- Alan Motenko’s insistence on opposing rushed votes and calling for expanded community engagement due to insufficient administrative cuts offered
- Agreement of all seven members to proceed to executive session on collective bargaining strategy and litigation after regular session
This combined summary integrates all major committee member stances, direct quotes, votes, presentations, procedural matters, and public input reflecting the February 28, 2025 Sharon School Committee meeting.
Document Metadata
- Original Transcript Length: 140,113 characters
- Summary Word Count: 1,186 words
- Compression Ratio: 15.7:1
- Transcript File:
School-Committee_2-28-2024_db32097d.wav
Transcript and Video
All right.
Welcome to the February 28th meeting of the Sharon School Committee.
This meeting will be conducted remotely over Zoom. Attendance by board and commission members will be remote, and remote attendance shall count towards a quorum. The meeting will be broadcast live and recorded by Sharon TV. If you elect to enable your webcam, your image and background, maybe broadcast with or without sound. As always, we'll begin our meeting with public comments.
I ask that everybody limit their comments to two minutes.
Comments can be about any and all things.
There will be the budget hearing later in which comments will be specifically about the budget. That doesn't mean that these comments can't be about the budget. Just want to make sure I give people a heads up where their opportunity to speak will be. There will be two opportunities to speak tonight.
Without further ado, does anybody want to keep time? Julie, thank you. I see Judy Crosby's hand. I'm hitting ask on mute.
I feel like you did this last time too.
Is anybody else able to try? I'm hitting ask on mute. I'm hitting ask on mute.
I just tried.
Didn't work, right?
I see Judy's still muted.
I'm readmitting her.
Okay.
That might help. SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Thank you.
Thank you. I'm sorry.
I had to admit twice because it's not letting me show my video or unmute on my iPad.
So I don't know if something is going to be a little bit more.
I don't know if I'm going to be a little bit more. I don't know if anything happened there. I apologize.
I'll leave on my iPad and try and come back in on it, but probably leave my phone on as well. So I had a couple comments.
One, I wanted to ask the chair, the way the agenda is set up. It has the public hearing happening before the discussion of fees. And I really strongly believe that a discussion of fees and the revolving account is fully part of a discussion of the budget, particularly as the line item budget that was sent out has references to, you know, increasing user fees in some of the line item explanations for both the bus and for athletics.
So my request is that the chair use his discretion and move the budget hearing to after the budget discussion and after the fee presentation and discussion so that the public has the ability to have all the information and comment on all the budget information.
I also wanted to note that the link on your agenda is not working for a lot of people.
So, you know, folks have to enter their, the member ID and password.
It's not easy to find.
I've had three people reach out and tell me they can't get into the meeting.
So you might consider whether you want to allow a second open forum or a second chance at it a little bit deeper into the meeting because I think you have people who are trying to get in and are unsuccessful.
Um, my third point was, um, I did send an email to the school committee.
I'm disappointed that I've not seen a meaningful response from the school committee.
And I discussed this privately with the chair on February 15th. There's a lot of vitriol in this town right now about our new families living in the shelter system and they're being referred to in very unfortunate ways. And I think the fact that our superintendent and business manager, assistant superintendent.
Excuse me, Ms. Crosby, you're like 15 seconds over.
Ms. Crosby, you're over your time limit.
That's fine. I know it's an inconvenient truth, Julie, the one you're xenophobic.
I get it.
Please do better.
You have a DEI goal.
Attempt to meet it.
That's quite enough. Thank you. Um, I will, I will take Ms. Crosby's, um, suggestion that we rearrange the agenda so as to allow the public to weigh in after the fee discussion and after the budget proposal.
Um, thank you. I see Carol Bratt.
Hi.
Can you hear me?
We can.
Great. Um, my name is Carol Bratt and I'm a proud first grade teacher at Heights Elementary, as well as a member of the SD negotiating team this past year.
A process that was full of collaboration and respect on both sides of the table.
I just feel like I need to respond to some comments that were made at the last meeting, um, that were truly insulting to, um, the elementary teachers of, um, of this community.
Um, specifically to Ms. Crosby, it is clear that you are disturbed by how we use the extra 20 minutes of work each day that was negotiated in our latest contract.
Um, you could have reached out and asked instead of making your own assumptions.
One of the things that you may not know is that our teachers filled out a survey with results stating that we were already using these extra 20 minutes towards prepping for our classes.
Remember that in elementary school, we teach reading, writing, math, science, social studies, as well as SEL. We took some time after 3.30, of course, to bring to light just a few of the things that we do besides, you know, just picking up a good book to hang out and just read as you stated at the last meeting.
Um, we make parent calls and send emails.
Um, we hold additional parent conferences past the conferences that we are contractually obligated to do.
Um, we make win groups.
We prepare those win materials.
Photocopying, meeting with our administrators.
Bus, walk, or car pickup duty. This is a job that we do that has taken us past a contractual time for the whole 28 years that I've been with the Sharon Public Schools.
We correct papers.
We reflect on those corrections to make sure that we are meeting the needs of all students.
We have consults between education and education teachers that needs to consistently happen. We are exploring the library and consulting with the librarian on books needed for specific curriculum topics, or more importantly, in the love of reading at an early age.
Organizing and recharging technology.
Learning about new technology.
Reviewing online content.
Hanging student hallways or in the classroom.
Collaborating with our grade level and special area teams about curriculum and student needs. Um, teachers are preparing art, music, library, physical education, and technology lessons and materials.
20 minutes.
And Ms. Crosby, we know that your response is what you said, is that some might do it, but all might not.
My feeling is that you do not get to degrade our life's work and reputation to the Sharon community in one of your rants on these meetings.
You just don't.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks, Mrs. Brown.
Lauren Grasso.
Hi there.
Lauren Grasso. I just wanted to take a moment and say that despite ongoing budget concerns, I really appreciate that there's been, you know, there's updating to literacy materials in elementary and the middle and high school math curriculum.
I'm just really happy to see that's a priority. And I look forward to hearing what programs were chosen.
But I am wondering what role teachers and leaders are going to have in reviewing and piloting these materials.
I just think that's very important. And with that, I hope there's effective professional development and strong oversight around its use because a program really is only as good as the training that's provided and the level of commitment around accountability.
So that's it. Thanks.
SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Thank you. Thank you. Casey McLaughlin.
Thank you. SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Thank you. SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Hi. SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Thank you. SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Thank you. Hi.
Thank you. I would say, I would say right off the bat that we need to get rid of the free kindergarten program. That's an easy one. We all had to pay before and it's not needs based, so I think we can get rid of it. While it's great that the union negotiated a contract that guaranteed them a raise every year, the vast majority of us civilian taxpayers have not had an increase or a raise. We're being asked to underwrite the poor budgeting and mismanagement of school funds. I don't want to cut any teacher positions or funding for academic programs whatsoever, but I do believe that these coordinator positions have got to go. When I was teaching in Easton, which spends far less per pupil, by the way, there were no coordinators.
There were department heads who taught three classes instead of five per day, but those department heads did the coordinating and received a stipend on top of their salary, not a whole new position.
Next, we need to examine these administrative positions more closely.
I think there is some serious redundancy, especially in the virtue signaling department.
What exactly does an assistant superintendent of equity and engagement do that a new DEI director doesn't?
Why have we spent 70,000 on an outside consultant named Katie Novak who single handedly ruined Barrington Public Schools by destroying their honors program?
Lastly, we need to examine every single student who is not connected to a tax paying resident and make some tough decisions.
Yes, I'm touching the third rail, the METCO program.
According to the Boston Globe article posted in November of 23, the METCO program reimburses $8,300 per pupil.
We spend 19,350 per pupil.
That's a balance of $11,000 per kid. Multiply that by the 62 METCO kids we had last year, and that's a shortfall of $685,000.
So maybe I'm wrong that we're getting all of that money, but according to the Boston Globe, we're not. And somehow we needed an entire FTE to coordinate the program at a cost of $90,000.
That is total insanity for another administrator.
That's a high price for families who are living check to check and seniors on fixed incomes to have to subsidize in order to virtue signal that we're woke. And don't get me started on the non-citizens because I know there is no one in this entire district who has backbone enough to put this on our little- Ms. McLaughlin, you're over time. Georgia and Lewis.
Hi, thanks.
So a couple of just questions.
I know you might cover it when you get to the budget, so just maybe in the back of everyone's head. You did a line item.
I had mentioned this last meeting on per-people cost comparing us to other towns that I know we aspire to keep up with as far as our academic standing.
But when you looked at the numbers you presented for the state, we fall pretty solid in our per-people cost across the state in that chart and as well as in our North Rock County, Hockamock area. So, a little explanation around where we feel like we're falling short there would be helpful for me. Kindergarten is a big question.
What's the status of that? I didn't see that anywhere, but I may have missed it. My apologies if I did. And then I just wanted to comment, I mean, for myself as an educator and for other people in the community I have talked to, I think people are very happy that, I mean, personally I am. I'm an educator and I just ratified a contract in a neighboring town. We want, that's the union's job, to get their teachers paid. And again, I commend you. Adding 20 minutes to the end of the day, I don't, I mean, I haven't read your specific language, but I know I'm the same thing. I'm in an hour, an hour and a half before school starts and same afterwards.
That's my choice.
It's not a contractual expectation.
And I'm just wondering if that was the point that was trying to be clarified.
Is it that 20 minutes you're expected to work or we just choose to because we're in education and we don't have a choice. That's what we have to do. We have to make copies. We have to plan. I mean, it's kind of what we sign up for. And I think everybody respects, I hope the fact that we do that for their children.
I know I respect the teachers in this town that do it for mine. So I think for me, the question there is, is it a contractual obligation that 20 minutes or is it just something that's already being done? So it was added in. I don't think it was a point of contention to disparage the teachers. At least I didn't take it that way. I can't speak for the rest of the public. Yes, I heard you.
That's time. I got you, Julie. Have a nice night. Good night.
Is that obvious?
Is that me?
I think I've is muted, but then I think you're good to go.
Okay.
Thank you. No worries.
Thank you. I just want to say I agree with a lot of what what Ms. McLaughlin said, especially regarding the administration redundancy.
I think that's a point of contention.
We clearly have a lot of challenges in the school districts, as many others do. But like with my family and any family, we have to live within our means. And that results in prioritizing needs over wants. And I feel like too often this district doesn't do that. This is an opportunity to correct that. And as a family, we don't prioritize vacations over the mortgage.
And as a district, we need to make sure that we're prioritizing the correct things.
You know, it's 2024 and connectivity is more important than ever. So when I heard that the network administrator position, assuming correctly that that's what this position is, with the connectivity, the Wi-Fi and everything, making sure that all of that runs smoothly within all the schools, was potentially one of the first items in the chopping block. I said, there has to be somewhere else that we can cut, you know, to save what will continue to be, you know, a very important position moving forward. And I honestly think that the place to cut this first is from DEI. A lot of people might disagree, but we should be removing all references to and positions dedicated to DEI. This would include the $70,000 a year coordinator position and all future training.
These cuts would at least pay for the much needed network administrator position, more so than the DEI coordinator, and also potentially provide additional funds that are going to be a lot of the most important. And we need to do a better job of prioritizing the actual needs of this district over the wants. And once we do that, we'll be on a path to a more balanced budget that actually addresses the needs of the district.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Mayor Belenke.
SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Hi. Sorry, I forgot the camera.
Can you guys hear me? Thanks.
Yes.
Fantastic.
So I wasn't expecting to speak this early in the meeting, but I was really touched by what Mrs. Bratz said. I actually had the fortune of sharing an apartment with a teacher earlier on in my life. And every day she came home from work, took out her grading book and got to work. So I think we really do need to prioritize our teachers.
We need to respect the time that they do give to our students.
And part of that is we need to keep our classroom size small. And as we make these difficult decisions, keep the teachers and focus on where else can we make cuts. Ask ourselves what positions are new to the district, which maybe didn't exist six years ago, you know, while the district kept on working.
So I do think we need to cut anyone involved in curriculum decisions.
Anytime, which is being we're paying people to cut honors classes.
I think that we need to look and maybe cut those positions.
I think also we need to start looking at student population.
We do have new students.
And as an immigrant, I really feel we need to emphasize ESL for the new students we have staying at those hotels.
But that does mean to beg the question with those new students, with the proposed redistricting for multifamily housing.
We need to think of do we need to be accepting students from out of district?
Is that still sustainable?
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Wendy MacArthur.
I just wanted to speak on behalf of the budget.
You know, one thing that I'm noticing is that there's a lot of talk about what is necessary in schools and what is not necessary in schools. And all of these are by people who have never worked in a school or by the select committee, except Shauna, who aren't in the schools every day. They don't know how they're managed. And sometimes you need to listen to the administrators.
You need to listen to the teachers. You need to listen to what they're saying and what they need on how to give the best stuff that our students need. Because you don't see everything that goes on behind the scenes. You don't see, you know, we need a DII director.
Because the amount of emails I'm getting just at the middle school about what's happening in the middle school and the anti-Semitism that is happening and the things being drawn on bathroom walls. You need somebody there who is helping us. I just think you need to listen to the people who are on the ground in the schools doing the work. Thank you. Thank you.
Matt Goyette.
Matt Goyette.
Matt Goyette.
Yeah.
Hey, I'll be quick. I, I want to express my disappointment and frustration at the school committee's ludicrous budgetary proposal.
it seems to be a reoccurring theme here.
Clarification.
The school committee hasn't made a budget proposal yet.
Just a clarification.
Administration has.
Go ahead. This comes down to your inability to prioritize requirements.
You can only distinguish between a need to have and a nice to have, which is a very basic financial skill.
I was curious if you honestly propose of this, or if you think that this would go over well. And if you did, it's obvious just how out of touch you really are.
I yield my time.
All right, Mrs. Frost.
Hi, I just want to say that several years ago, I advocated for FLESS, the language program.
Language is the gateway to diversity.
That was $65,000.
And yet we went from FLESS in the elementary schools three days a week to just one day a week. We keep taking away from our families.
If we're interested in diversity, equity, inclusion, let's focus on providing our children with the resources to learn languages so that they can bridge the gap between cultures.
Also, I'm aware that the DEI positions, they're not to help the families who experience diversity issues in the schools.
They're really to buffer the schools from liability.
And a lot of families don't understand that.
They think that the intention of those positions are to help families.
And they are not. They just help the district.
It makes me also wonder about the liability expense that we're not seeing, that I did not see in the budget. How much are we spending on attorneys?
Because I am aware that attorneys are being hired for a lot of things.
Thank you.
Lori Beeler.
Hi.
I wasn't planning on talking today, but I just wanted to say I'm really shocked at how many people are against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And the diversity, equity, and inclusion position is to support our students.
It's not about placating political...
I don't know.
It's to support our students.
And our students need it. And I'm just shocked that so many people have been calling for the position to be cut. So anyway, just wanted to put a different voice out there.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
Donna Correspondence, Julie Rowe.
Okay.
Where did I put it?
The school committee received eight pieces of correspondence between February 14th, 2024, at 9 a.m.
and February 28th, 2024, at 9 a.m.
We received several updates from MECO, including Millie's MECO Monday newsletter celebrating Black History Month, as well as information on a professional development opportunity for school committee members.
Community members wrote to express their concerns regarding the recommended fiscal year 25 operating budget. They questioned the priorities reflected in the budget and acknowledged that the district is faced with difficult choices.
Congressman Jake Alkencloss sent an invitation to attend a roundtable, a virtual roundtable, that was held on February 23rd.
School committee members were asked to participate in a survey conducted by a doctoral student at the University of Toulouse, which focused on civic education in public schools in the United States.
A community member wrote to express concern regarding the language used by the district when referring to new students who are being housed in the state's shelter system.
A student wrote to express their support for adding the Muslim Eid holiday to the district calendar.
The president of Sharon Travel Basketball wrote to express their concerns with the fees charged to nonprofits for gym time at the Sharon public schools.
And that's it. Thanks, Julie.
Do we have a student rep update?
Just go raise your hand.
All right. Seeing no hand, I will move it to the superintendent for his general updates.
I think we have a hand.
Oh, there we go. Awesome.
All right. I'll throw it over to our student rep.
Mr. Shahir.
Yeah. Hello.
My name is Newt. I'm part of the student advisory committee for the Fresh Air High School.
And I'm just going to give a quick update of what's going on at the high school.
You know, we got AP exams coming up. We got prom.
Following February break, we started this new, like, program to limit the phone usage in the classroom.
So, you know, a lot of new things happening in the high school. But in regards to the budget, there are, like, some issues with clubs and transportation that we kind of have.
You know, some kids at the high school, students at the high school have been facing trouble paying for transportation, for the events that they've been working on for the entire year, or even just for certain clubs.
So if the budget is willing to, you know, to support that, to help fund for larger clubs and transportation for these clubs, that would be great.
But other than that, me or any other student representatives that are here, we'll try and give our update if we have any issues with the budget.
But other than that, we'll just be in the background listening.
If you have our input, then, yeah.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you, Newt. That was great advocacy.
Appreciate you.
All right.
Now I'll throw it over to the superintendent for his general updates.
Great.
Thank you very much.
I'm going to try to keep this relatively short because we have a big budget presentation ahead.
But we do have tons of great academic, artistic, and athletic achievements going on, you know, throughout the districts with our students, to name a few. You know, students participating in the Allstate and Semispa musical festivals.
Athletics in winter have been up and running and people are getting into those end-of-the-year competitions and really making us, showing their hard work and making us proud.
We've got some theater performances with Middletown and SpongeBob the Musical, as well as a polar plunge for Special Olympics coming up at Cottage. So tons of stuff going on.
Again, we'll be going over the FY25 budget this week with an initial vote by school committee next week on March 6th.
And then also continuing to work on the school year calendar and consider the addition of additional days for next year. The school committee will be discussing whether or not they would elect to submit a statement of interest for a possible elementary school building project with the MSBA.
This does not commit the district to a project and typically, SOIs are submitted for several years prior to the MSBA extending an invitation, in which case they would then come up with their suggestions as far as renovation, you know, expansions or new buildings based upon the needs of the district.
And then we also have completed an updated draft of the bullying intervention and prevention plan and that will come in front of the school committee soon, but also you should watch out for your district-wide emails because it will be shared for a two-week period for public comment with the community.
And then Student Opportunity Act will be bringing that forth in March before the school committee and this really focuses on our goals as well as disparities in learning experiences and outcomes for student groups across.
We have a new three-year plan submission cycle so we need to submit that to the state for approval for this year.
And then also we will be bringing forth information around school choice so that the committee can make a decision on whether or not to participate in school choice this year as we do every year by statute.
So we'll bring that in April instead of later in the year as we have in the past. All right.
Are there any questions from the table?
All right. Seeing none, let's move it along.
I think next up we've got the FY25 operating budget superintendent's revised budget submission. Javi, I wonder if you want to go with the fees first just because it is both related but the budget presentation is so meaty it might be better to have that fresh right before the budgetary.
Absolutely.
I'll follow your lead there.
Yep.
All right. So next up, fees.
Okay.
So we have, you know, numerous funding sources for the schools, the operating budget, grant funding, revolving account and capital budget. I'm going to really get a focus on revolving account.
These are very specific uses and rules associated with them and they're focused on user fees that are charged to students and their families in the area of athletics, transportation, early childhood.
So some of the revenue history with respect to our revolving account, you know, the FY21 year was still a hybrid year so those numbers are expectedly a little bit different than the other ones but other than that been fairly steady with revenue being brought in in athletics, transportation, ECC over the last, you know, couple of years.
With respect to athletics, we, you know, currently have the current fees of $375 for one season, $300 for a second season and $200 for a third season with a family max of $1,250.
We also have qualifications through free and reduced lunch for a 50% reduction as well as some additional scholarships based upon need.
These fees are, you know, tend to be competitive and a bit on the higher side relative to our neighbors so that's something that we certainly consider as we're trying to, you know, bring in money to support the athletic program.
Certainly, the bulk of the athletic program is supported through the operating budget but the fees really help a lot. So, the fees cover approximately 30% of the athletic program.
Boosters, you know, really can help contribute some supplemental funding as well. We eliminated mandatory fundraising.
However, boosters can still fundraise to support our athletic programs as long as it's not done in a way that's, you know, a mandatory part of athletes' responsibilities.
SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: So, our operating budget costs are right around, you know, $690,000 last year, a little bit less currently for this year and then expected about similarly next year.
And then there's also some miscellaneous income through gate receipts and things like that.
As far as transportation, we are mandated to transport all students grade K through 6 outside of a 2-mile radius.
And we also mandated to transport all free and reduced lunch students in K through 12 as well.
We have a competitive big contract with Connelly Bus.
A new three-year contract was going into effect on July 2024.
We have 14 yellow buses that we currently contract out for with three tier bus routes, elementary, middle, and high school. And we have about 200 in 2023 pay-to-ride students.
Oh, in 2023, we had 884 pay-to-ride students, and in 2024, 920.
So our pay-to-ride is $600 per student.
And we have a late bus a couple days a week for no additional charge.
and this helps to offset the operating budget costs that are shown below as well.
Our recommendation for transportation as well as athletics is to not change the fees this year.
Both of these, as much as we'd like to bring in additional revenue, the fees are on the higher side.
There had been some question about if we had reduced the fees, might we bring in more riders?
That might be the case, though we would have to add additional busing in order to accommodate those riders so the offset would really not result in significant increases in funding.
And then our early childhood, we have program fees for students who are not mandated to be there through their IEPs.
Our peer model students pay for 4,133 for half days or 8,975 for full days.
And we reduce tuition for students who are qualified for free and reduced lunch or if their IEP calls for a half day and they're attending for a full day they pay for the second half of the day.
And the fees cover a lot of things including salaries of early childhood center, director, administrative assistance and several IEPs.
So the operating budget along with the 262 grant money for early childhood and, you know, supports the remainder of the cost for early childhood center.
the year. SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Okay.
And we're recommending a 5% increase in our fees for next year.
This would support some additional expenses including salaries and supplies associated with new ECC classrooms.
You know, we want to try to bring in some additional fund while still maintaining a competitive, you know, fee when we look at other public programs but also some of our private programs in the, in Sharon in the very close region.
So this would result in our full day rate going from 8,975 to 9,423 at our half day rate going up to 4,361.
And then we have these half day twin rate or free and reduced rates. At those numbers as well. So for a 5% increase.
So again, in summary, we're looking to, we're recommending a 5% increase in early childhood and in, for transportation athletics, keeping our fees at our current rates.
We certainly would love to bring in more early childhood kids, but you know, right now space limitations does not allow to do so. So we'll just be maxing out those classrooms first starting off with students who are mandated through their IEPs to get services and then their model peers who work alongside.
It's definitely a very popular program for folks in town to be able to have their preschool in the district instead of in private preschool.
Can't hear you, Avi.
Adam.
Thank you, Dr. Patello, for reviewing that.
I had a question about the transportation.
I know we have later in the agenda a new contract that is proposed with Connolly.
And for next year, I forget the exact increase, but there's roughly a $76,000 increase over this year.
And so I guess I'm curious why we want to maintain fees given the shortage in the operating budget that we're dealing with.
That feels like that $76,000 could be utilized elsewhere or maybe offset by increasing fees.
I guess the reason we're not proposing the increase in fees is just because of the state of our current fee is a pretty significant one and is pretty high relative to other districts.
So we're just, that's the rationale. now.
Certainly you could consider raising fees above that. But if they were on the modest, the medium to low side, we certainly would propose an increase in fees. But since they are currently quite high, that's the rationale. the current contract we have, we've SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: been paying a SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: fuel escalation charge, which has driven up the cost of the contract. to the new transportation contract.
The current contract we have, we've been paying a fuel escalation charge, which has driven up the cost of the contract to, we have budgeted for FY24 between the revolving, the fees taken in, as well as the operating account, $1,206,970.
So when we look at what next year would cost, factoring in that we have taken in more fees in the last couple of years, I was actually able to keep things pretty, actually reduce what the operating budget contribution will be, again, because of the fuel escalation costs that we've been paying and the additional revenue we've been taking in in fees.
Thank you, Ellen. So if I'm playing that back, it sounds like we can maintain, we will be paying fees where they are and it won't have an impact to the operating budget.
Correct.
SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Okay. We're actually going to see, when I went back and was looking at the budget, you'll actually see a reduction in the transportation line.
Awesome.
Thank you.
All right.
Great question, Adam. Thank you, Ellen.
On to when.
I think, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but it seemed like athletic fees is the only one that has a family cap at it.
So 1250 is the family cap. If we, if someone has three or four kids in the high school and they all play three sports, 1250 is still the cap for that family.
Why?
Okay. Well, I think we should. I think that's, that's it. Yeah. That's been the, the current, current fee structure for, for quite some time. And I certainly understand something that the, that the committee can, can discuss in question.
Yeah. I mean, I certainly understand giving a discount for every additional sport and also every additional child who, and a student who plays sports, but I, I think I'd like to revisit that cap. All right.
Julie. Thank you, Avi.
I just, I had two comments and this is for some people who are new, but I, I guess, can you confirm that the same thing happened with transportation that I did in the previous contract, which is we put out the RFP and we only got one bid because there's kind of a cartel.
Is that kind of what was happening?
Like we, we weren't, we just didn't get any extra bids. Is that, that was the last time. Is that still what happened this time?
So the invitation for bids did go out.
It was posted about a week longer than it typically is posted in some cases. And it, we did only receive one bid.
I can tell you from my previous experiences that this is typical.
You know, it's for me getting a second bid would have been, would have been unusual.
That this is, you know, out in central mass up on the North shore, they tend to be pretty consistent.
Thank you.
And then the second was just a comment on the athletic fees. So a couple of the 2022, I actually looked up some of the other schools that, you know, we consider peer schools. And I would say that pretty much all of them have a family cap of something.
And I would say a lot of them are around our 1250 family cap.
And the fee structure is a, it's a little high for 375 for the first, but since we declined, there's some that are just 300, like no matter how many sports you play and, and so forth.
So I just wanted, and then other towns will like say, okay, if you're playing, you know, this sport, it costs a little more.
If you're playing this sport, it's a little bit less. So I think that those fees are pretty thought, we, we thought about them when we established them a while ago. So that's, that's kind of all I wanted to say.
Thanks, Julie.
Shauna.
Thank you.
So I have to say, my question is regarding the EEC fees.
I know as a family who, we were a private daycare family in town.
We regularly had a 5% increase.
And so while that does seem like a steep increase for one year, like I'm wondering if we can leverage a higher increase than that, because the fee is still so much less than some of our neighboring districts.
And given all that we offer to our families.
So I'm just wondering if, if we can look at that as a means of another revenue source.
Absolutely.
I'll put together some additional information. Thank you.
Thanks, Shauna.
Adam?
Thank you. Just a quick piggyback off of Wen's question.
When we're looking at the fees in the family cap, if we could just pull the number of families who are actually at that cap, I think that would also be informative.
Thanks, Adam.
I mean, I just, first of all, I appreciate, Dr. Vitello, you putting the fees or asking them to move the fees up. I do always feel like the fees are a part of the budget process and are something that we should be weighing in ways that I just heard my fellow committee members mention.
You know, seeing the presentation, which I thought was solid, it's very clear.
And I think it's important to the public to understand just as I think we're understanding that these fees do not cover the entire expense.
they offset it. So in saying that, it does, there is a seesaw between the fees and the operating budget that has to be balanced.
So to that point, I would say, you know, I think Shana makes a good point about looking at the market value of EEC.
I also think that, you know, to Wen's point, for me, look, I don't like fees. I don't think anybody here likes fees.
I don't like paying them. I don't like the other people paying them. Transportation, it feels like, you know, in a perfect world, we would provide for free.
We can't afford a lot of things that we'd like to provide for free.
Athletics is something I'd hate to think a single kid misses out on sports.
So I do think we need to always make sure that we're that we're always being really clear and proactive about the needs-based stuff in this district.
But what I will say about the athletic fees is, A, to Wen's point, the cap, it does feel like there's a little inequity in it, in the sense that, A, it's very reasonable to think that there are parents in this district that have four children who are riding bus, for example, and we don't cap that. That would be $2,400 a year to ride the bus.
It's also possible that folks in town have, say, let's just say three kids, for example, that are spaced out such that they never hit the cap, right? So they pay in full for those kids to play their sports, whereas if those kids happen to be at the high school at the same time, they hit the cap.
So I would hate to see athletic fees raised in general, although I would make the argument that in today's day and age, there's a lot of folks playing a lot of private third-party sports, and those, to Shauna's point about the market value of EC, private sports are much more expensive than our district charges. Again, it's public education.
I don't want to see that raised. I do think the cap is something we could discuss because, again, for me, it is, I'm not sure where I lean on it, but I hear a point, and I do think there's an argument to be made that the cap could lift.
Go ahead, Shauna.
Oh, sorry.
It's all good.
You're good.
All right. If there's nothing more on this, we'll move to the budget presentation.
All right, Dr.
Patel?
Yep.
Okay.
Okay. There's, again, the context for our budget, the context and approach for budget development as a part of this presentation, as well as looking at the priorities that were reflected, the budget financial summary, and then the calendar.
Including in that financial summary this time is also how we would go about reaching the 3.127%
target that's been set by the priorities committee.
You know, when we're looking at our budget, we certainly look at our district plan and our priorities around district and school culture, educational excellence, and how we infuse more innovative student-centered learning experiences, and how we do that in a way that meets the needs for all students and make sure that all students have a feeling of belonging and inclusion in our district.
Part of our context is certainly this budget here in Sharon, as well as throughout the region is a very, very tight budget year.
We focus on maintaining level service to begin with in order to provide a quality education and service for our kids.
This starts off with the core of this is contractual obligations, then contractual increases for non-personnel- related expenses, such as transportations and facilities, the funding of mandated requirements, an effort to look at enrollment and maintain appropriate class sizes, as well as the continuing support of critical initiatives, including MTSS, our curriculum review, and infusing more challenging student-centered learning experiences for kids.
Our process included consulting with school and district leaders to identify needs, calculating the cost, our set costs, with respect to contractual obligations, as well as analyzing enrollment and class sizes, looking at opportunities to restructure, shift, and reduce as possible.
We've really looked over the last couple of years, looking at every place that we could shift around money to have it meet the needs of the district while trimming any fad in areas that has existed.
Working collaboratively with the town during the process, looking at risky places where we need to prepare, including projected out-of-district tuitions, as well as utility costs, and identify reduction areas for discussion.
That's part of what we're doing in this process tonight. So we look at our budget, the core, core part of our budget, 85% of it is salaries, and this is very similar in other districts as well.
It was perhaps identical when we were looking at Westwood's budget presentation earlier this week, and then we have areas of special education and transportation, all of the non-salaries utilities in other areas, athletics.
When we look at the salary part of the pie, 75% of that is going to teachers, almost 9% to IAs, 6% to others.
So that includes, you know, tutors as well as instructional, as well as building substitutes, as well as some people who are on separate contracts, some central office support staff, people like that. Then we have building level admin, district admin, and maintenance staff and custodians.
So those portions really are the biggest driver, the contractual salary obligations that we have for our staff.
They drive the budget.
They are really driving our increases. The other places that really have caused the increases that we've seen this year and over the last couple of years are special education costs, whether it's tuition or salaries for special education services within our district.
You know, we've added salary positions in special education here in order to rent, first serve kids based upon their IEP needs.
These are legally mandated needs and needs that the kids have in order to really be successful and have a free and appropriate education, which is part of the law and part of what we want to do for kids.
But it's also a way to make sure that we keep kids in district and don't pay even more exorbitant costs through tuitions out of district placements.
Our current increase is for a level service budget was a 5.97% increase over FY24.
It is 2.85%
over the priorities target.
And it's a budget of $55,525,344.
So we look at over the last several years as far as increases we've seen any place in the mid twos to, you know, 4% as we've settled on a number.
And then, you know, this year our initial request is up at 5.97%.
When I was working with my colleague in Walpole who had collected some information about where other districts were starting as far as their asks, there really are significant asks in many districts in the state.
You know, so these were some, she just was looking to collect as many as she could and these are the ones that responded.
Many of them are in our area and some are in other parts of the state.
But you see any place from a 10.6 or 8.8 requests in Milton and Canton and Wareham to a couple districts in the low to high threes and then the great majority in the fives and sixes, sevens and eights.
So the needs of districts in order to continue level service and continue to provide the type of education that kids needs are, you know, continue to increase.
Again, this is driven by contractual obligations as well as utilities, transportation and also special education both in district services and out of district costs. So we're not alone in the kind of the needs that we're having in order to try to really maintain high quality education for our kids.
Okay.
So when we looked at how do we get to that 5.97
percent, we start off with the $52,395,000 FY24 budget.
We build in our contractual obligations, which is just a little bit under $3 million.
So that's the great, great majority.
5.52 of the 5.97 percent increase comes from just contractual obligations in order to maintain the people that we have, we currently have.
Then we have some increases that we need to project for special education.
We try to be as conservative, like as careful as we can with that without over-inflating that number.
And almost always we end up, you know, really needing that money.
We also look at mandated special education staffing and physical education staffing, as well as we have reduced in grade 5 because of a big class moving into grade 6.
There's one that we can reduce without really impacting class size.
So we have that one reduction.
We also have state funding for families and state shelters.
That's going to help with some of our ELL costs, as well as some other offsets.
So this takes us to, you know, slightly over a $3 million increase, which is 5.97 percent and $1.4
million above the initial priorities cost.
And we look at those mandated additions, you know, because we're really, you know, we really would not be looking to do any additions based upon our budget status, but there are some things that if we don't do them, then we're not meeting the mandated needs of our students.
So this includes, you know, maintaining an adjustment counselor in order to meet some of the mandated needs that have increased over the years.
We had two adjustment counselors on being funded through a grant and that were needed in order to, again, meet mandated needs of kids. And so we're looking to maintain one of those to stretch that individual as far as possible.
Also, we have increased identification of kids in ECC through early intervention.
So we need to either serve those kids in district or we need to provide, you know, funding for them to be served outside of district.
So we're looking to keep those in, and part of that need in ECC would increase is teachers for evaluation and direct service coverage and then some additional instructional assistance.
So these are mandated special education needs that we would not be putting forth if they weren't absolutely mandated by law and by the needs of our kids.
And then again, in our tiered focus monitoring audit process with the state, one of the things that we weren't currently doing was providing physical education in grade 11 and 12.
And so that is something that we have been directed to, you know, add to our high school program.
And then also in order to, we have, you know, increasing number of English language learners and so increasing funding for that.
This funding will be in FY25 funded through our state supplemental shelter funds.
So therefore it won't have a direct budget impact on the operating budget asked for next year.
When we look at the major categories that we've discussed, so we have, you know, our salary increase again has gone up, you know, 3.2
million above FY24 and then non-salary in the form of utilities, special education facilities, athletics and transportation in all of their non-salaries.
There have been some areas where utilities and special education going up as Ellen mentioned, transportation as well as facilities.
We're looking for ways to spend less next year relative to this year.
Athletics based upon the real needs that we've seen in the FY24 budget as well as projected needs for next year, having that go up a little bit as well. So one thing to consider as we're looking at, you know, where we might be able to either need increases or make reductions is enrollment.
So enrollment has been fairly steady over the last several years.
And as we look to this year or next year, in FY25, we're projecting enrollments at the high school or middle school to go up slightly at the high school by, you know, 10 students.
At the middle school to go up a little bit more.
The majority of that increase at the middle school is because of a large class leaving fifth grade and entering sixth grade, which makes it difficult to make any decreases at the grade six, you know, grade level where those might be in some of the places where you would look in tough budget times to decrease.
Our elementary enrollment shows a decrease currently.
I want to make clear this is really a current enrollment numbers shows a decrease of approximately 80 students.
That's largely by the leaving grade five.
But it also is because grade one current numbers are low, not low based upon what we expect this time of year, but low based upon where we expect them to land. Usually we have in grade one a jump over the summer and the census data and patterns from previous years show that we will have a jump so that 80 students will decrease significantly.
We still project to have a smaller elementary enrollment than last year, but not that 80 students that we have.
We'll have a little bit lower again because of that grade five bump as well as possibly, you know, some lower numbers in grade one than this year, but not as low as they are currently because again, this summer we always have increased numbers of grade one students enroll.
And even though we have pre-full day K based upon census data and knowing that some kids choose to continue with pre-K in the private schools they were in previously, we expect to have a significant jump there as well. K numbers are based upon projections and we expect to have K numbers that are similar to this year based upon the census data as well as some other data that came from our elementary master plan that looked at what the projected kindergarten data for next year would be.
So currently, based upon the proposed 5.97%
increased budget, we have these numbers in our elementary schools and these current, you know, projected class sizes.
So any place from 20 to 22 in grade K, any place from, you know, 15 to 20 in grade one, any place from, you know, 20 to 22 in grade two, and so on and so forth. So the numbers here are not low, but acceptable.
There are a couple of places like grade one at Cottage and East that are a little bit lower currently, but we expect that those numbers will go up as we take in additional grade one students that we currently, that we typically see coming in late spring and in the summer. So, you know, the part that we can, you know, really predict are our contractual obligations.
The part that is most variable is really around our special education costs.
The district-wide programs that we have created really help tremendously to keep kids in district and help us to be able to predict costs, but just like any other district, we do have students who need to receive their education outside of the district because of the severity and significance of their needs.
As far as out-of-district tuitions, we talked a lot about the 14% increase that we saw last year, which is an extraordinary increase.
That still is impacting us both this year and will continue to impact us next year as well.
But in addition to that 14%, we're expecting almost a 5% increase this year.
So it's almost a 20% increase in that over the course of these two years.
Typical increases in the past would have been 2% or 3% or 5% to 6% over two years versus 20% over two years.
So this is a cost that I think as the private schools that are providing the services for these kids are realizing that they need tremendous increases in order to provide services, that makes sense to us and it also impacts our bottom line tremendously.
So that's an area that really has impacted our budget as well as budgets throughout the Commonwealth.
And so that's what we're looking at.
As far as 2024, 25 special education out-of-district tuition projections, we project about $5.8
million in out-of-district tuition. About $2.5
million will come from the operating budget and the rest will come from both our $240 special education grant and circuit breaker for a total funding to fund that entire out-of-district tuition cost. cost.
And we look at the total cost including special education personnel, that's, and this is for both in-district and out-of-district costs, that's approximately 30% of our overall budget.
This is not something that's uncommon, but it's a reality that we face that special education is a variable that is really challenging as far as the budget, but it's also incredibly important to serve our most in-need kids well.
Okay, so we have, so all this stuff goes into our 5.9%
ask, and at the same time, there are things that we really, really do need that we're not putting forth in this budget.
That includes the network administrator that someone mentioned previously.
So that's not that that position is being cut, it's just not being continued in our ask list considering the, the, the, the, the set demands of our budget already.
So these things are not moving forward with our ads, even though they are, you know, important ones.
Okay.
And so we talked a little bit about the potential impacts of getting to the 3.12%
priorities target, and we're going to get more specific into some of the impacts and what they would look like.
They would, they're going to, they would cause significant cuts in instructional staff, as well as larger class sizes and reduce supports offerings and programming.
We would do, you know, cuts as needed in already austere supplies and materials budgets.
We really would not be able to increase our technology support staffing.
And we're also know that we need to look at some more creative, you know, solutions with respect to district-wide staffing, which I'll, you know, which I'll talk a little bit about today, but also I'm going to bring a more specific kind of ideas to it next week that could help at least offset some of the significant cuts that would be necessary if we had to reach to 3.12%
priority target.
So working with our, you know, our building administrators and some of our teacher leaders in order to, you know, fill the gap, the next two pages reflect the types of cuts that would be necessary in order to do so.
These are, these are in, to some degree, a priority order, but there's still a lot of analysis as to the exact order, partly based upon, you know, some of the ones especially connected to the high school depend upon what kids, you know, are looking to sign up for in enrollment numbers, and that would greatly impact what would be, what would be cost.
And then part of it is also based upon discussions we have over the next, this week and next week. But a possibility of a cut would be a social studies teacher at the high school.
We do have a retirement, I apologize for the spelling of Jeopardy, but we do have a retirement there.
It would impact the offering electives, including possibly AP Psych.
So some of the electives that were lower enrollment or as the core classes were filled up and utilized all of our social studies teacher FTEs, then those would be things that would be in jeopardy.
We're also, we really need a 0.5
wellness teacher to fully fund our grade 11 and 12 PE, but we would look to, instead of doing two times per cycle for grade 11 and 12 PE, do it only once a cycle.
And this would pose some caseload concerns that we're talking about as far as the number of students that wellness and PE teachers would have.
Some of the other positions do not impact class size as they are some of our support personnel, but they're incredibly important as we try to build up multi-tiered supports for students, but they would include math and reading specialists at the middle school. We would still have one, you know, math and reading specialists at the middle school, but the second one would be reduced.
An elementary math specialist, we would have one math specialist at each school, but we also have a floater math specialist who helps provide additional tier two interventions.
So tier two interventions are those interventions that don't happen in the classroom, but that are happening for kids who, in order to access the learning in the classroom, but who don't need a prescribed IEP, they provide services to, you know, prevent more costly special education services for kids who don't need them, but just need some type of additional support to really reach their potential and grow and improve.
Elementary teacher would be another one.
This would likely be in grade one. Right now, again, we have, you know, from 15 to 16 students in one of our schools in grade one, and this would result in it jumping to 20 to 21.
That number would be acceptable in grade one.
The problem is, again, grade one often has an influx of kids in the summer. So that's why we wouldn't, like we did the grade five cut where we really know what grade five is going to look like next year. We could do that and still have acceptable class sizes.
With grade one, it's really questionable about if we ended up having a smaller group and we could stick at 20 to 21, that would be great, but we expect that it will grow, and so that's the risk of this reduction.
A Spanish teacher at the high school would result in larger class sizes and also a concern about caseload limits, but that's something we would be looking at in this situation.
We have elementary librarians who we would like to keep at their current FDEs, but they do have some courses that they don't, times where they don't teach in the day, so a couple of extra blocks, and so this would reduce librarians to 0.8 and 0.9 in each building based upon the number of actual classes that they teach, so this takes away some of their time to prepare for additional supports for students and teachers, and it also puts us at risk of losing librarians because they're not working at a 1.0
and they could seek out other places where they would.
So I'm trying to give you a sense of what the potential impacts are so you can consider them.
Elementary teacher, this again is another grade 1 situation.
This is a situation where currently the classes are at 17, and so those would go up to 22 to 23 if we cut one teacher at that school in grade 1.
Again, this is still before the influx.
So if we didn't have an influx, that would be high but acceptable to have 22, 23.
Not acceptable in a regular year, but in a year like this, but the problem is those are two of our smallest current classes.
So with the influx of kids coming in grade 1, that's where we would plan to put those students, new students that moved in during the summer. school and then another possibility of cuts in order to fill this gap would be to reduce a team at the middle school.
This would approximately result in classes from 21 to 26 students per class. we would look at some of the smallest grade level and that's been done in the past, but it's certainly something every time that it is done, it's something that we're always striving to reinstate those teachers to get our class sizes back to the places where they should be and to have three full functioning teams per grade level.
Some of the high school positions that are listed, none of these are ideal, they're not in a particular order, really would be based upon enrollment, but visual arts, science, ELA, math, or science teacher. ELA, this would result in the reduction or elimination of classes like digital photography and animation courses, which kids are really thriving in.
A science teacher reduction would restrict opportunities for doubling up in science, so if all kids were taking one science at a time, then we probably could do with this reduction and have some increased class sizes, but not something that we could handle, but one of the strengths of the high school is really having opportunities to take more than the core, you know, say four classes in science, and so this would really restrict that.
The ELA reduction would result in the elimination of many ELA electives and result in larger class sizes.
Math would again restrict opportunities for doubling up in math. There are some kids who really love math or want to kind of excel and take multiple courses and that would be very difficult when reducing a math teacher.
It also could jeopardize computer science and business classes.
Again, it would be looking at enrollment and making hard decisions about what classes and sections were offered and which could not be based upon the number of FDs that we have.
Again, science teachers.
So science is one of the areas where we have some of the most offerings and we have more staff.
They're very well regarded by kids and families, so they're not things that I would say are niceties at all. These are really great things for a comprehensive, strong high school to have, but when we cut back science teachers, they would be in jeopardy courses like anatomy, biotech, AP biology, AP chem, AP physics.
We would have to look at enrollment and decide which courses we could offer.
Might there be some courses that we can't offer every year and so they would be offered every other year?
Those would be tough decisions.
So that's some of the decisions that would go in to if we had to cut this deep.
Special education teacher, we have a lead teacher in all four grade levels at the high school. This is really critical to the model that are based upon their IEPs where there's a co-teaching model.
So we're not even quite sure that this would be possible, but we certainly analyzed this deeply to see if we could develop some efficiency while meeting the needs of kids and fulfilling their IEPs.
But the asterisk is showing that. I'm not sure if this is possible, but it's listed there.
Instrumental music, this is something that is really popular with our kids and our families, and we really value being able to offer this at the elementary level.
But in this significant list of potential cuts, this would need to be shifted to an after-school fee based option.
And then we get to some elementary classrooms at other grade levels, looking at grade levels that had the lowest numbers and reducing there, and that would result in class sections of over 25, 26 to 28. So it's not something that we certainly would want to do, but this is a way, those are purposely listed at the very end because it's something that we really were looking to prevent ourselves from having to consider.
But as we're trying to bridge that gap for this 3.12%
number, that would have to be under consideration.
This is also, the next one's just a minor cut of an elementary art teacher from 0.8 to 0.9.
It's certainly not something we want to do. It doesn't raise much money, but it's something to be considered.
And then district reductions.
So I've just, you know, we know that even to just cut even, that we would have to come up with some district reductions in operations or administration.
And so this is, that number is just a number to kind of meet priorities.
But one thing that, you know, based upon requests from last time and based upon as we've gone through this exercise, knowing that I will bring to the table next week and have conversations with folks individually in between meetings about other possible district reductions that could at least shorten this list a little bit.
I don't imagine it would be, you know, more than $100,000 or $200,000, but we will certainly look at creative ways to reduce.
There's not areas that I think we are, we have, you know, tremendous I think what we have is what we need and in this dire circumstance, we're going to have to look at creative options that do their best to serve kids and serve teachers in the buildings while looking at district-wide options as well. so there'll be some additional addition to that by our next meeting as well.
Okay, so this just shows based upon a 3.5, so that was the 3.127
and based upon a 3.5%
target, you would see still all those positions or, you know, that number of positions and go to the next page.
And then you see about approximately the three positions that would not need to be reduced when you go from 3.12%
to a 3.5%
priority target.
Certainly something will be, you know, advocating for the priority target to be as high as it can while understanding the revenue challenges of the town.
And then this shows as you go up from 3.5
to 3.75
to 4% to 4.25,
you have a couple of positions that you could reinstate based upon each quarter percent.
And so you go from, you know, 18.1
with 3.5, you know, more than that with 3.12,
about 21 positions to 13 positions with a 4.25
reduction.
And then you can keep on going.
And so I've done this exercise up to 5.25%.
So with a, you know, a 5.25%
reduction, we have, you know, a couple of two or three teachers as well as some specialists.
Again, some of that could be reduced by some more creative options with district reductions, which I'll continue to explore as well.
So some final notes. This initial budget represents the fiscal support necessary to maintain level shorts, so that was that 5.97%.
The priority target budget represents a severe reduction in services programming supports, along with significant increases in class size and caseloads.
Reductions in funding and level services greatly impact students and staff and make it exceedingly difficult to make significant improvements in employment critical initiatives.
You know, one thing you did not see there is our coordinators.
You know, we talk about, you know, the need for additional curriculum materials as well as improvements in teaching.
those things, in order for kids to really have a consistent experience, those coordinators are critical to making sure there's consistency across the district, to make sure that we have the professional development training to both pilot and utilize new materials to continuously, you know, improve. So I think those middle-level positions are really, really critical.
And we already don't have them in some areas, including elementary science and social studies. And we already do have teachers who are coordinators who do teach some courses, you know, at the secondary level and are really serving 6 through 12. So I think it's critically important that those are maintained.
As I spoke about last meeting, you know, we're really trying to provide a great education for our kids. We have lots of really positive, strong aspects of our system that, you know, and we're really striving to go from good to great.
Unfortunately, you know, for the financial picture, this really takes significant financial support.
We know that the town strives for that and wants to do that and knows it's in a tough situation, but it's the reality that, you know, that, you know, even 2.5% increases are really, really hard for schools in Massachusetts.
And yet we know tax increases are really, really hard for community members. But it's the reality that we have to present in an honest way as we look at this. And we have looked at trimming any fat that we have in the district.
And it's really, really the services that we're providing are essential.
And we are trying to, you know, there's so many things through my entry plan that we want to do even better as far as authentic learning experiences that really push kids to their ultimate limit that give them all kinds of opportunities that maintain rigorous classes as well as providing classes and supports for kids who might be struggling.
All those things are critically important and they, and it's more and more complex to educate kids and it costs a tremendous amount of money. We did look at this, you know, again, this is just one educator looking at our prepubal expenditures and, you know, compared to some of our districts around, you know, we're kind of modest in that regard.
I know our tax base is not as strong as some other communities, but it's a reality that educating kids is expensive and prepubal expenditure is one way of looking at that.
We look at the way we've trended over the last several years, though we have increased, we haven't necessarily kept up with some of our peers.
So where, you know, Sharon Needham and, can you go back to that one?
Sharon Needham and Westwood are all around 15,000 in 2014, you know, Needham and Westwood are around 24,000 or 23,000 this year and that difference is massive.
We know it's not because our, we know our community and family members care about their schools, but it's just a reality that really impacts the bottom line for how we, what we provide, what opportunities, what choices, and what class sizes and supports we have for our students and teachers. And again, I think, you know, I'm proud of the negotiations that we held.
I know, you know, after having really modest increases in previous years, teachers earned a significant increase.
When we look at the, the places in the state that have gone to strikes that have really torn those communities apart, I interact with the principals in, each of these districts. And the financial impact of even after a, after a strike of having really high compensation that they still need to deal with budgetarily combined with the devastating impact of, you know, a strike type of that atmosphere.
We were proud to have not prevented that.
And we know, everyone knows that teachers kind of deserve the pain that they're getting. And yes, it is a challenge to keep up with it budgetarily.
And so, we have the meeting tonight with the budget hearing.
We'll have a school committee vote on March 6th.
I imagine, as well as the committee vote on fees.
I imagine that will include both a vote to provide a budget that shows the 3.1227,
as well as a vote to provide a proposed budget that might be different.
And then we'll have the budget presentation of the finance committee on March 11th.
And this year, I know, throughout all of my colleagues, because of looking to see if the state is able to improve its picture as far as funding for schools, as well as just the challenging atmosphere in schools budgetary this year, I expect that there'll be continued conversations between March 11th and 25th when the finance committee votes, as well as conversations in April as we look towards town meeting. All right.
Thanks for that presentation.
Guys, I raised my hand on purpose, just so that I can hold my spot here first. I know normally I go last. I have a few thoughts I'd like to share.
My first thought, Dr. Patel, is I don't see how this committee and I let my other committee members weigh in here. I don't see how this committee can be voting a budget a week from today.
That was a lot.
And while I know that you've sort of maintained adamantly throughout this process that those higher numbers are what you needed, I think this committee two weeks ago gave guidance and direction that those numbers weren't going to be where this community wanted to land at.
And so to sit here and think that we're still evaluating options that will be presented a week from now and then we'll vote a budget feels rushed and it feels last minute.
Looking at that budget, I do want to say here's some direction that I feel like it would be my preference that we go in.
All cuts of personnel are hard. All cuts of services are hard.
So none of this is things that I take lightly. I value coordinators.
I value administration.
But to see classroom educators be cut and impact the very direct delivery of education to our students while we maintain coordinator positions that have not always been there. And Sharon has been a performing district for a long time.
Prior to those positions existing, I believe deeply in the needs for this district to have very modern education and education that is inclusive.
I also think that we could be looking at, and to be clear, I don't mean our DEI director.
I think we should be looking at, I always think management should be looked at first. I think admin positions should be presented and with aid.
You know, again, for me, the idea of cutting classroom teachers without having been given the opportunity to see what the numbers look like in admin and in coordinator positions is frustrating.
I also, and this is a question, when we voted a teacher contract, my understanding was that additional classes, teachers were going to be teaching a fifth class at the high school. school, I'm seeing now the possibility of cutting certain AP classes.
The math doesn't math.
If teachers at the high school teach a fifth class, we could essentially offer no new schedule.
We can reevaluate the way that we're going to run the high school, and we could have teachers now teaching five sections.
There could be cuts to high school teachers without hurting the class sizes, and certainly without hurting the class sizes at the elementary school.
I'm not sure, and I'd have to have you explain to us, why is it that at the high school, if we cut a teacher, would it impact, I mean, there are multiple places on your presentation where you're cutting a teacher, and then you're impacting the offering of classes, but we just gained 25% more classroom time, didn't we, when teachers went from teaching four sections to five?
Am I not understanding that?
They went from teaching two-thirds to five-sevenths, so there is an increase.
So, yeah, I'll tell them. So, I don't think, okay, two-thirds to five-sevenths would be a big increase.
Oh, I don't, right? I mean, wouldn't it be?
SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: Um, but I, my understanding, and again, full transparency here because I do think we need to be honest with the public, that contract was settled, we had an educator here speak about it, I sat at that table with you as part of negotiations, I'm very clear that we went from four sections to five sections.
That two-thirds to five-sevenths is a product of a schedule, which certainly the district controls.
my understanding is the teachers went from teaching four sections, which they had historically been, it's a very rare thing, most districts have high school teachers teaching five, to agreeing to teach a fifth section. That's something we touted to this community when we did settle a contract.
I'm not understanding how that's not a 25% increase in teacher availability and why we wouldn't be able to cut, make cuts at the high school level rather than middle school or elementary school if we had to make educator cuts.
I mean, I think part of it is, again, they went from teaching four of six classes to five of seven classes.
So that's from a 0.67
to 0.71
part of the day. So it's not a 25%.
Sure, but to be clear, and again, let's have the conversation here in front of the public.
To be clear, the seven is not a contractual agreement, right? The seven is something that you as the leader of our district are saying is existing, but is not the contractual agreement. The contractual agreement is four sections went to five sections.
What it was out of is a product of decisions the district makes. But it's also it's also needs to maintain the contractual planning preparation time.
So to just have them teach, to have them teach instead of four of six, five of five of six would not meet those contractual obligations.
So that's...
And those are the contractual obligations of three periods?
Yeah, that are part of that. They were not changed in the contract that are part of the contract.
In addition, I'm not saying that there's not some truth to what you're saying, Avi. I'm just trying to explain a little bit.
In addition, you know, part of the thing that we talked about a lot at the table was that, yes, there'd be...
You might be teaching more sections and such, but the class sizes would go down when you're reducing staff then...
So the additional sections would, you know, largely impact not necessarily the overall number of students that you had, but the number of students that you had each time you teach.
So there's not that...
you know, that significant of a gaining of...
If everyone taught...
Yeah, if you taught... If you went from teaching four of six to five of six, and if your average class size was 23, 24, and you maintained 23, 24, then you would get a tremendous gain in...
And then what you're saying would be more true, but there, you know, but I think we do still need to analyze are we taking fully advantage of what we can contractually within the contract as we, you know, make decisions.
But it's just not as big an impact as...
Because of these other kind of contractual factors.
Okay.
Then that was certainly...
That's fine. As far as my priorities and what I would be looking at cutting, I think we needed to see admin cuts.
I think we needed to see coordinator cuts, and I think we should be leaning at high school cuts if we had to cut classroom teachers at all and not touching elementary class sizes, middle school class sizes either if we didn't have to.
When? Yeah, so I think in ideal world, I understand the case for keeping our coordinators.
I'm very much like a macro person, so I mean, like I do understand that you want, in order to attain maximum efficacy and efficiency, you want to have a consistency in someone sort of overseeing the curriculum across the board.
I guess I need you to help me understand in this scenario in which we don't cut coordinators, but we're cutting teachers in the classrooms, how is that more beneficial than keeping the teachers and cutting the coordinators and yes, having maybe a little bit more consistency and a little bit more chaos, but I guess I'm just having difficulty understanding how that is the better option than keeping the teachers where they are.
Yeah.
I guess it's, from my experience, not having a certain level of those coordinators, those type of people, it results in a tremendous degree of inconsistency, not a little inconsistency.
It also really hinders school-wide, grade-wide, initiative-wide improvements.
I think there's a point where you can cut them and still have teachers get the supports they need.
So I think you always question that, but there's a point where if you don't have some level of that, then it's the inconsistency, and I think you end up making up for that for years and years when you do kind of reinstate.
So I think, yeah, I think, I understand that we still kind of need to consider that even more so, but from my experience, that those kind of coordinators, and again, a lot of times, sometimes a lot of coordinators are just high school. we have coordinators that are 6 through 12, so that's, they're bridging a lot of classrooms, which makes it a little bit more efficient, but it's still an investment.
And so if we were at a 9 through 12, I might be looking, okay, let's make them stretch the 6 through 12. We're already there.
You know, at the elementary level, we just have one, you know, literacy coordinator, one math coordinator.
Many will have one of those people for each school.
So what we have, though it seems like a lot is, from my experience, is really something that is not, you know, is not a lot.
You know, again, and this is from my experience, from my research, those types of supports and those types, those people working with teachers directly, and I find that, you know, the people that we have here are also really, really good. They work well with teachers.
They respect teachers.
They, together with teachers, can amplify what we can do for kids.
And so, you know, it's part of my philosophy.
Like, I know, and part of my experience is these people really do have tremendous impact on what we do for kids, even though they're not the ones who are providing that direct and that there's a certain level of that that is, you know, kind of necessary in order to do so. So, you know, at the elementary level, having some kind of coordination of, you know, literacy and math, especially as we're implementing new programs, is incredibly important.
At the secondary level, six through 12, as you're having that building that's so important in all the core courses to build from six all the way up through 12, without coordination, you're really going to get, we already have, you know, challenges with making sure that if you have one teacher or another teacher or a different building that you have a consistent experience.
And that's something that is experienced in all districts, but it's something that is, you know, is, you know, is much, much better with, you know, with individuals that devote their time to working with teachers to improve curriculum.
We don't have, you know, we haven't had, we have, you know, still great room to kind of, you know, making sure that we're documenting curriculum and improving curriculum in a consistent way. So, that's the reason. But I'll certainly look at additional options as far as that and as well as, you know, levels of administration as well.
Adam?
Thank you, Dr. Patelos.
So, I feel like I echo the sentiments of frustration and I say that for two reasons.
One, I think in our last meeting, the committee in its kind of guidance effectively requested seeing budgets in which those who are directly delivering education were impacted the least. and we've received a presentation where they are kind of exclusively impacted.
And so, I think that is frustrating to me and it puts me in a position where I don't feel like I can make a decision because I don't understand different options that are on the table.
I think in what has been presented, we don't see a tremendous degree of looking for creative solutions.
It seems like we are eliminating certain positions but I don't know if there are other options that are not ideal because none of these situations are ideal but that perhaps leave us in a kind of better position.
And so, when I think a couple years ago and we didn't have coordinators, we did have some teachers with reduced course loads and stipends in a kind of quasi curriculum coordinator position.
I don't know if that's an option because that hasn't been presented as an option and I don't know what that would mean in terms of the total budget.
I'm also frustrated because you've alluded to ideas that you have that you want to present next week when we are supposed to vote next week.
So, I can guarantee you there will be no vote next week. because we will not have had an opportunity to evaluate those options, discuss, collect any community feedback.
So, I would say at this point I need to hear those tonight or we're going to have or I would request of the chair a special meeting on Monday night where you can present all options across kind of different budget scenarios where we see cuts in well, I would just say this I feel like all district staff and all programs are on the table.
This is an extremely painful cut. We have a large deficit that we need to account for.
We need to know what those options are in order to make an informed decision.
And right now we have none of those options.
We have a single set of options that exclusively reduces educators which is expressly what this committee has asked to not see.
So, I think you've put the committee in a very difficult position and I feel like if you want to maintain and we as a committee want to maintain the schedule that the town has requested to maintain a smooth budget process we're going to need to either have additional information prepared tonight you said you have ideas I don't know whether they're not being presented so I'm amenable to hearing all of those ideas now otherwise I think we need a meeting on Monday.
Thanks Adam.
Dr. Do you have anything on that or do you want me to move on to the next person?
You know I'm I'm fine with having a you know additional additional meeting I I I yeah I think I need I have any additional meeting to do so I do think what I'm showing today is that with this type of cut it's we're not going to be able to avoid some of these difficult cuts if we have to reach the three point we don't have that many additional places to cut but I will certainly provide additional options to reduce the the impact of what what what I've had to present tonight.
Yeah and to be clear I'd like to see all options at this point like I think we we again we have very little information with which to do anything and I certainly don't want to put the committee in a position where we are voting you an option that we haven't seen so to speak right like the committee could dictate and say well we're we're just going to eliminate xyz which is not an option that you've presented and we don't understand the the financial ramifications of so you know that's obviously not ideal we need to know all the options Shauna thank you I have to say I'm I'm beyond I echo my fellow school committee members in their frustration I have to say I'm extremely disappointed by the presentation I don't think there was a lot of new information that was presented I think that we owe it to our teachers to go back and to look at all of the cuts we had pages and pages and pages of reductions in our teacher force and then there was a line item of district administration and not even not even any specificity to that for me we made that abundantly clear that you know we settled an SDA contract and I believe that when we settled that we weren't going to go and in turn the next year go make all of these reductions that's not good faith based on our part and based on what we owe to our community and to our educators who have dedicated themselves to our children and our district so that's first and foremost I need to see a very clear line by line itemization of where cuts in other places outside of our teaching force are going to come from I understand that you made a beautiful chart highlighting that the budget is taken by you know x amount percentage of salaries I get it but we need to be creative here and we have a lot of creative people who are willing to work with you and I'm really disappointed that we have teachers here on this call and this is what they're hearing from their leader that's first of all second of all when you say that you want to propose making a cut for example the middle school math and reading interventionists how many interventionists do we currently have what is the impact of that going to be do we have an interventionist per grade level do we have an interventionist per team what does that look like like I don't know and perhaps maybe shame on me for not knowing that level of intricacies in terms of our staffing but I think that's really important for us to know as a committee I said previously we have one interventionist we currently have two one in math two in second one in literacy and we go to one each so it's one person for the school instead of two person one for the school yeah okay one in each area so for middle school as well elementary level we have we have in math we have four one floater in three we have multiple in literacy in the elementary schools but math we have four and that reduction was two three so the floater the floater position not necessarily the floater individual the floater position would be decreased so you're looking at you're looking to identify eliminate 50% of the math interventionists at the middle school and 25% of the math interventionists across three elementary schools correct that is that was that that is the on that list yes okay and then my third item and perhaps it's because I do know the intricacies of a high school if our high school teachers went from teaching four classes out of a six day rotation to five of seven then the contractual obligations that we have are directly related to their preps and the number of preps based on the number of unique individual classes that they have so for each class that they teach they are allotted to a prep that does not account for anything above and beyond their five those account for their two periods so we did gain we did gain 20% extra staff at the high school by virtue of changing our own schedule and negotiating that so I don't understand if we had four science teachers previously teaching 16 sections of science and we went from those four science teachers and we still have those four science teachers but now they're each teaching five sections then we have net gained four sections of a class so I'm also not understanding the math and the rationale of how we are reducing a teacher and losing classroom losing sections despite us net gaining sections by virtue of us changing our own limitations that we set forth by the schedule that we had inherently been running at the high school so I'd like I'd like a deeper look at the high school and not saying that I'm for teachers but the math is not adding up in terms of how many class sections how much more we're offering to our kids and the number of sections that need to be reduced thank you all right Veronica thanks Avi thanks Dr. Patello I noted that the mandated additional staff positions look heavy on the ECC side if I'm remembering that slide in your deck at least three of those additions look to be coming to ECC ECC and it really does then point hammer home to me the observation that was made earlier regarding that revolving account coming through ECC and really making the request to you and to the team to look at potentially attempting to cover the cost of those additions through that fee increase again we hate to add user fees but in this unique circumstance in particular since that program is going to be very obviously in your presentation right directly being enhanced by the increase of those staff folks that is where those increases are going and so that seems to me to be an absolute one-to-one correspondence to those families those kids receiving those additional services so I'd really ask you to look and look at that but one thing I want to clarify is the reason for the additional FTEs is because of more students being identified through early intervention for free and appropriate public education at the early childhood level so it's that's what's driving and it's not being driven by kids who are who do not get a free early childhood education it's being driven by the kids who are based upon their legal needs coming through their IEPs identified and that's something again that increase in kids being identified over the last several years throughout the country is a reality but we can certainly still look at ways to help offset it but it's not a one-to-one correspondence because the kids who are actually causing the need are kids who by law get those services for free gotcha so I understand that you're saying that it's not going to be something that could necessarily be a full coverage but it does look like that program if it's fair to say is going to cost our district more to run and therefore we're justified okay in looking at those fees so I just kind of wanted to point that out and I also want to kind of reinforce that and I understand you're not prepared to talk about it potentially tonight but you know looking at our chart we do understand that district staff other costs central office staff folks it's not a huge driver of the budget it's not a huge amount but some creative thought toward looking at how we're using our administrative level group and potentially looking at how those job roles and those job duties are currently looked at we need some really creative and thoughtful and I know very difficult thinking along those lines because we we did you know really want to look at not touching class sizes and at the very very you know right at the very last resort not touching direct to students and so that's something that I think that you've heard loud and clear from the rest of us but I wanted to reiterate that and I know it's going to mean going to potentially obviously administration and district wide but we really do I really want to reinforce that I concur with that thanks Veronica Julie I probably shouldn't have my hand up anymore because I feel like everyone particularly Avi and Adam have really expressed what I'm thinking and how I feel I regret that I was not able to really look at anything at this granular level until like basically yesterday and I wish if we could go back in time that we had been able to discuss this more evenly but I agree that I'm not prepared to vote on this next Wednesday and everybody else said what I thought much better so I'll be quiet thanks Julie yeah I'm in the same camp as Julie my colleagues I think spoke to level of frustration Dr. Botella unfortunately I think you missed the mark you got direction I think you came to the table with the inverse of what was asked for and that's frustrating and I'm also not prepared to vote based on what I just saw but you know there's an opportunity there right so hopefully you're hearing direction now and you can come back to us with the information that we're looking for with the priorities that we just outlined and I'm with Adam on this I do think that we need both us as committee members and the community need the opportunity to see sort of a final presentation that aligns with what we're requesting so that we can review it and the community gets an opportunity to apply on it before we vote so however we do that within the schedule I think that's important as well from the process perspective thank you thanks all right see no more hands from the table is there anything more from you Dr. Patel before we move to the budget hearing no all right in accordance with MGL chapter 71 section 38 n public hearing for the proposed 2024-2025 school budget will be held on Wednesday February 28 2024 during the regularly scheduled school committee meeting all right first up I see James C oh I just lost him I hit unmute and then he seemed to have disappeared from my screen I assume he lowered his hand James if you see this please raise your hand again and I will call you Alan Mattengo hi everybody thanks for the time Dr.
Patel a couple questions I agree with the members of the committee that it would be really helpful to have your administrative proposed cuts before we make as a community any kind of decisions and I hope that there would be an additional budget hearing held to allow the community to have some feedback once that information is provided I was disappointed again Dr. Teller not to see Sharon as one of the comparators under the teachers contract I saw a number earlier in your slide deck that I think alluded to something like 7% I may be misreading that but I get the sense and I have no reason to disbelieve that the school committee and yourself are proud of the contract that was drafted with the teachers association and so if that's the case let's compare it let's see it let's have it out there and I think to keep it off the comparative list it just reeks of being embarrassed of it and I'm not sure why we're embarrassed of it I want to comment on the concept of reducing AP classes just generally as someone who's worked in the college admissions field I feel very strongly that the breadth and depth of what we offer for AP classes is a big measure for colleges and universities of how rigor of Sharon high school and Sharon public schools is measured and so as the committee considers the cuts it's going to take I would encourage and ask the committee to keep that in mind and then there's a slide Dr. I don't know if it's appropriate to pull it up but I was struck by one of the last slides you have in which you showed the budgets at the different percentages and how you went about maybe from right to left as opposed to left to right so from a higher budget to a lower budget of choosing what would be cut first and what wouldn't so for example the middle school specialist that Shana was mentioning earlier I think appeared on all of your cuts including the one on the furthest right side of that slide deck and so I'm just wondering from an academic standpoint if you could kind of just speak to your vision as to if you have to cut something okay why are the things on the furthest right side of that slide the things that you would cut first is that an educational decision is that a budgetary decision is it a mix of both and then sort of as you go down throughout the different layers of budget how do you make those decisions as to what to add back is it just a financial calculation or what's the academic sort of reasoning behind that thank you thank you uh mirabling sorry james c did return i saw that he had dropped off so i'm going to go back to james c james c please just uh state your full name uh james camposano 11 carberry avenue i just had a question on slide 11 which you know i'm just trying to understand the use comparisons of several different schools in that slide um wearham can milton act in boxborough stowden northampton melrose schools that are well outside of of where sharon is and if you look at the stowden the stowden school budget they use brockton east bridgewater easton foxborough mansfield norton sharon stowden and i'm just i'm just wondering where the numbers that in the towns in slide 11 were where you derived them from and what the what the thought process was to use those particular towns that you know northampton's 108 miles from here westport's 52 miles from here wearham's 44 miles from here like why are those the numbers that we're using when their school population doesn't even match ours either so i'm just trying to understand that particular slide all right thank you mera balenke hi can you hear me yes we can fantastic so um i'm a little shocked uh to see this presentation of cutting 21 teachers and not a single administrator i was so relieved last time when this committee uh said that saving teachers jobs and keeping class sizes low was the top priority and then the proposed budget in fact the first balanced budget we've seen all budget cycle basically puts them first on the chopping block i understand that curriculum coordinators are wonderful luxury to have they really do propose wonderful programs they even out how we use the curriculum but uh i have to say that a bunch of third graders will have a much much more consistent experience if they don't have 26 classmates bouncing off the walls so as you know and this is actually what i'm seeing is that nobody wants to actually propose an actual cut so it was very brave of dr patel to actually start putting you know positions on the list and what i'm really hoping to hear the same from this committee is you're going to have to make tough choices it's time to make tough proposals and to take the responsibility for making those tough proposals and not leave it all on the administration this should be a collaborative process usually it starts in december so there's a lot more time for this back and forth but there isn't and what i would really hope to see from you is some specifics now i want to discuss the fees i'm really glad that it was brought up in specific and one thing i find very confusing is why the first sport has the highest fee where you're paying almost four hundred dollars for the first sport and then it goes less and less you're paying half as much for the third sport now it makes sense in a private say gymnastics facility where they're making a profit on every single class you take just less and less but since the school is actually losing more and more money with every single sport that student takes i think first of all it's more equitable to make that first sport as cheap as possible so that as many students as possible can participate and i have to say i have a big family for me it would be much more meaningful if that first sport is inexpensive and then instead of you know worrying about that twelve hundred family cap i could say all right at least every single one of my children could afford one sport and then once again since the school is losing money on every single sport this might be a way to basically be a win win for large families and for the school budget as a whole so that's kind of one specific proposal i would like to make i what i really hope though is to see specific proposals from committee members saying all right this is a program i love but i'm willing to sacrifice thank you all right next up i see jay leader i'll just please state your full name hi this is judy weeder we're on a different laptop um okay so a couple of things uh first off i want to echo what every member of the school committee said i'm very disappointed that we sat through basically the same presentation for the first i don't even know how many minutes just in blue it was just in a different color that didn't fundamentally change what was being presented until we finally got to the cuts which were extreme and as someone who has done budgeting for many years and for some very prominent organizations including the federal reserve i can tell you if i ever presented a budget that looked like this to my bosses i would have been questioned on my sanity i wouldn't question on my ability to budget so a couple of things first off the comparator towns they have different tax bases than us trying to compare us to towns that don't have the same number of students that have vastly more commercial tax base to work from doesn't really make sense second the proposal of the number of cuts for the different teachers those look like just salary not fully loaded but ultimately the budget comprises everything health rnob all of it so if you're telling me you're going to only need to cut 70,000 if we cut one teacher i'm asking what about their health care costs fully loaded teacher at 70k is probably actually costing us more like a hundred so this budget also seemed like the presentation was designed to be fear-mongering and that really works my nerve one of the prior speakers from public mentioned the prioritization of cuts there there's no seeming logic to this other than we're going to cut where it hurts for example the fine arts teacher who's responsible for the digital photography class or at least some sections of the digital photography class which by all accounts my two high schoolers tell me is one of the most popular arts classes so if you take away one of the most popular arts classes that's going to get a lot of people's attention much like when you say and we're probably going to have to kill at least one ap class having just done college tours where they're saying we want to make sure you're taking the most rigorous academic schedule that you can and we take that into account when we look at your application i can say not having access to as many ap's is not going to make share and look like the amazing school system that we are and then one other point that i do want to make because i didn't see it mentioned in here is the kindergarten fees so i know that there's some issue about we thought that we were going to get all this money from the state and then we're not actually getting the money from the state because we didn't do the calculations properly or we didn't factor everything in correctly and i don't understand why we're still then absorbing all of that and not at least asking for the incoming kindergarten parents to have to offset some of the costs as someone who who paid for kindergarten for full day for both of my kids i understand it's not fun it's certainly less than our costs were at kindercare but it's still a cost but even a small amount coming in from each of those parents for each of those students will certainly help offset some of what we need we need some creative solutions and what i saw here was fear-mongering and frankly what i would have been told was lazy budgeting so i'm looking for something completely different when we get to monday thank you um so dr botella i just want to say real quickly that uh well i'm certainly very frustrated and i think the committee is certainly frustrated i can't speak for every one of them but i know these people well enough to know i don't think anybody is questioning your sanity and i i do i do want to be clear that while this is a difficult conversation um for all of us uh and i can't limit what people can and can't say um they're members of the public and they have their rights i also don't feel comfortable sitting here and and letting even insinuated insults be thrown at you without saying that um again i think we're very frustrated here but i don't think that we've lost respect for you and i don't want i'm not comfortable uh letting in the insult that be thrown your way without saying something dan newman hi thank you um this is a difficult conversation but it's a necessary one uh i'm going to try to be um respectful and productive in my comments and you'll let me know how i do um something we should be teaching our children is that um successful people and successful organizations all have something in common which is they look forward and not backwards so i have no desire to relitigate things of the past but um let's look forward together about how we can get to a more uh balanced budget so all of the top organizations where i've worked over my career uh have a full and proper budget prioritization usually yearly and what that involves it's it's always done the same way it's um you list out what you consider um essential positions and services and you list out what you call non-essential now before anyone takes offense at that term non-essential employees uh i can i can um soften the conversation a little bit by saying i'm a non-essential employee in my job it doesn't mean it's not important it just means if i didn't show up to work the lights don't go off um the plumbing doesn't go off it means though the organization can run without without me there now i like to think i had a lot of value to my job in this non-essential position but it's not an essential position and everyone who works in government knows what that term means and there are very clear guidelines around like when essential employees have to show up to work the non-essential it's a it's a mundane fact but we need that breakdown don't we in order to do a full and proper prioritization and get to a balanced budget when i looked at this list um let me tell you a bit about what i saw i saw cuts to things like math uh things to cuts like reading cuts to the leap program this is a special education program parents have told me that this program changed the lives of them and their children um cuts to things like ap bio things that almost everybody takes who's on a college track who needs these courses to get to college so my question is do those sound like non-essential teaching positions to you they don't to me they seem more essential and i get that sometimes you can reduce teacher positions and increase class size and things like that but the fundamentals of these areas where we would make cuts based on this proposal sounded essential to me didn't they sound that way to you um and then what we didn't see was a full list and accounting of those non-essential positions those tend to be more administrative in nature um those positions i think need to be part of this county i actually really appreciated that detailed breakdown of impact of of all these different types of positions i think that adds a great value but we need that for the non-essential positions too um so that we can start ranking these things and committee members can weigh in um i i i don't um i also don't think it would be appropriate in the spirit of a full and proper proper prioritization to start taking things off the table based on personal preferences um you know i would want positions that i personally value that are non-essential that i think maybe the benefits greatly outweigh the cost to just be included um and maybe you can make a case for those but um you know we we have had new administrator positions some of these are very very expensive some of these we've done fine in past years without them um you know i'm not going to get into the specifics of what they are but i think those should all be put on the table and discussed um and um i don't know how you can say these positions are non-essential or that just take them off the table with no discussion say don't touch that one i like that one i think it should all be included um so that's kind of what i'm looking forward to seeing in the next week is a full and proper budget prioritization in that spirit um one more note before i log off um i think there is a tremendous symbolic value to administrative cuts in addition to the cost i think it speaks a lot when the ceo takes a salary cut when the ceo cuts the ceo's personal assistant um you know maybe these aren't the the magic bullet that solves the budget problem but they show solidarity with the teachers who are getting laid off or reduced and they show integrity and leadership so that's another value we need to spread the pain around and we need to all be in this together um so thank you for my allowing my comments thanks dan um i'm gonna voluntarily give up my entire salary um for this position uh judy crosby um thank you bobby and i apologize i have to be on my phone because something weird with my ipad and school committee do not play well together um picking up where dan left off dr patelio you got an out of cycle additional ten thousand dollars for this year of your contract which was the third year of your contract and next year based on the line item budget your salary is scheduled to go from the 201 000 you're getting this year to 216 000 and change leaders lead from the top i would love to see on your list of cuts that you will be reverting to what would have been your fiscal year 24 salary minus the out of cycle raise you got last year um that feels like an excellent place to start and that will save the district something approaching 25 000 dollars um it was concerning but not surprising to see the penny drop for various school committee members on what the contract they signed actually says um i've known what it said since i got a copy of it at the start of august last year via a public records request it's crystal clear that yes high school teachers may teach five classes but that that is a premised on a schedule change and b they're capped at a hundred students total caseload which is basically their current caseload so i could see everyone trying to do percentages when dr patelio was trying to explain the difference between four out of six versus five out of seven um but the caseload cap is what's killing you you didn't actually get the teachers to agree to teach anything beyond what they're already doing they're still going to get two prep periods a day which is still one more than pretty much every other district in the state and and all of you seem to have failed to grasp that you cannot force them to teach five out of six periods it violates the contract you signed with them you cannot jump their caseload it violates the contract you signed with them and just like i know mrs bratt is a very hard worker and has been doing that extra 20 minutes for the entirety of her career the actual contract you signed with the elementary teachers says elementary teachers shall report 15 minutes before student arrival and shall remain 15 minutes after student dismissal that's 20 minutes more than used to be there before it then goes on to say teachers shall not be required to use this time for classroom instruction or regularly scheduled meetings it's just what it says you can you can dispute with me you can tell me i'm a horrible human being for sharing actual facts of what this committee signed and what they gave away for the historically largest raise that has ever existed in this district but it's what was signed mrs bratt you and your union did a fantastic job i don't begrudge you i begrudge this committee and i begrudge the superintendent and the fact that none of you understood what you signed as was crystal clear during this meeting tonight where you think you should be able to cut 20 percent of the teachers at the high school because look you saved all this money you didn't save a penny under the contract you signed you spent money a lot of it and while we're all talking about where we are right now and how painful these cuts are you're facing the same again for fiscal year 26 so i'm going to echo some things when the fee discussion happened where was the slide on full day k i was an early and often advocate of free full day k but not at the expense of class size of electives of instrumental music i was an advocate based on doing it in a sustainable planned fashion not hold my hand out and stomp my feet and demand that the town give me more money because i'm a spoiled brat and that's how you all are acting i get it's politically inconvenient you took a lot of victory laps for fully funding full day k but you know what you didn't do it and you have a one and a half million dollar gap right now if you reinstituted fees for full day k your gap would drop to nine hundred thousand dollars look at the magic of that immediately drops dr patello gives up his 25 000 now you're down to an 875 000 dollar gap and we can keep going in that method regarding cutting curriculum coordinators which so many on the school committee seem enthusiastic about doing do any of you remember what education looked like in 2020 and 2021 when we were lacking curriculum coordinators at a variety of levels and the number of complaints we received about the absolute lack of horizontal and vertical alignment in this district do you understand what curriculum coordinators do and why they matter and unless and until you do i really think we should take pause um hey avi you can make all the faces you want it's the tone it's just it's the tone you can make good points but it's the tone avi avi you're upset you're upset by a duty leader telling dr patello it's an embarrassment but you're perfectly fine with other people saying nasty things to people i'm sorry you don't like my tone it's a free country you still sit on zoom i don't like that i think you're lazy but here we are we're on zoom we're not in person this is where we are sorry have your 15 minutes thanks avi um i did want to give dr patello props for changing the language in his presentation to reference money related to the state shelter i do appreciate that that was a substantial and important change to me so thank you for that um but but please seriously go back look at the contract you signed understand where you've put the district engage in radical acceptance and start to figure out how you're digging out of this hole there is another option you all can ask that a warrant article be put on on the town meeting for an override and you can make your case to the public for why the public should dig you out of what amounts to your own incompetence you can make that argument you know i think there are lots of people who like teachers and who might be willing to do that but if you do you better ask for three million dollars because you're going to need another million and a half minimum next year based on what the contract you signed says and i don't think any of you actually understand that thank you george and lewis i'm here sorry i just wanted to take my camera off there um so i'm not going to be a broken record i 100% agree with all the committee members um miss sweeter made some comments that really struck i'm trying to find my notes here so i don't take up too much time um i feel like dr botello and i'm not trying to be offensive obvi in any way but i just feel like your whole presentation was geared to garner fear i found it immensely disrespectful to the teaching staff although i didn't agree with miss bratt's presentation and some of her commentary i found it targeted and offensive i get where it's coming from um because i am in a unique position as many are that are in this community right now because i am in education and i'm also a taxpayer in another community which i don't work um i understand the negotiation process and avi you brought up some great points earlier around the four to six versus five to seven i know you and i don't see eye to eye on a lot of things with this contract but um i get where you're coming from um but to judy's point good contracts are negotiated based on language not money and what the sharon teachers association did really well was get some fantastic language in that contract one being around those minutes and why i'm bringing miss bratt up is not to pick on her but to her point i said it earlier we all work those hours we don't go in this field for the money we don't go in this field because we work six hour shifts and have summers off because those of us that do it know that that's far from the truth we do it because we love it we do it because we love people's children and education and all the other great things that come with it to that end the contract says very clearly what the teachers can't do what they can't be asked to do which is what miss uh of course we already stated but it doesn't say what they have to do and that's the point that was lost and miss bratt's presentation and that we'll be lost on the community at large because as i said when you negotiate a contract in education it's about the language not the money the language in this contract is great when you spend the time to dig through it which also makes it confusing when you're starting to try to rationalize wait a minute we just added five but we added a period so really kind of all washes out even when you think of it that way because when you brought that up i was like scratching my head and then i i think about it for a minute so i don't know what the answer is but i feel like this is a lose-lose but at the end of the day it shouldn't be the teachers that lose because the town ends in an agreement with them and i think that's for better or worse for all the arguing the disagreeing the hurt feelings i think everybody's on the same page in the community on this committee and on the committee that it shouldn't be the teachers that suffer and it sure shouldn't be our kids that suffer um dr. Botello i would encourage you to take a hard look at special education that and ap cuts stood out glaringly to me in your presentation i'd be interested to know how much money we spend out of district and can we bring any of those kids back you estimated i think it was and i'm sorry if i don't have the number correct 122,000 dollar increase next year for out of district placement well that's like one kid so unless i'm misinterpreting erin you said 20 we went up to 20 percent this year so that didn't work out in my head 122 grand is about one kid out of district that's about what it costs so how many do we have out are there any we can pull back um that's a place to look to save money a great place because that's a big number one bringing one kid back is a hundred thousand dollars um so that's a suggestion the case a no-brainer it's painful to say it it is what it is it was a mistake i think we just got to own it and move on if we can roll 105 in and saves people 50 bucks it saves people 50 bucks maybe we shoot down the road to work that out um i think you could do a much better job than picking off teachers um and i what i felt was a very targeted way to garner fear in teachers and in the public and um you know i really look forward to seeing something else on monday that's a little bit more acceptable and would make me as a voter and a taxpayer and an educator maybe more willing to dig into my pocket to help out but not like this thanks for your time john mail thank you john mail hey avi um first i just want to say that um george ann is a former colleague and someone i consider a friend and i fully agree with um what she was talking about she's a very very bright educational mind um so i appreciate that but i wanted to talk about a couple things um i wanted to talk about first of all this curriculum coordinator department head thing you know i've worked at a lot of different places i've worked in schools for the last eight years there's actually fairly negligible difference from the teacher perspective about if you have a curriculum coordinator or a stipended department head okay you know what you have to do you have to teach to an mcas you have state standards to align to you have a curriculum that's being assigned you're being evaluated by a building administrator you're being evaluated by your department head to have a curriculum coordinator i consider that to be a massive luxury it's great if you have one but i'll tell you this if you went to all the kids in town and you said okay we can cut AP psych which is the most accessible AP to underperforming students and students who were brought up underprivileged we can cut we can cut instrumental music cut chorus cut visual art or we can make sure that the curriculum is completely perfectly aligned think about this what are the kids going to want what are the kids going to need okay i want to speak on behalf of these kids you know it's it's no secret to a lot of people in this meeting that it's my life's dream to one day serve this district and work here and when i hear things like this it just makes me feel like the district considers teachers to be a flipped commodity to say oh well you know who needs music who needs art who needs social studies you know who needs foreign language you know we can shrink a whole team at the middle school you know a kid's going to get a much more valuable experience from being in a smaller class for having a teacher who's not as totally flustered than they would get from having you know two assistant superintendents to having you know a curriculum coordinator overseeing horizontal alignment it's tough choices but you know that's just my perspective as an educator the other thing i was going to say it's just a proposal for you guys to think about you know i think that george ann made a good point about full day k and about bring back students from um you know from outplacement um my i went to star camp as a kid that wasn't cheap you know i know that's community education which is somehow some sort of an offshoot of the schools but if we really need to start talking about recouping money okay maybe dig into that budget star camp and create camp and pull that back over to the schools or raise the rates for that um you know there's a lot of different ways that you can do this and i just think getting rid of teachers and getting rid of ap classes and just you know all this other stuff that was talked about that that was just kind of shocking for me um and you know i'm someone i've been you know i've i've been to different school districts you know i've been to this one and i um and i just value the teachers in this in this district so much that the idea of letting them go over you know over admin or over you know any of these other ideas just seems to be absurd to me um but i thank you guys for giving me a little bit of time and i hope you all have a lovely night thank you wendy mcarthur um so i just wanted to share that you know sharon is absolutely not unique at all and what we're going through tonight all schools are in need of more funding they all need more aid more teachers more special ed more everything after covid if you haven't been in a school school behavior is horrific we need counselors we need teachers we need smaller classrooms we need aids we need special ed we need more teachers so the idea that we're looking at reducing teachers making classrooms larger i mean all you are looking at is making sure teachers want to leave making sure teachers aren't happy and then you're also reducing other teachers times you're putting teachers from like 1.0 to 0.8 to 0.9 you know they're not going to want to stay there like why would they stay when that's what they're dealing with every day contracts done prior to covid are not indicative of what is happening today teachers need more not less so like i agree dr patel's presentation was not it did not share anything that we needed to do uh it was fear-mongering um but it did show what the teachers need it did give people uh the school committee like i said there's only one person on the school committee that is actually in a school it did show that um this is what teachers are asking for this is what teachers need this is what teachers want and you're throwing him under the bus for saying he's over budget well every single school district in the state is over budget and i know that because i've been on at least i don't know a lot of different school meet school district meetings but i'm frustrated that all of this talk is about what you need what you don't need what classrooms need what classrooms don't need you don't know what classrooms need you do not know what classrooms don't need dr patel might not know this those teachers know when that teacher talked i forget her name when she talked about what she needed she is in the depths she is in the mud and she knows what she needs she knows what her uh the teachers around her need she knows what the school needs listen to those people don't listen to the budget and i know budget budget budget it is a big thing but every town is doing this and you're not giving enough budget to the school and what it needs after covid and what the students need and what the teachers need thank you carol hi i just i just want to clarify um to georgian that fundamentally we agree um that we're we're already all doing that work and we signed up for this job and nobody's saying that we didn't um i think what happens is that when somebody comes on and says something like teachers you know nobody says they can't just pick up a book and like basically it felt like put their feet up and do whatever they want during the day you know and we all know that's not what we're doing and when somebody puts that out there to the community and it paints a picture of that's what we're doing somebody needs to stand up and say that is not true and here's all the things we were already doing and that we are happy to do and that we love doing but you can't just come out there and decide you're going to just be against like not against what we do you're just gonna make it seem like like it just paints a picture of us being lazy and that is everything that any teacher i know is exactly the opposite in the share of public schools and you know when it comes to budget i'm just gonna echo that we need hands-on kids right now we need more people working with kids um and it's what we need right now um after covid after um kids who didn't go to preschool all of these things we need more hands working with kids and we've asked for that we have so i hope somebody is listening thank you thank you mrs brunt casey mclaughlin hi i just wanted to echo what um john said as well um and disagree with judge judy about the curriculum coordinator part because all especially teachers modern teachers all have to go through a master's degree program and so it is a very intensive course of study where we go through curriculum frameworks there is a tremendous amount of responsibility that teachers now have to take in their classrooms and again like i said in in uh when i was at franklin where i did my student teaching where i ended my career in easton we had department heads who served as those curriculum coordinators with a reduced class level and a stipend and they were able to coordinate each department so that we were all in line pacing wise curriculum wise mass frameworks wise all of our kids that were on ieps were being serviced like we had that oversight with our own and they connected to the principals they you know orchestrated the observations it was very very professional and very well done and tight and so that is something that i think that we could replicate i think that that's a creative idea that we should definitely uh traverse i also am upset by the fact that sros aren't even on the table we still have one school resource officer for the entire school that's not even part of the budget um so if you're talking about these draconian cuts which i think are highly offensive and totally out of touch with what everybody in the community um has as expressed i think that you're going to raise class sizes and guess what that's going to increase discipline issues which is going to need school resource officers and so people who are honking on about all of the hate and anti-semitism and whatnot in school also have to uh you know take responsibility for the fact that you're setting these kids up for failure if there's not the discipline structure in place to be able to address these inevitable issues that are going to come up and lastly um the the kindergarten class again i think that that is something that um is an easy cut to make um so again uh let's let's get creative with what we can do and let's put these administrators like come on seriously like almost 200 grand for an equity and and engagement position like think about the teachers that you could actually subsidize if that position weren't in place because again it's a redundant position uh no offense to uh the person that's in that position so that's all i got have a good night thank you all right seeing no more hands we're on to the fy 24 operating budget quarter two financial report go ahead julie oh hey obvi um i was wondering if i could just address the question of the comp towns really quickly is that can we squeeze that in for a minute i'm just looking at time can we it might be something for for the next for that in between meeting if we have to schedule i mean we're gonna have to schedule something okay i just want to say that i i i say really quick i um did get a list of what is considered our peer towns from um the town administrator and these are like they have some kind of calculation which is based on population and um business blah blah blah it was a whole big calculation so i did um do that work for um the the peer towns and we are like kind of in the middle of it uh every year especially towards the end um where the funding goes up in the other towns so if i can talk about it later just wanted to throw that no worries i think i think everyone agrees we're funded less than a lot of districts we compete with i think unfortunately that's sort of the lot that's what we got to work with uh adam thanks i realized in my comments earlier i'd asked for general breakdown to give us more more information um i do want that i also just want to be explicit in a request um in that interim meeting for a budget proposal that retains at least 50 percent of the kind of educational staff that was proposed to be kind of laid off in this proposal if that makes sense like i would like to see not only the the list of options and different thoughts but i would i would like to see a proposal from administration that says if we were to retain half the staff that we had originally proposed to lay off here is what that balanced budget proposal would look like given cuts in other areas all right thanks adam all right now on to fy 24 q2 update um so that is simply it's in your packet um for review uh and we're not we don't have on the agenda to um to uh vote on it tonight but we can take a look at that ellen do you want to go through this for sure so the uh quarter two financial report is for the quarter that ended uh december uh 31st uh 2023 this is actually through um all expenditures um and encumbrances that were posted as of january 12th 2024 um our appropriated budget for fy 24 was 52 million 405 604 dollars this includes the 9 916 dollars that was appropriated for arc of south of south norfolk as an additional line under the school department the fy 24 quarter two expenditures uh from july 1st 2023 to january 12th 2024 was 22 million 312 thousand 511 dollars we have encumbered um through payroll as well as other purchase orders uh for known expenditures an additional 28 million to three hundred and twenty four thousand one hundred and forty seven dollars that leaves a remaining unencumbered balance of one million seven hundred and sixty eight thousand nine hundred and forty six dollars this is not a projected surplus as i've um indicated before when i've provided um quarterly updates that these funds um will be used to pay substitutes van drivers as well as additional expenditures related to district operations that have not been encumbered as of yet um the general um fund expenditure report as i mentioned includes spending through j january 12th 2024 um there is included in your package the year to date budget report from july 1st 2023 to january 12th 2024 and includes the original appropriation approved by approved budget on the school committee voted on transfers this includes the quarter two transfer sheet um the munis report includes the revised budget which is the sum of the original appropriation and the transfers column the year to date expenditures the encumbrances and again the available balance which is um unencumbered remaining funds um at the time that the report was run and then this is just the quarter two fiscal review by location um cottage district wide east heights high school middle school early childhood secondary elementary and then the totals and then this the next pages are just by uh the department so there's several pages in your packet um that list this as well and if um anyone has specific questions um i'm happy to reach out i'm happy to have a conversation offline or if you just want to email um your questions for me to avi um or dr vitella i'll be happy to answer them all right adam is it you got a question i do it's just really quick one ellen um thank you for the presentation is when we think about the encumbrances to date are those all of the anticipated encumbrances for the year or are there things that we would anticipate encumbering later so there are some things that would be encumbered later um expenditures for for things like graduation um things that definite costs have not been identified but we do you know expenditures that i would expect um there are still um you know we do have all the known payroll um expenses are encumbered um for you know teachers and you know regular staff members we don't encumber our substitutes um and then all of transportation um for yellow school buses encumbered so just you know utilities um known the projected utility costs are are also encumbered but there are there are lines that you know we we budget anticipating that we're going to spend every line on however you know you know planning changes things do change yep thank you and i i totally am on board with that i was just yeah i didn't know if the uh everything that we would anticipate encumbering kind of had been encumbered and everything else is that kind of unknown we'll see where we land etc everything that we have a contract for for services has been encumbered okay thank you you're welcome thank you both all right um next up vote to award contract for transportation so this was um discussed during the um the fee discussion as well um so we did receive um one bid package for the transportation um gillow school bus as well as um metco um and additional um athletic trips uh conley bus company our current vendor was the only um respondent to the bid um again as i indicated before i was not surprised by this um in your packet um the new contract rates are delineated um as well as what the current contract um is but again um the current contract does we are um holding within the budget and encumbrance of sixty one thousand dollars in fuel escalation because that we have seen that come to fruition over the um the later parts of this contract because of the um the higher prices in fuel from when the the original contract was um was negotiated this contract was based upon um the fuel costs you know currently in in you know the end of december so i'm comfortable with where we are with um with what the cost of this is as well as what our resources are go ahead adam sorry to be taken up all the time um i'm just curious in the so in the rates that we see it looks like in year two um kind of between 2024 25 and 25 26 um the rate increases by 10 yes um that felt steep and out of line with the other years so this contract um they did you know give a couple of different um reasons for the um the the increases in the cost and it has to do with the fact that they do have to buy purchase buses um the cost of a yellow school buses you know just like a a lot of these special education vans that we were purchasing have seen increases they are also um you know insurance health insurance costs insurance um where the vehicles have also increased they're also a labor shortage for bus drivers so they are paying a higher rate um to retain to attract and retain drivers as well um this these rate increases are consistent though with uh with what my colleagues across the commonwealth are are indicating that they're seeing as well do we have any option to to attempt to negotiate down especially given our budget situation um i did have a conversation with them they were willing to restructure you know the increases and this was the most favorable restructuring um for us otherwise the first year would have been um would have been a bigger increase i see thank you all right i would entertain the motion so moved second adam yes monica yes shauna yeah when you over to the fire yeah i'm sorry i'm not sure sorry i think i'm coming in at yes yes not that we have a choice but yes there's no yes julie yes alan can i just ask i mean we have six yeses so far anyway but can i just ask what would happen if we didn't accept this bid what are our other options we could go out to bid again um and risk having um one responded again and they the prices could increase um even more so right we saw that happen with the heights project a couple years ago i'm uh i'm a no i mean i'm sorry i mean yes i apologize i i meant a note of doing that over again motion carries 7-0 thank you um all right vote to approve the minutes of february 14th 2024 so moved thank you all right uh adam yes ronica yes shauna you caught me mid yawn yes sorry sorry yes yes yes yes yes yes i'm a yes motion carries 7-0 i'll entertain a motion to approve the acceptance of the donation from the special olympics to cottage street school for $500 so moved thank you all right veronica thank you yes jonah yes when yes now yes julie yes yes adam and i am a adam nodded i am a yes yes thank you motion carries 7-0 i'd entertain a motion to approve overnight field trip sharon middle school 7th grade various dates october 2024 thompson island outward bound trip so moved second all right adam yes julie yes yes yes SPEAKER_UNKNOWN: yes yes yes yes yes and veronica yes yes motion carries 7-0 i'll entertain a motion to approve state field trip sharon high school photography students rsd art museum photography exhibit may 1st 2024 so moved second adam yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes monica yes i'm yes motion carries 7-0 are there any any are there any announcements or updates all right seeing not sorry adam go ahead yes that may be any are there any questions yes sorry yeah just a quick one that the uh dr patel reference in one of his earlier slides but the uh the uh sharon high school theatre company is uh presenting a community performance of middle town almost a free run it's tomorrow night 7 p.m. at the sharon high school auditorium all right veronica yeah thanks avi i just wanted to call people's attention to the fact that the boys basketball game has been rescheduled from friday night from Friday night to Saturday afternoon because there was some questions about the school that had, you know, gotten approved for participating.
Somehow there was some snafu, and so they had to restructure the schedule.
So people who might have anticipated a Friday night game, it's going to be 2 o'clock at the high school on Saturday.
Yep, and for those keeping score, senior Nate Katz-Nelson is 28 points away from 1,000 points.
Possible it could happen in that game. Hopefully Sharon advances. It could happen over the two games.
So shout out to him. I think maybe 13, something like that, Sharon athletes.
Pretty exciting to see Nate do that. All right, moving us into exec. Pursuant to MGL C30AS21A3 to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation with the STA, an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigation position of the Sharon School Committee, and the chair so declares, and to discuss strategy with respect to potential threatened litigation by a resident regarding allegations concerning a student conduct matter, or an open discussion may have a detrimental effect on the litigation position of the school committee not to return to open session.
Entertain a motion?
So moved.
Second.
All right, Wyn.
Yes.
Adam.
Yes.
Veronica.
Yes.
Julie.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Shauna.
Yes.
I'm a yes. Motion carries. Have a great night, everybody.
I will see the committee and exec. Bye-bye.