Coraggio Consulting
Albemarle County School Board Regular Meeting, Thursday, January 25, 2024

Date: Thursday, January 25, 2024
Place: Albemarle County Public Schools / School Board meeting, Virginia
Length: 3h 3m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY4uqLAzMl4

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-10-14. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

[00:00:50] Allison Spillman, at-large representative. Ellen Osborne, Scottsville district representative. Judy Lee Ryman, district representative. Graham Page, Miller district representative. Chuck Pace, representative.

[00:01:05] Claire Kaiser, assistant superintendent. Rosalyn Schmidt, chief operating officer. Pat McLaughlin, assistant superintendent. Chandra Hayes, assistant superintendent. Helen Dunn, public affairs and strategic communications officer.

[00:01:25] Christine Thompson, Clerk of Board. Christine Diggs, Chief Technology Officer. All right, wonderful to see everyone on the dais. Thank you. Next, we will stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. To the Republic, which it stands, one nation, under our, indivisible, liberty and justice.

[00:01:55] Thank you very much. Next, we'll have a moment of silence. Next, we have the approval of the agenda. Is there a motion to approve?

[00:02:40] I move we approve the agenda for tonight. I second. Moved by Ms. Osborne, seconded by Mr. Page. All in favor say aye. Aye. No one opposed. All right. Motion carries. Next we have approval of the consent agenda.

[00:03:01] I move that we approve the consent agenda for tonight. Second. Moved by Mr. Page, seconded by Ms. Spillman. Is there any discussion on the consent agenda? Nope. All those in favor say aye. Aye. - Aye.

[00:03:17] - Opposed? All right, consent agenda passes. Next we have announcements, 6.0. - So, thank you, Ms. Lee. I just had a couple things to say. One was, I had a great time last night at Henley Middle School.

[00:03:33] They had a production, they did two productions from the Henley Theater's production company, Game of Tiaras and 10 Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse. And I'm telling you, I mean, it was a dreary night.

[00:03:49] people don't really drive on nights like that but the entire like half of the cafeteria that they had chairs out for was full the kids were great you could tell they put a lot of effort and a lot of practice into both of the plays it was a lot of fun and I had two school visits this week Stoney Point Elementary School on Tuesday and Ivy Elementary School on Wednesday and when I visited Stoney Point I asked the principal Maureen Jensen to if I could talk to

[00:04:24] teachers about closing opportunity gaps for students and lots of times we talk about words like opportunity gap but we don't necessarily define them and an opportunity gap occurs when some students do not have the same chances for a good education because of differences such as family wealth racial bias knit their neighborhood and their background. Simply put, it means that not everyone gets the same help and opportunities in school. And so I had the chance to talk with teachers about how they

[00:04:59] work on closing that gap and make things more fair for students. I talked to a third grade teacher named Addison Holmes. She shared that closing the opportunity gap begins with establishing the same foundation and expectations for skill attainment for all learners. It involves considering student data through more than one lens so that we can see all see that all students achieve while they achieve differently and show different strengths and then you build on those strengths and the student structure for learning to help them learn the curriculum librarian julia mcgill

[00:05:36] tackles the opportunity gap by ensuring access to literature for all students and there were a number of things she does but one that i really appreciated was rather than predetermining all book selections for students. Julia polls all students in the school to see what they would prefer to read about and stalks the library accordingly and she's seen her number you know the numbers of students using books in the library just skyrocket over the years. And finally Lynn Leathers, second grade teacher, closes the opportunity gap by building her students background knowledge

[00:06:10] so that the vocabulary words that students must master to comprehend their reading are not abstract. Lynn talked about a virtual field trip she and Mia Shan provided for Lynn's students. They made a live visit to Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania to tour the gardens.

[00:06:31] It's 220 miles away, but the students did the field trip live on streaming. And so when she wanted her students to know vocabulary around the plant lifecycle, they They could see and ask questions about a bulb, a flower bulb, rather than just having it as an abstract concept that they were trying to learn.

[00:06:53] At Ivy Elementary School, I wanted to find teachers and talk with teachers who are always on standard. Whenever you go in their classroom, they're teaching the grade level standard at the level that it should be taught. I talked to third grade teacher Michael Weiss, and he advised me that it is about being disciplined, to pacing guides and cycling back to reteach skills that students need extra help with while staying on pace and he uses warm-ups to do that and he's a novice teacher and he felt that that ACPS curriculum and pacing guides is an

[00:07:29] essential foundation and then he can be autonomous as long as he's following those guides PE teacher Matthew Cruz had a very straightforward response he said I followed the pacing guides that Jay Thomas gives me and we talked about some other things he uses the same method he observes and assesses to determine which skills need more time and then he cycles back to a particular skill and finally rachel montgomery first grade teacher emphasized planning ahead and optimizing instructional time to prioritize teaching and learning that is useful to build essential skills while minimizing busy work

[00:08:07] she said she wants every minute in the classroom to be impactful and that's how she stays on pace and it's important for all the for teachers to teach to standards because that ensures fairness in the curriculum across the school the county and the state and it really is about having common goals with students and families about what we expect them to learn and then getting them to where they need to be so i really appreciate those visits and um they think they exemplify all the really great work that our teachers and support staff do and i learn something new every time i

[00:08:42] go out to a school thank you thanks very much um are there other is there any others yeah i just wanted to tell you had a nice visit a nice invitation from the scottsville pto to join them last week and i really just enjoyed hearing about the things they're working on to uplift the students it was great and the teachers too they really care so much about the teachers there i guess i should mention also that i visited the learning lab at monticello a couple of weeks back

[00:09:17] with madeline michael there it was really great it i my favorite part of this job i think is speaking with students um it was just really they uh gave me their candor which i think is a real gift um so i uh recommend anyone else on the board who wants to go out i know that madeline is always open to having school members out there all right so next we'll have public comment um ellen i believe you're doing that yes so we invite and actively seek the public's input in matters relevant to school board governance and provide time in our business meetings to hear from

[00:09:54] our residents and community members. During public comment, we expect respectful and on-topic comments. Disruptive behavior from speakers or from members of the public in attendance will not be tolerated. Anyone who willfully disrupts this meeting in a manner that prevents or interferes with the orderly conduct of the meeting may be ejected by the Chair. Individuals and/or organizations wishing to speak during public comment must sign up prior to the meeting.

[00:10:21] Sign-up is available online beginning at 9 a.m. on the Monday of the meeting week until 2 p.m. on the day of the meeting. Sign-up is also available by contacting the clerk directly. Public testimony guidelines are as follows. Please adhere to the following protocol.

[00:10:39] State your name and address or your voting district. And that's basically so we know which one of us is your representative. Address the comments to the school board as a whole. Limit the comments to those matters that are relevant to school board governance or school division operations Give written statements and other supporting material to the clerk if you are unable to complete the presentation and the time allotted A copy of supporting materials will be provided to school board members three minutes will be allowed for each presenter to speak Commenter will be required to discontinue the comment after three minutes

[00:11:14] Color-coded light or card system is used to time the presentations the yellow light means the speaker is two minutes Into the presentation and the red light means the speaker is at the three-minute limit of the presentation and must wrap up To maintain respect for all points of view the school board requests no clapping booing or any other audible form of support or non-support Be used if members of the public wish to show their support for a speaker that may stand or raise their hands When multiple comments on the same topic have been presented the chair may request additional comments on the topic be limited to those that have

[00:11:52] new information to present. Debate and dialogue with the school board are not allowed. Use of projection system is reserved for staff. Tonight we have two speakers, one in person and one on Zoom. The first one is in person, Mr. Bob Garland. Good evening, Mr. Garland. My name is Bob Garland and my wife and I have

[00:12:24] lived in the Jack Jewett District for almost 56 years. In our immediate family we work around a total of three academic calendars, one of which is Albemarle County. I also volunteer for several community organizations, one of which is the Jefferson Swim League, which is the summer swim league for over 2,200 children in Central Virginia.

[00:12:50] I happen to be the one that makes the schedule for the 17 teams that make up the Jefferson Swim League. For that, I have to consider six academic calendars, including Albemarle County. I'm sure you can understand why I follow Albemarle County calendar development rather closely.

[00:13:11] I realize my situation is a little unusual, but I can't imagine that I'm the only person where JSL is the only organization in Albemarle County that depends on receiving the school calendar in a timely manner, especially when it appears that you're considering a possible change to the start and end dates.

[00:13:33] Parents have to plan for child care, summer camps, vacations, and other activities. Children's sports organizations like ours have to have schedules and locations reserved far in advance of their seasons.

[00:13:52] Because of the size of the Jefferson Swim League, other organizations wait for us to finalize our schedule before setting their own. Traditionally, we have set our championship date in September for the following July.

[00:14:08] Because of the uncertainty this year, we've had to wait until after this meeting to finalize the date for our championship this coming July, which now is only six months away. I ask, number one, that you approve the 2024-25 schedule as presented this evening, and then I'm going to leave you with two requests for the future, and that is make a decision to leave the calendar start and end

[00:14:42] dates, the same for 2025-26, which is my personal preference. Or if you're going to change, give us at least 18 to 24 months public notice before changing. Just don't leave us hanging. Thanks.

[00:15:01] Thank you, Mr. Garland. You're welcome. Next, we have one on Zoom. Ms. Bridget Rogers. Chair Lee, our Zoom participant has not arrived in our queue. And she wants to arrive at 6.30.

[00:15:23] okay um then we will if it does i assume that's not her beeping in i'm sorry i assume that's not her beeping in no it's not sorry then we will um we'll just move on from that then okay that concludes public comment and ms rogers wants to send us her comments yeah i will i will communicate with her thank you uh next we have school board or superintendent business pardon me no we had

[00:15:59] announcements and then we now have school board oh no ma'am i don't think we had anything for tonight thank you okay uh next we'll move on to 9.0 the work sessions uh starting with 9.1 the school year calendar um basically this had been in our consent agenda but i wanted to be able to hear the public comment before we um discussed it and made a decision so uh first we can start out with a motion and a second around the whatever moves the board member around the calendar presentation from last time and then we can have discussion about it

[00:16:37] but anyone like to make a motion regarding the 24/25 school year calendar as presented last time I move we accept the 24/25 school year calendar as presented at the last meeting second so moved by Ms. Osborne seconded by Ms.

[00:16:52] Spillman and now we'll open it up for any discussion so I just had a few points that I wanted to make I appreciated Mr. Garland and the notes that we've gotten we haven't gotten a ton of feedback since the last meeting so I'm really depending on the information that we got the last meeting about feedback that had been gathered by staff I will say that there are three compelling things out of all the feedback from that presentation and others that we've gotten

[00:17:34] the first is that I have heard compelling evidence to move up the dates there are various things that I won't go into all of them now but you know including the semester end before winter break makes sense there are there were a lot of parts of that that made sense aligning with other calendars that might also have chosen that for that reason the second compelling thing to me is to wait to not do it this year because i do think that we have a lot on our plates right now

[00:18:09] and i think that moving it it would be too much um disruption for this year and then the third compelling thing is to move up the calendar process um i and i know that jamie had mentioned that last time so i just wanted to voice my support for that uh and i looked at the past five years and mostly we do um vote on the calendar in january half the time in the second meeting which we're in now some of the times in the first meeting in january and in 2019 we did it in the december meeting um i think for the purposes of families um various organizations

[00:18:49] the thing that has changed for me is that in the past five years when we were doing it in late january when we were okaying it and we never heard from anybody now it seems like since all the other divisions around us have moved you know that has changed for us so to me it just makes if it's possible for staff to do it so that we can at least vote in december i think that that would be really helpful to our families so those are just my

[00:19:24] thoughts we can have a vote now um christine can we have a roll call vote on that please yes this is to accept the 24 25 um calendar miss philman yes miss osborne yes mr pace yes mr page yes

[00:19:49] Chair Lee? Yes. So moved. Okay. Thank you very much. Next we have 9.2, which is the AHS Second Floor Connector Project. Lindsay Snoddy will be speaking with us about this. Good evening. I'm Lindsay Snoddy, Director of the Building Services Department, and tonight we're going to take you through schematic design for the Albemarle High School Second Floor Connector Project. We'll start with a project overview, then show you some elevations, touch on the budget, and then the schedule for this project. And again, touching on our vision and mission, we are excited that this project will contribute to all goals of

[00:20:47] thriving students, affirming and empowering communities, and equitable and transformative resources. And we've been before you a lot with architectural schematic design, so I wanted to point back to policy for a minute. For policy FBA facility design, we bring the AU selection committee to the board if the fee for the project is expected to exceed $100,000. And then policy FA building and naming facilities, the school board by policy has to approve the schematic design for the facility and design development before we proceed to construction document phase. So we just want to point to those policy references.

[00:21:25] The second floor connector project was identified as a high priority during the Albemarle High School and Western Albemarle High School master plan that was completed in 2023. This was one of the projects that rose to the top and the funding for this project is coming from the high school renovation funding that's been allocated to us. The construction budget for the project is $4.5 million. And I'm here excited to introduce Josh Bowers, who is with Crabtree Rohrbach, and he's going to take us through the design.

[00:21:56] Great, thank you, Lindsay. Welcome, everybody. Glad to see all your smiling faces. We're going to run through the most complex 6,600 square foot project you've ever seen in your life. Is everybody ready?

[00:22:11] Yeah. Awesome. So starting off, just to get you familiarized with where the project is going happen so this is this is aerial of the of the high school of Alphamore High School you can see the main entrance off to the kind of the bottom right then you have the auditorium what our goal is of this project is to connect the two two-story classroom wings that you have on this piece which is adjacent to your auxiliary gyms you can see the the two wings and your auxiliary gym that red section is where we're looking to put the addition is again which will be above current occupied space and connect the two two-story wings it's maybe a little less than awesome for students and teachers

[00:22:48] to be able to get around if they're up on the second floor and they've got to go down to the first floor go across and then go back up to the second floor so this is going to help the another another big positive is the addition of classrooms which are in desperate need as you know in the facility I believe Mr. Wortman is going to be talking about your other your other building next so looking at the floor plan what we're what our plan is it is to connect the two two-story wings with this addition so this would be a connector with a quarter and this will include six classrooms a teacher workroom and the quarter connection so going from left to right what we're going to do

[00:23:24] is we're going to do a small modification of that of that large classroom that you have at the end of the classroom wing to be able to create a quarter a quarter piece the yellow is the is the actual quarter connection they said that we have a group of five classrooms and one classroom one single classroom and the teacher workroom some things that as we're going through the design that that we've been able to achieve is some big things of security is that when you're when you when you do stand let me see if I look at that you can talk so as you stand here in the corner this is an opportunity for folks to be able to look down both ends of the corridor from one point so

[00:24:01] this really does create a great sight line to be able to see it in multiple locations from one spot. So this does allow us to go from the second floor across and down to the other portion of the second floor to avoid the traffic jam that you currently have on the first floor. Some things we're able to do is to get daylight in all of the classrooms. So we are going to have viewable and daylight in these four. We're going to be able to achieve daylight in this room with a with a skylight under a solar tube we are also going to be able to have windows in this classroom and then we are going to have windows going down

[00:24:39] the corridor here so we have not a lot of opportunity here for for natural daylight not only have we had an amazing time working with staff but also we've had an opportunity to engage with students and with teachers some things that we heard was was was to try to get as much daylight in the pot is in the in the spaces as possible the teachers have asked for potty which is always a good things we're looking to add and put a potty there in the teacher workroom of course everybody wanted a Starbucks kiosk I just don't think this quite your budget but we said we'd look at it and see if there was a possibility in the future so the and then also the request was this could we have one one of the

[00:25:17] two you know of the groupings of classrooms to have a partition that could fall back and make one larger space whether that's a teacher meetings or a couple classes want to do some collaboration so we have so one of the one of the two classrooms this will have a floating partition that will fall back to be able to make this one one big open space so we've heard a lot of positives said from staff that's a little bit of blow up also we've been able to meet with the with the county code official to walk through the project because this is a challenging project from the standpoint of we're adding square footage to the building we're doing good over over occupied space the building is not fully sprinklered so

[00:25:53] there was so how are we what are we going to do to improve safety and I believe we received a very positive response back from the code official that they feel that that what we're doing here is actually going to improve safety and security and the overall feel of the building as opposed to being a detriment so how are we going to do this that's a great question so let's talk about phasing so the first the first thing that we're going to do is there's two large rooftop units that actually feed the auxiliary gym that we are going to be demolishing so one of the big challenges that we have with this is is when are we going to do this project because what we don't want to do is we don't want to be putting steel over top of occupied space and just have a roof

[00:26:31] separating it so the so looking at the rooftop units what we believe we're finding is that doing smaller units are going to be able to get the you we're going to be able to order the units and get them in time so that way when we get into the fall that we're not going to have that we're going to still have air conditioning and also ventilation in the auxiliary gym that is our plan and that's that's the the goal that we're setting for the entire team the some things we talked about during during design is how are we gonna do this so you know are we going to tear off the roof and you know and that that's the ceilings gonna come out and all the piece and then put the structuring over top of the existing

[00:27:08] load-bearing walls and oh how are we gonna do this over two months of a period of time so what we sent us to challenges to our team and said okay we got we have to figure this out how can we do this without having an impact and oh by the way if we don't have the roof on how do we keep water from coming in all summer long when that's what that's going to happen it's it's it's definitely a challenge so what our team believes is and this is the goal that we're setting is to actually design the columns and the structure to go over top and alongside of the existing building so what you can see here is we're actually going to be putting the columns adjacent to the existing structure we're going to actually keep the existing roof in place and do small penetrations down to load

[00:27:46] bearing walls and then build the structure over top of the existing roof and what that allows us to do is have that roof in place the entire time of the of the project and build our structure over top of it so this is a section kind of cut through the building and it's gonna show you a little bit better of how our plan is so the blue is the columns on the outside I said then what our plan is to put large steel that's gonna go across it's gonna it's gonna be buried on by the by the corridor wall and by the other exterior wall and then going into the other region and then what we're going to do is then build the second story above that piece and what that allows us to do is over the summer is to put the

[00:28:23] steel in put the the decking in and pour the concrete floor this summer before any students come back so that way we have a safety factor for anything that's going to happen above that so the um and this with the uh with the scope of work we we do believe that this happened can happen uh this summer so that we're not doing this inside of you know we're not trying to put steel over top of occupied space now some things that we've talked about teachers and staff is there going to be noise yes there's going to be noise this is still a construction project and and anybody's gonna do this as any contractors can do this is going to be a contractors worked in schools before but there's always a

[00:29:01] factor that there is there is going to be time where there's going to be noise whether it's in the classrooms below or adjacent to that but everybody's gonna do their best to manage that and to not have a disruption of educational program um during the process so as we move into the fall is to finish up the exterior walls uh put the uh the the smaller roof choice on uh the roof decking and then have the entire structure um under roof by uh by the end of the fall so that way we can be doing the interior finishes putting the windows and things like that over over the winter time and have this entire project complete by march of 25.

[00:29:38] and you're saying wow that seems like a long time marcher 25 is like tomorrow uh so but the um you know but we feel that after um here we are stolen schematic design we feel solid that this is a great plan um and this is a plan that we are moving forward with um uh to be able to get said have the least amount of disruption um and get this done for um uh it's much done over the summer time so i know what you're saying josh what is this going to look like that's a great question uh so uh on this building this is a beautiful building and you have a lot of different materials So we have a lot to work with.

[00:30:10] You have brick, EFIS, which is Drive-It, you have metal panel, you have a lot of different things. You replace some windows. Some windows are more mature in age, but you have a lot of different things to be able to work with. So as we're looking at just the courtyard itself, and it is an enclosed courtyard, so you can see all the different materials that we have available.

[00:30:31] So we ran a number of different scenarios to staff and some of the teachers' administration and here's here's some different options this was the the greatest received the greatest amount of support so this was the so what you see here is the existing facade of the building below okay so this is that one story existing space and then so what we're doing is we're going to be constructing the second floor above that so we're going to have brick that is complementary to the existing brick that those steel columns we talked about being on the exterior of the building we're going to wrap those so you can see these brick columns kind of going going up to two stories we're going to have

[00:31:06] windows the the windows for the for the classrooms will have will have will be operable and they'll be complementary to the existing windows that you've been putting inside of the building so what you can see here is the these are actually the existing windows on the first floor you can see the windows on the second floor are very complementary in size and proportion and then going across the top we're gonna have a metal panel would you have that if you've been inside of the courtyard right right outside your library you have some metal panel you also have some EFIS going along with the adjacent side we believe that that metal panel is a is a longer lasting more durable material and so what we're showing here is that the cross atop is is that metal panel so

[00:31:46] here's a perspective of what this could look like you can see the existing two story element here you know with a brick the punch window openings this is running EFIS there drive it going across going across the top of the parapet so we're showing a metal panel which will be complimentary in size and proportion and then this is the other two-story piece so you can see here that we're what we're trying to do is we're we're trying to be very complementary and be sympathetic to the architecture that is already there and but also kind of given as much of a more modern element as possible

[00:32:23] so again this is a 6,600 square foot addition and and I would say that in talking with our team this is one of the most complicated 6,600 square foot projects that we've done and we are doing some So select renovations, we talked about doing that corridor, modifying the one classroom and creating the corridor. So we have a little bit of renovation that we're going to be doing.

[00:32:42] Project budget is about $4.5 million. And right now our project budget is roughly $4.1 million. It is $606 a square foot. So again, part of this is that we're doing a lot over the summer. And we are doing this, you know, this is a challenging project.

[00:32:59] So we are anticipating a higher cost per square foot. But we do believe that this project is going to be lower than what the budget presented to us is for construction. So right now we are wrapping up schematic design.

[00:33:15] Over the next two months we're going to be going into design development and construction documents. Our goal is to wrap up this project by mid-March and we're going to be requesting to go out to bid with this project. And part of the goal is to get the contractor on board and get materials and get them to mobilize that as soon as school lets out we're ready to rock and roll. We have materials on site and things are being ordered. Do as much work over the summer as possible so that way when the students come back in the fall that we can continue on the space below and the adjacent spaces with this with this minimal disruption as possible and and what we're asking the contractor is to

[00:33:50] complete this project in in March of 2025 and have full occupancy and final completion by the end of March of 2025. That's my favorite slide. So are there any questions anybody has?

[00:34:06] Anything to go back over? Yes, sir. So you guys are building this on top of the original school, which was built in '52-'53. And I wonder if we're sure what we're dealing with.

[00:34:23] Is it something-- have you done, like, test boards or something like that to figure out what you're actually laying this on top of? You mean as far as the bearing walls themselves? Yes. Our structural engineer is very confident that the walls that we are putting on are going to be able to support. And I said, if you go back, the majority of the actual structure weight is going to be on this column. And it's going to be a shared support between the exterior wall, which is a bearing wall, and the quarter wall, which is a bearing wall.

[00:34:53] So we're actually, it's really thirds, you know, when you're looking at the overall amount of weight. But our structural engineer feels very confident that what we're proposing to do is going to be able to support the structure. And you guys are going into the '91 edition, so that's, yeah.

[00:35:16] But the one other thing I thought of, and this is a very minor thing, but I believe the windows down the first floor painted, the trim is painted red. Is that something, is that, are you going to match that or? Our goal is to try to be as complementary to the existing architecture as possible.

[00:35:33] So if they are, if the adjacent windows are painted red, we're happy to make sure that the new ones are going to have that red Karnak finish great questions I wish you had built this one I was still there I would not have to walk downstairs and go back what we all hope is that when this is done everybody's gonna say why did we do this ten years ago we really feel that this is again for the for the size and the dollars this is a really really well thought out project you know when the study this is going to make a major significant positive impact on your school between you between reducing the need for the modulars and connecting

[00:36:11] these two to have better flow it's it's really really a well this is going to be an exciting project to do and it's a safety issue because at least one blind area is going to be taken care of with this at least one um I have a couple questions first of all I love under budget that makes my heart happy and everyone's pockets happy especially given our current budget struggle so that's exciting um a few questions the is the it's over the auxiliary gem is that correct it's actually adjacent to it okay so the auxiliary so what is it going over just so what is it being

[00:36:49] built on top there's a handful of small classrooms that are had that that are on the i don't i'm sorry like underneath yes ma'am okay so there's a couple of classrooms below okay um that that exist and the your cafeteria and your auxiliary gem are spaces on the first floor that are adjacent to it okay so those classrooms are all still going to be functional during construction right so we are we moving people around during construction during the summer we're going to be asking that that we're not have folks down below because i really don't want to swing steel when people are below the building once we get the floor poured and the concrete's there then yes so the goal is is that when everybody comes back in the fall all of the spaces below are fully

[00:37:26] functional so is there a um backup plan because we all know that construction doesn't always go as planned that if um for whatever reason things get behind when school starts in the fall um if that's not all done is there a backup plan for those classrooms so yes we're working on backup plans not only for the classrooms but then also keep in mind that that is your main quarter connect between the two uh so we're also working on consistency plans if we had to go and use the courtyard for a couple of days or uh so yes we are working with the building principal to work to for can just see plans in the event that oh my goodness it rains every single day

[00:38:03] and we're able to do that um so okay i mean yeah i think we would all like to see that too just as far as um for academic planning um and then um my other question was the classroom that has the partition um which i think is awesome but i'm a little concerned about um noise between the the classrooms could you just give me a little more information on that yes so when I was a student which was like 70 years ago so we those of us are you know when you so used to see the the floating partitions are more of like a panel thing that and all they do is basically keep your vision out right they were

[00:38:41] super thin the good news on the new panels is they have a high STC rating you know so they are thicker and they run off of a off of this the structure is above so they're really easy to open and close and they have a high STC rating so if you can imagine a gypsum warble you know a gypsum warble wallboard wall that has gyp and then some I'm sorry Matt is that better okay so the so the answer is the STC rating on those are as good as a as an insulated wall that you would have in between classrooms okay yeah they've really made significant improvements in the in the sound quality of those panels okay that's

[00:39:20] wonderful okay that's all I had thank you okay have questions about I think you mentioned that there would be like daylight in parts of the new corner is that going to be true on this does it show up there windows right near where that word addition would be right here that we were looking at putting the windows in this quarter wall here to allow daylight to come in yes sir okay and then what about in the existing gym because there are windows there too so those windows going to be lost? Yes, sir. So the windows that are on this side are going to be

[00:39:56] sacrificed to the addition, but we still have the windows on this on this elevation, the glass block windows. So there will still be natural daylight coming in the space, not just not quite as much as there is right now. Okay, thank you. I actually think March 25 is going to be here in a second also. A little scary. Yeah, so I was wondering maybe Roslyn, you might be able to answer this.

[00:40:26] Do we have any examples of recent projects built in close proximity of classes while classes were going on i would say right um any any major construction project all of our additions have been immediately adjacent to classroom spaces i have to admit this is probably the first one in a long time where it's been over uh occupied spaces but as he mentioned we pre-qualify our contractors and they have experience often in schools and our project managers on site and school

[00:41:01] safety and fire and everything so there's a lot of protocols in place for that to occur and also um since dr acuff is not here with us tonight um i would be remiss and not being really excited about getting rid of one of the learning cottages um so well one right is it one this one this will um so albemore currently uses two modular this would um we're eliminating one in conjunction with this project and then the center too um so one would still remain but this removes one um and on behalf of dr acuff too this is funded through the high school renovations work

[00:41:41] so i think it's an example of when we think of renovations it's improvements to existing buildings it's not updated finishes and other things so that's the other thing i want to echo dr acuff and mr alcaro's advocacy for that those work i mean this is the outcome of it yeah this is great i I mean, for all the reasons that we've mentioned, I think this is going to be a great addition.

[00:42:05] And this is just for information. We'll vote on this next time. Is that correct? Just for information tonight, it will be on the consent agenda at the next meeting for approval. Fantastic. Thank you very much for your work. Thank you. Next, we have the High School Center 2 schematic design.

[00:42:27] Mr. Wirtman. Good evening, members of the school board. My name is Matt Wirtman, Deputy Director of Building Services. I'm here this evening to give you a brief budget update on the High School Center 2 project and to request action to approve the schematic design and to advance to the design development phase.

[00:42:54] Our agenda will include a brief update on the budget, followed by the subsequent request for action. Our conversation this evening is focused on the third goal of providing equitable and transformative resources as outlined in the board's strategic plan. So first, our budget update.

[00:43:12] As a quick reminder of where we were when we last presented this project to you on January 11th, we were at that time projecting an initial funding shortfall of approximately $10 million. We had identified some potential value engineering options that would reduce this shortfall to $4.7 to $6.3 million.

[00:43:33] The first proposed value engineering solution is actually several miscellaneous value engineering options that total over $3.6 million. The largest of these is an overall building square foot reduction by approximately 5,000 square feet.

[00:43:51] I will go into more detail on this in the subsequent slides. Other value engineering options include bidding the second elevator cab as a bid additive, however still building the elevator shaft itself. Changes to the type of window systems utilized, as well as some minor site modifications across the campus to reduce project costs.

[00:44:13] The design committee discussed each of these measures individually and collectively agreed that they did not present a major impact to the student learning experience and helped alleviate budget concerns without impacting future needs. To further break down the proposed square footage reduction, this slide shows a visual of the new overall building footprint in gray with a dark outline of the previous building footprint.

[00:44:41] A majority of these reductions were centered in two major areas, the corridors and the commons area. It is important to note that this reduced building footprint did not significantly reduce classroom sizes and it is also more aligned with the original CIP scope which was for a 61,500 square foot facility.

[00:45:00] This slide is to show that even with the reduced common square footage, we are still able to accommodate the same amount of students during a lunch period and the reduced footprint still accommodates the entire 400 student body in a lecture seated configuration.

[00:45:15] The second value engineering option represents some changes to the Albemarle High School campus with respect to the location of the practice fields, tennis courts, and proposed parking. The original option on the left proposed moving the tennis courts and practice fields towards northeast of the site to accommodate parking on the site of the existing tennis courts.

[00:45:41] However, we are continuing to study the possibility of retaining the existing tennis courts and instead only moving the practice fields to accommodate a new parking lot on the location of the existing fields. Hope that makes sense. That's a little wordy. There are several pros and cons for each option, but this value engineering solution has an estimated savings of approximately $1.7 million.

[00:46:06] The design committee is still considering several key factors related to these two options, and we will provide an update on this when we return to you with our design development presentation in April. So I'll quickly take you through the revised floor plans.

[00:46:22] There were no substantive changes to level zero, which serves as the proposed data center and main mechanical room. We are continuing conversations with the technology department about the pros and cons of a new data center integrated into this building versus a separate standalone building.

[00:46:40] Those conversations are ongoing and we will provide an update in April. On the first floor, as I mentioned, there was a reduction in the size of the commons area, as well as slight reductions to the admin suite and corridors throughout the building. There were no changes to learning spaces on this floor.

[00:46:56] On the second floor, the only major changes were a slight reduction to circulation spaces. And again, there were no changes to the learning spaces on this floor. So this brings us to our current budget status.

[00:47:14] In our fiscal year 25 CIP maintenance budget, we had already accounted for a $1.1 million programming for tennis court resurfacing and repairs to Albemarle High School's tennis courts. We are proposing to utilize those future CIP maintenance funds to assist with the modifications to the AHS athletics portion of the project, which brings the revised construction budget to $33.75 million.

[00:47:38] However, our estimate has actually slightly increased since we last presented this project. This is largely due to some decisions that have been made around the HVAC system that is a preferred system to ensure we are striving for the ambitious sustainability goals that we have for this project so that we are aligned with the county's climate action plan.

[00:48:00] And as I previously mentioned, the design committee is still considering the pros and cons for value engineering solution number two. Thus, we are unfortunately still forecasting a $4.5 to $6.2 million funding gap for this project. As far as next steps, per your action at the January 11th meeting, Chair Lee will be sending a letter to the Board of Supervisors formally requesting additional capital funds for both this project and the Southern Feeder Pattern Elementary School to cover these gaps.

[00:48:31] As I mentioned, we are here tonight to formally request your authorization to proceed to the design development phase of this project. In doing so, the design committee will continue to seek ways to reduce project costs where possible without sacrificing ACPS standards and quality.

[00:48:49] At the conclusion of the design phase, we will complete two additional cost estimates, including an independent estimate, and then we will return to you in April with an update of the project status. I also have one other update on this project since the school board's last meeting. Kagan Squire, who's the project manager leading this project, and our team were able to successfully complete the rezoning process that was necessary to provide additional flexibility on setback and height restrictions for this new building.

[00:49:17] I'm happy to report that the Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed to that and approved that rezoning application at its January 17th meeting, which now paves the way for us to proceed to the site plan application process as soon as we're able. Of course, major risks moving forward could include continued inflation to construction costs, delays in obtaining site plan approval, and any major changes to the site plan or overall building layout could result in scheduled delays and or cost impacts.

[00:49:47] So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. We do have a proposed motion should the board wish to take action this evening. So on the practice field, did we lose one?

[00:50:04] No. Because didn't we have three back there? There's only two existing ones, and these don't show it. So basically, where the proposed parking is here, I think you can see my mouse.

[00:50:20] There's a field here, existing field here, and then there's an existing field directly beside it. There is kind of an extra grassy area here, but it's not truly a practice field that is utilized by the Albemarle Athletics Program. I remember a time earlier that when we had three back there, but we did some modifications in 91.

[00:50:43] There's a field across from, across Lambs Lane. I understand what you're talking about. That's different. Yeah, I've got it. Thanks. I appreciate it. In the value engineering, where was the pedestrian bridge?

[00:51:11] That was actually on the site. We were able to mitigate by removing that, by changing some of the grading, but we were basically kind of trying to create a landscaping type feature through here. So we were able to mitigate that by just grading it out, which is saving us money. Okay, but it's not going to be a safety concern. No, no, ma'am. It was really just a landscape architecture feature. Those are

[00:51:40] nice. Okay. All right. Does anyone have a motion? I move to approve the schematic design of the new high school center to which will have a name, I presume, and direct staff to proceed to the design

[00:51:59] development phase. A second. Moved by Ms. Osborne. Seconded by Mr. Page. Any discussion? Are we ready for a vote? So we will give that a name, correct? Well, I mean, you put it into the motion, so it is. Good job. I think we can, can we get a roll call for this, Christine, please? Ms. Osborne? Yes. Mr. Pace? Yes. Oh, Ms. Pace? Sorry about that. Yes. Yes. Mr. Page? Yes. Ms. Spillman? Yes. Herley? Yes.

[00:52:41] So moved. All right. Thanks very much. Thank you. Okay. Next we have our Budget Educational Information Session, Part 1, with Ms. Kumazawa and Mr. Regitable.

[00:53:03] Good evening. I'm Maya Kumazawa, Director of Budget and Planning. And this evening I hope to facilitate an Educational Budget 101 session as we prepare for the presentation of the draft funding request. Our agenda is twofold. There will be a break in between, but we'll first hear a little bit more about state revenues we're anticipating a pretty significant change from previous years. And then the second part will be a working session on digging into all the parts of the budget and understanding what makes up our budget each year. This aligns with

[00:53:40] goal three, equitable transformative resources of our adopted strategic plan. Before I hand it over to our guest speaker, I just wanted to go over an overview of our revenues. The pie chart on the left shows our recurring FY24 adopted revenues. This is showing that 72.4 percent of those revenues come from local sources including the local transfer from Albemarle County. 27.4 percent comes from the state and then 618,000 comes from the federal government. Our total recurring budget this year is 257.7

[00:54:19] million. As I mentioned we're anticipating pretty significant changes in the state budget going into the next fiscal year so that's represented on the rate. You can see our local source of funding is going up to about 75% to make up for a decrease in state funding. That's going down to 24.8%. In dollar terms, we're projecting a $6.6 million increase in local revenues or 3.6%. In state revenues, we're projecting an $8 million decrease or a decline of 11.2%. And overall, that is a negative $1.4 million

[00:54:56] dollar impact in terms of our projected revenues as of this point. Again, we do anticipate things to change as we progress throughout the budget process, but this is the starting point from which we're working. A bit about our local transfer overview, since that makes up really the bulk of our funding. Within the local transfer, it is calculated by formula, and so we have general property taxes, other local taxes, and non-categorical state aid that the county considers

[00:55:30] as shared revenues between ACPS, local government, and the CIP. And so they take the projected shared revenues for the following fiscal year, and they take off some committed expenditures from the top. That includes revenue sharing, tax relief programs, economic development authority performance agreements and a transfer to the water resources fund. So what's remaining after these expenditures are taken out of our projected shared revenues, 10% of what's remaining goes towards the CIP, that's a shared program

[00:56:06] between local government, partner agencies, and ACPS. 54% comes to our operating budget in the form of that transfer and 36% goes stays with the County. So since we've talked a lot about state revenues, Jackson Zimmerman is going to introduce our guest speaker for us this evening. Hi, good evening. I'm Jackson Zimmerman, the school finance

[00:56:41] officer. I just wanted to introduce Jim Reginball. He did a wonderful presentation at VAS and VASBO earlier this month, and following that presentation, I invited him to come and speak to the school board regarding potential state revenues associated with it. Mr. Reginball has 40 years of experience in state and local government and tax policy analysis. He's served as 12 years on the staff of the Virginia Senate Finance Committee from 1987 to 1999. And since then he's founded Fiscal Analytics, which provides expertise in tax policy issues to local governments

[00:57:21] and trade groups. His government clients include Virginia Association of Counties, Virginia First Cities Coalition in the past. He's done also Virginia Municipal League, the Virginia First Association of School Superintendents, and Virginia Health Care Associations. So I'll present Mr. Reginball. Thank you. Thank you, Jackson.

[00:57:45] Good evening, Madam Chair, members of the board. How are you? I've been doing a version of this presentation for years now, and obviously the story changes a lot, but I keep getting asked to do this by various groups, so I I hope I'm getting better at it.

[00:58:02] I know you guys are wondering why you're, maybe you've heard something, why the amount of money you're expecting to get in fiscal 25 and 26 is quite a bit lower than 24. So I want to kind of start with that. So there's a couple main reasons.

[00:58:19] First of all, fiscal 24, there was some one-time pots of money that was put in because of the huge growth in state general fund revenues. decided that this wasn't going to be an ongoing situation with this with the growing revenues and so they put one-time monies in and they were they they have proposed the governor has introduced bills proposed to take those out so that was 2.4 million out of the 418 all in money as the governor calls it that was one time and then 1.7 million this was out of your pot um from the re-benchmarking hold harmless during covid because they didn't trust the data during covid and the re-benchmarking

[00:58:58] process so they gave everyone extra money uh in both years so that's uh you know four million dollars right there um and then the governor's proposed to remove what was supposed to be an ongoing revenue source that was replacing the cut in in in the food tax that was that reduced the sales tax distribution based on school age population uh by 18 you you were getting this year this year 3.2 million dollars so that is not in the proposed budget by the governor my expectation is the general sum is going to put that back in so there's a source of money for you

[00:59:35] right there potentially all right so the issue of course is how much money is available to put more money into k-12 and the governor he pretty much flatlined it also every two years you probably heard that the the SOQ the standards of quality which is the pot of money that is distributed the school divisions then as each division gets a share based on your local composite index which yours is pretty high that's the other huge reason that you've lost money that's about six million dollars worth that you lost in this budget because you went you you

[01:00:11] gained uh five points in your lti five percent in other words you went up to um from point six four to like point six nine and that's my calculation you know roughly 1.2 1.3 million dollars a point for albemore county so when it goes up that's how much you lose so the re-benchmarking yes it added money a significant amount statewide you know about half about half a billion a year by the the re-benchmark of costs that's what that's what it is it's inflation and prevailing salaries going up and they're there they they just they decide how much they're going to increase the state share through re-benchmarking so you've

[01:00:51] got more money through that but it got taken away from the one time being taken out that we discussed and your local composite going up and so that's why you're actually losing even more money the more money than you're getting so what I want to tell you is I want to go back now see if I use this correctly I'm not gonna this is a long presentation you don't have time for all this okay so I'm gonna summarize greatly the economics that the governor uses to forecast revenues is very conservative and they've been expecting a recession the the state for over a year now that hasn't happened they're still expecting

[01:01:31] risk a recession at the end of this fiscal year in the start of 25 doesn't like that's going to happen either so they want to be they always like to be conservative they don't they don't want to overspend they'd like to either underspend and have money at the end of the year and so that's probably going to happen again in fact it might happen so quickly that the general assembly is going to decide to re-forecast revenues himself or maybe the governor will come over in february and provide more money so there's another potential source of money okay is that revenues without in doing anything the growth in your economy is going to be better than expected so So that's a possibility that they could put more money in.

[01:02:05] This is the economic forecast. You can see it, 24 and 25, it drops significantly. The U.S. GDP, today's GDP report was 3% for the quarter. You know, so that's pretty, I'm not going to do all this CPI data. That's the growth. And this presentation you'll have, you can look at your leisure.

[01:02:23] So what else impacted revenues? Well, two years ago and last year, we had big tax cuts. So much money was rolling in. General Assembly agreed with the governor to mainly, the biggest one, was a standard deduction increase. And that, you can see, is $800-plus million a year and $25 million to the cost of that.

[01:02:42] That's already been done. This is the new proposed, that the governor, in his introduced bill, he's proposed to cut income taxes, but then to raise the sales tax rate 9 tenths of a cent, to partly make up for it, and expand the sales tax base to include things like streaming services, pay tax on your Netflix bill, okay, other things.

[01:03:03] like that that would that would still leave though a billion dollars over the biennium short so his budget proposal has tax cuts in it again and the General Assembly I don't believe is gonna pass this so there's a billion dollars right there that they're probably going to put a lot into k-12 although there's other needs state employee salaries basically didn't get anything either teacher salaries didn't get anything but that would help you but there are other potential needs that the general system is gonna have to address so this is one

[01:03:39] avenue the this is the I'm not going to go through the forecast this is the huge growth in general fund revenues over the last couple years 33% I've been doing this since 1982 I've never seen growth in general fund revenues like this over a couple years from 2020 through 2022 and as you see the green that without the tax cuts, it would have been there. That's the tax cuts. Remember, there was a huge rebate that was given, a billion dollars, then the standard deductions. Another rebate was given this year in 24. Remember in the fall, you got a check from the state. So that's the green bar. And

[01:04:13] the proposal is the red that you see when you go to 25 and 26. So revenues are flat because of growth has slowed down the economy, but also because of tax reductions. So that's the point there so you can see they have money to carry forward you see the available balance they didn't spend that they couldn't spend money fast enough it was coming in so fast at 2.3 billion 2.4 billion carried over from 24 into 25 and this in this introduced budget that's one time remember that that's why they can see you go down to the pros the general fund appropriations 32.2 that

[01:04:52] goes down the next year because all that one-time revenue is used up okay so So that's part of the problem. You know, the state has to balance its budget. It's some one-time revenues. They're not going to build too much into their operating budget. They have to be cognizant of structural balance as well, okay?

[01:05:08] So bottom line is that I don't think that tax policy proposal is going to fly. There's going to be money there, and I think there's a better economy than they expect. There's probably money there. And I can tell you this. There's money the governor proposed to spend. They're probably not going to do. I mean, I worked at Senate Finance.

[01:05:25] Part of my job was to find money for them to spend, and we always did, okay? so they'll they'll be finding some other money can't tell you what but they will what's there so this at your leisure this is the state general fund budget and those numbers balance okay so you get your leisure you you want to look at what we the state spends its money on appropriates money too and you can see the last couple columns are the proposal by the governor that's three actually because there's a caboose bill for this current year to actually that actually cuts relatively significant dollars out of k-12 this year because there's reduced

[01:06:02] enrollment than they expected, reduced sales taxes, some other things and technical changes that actually cut. You can see the 929, you know, they cut they cut a couple hundred million this year we're in as well. Now the 500 million that you see for the biennium that's more at the very right, the majority of that is actually the money going to DOE for the childcare program, the subsidy program that the federal government was funding that's ending at the end of this year and the governor has put in his budget over 400 million dollars to to continue that subsidy

[01:06:38] program for child care that's not going to school divisions that's going to doe for for basically young children's child care subsidy for their parents okay so don't get fooled by that 500 million right there is what i'm saying so this is a vast people the school superintendents always like me to do this this is the per pupil state funding on statewide on on average and so you can see it was very flat and finally with that that huge growth in revenue in in 23 and 24 it went up a lot on a per pupil basis and that reflected five percent per year seven percent

[01:07:15] one-year salary increases that they they funded the one-time funding 800 million plus for school construction they they did something there the one-time money as we discussed all that's kind of been poured into was poured into 23 and 24 and so the per pupil amount went up quite a bit then look at what happens after that it goes flat again and and uh 25 and 26 basically and then when you adjust for inflation the red bar it really doesn't grow as much as you think okay when you take the seat when you adjust it for the cpi it really doesn't grow all that much and you can see

[01:07:50] 2009 is kind of a high watermark we haven't inflation we haven't done much better since then since then on an inflation adjusted basis in terms of state funding for k-12 uh our school system is slowly declining throughout the state. In fact, I noticed Albemarle has a slight reduction in its ADM as well and so that that's another reason. Remember the SOQ and a lot of the even the incentive programs and other programs are funded on a per-pupil basis. So if you lose students, it doesn't mean your costs go down because the economies of scale are kind of the same. You still have to have the same, but you

[01:08:27] lose funding from the state because it's paid to you on a per-pupil basis. These, just showing you some of the reductions and increases, I've highlighted the technical reduction. This is the caboose bill this current year. These are what I talked about, why it's gone down from what was in the adopted budget in September to now. The proposal is to actually reduce, because these general funds spending across categories, most of them are for K-12, fairly sizable amounts, sales tax, lower enrollment, incentive programs going down, esl and remedial summer school enrollment going down so um they they were able to use lottery

[01:09:06] monies as well because guess what lottery must go to k-12 and they're like general funds in reality but they do substitute for general funds when i talk about general funds and the lottery accounts jumped up there's a lot of gambling going on or something because it went way up and they then took general funds out and replaced it with lottery so if you're only talking general funds then it goes down but it really is some of it's replaced with lottery monies all right now you know about i how familiar are you guys with re-benchmarking this this slide just

[01:09:41] shows you sort of the what is going on through benchmarking they're basically increasing both personnel and non-personnel costs for inflation and other reasons and we benchmark for numbers of kids etc and so that um this chart kind of gives you a flavor for that okay um now what also happens every two years and uh jackson said you aren't that familiar with how the local composite in is is constructed and what i try to do with a chart like this is this shows you the math of it okay

[01:10:17] and those numbers represent your percent of the state okay so and they use the data that's used which is 2021 for this next biennium except for adm which is march of 22 but all the other four March are 21 they're very lagged data and so look at real estate true value real estate Albemarle County has 1.58% of the state's true value real estate that's that's what you have whereas I believe Fairfax would be something on

[01:10:52] the order of 20% something like that so you're 1.58% but it doesn't matter because really what matters is it well what matters is the numerator of the denominator. So the three factors in the numerator are supposed to, they're a crude measure of your ability to raise, what your taxing ability is. So 50% across is viewed to be real estate, your real estate taxes. That's why it's weighted at 50% in the numerator. 10% is the local option sales tax, you see that.

[01:11:27] And then the 40% adjusted gross income, which your residents put on their tax returns, the total, the gross amount, that's supposed to represent all the other tax sources that you can get money from okay everything else and so then so that's this crude measure of your ability to raise revenue and then the denominator is what you're spending it on and so that's your ADM and then the rest of your population this this used to be all ADM but got changed one-third population and reality is localities on average spent half their money on something besides education I think should be 50/50 the number it's not it's

[01:12:02] two-thirds one-third okay and so if your numerator goes up that ratio look at the look at the current one 1.79 look how it's gone up from 165 to 179 that's almost all is the reason is because you're adjusted gross income line maybe you had Warren Buffett move into Albemarle County I don't know but somehow you had a big jump in that two-year period from the 2019 tax returns to the 21 tax returns, you've jumped up from 1.7% to 2.14% of the state's AGI.

[01:12:35] And that's a huge jump, okay? Your denominator didn't change hardly at all. You see the denominator? It didn't change at all. Your population, ADM, that stayed the same. So that's not the factor. Your real estate actually went down. That helped you a little bit in terms of your comp, but it was overwhelmed by that 40% AGI number, okay?

[01:12:52] So that's why you went up. And you can kind of track that over time. Yes, sir? So Jim, the one question I have is like, I can see how the true value of real estate, that comes back through the local, right? And then taxable sales. Does the income tax that people are supposed to pay based on their gross income, does that in any way find its way back to us?

[01:13:19] No, you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. Okay. That 40% AGI represents all your other taxes, like your tangible personal property, your car tax, your meals tax, if you have one. It's a proxy. That's all it is.

[01:13:34] Okay. You're absolutely right, though. It has nothing rooted in reality of local funding that would come to us. No, and in fact, JLARC recommended in its summer report to not use this anymore, to use a much more disaggregated bottle that actually uses your various tax sources and then compares them differently, okay?

[01:13:57] So that was one, and then use a three-year average of it, so if there's a jump in one year, it doesn't affect you. So JLARC is recommending something on the order of what you're saying, okay? We'll see if the General Assembly adopts it. It's a tough deal. I've watched this a long time. The reason it's a tough deal is because without putting more money into the pot, there's winners and losers every time this changes because it's a zero-sum game.

[01:14:19] Remember, percent of state. So if you go up or you go down, someone else has to go up or down opposite of you. So it's all geared around the average LCI always is 0.55 for the state and 0.45 for the locality.

[01:14:36] So see that number at the bottom, the ratio of numerator and denominator? if that's 1.0 if your numerator is exactly the same denominator you have a 0.45 composite index okay so that's the math of it all right and and this across the state that will happen that's what the state will pay they pay 55 of of the standards of quality localities on average pay 45 but it varies by every locality because of this okay now the reason why you spend so much more just for your edification every locality does is because sort of the next slide these are the big ones

[01:15:12] you see charlottesville also had even a bigger jump than you they went up seven and a half points same reason agi something happened charlottesville too so i'm moving there this whole region had an agi jump from 19 to 21 okay same reason all right so i here i'm just telling you about um i had a thought and i lost it but um yeah i lost the thought i was going to tell you something else but um so these are the other changes to the current the introduced budget and this is just the k-12 changes, but I'm not going to go through them all. We don't have time, really. There's technical,

[01:15:49] there's policy, but I'm going to take you to this chart, okay? So this sort of gets to the bottom line and shows you why it's very flat. You can see the base for 24 was $92.15 billion in general funds, $9.2 billion. Well, the technical adjustments in the caboose bill are going to bring it down to $8.9. Remember I showed you earlier that reduced, you know, number of students, reduced sales, know that's the caboose bill that's that's before the general sell me too and then that base same base use well you remove those one times i show you the big ones i show you the ones that they're

[01:16:25] all the four of them the the flexible funding and the covid hold harmless that's the major ones and that's that 586 that's being removed out of that base okay so that gets you that new base 8628 well then the rebenchmarking you can see was 471 and technical changes your benchmark then you you did some other minuses in there, lower enrollments, et cetera. That's a plus of 471 and 497 for the two years, the re-benchmarking and technical change. Then you can see the policy changes. Okay. The increase is 303 for 25, but there was more decreases. So the actually policy

[01:17:00] proposals, it was basically nothing. Okay. A little bit of bonus, a little bit of salary increase um but really nothing more more negative than positive and so so you get re-benchmarking minus the policy changes get you the new amount spending that's and so it's it's not more money that's one of the reasons you're not seeing more to albemarle because he's not proposing more money in this interviews bill as i mentioned i think that will go up though for the reasons i mean taxes won't be in the general assembly i will say this the general assembly what i've seen

[01:17:37] is they look like the members or the senior members are coordinating on both in the house of senate proposals to increase funding but their their major proposals look to be around special ed and that's very expensive and then the at-risk students okay and some of those are a billion dollars a year okay some technical changes too but the big ones are special ed and at risk i don't know if that's what they're ultimately going to do because i haven't seen much in salary increase I expect they would want to do that and I would also expect they'd want to get that rid of that fully get rid of that support cap that has been in place

[01:18:16] since 2009 and they've been getting rid of that last couple years but they still have 116 million left to do so you know I don't know how much they're gonna raise and there's a whole bunch of ideas on how to you know what they can put it in it matters to you because I don't suspect you have as many as others the at-risk student population and maybe not even the special ed population so if they put a button I don't know that I just don't know maybe if you don't if you if let's say Charlottesville has more Richmond has more that that's going to be directed more to them this this new pot you know if they

[01:18:53] decide to spend money there of that extra money they're going to find then it's not going to come to Albemarle as much I know you have some but not as much as them because that's more directed spending okay um now these are just i'm showing this to other people that all these major spend because this is showing people if i had time where they might not what they might not do what they might you know economic development ideas you know 100 million here 50 million there they the general say might not do that put it in the pot to spend for k-12 so here's the jlark recommend from the

[01:19:29] summer right here have you seen these before you've seen summaries of this yeah and so you know that there's sort of longer term and the longer term revolves around the fact and this is the this is the thought I had it revolves around the fact why almost every locale spends way more than what the state provides them it's because they own this the standards of quality only cover two-thirds of positions on average throughout the state that are employed and that means that one-third that's not covered you every school has to spend has to pay for a hundred percent of those

[01:20:05] positions you get no help from the state and so it you know every locality spends a lot more you're not alone you are on the higher side of the percentage but you're not alone they everyone does that because I'll give you an ex I'll give you two examples on the positions so teacher aides there's 21,000 in Virginia employed by school divisions that's a year or two ago there's less than 3,000 covered by the standards quality out of 21,000 okay they'll basically cover kindergarten very few kindergarten and special ed teacher aides

[01:20:40] that's it but teacher aides are employed all the way through high school and the other big one another big one is assistant principals they cover about 2 000 out of the 8 000 assistant principals that are employed in the soq so that's two big examples the other one here is and you probably are affected by this i don't know your salary scales are here but are you familiar with how the prevailing salaries work it's in the budget prevailing side what they'll pay for an elementary school teacher what the SOQ recognizes and pays for a high school teacher for a principal for an assistant principal they're in there and it's a dollar

[01:21:19] amount it's calculated based on all 134 school divisions are each one is equal no matter the size okay but the ones that are astute two standard deviations basically outside the average are lopped off on the back and the other side and then whatever is in the middle of that is the prevailing salary well guess what you take the middle and you go up to that side and maybe not too standard are all the big counties they pay a lot more than the rules and the rules are there's way more rural counties and they don't

[01:21:54] pay nearly as much so that prevailing salary is always ten thousand less than the weighted average salary so jlark said wait a minute the funny thing is they're the ones that came up with it and i've been telling them ever since they did it that i didn't like it it doesn't work so they're finally they're finally now saying no it doesn't work it's not real it's not right because three quarters of the teachers are underpaid you know by the state you have to supplement and pay the rest so that's a huge part of the jlark one two um and that was actually one of their near-term recommendations but i didn't see that in a budget amount by a member maybe i missed it i haven't

[01:22:33] seen that one maybe they don't want to bite that off yet though um so these are the near-term ones that jlark talk remember see the middle prevailing salaries using a division weighted average that's coming right out of jlark right in the middle of this this thing i haven't seen that proposed budget yet um some of these other ones this that's that at risk one at the very top and i've seen budget amendments saying jlark estimated that to be 250 million a year the cost to to actually combine the soq at risk what's the incentive at risk and then use the proper data we're not using

[01:23:09] proper data to decide who gets it that would be 250 million i saw a proposal by senator hashman that's 500 million to fix that so i don't know where they're going to go on this okay on this one how they're going to spend their money um but that gives you an idea of what and the discontinued great recession air cost reduction measures that's the support cap plus transportation costs things like that that they took out on you okay that one all right and i put that bill see you you can look at HB 624, Rizul, go to him. He's kind of leading the pack. He's one of the leaders

[01:23:44] in the House on this issue. And he's got a bill in, $924 million a year, and he's got a budget amendment in two to do the same thing. And you can see $600 million of that, of that $900 is for special ed. So they may go that way. All right. So I don't need to go over that. You probably know.

[01:24:03] This just reiterates the composite index, of the five factors the most important. The most important is ADM, actually, not real estate. So when you lose students, you get hit twice because it's paid on a per-pupil basis, but if you lose students, it also raises your LCI. It does both. So you don't want to be a school division losing students under the current formula. It hurts you. This is just you want to look at it. I put some information on how the state comes up with

[01:24:41] its funding, the model they use. And I am going to be doing a seminar through VAS on Monday at 10 o'clock. And I sent Jackson the link, if anyone's interested, Monday morning at 10. And it's going to be a much further discussion of this chart right here. There's more in here for you to look. You can see the staffing standards right here that go into there. And you can see the prevailing salaries that are in the current biennium right here. They went up a lot. That's part of the re-benchmark. But they're still not paying as much as you are, are they? Do you pay

[01:25:21] your elementary teachers on average $61,000? I don't know. I don't know. But you can... We're above that. You're below that? We're above that. Yeah, you're above it. So, right. But that's the proposal, the 24 to the new biennium. And you can see the current one is 53 that's the fy24 amount that this soq recognizes but this so re-benchmarking always lags it uses it uses data now to give you money in the future and i've always had a problem with that too because it doesn't really give you the real cost at the time you're

[01:25:56] having to pay it okay so anyhow monday at i'm probably taking more of your time but monday at 10, you can register. I sent the link to Jackson. Jackson, could you send that link to all of us? Great. Perfect. Happy to answer any questions. I blew through that, I know, but I know your time is valuable. So when do we actually know? I mean, okay, so when can we get a better idea? All right, that's a great question. So a better idea is definitely the right word to use because the

[01:26:31] February, the Sunday, is it February 18th or 19th or 17th? What is that February? uh i know i'm going saturday i'm going skiing so it's the weekend before so the 18th is the money committees meet on sunday afternoons general assembly building they will present the committee budgets that alter the governor's introduced bill and the committee budgets have never been not vote have never been in the main voted down in the full senator house the committee is is the leadership of those bodies they've come together

[01:27:08] that committee budget will be what goes to each house now what does happen of course is then it goes to conference because they're not going to be the same and they are going to appoint a conference committee and they're going to hash it out and that can take weeks and remember what happened last year they couldn't come to an agreement it took till september basically for them to get a budget for this year and that was the first time it took that long but i can see even though i don't see a problem with the general assembly agreeing on their budgets I think they will probably be in sync both Democrat if

[01:27:45] last year was Republican and Republican House Democratic Senate one of the reasons I couldn't agree there was a lot of money couldn't agree how to spend it they want to spend on tax cuts well the tax cut issue is still before them this time with the governor it was last time too but he had an ally in the house he didn't have an ally in the house this time not gonna happen in those budgets but the governor may decide he wants something so what is his leverage so let's say the get out on time sign he die you know late march or mid-march they send the budget to the governor what is his

[01:28:22] options his options he can amend the he can amend sentences lines in the budget he can do that but guess what you can override those with a majority vote easily over it so that doesn't do him any good, the governor. He can only veto an entire item. And so direct aid to K-12 is about a nine billion dollar item. If he does that, which I've never seen a governor ever do, that's a nuclear option. He might as well just veto the entire budget and say, I don't like this budget. Go back to work and send me something else. And then the fighting happens. Okay. So who knows what's going

[01:28:58] to happen? I'm just saying, I can't answer your question other than explain what the process is. OK. Thank you. So just really quickly. I'm sorry. So on one of your slides, I found it on what I've got here, reduced individual income tax rates by 12 percent.

[01:29:22] So what is that percentage now? The governor's proposing to, for example, reduce the 5.75 percent rate to 5.1 percent. Oh, OK. OK. That's his tax proposal. wants to reduce every single bracket of the individual income by 12 percent and that's that's what why it cost where is that for what slide number is that do you know it's proposed tax policy i don't know it's a slide number on the bottom yeah where i put it here anyhow that that it's expensive a couple billion dollars to do that that's why he has to offset it with an

[01:30:01] increase in the sales tax and broadening the sales tax base in his proposal to digital services yes but he's also raising he's also proposing to raise the rate by a point by almost a percent but the income tax is the primary driver of the general fund you realize that right it's two-thirds of the general fund so trading a cut in the progressive tax for a cut in a more more regressive tax for an increase in aggressive tax yeah yeah increase and the governor's the governor

[01:30:35] to be fair his rationale is many states are reducing their income tax rates and he he's stating that we're losing business people aren't coming here because of that that's that's why he's not just doing it for you know that's his reasoning that's great thanks appreciate it um are you familiar with any new methods that the state department of education is coming up with or trying to come up with to devise uh education budget that might alleviate some of the problems that you mentioned uh in what sense sir what problems uh like a new way of sort of calculating

[01:31:15] certain things looking at um different aspects instead of just what's being looked at now to devise the budget well the state department of education is not doing it that's not really their role they're not a policy making body uh the board of education is the board uh has proposed in the past for example enhancing the standards of quality like jlark has done they proposed that for years and but the General Assembly is the one that is the final decider of what the standards of quality are going to be. The board can propose, JLARC can

[01:31:52] recommend, it's a, JLARC is a study committee commission of General Assembly. They get asked to do studies by the General Assembly and so they've recommended that yes it needs to be enhanced. The Board of Education, which is an executive branch agency, they've said, appointed by the governor, they've said yes for years that the standards of quality are inadequate in other words that you're having to pay for too much at the local level and the state needs to pay for more because the reality is you have to hire all these people and you need the state needs to step up and cover more so that has

[01:32:26] been proposed it's it's really a matter of money it's a matter of there's there's two the most important thing that legislators deal with is what taxes taxes what's the taxes that's that's the number one topic in my experience the number two topic is education so they do butt heads okay they do butt heads but you have to have the money and so you'd rather get the money by good economic

[01:32:58] growth you know as opposed to raising taxes but if you're not getting enough then i've been reading books on going all the way back to 1900 on virginia 1950s and the debates they had on education different kinds but this is not a new debate funding public ed thank you jim thank you so much well next we are going to take a 10 minute break so we'll be back here at 8 15.

[01:46:19] the second the second tab includes um what we're doing in this work session which is the expenditure 101. so i will be moving the slides um for the public on the screen but you can just fall along in your binder and then a lot of the slides do reference handouts the first half of the handouts are in the third tab and the latter half of the handouts are in the last pocket so it's just slides then first part of the handouts are these all handouts that are made available to

[01:46:53] the public as well yes there are extra copies here and then i know there's a on the table over there there are copies available so anyone anyone in the audience wants copies they're up here thanks so the basis of the information presented is the work that we have been doing to build the baseline budget for next year so this is the baseline for budget development it's really a step that we typically don't haven't done in this time frame we'll usually do it after the draft funding

[01:47:28] request but we thought since uh it's going to be a little bit of a different budget process this year it made sense if you all really understood how the budget was built before you heard the draft funding request. On slide eight, you will see the different pieces of what encompasses the baseline budget. So we're today only going to focus on the school fund. Oh, thanks. We're going to focus on the school fund expenditures. This is the day-to-day operating budget we talk about the most, but we do also have special revenue funds that include our self-sustaining funds

[01:48:07] and grant funds. Those we will not cover because those are budgeted totally separately. Within the school fund, if you go to level two, we have school-based budgets and department-based budgets. If you're familiar with the budget book, we always have sections on school-based and department-based.

[01:48:26] Within school-based, we have operating budgets, so non-people-related budgets, and then personnel budgets so the budgets that are compensating people and same with the department-based budgets we have operating budgets that we separate from personnel budgets and the reason why we do that is because personnel budgets are managed centrally so we don't ask department heads to budget how much their fts are going to cost we do that centrally for them but operating budgets are typically managed within a school or a department and that's why we separate those out this is really

[01:49:01] the internal view of why we have set it up this way and then within the operating budgets for both school-based and department-based we can further break it out so on the next slide this is the structure in which we're going to go through the materials so we'll start with FTE budgets that are school-based first then we'll go over FTE budgets that are department-based and then we'll loop around in a circle we'll go over lapse factor non-departmental department-managed operating budgets centrally managed school budgets and school managed school budgets so

[01:49:39] starting with school-based ftes and school-based fte budgets make up about 68 percent of this baseline fy25 budget that we're going to build up and so this section will be the longest since it's obviously the largest part of our budget and where we spend our money within school-based budgets, just to give you an idea of the pyramid on the right, you all have seen before that is the if you took the total school based budgets, then about 93% of that goes towards the FTE budget.

[01:50:15] So that's the piece we're talking about, which is the bulk of funding for school based, we break down because it's such a large amount, we break it down by every comprehensive elementary school, middle school and high school we have a budget for center one community lab next year we will have one for a newcomer learning community post high center for living growth and multi-school services any questions so far what's an example of multi-school services um great question

[01:50:53] multi-school services is where we would um if we have because we're projecting say a special education population for next year we don't know exactly where to staff all of our teachers So we kind of hold back and wait to see, oh, well, where are the students showing up?

[01:51:11] And then we assign teachers. So it's almost, it's a holding area for, until we see where the kids are, then we allocate the resources. That's the primary purpose of multi-school. And we used to budget post-high and Center for Learning and Growth there, or other services.

[01:51:33] And we've started trying to break apart that piece so it's more clear. So the budget for that is going down over time. - Thank you. - Where does intensive services fall? - That falls within the special education department. So as of now, we consider department-based in terms of the FTEs who work there.

[01:51:54] But again, as we have new programs that are site-based and kid-focused, we try to adjust that each year. So that might be something to consider if we wanted to as a school. So it's not, there aren't any set hard rules around which is which.

[01:52:12] This is just how we've defined it. Maya, this might be a little bit off of the question, but is this the category that you would have, say, perhaps a special ed placement that left the division to go to a residential setting, perhaps?

[01:52:31] Is that coming out of a different way? I don't think I understand this. Sometimes the division will be involved in the education of a special ed student. Oh, the private placement. Yeah. Yep.

[01:52:46] For those we covered by the Children's Services Act, that is a transfer, we budgeted as a transfer to that fund. And I'll go over that, I'll point that out when we get to that part of the budget.

[01:53:02] So you will see that there are many school expenditures that we do budget in department-based, so I don't wanna get too hung up on how we name those. You will see that a lot of what's in the departments goes directly to school.

[01:53:21] Okay, so this is, we're gonna just kind of do some work to build up a budget for a school, since we're talking about school-based FTEs. How do we come up with an FTE number?

[01:53:36] So the first thing we do is we have enrollment projections, which we usually present in the fall. For the purposes of the baseline budget, so as I'm talking in your third tab, you'll have enrollment projections.

[01:53:53] the purposes of building a baseline budget we use 2324 projected enrollment so the current year and the reason for that is we want to track the cost of growth which you might remember in previous budget development cycles that we first project out a new cost for the current year based on the current year's projection that way when we apply next year's projection we can calculate to the dollar how much that's costing us and so the baseline budget does not include anticipated

[01:54:26] growth or decreases it just assumes this year yep so the first page is the 23-24 projection and then the second page of handout a is the 24-25 projection if you wanted to start you know building your own growth budget to determine well what's going to be the change by school so take page one to determine baseline and take use page two if you want to project how the ft would change by school the next handout handout b is the staffing standards this is the lengthiest

[01:55:05] handout because it goes through every single position almost in our school division and how we staff it by formula and so the purpose of this is to make sure that schools receive fair a fair number of resources when compared to the number of students and the types of students that they're serving. These standards are reviewed typically during the budget process, so if there is a proposal to change a standard that usually has a budget impact that would come

[01:55:38] through during the budget cycle. If you turn to page two of the staffing standards, this is the page we'll work with on the left we'll start with regular education elementary schools on the left is the ACPS staffing standard so what's the position and what is the criteria that we use to staff that position the classroom teacher kindergarten through third grade is allocated one teacher for every 19.55 projected students and then on the right is the corresponding SOQ

[01:56:16] provided by the state which says that we must staff in order to receive that state funding we're talking about we must staff one teacher per 24 students generally you can see there's some more details there so wherever there is an soq you'll find it on the right not all of our positions have soqs a lot of our positions are acps positions but you can compare those side by side if you'd like so before we get to handout c um on the next slide what i want to do is kind of walk through

[01:56:55] this agner hurt because it comes first in the alphabet and classroom teachers because it comes first in our staffing staff it's easy for you guys to find um if you take the projected enrollment so page one of handout a for agner hurt add up the number of students in kindergarten first second and third grade 255 and then you add up the fourth and fifth grade which is 138 and you can see we

[01:57:32] have different ratios for k3 and four five because there are different soqs with those two groupings the k3 for every 19.55 students they're allocated by one so you can divide the enrollment by the class size ratio and then for four five it goes up a little bit you can take the enrollment for four five and divide by 21.75 so if you do that you get 13 teachers for k3 and six teachers for

[01:58:05] four five add those together and you get 19 teachers for k5 at agner hurt um there are many many physicians here and that's the only example if you want to go through anything else i'll do that but let's pull out um handout c so you can see where that ends up um if you've done a budget work session with me in the past i've always talked about how the supplemental section is really what the budget is about that is what all these materials are pulled from the supplemental

[01:58:42] section of the budget book so they're always available it's sort of all the inputs what goes into the budget and then the first half of the budget book is all about sort of the output what happened how did it result in financial numbers if you look at handout C and on page one Agner Hertz at the top you can see their enrollment number their differentiation factor which is based on free and reduced lunch and then if you multiply that against their adjusted enrollment you get the number of projected economically disadvantaged students which is 209 and just to the

[01:59:17] right of that you'll see 19.39 base teachers and now you know where that number came from. So you can see all the schools are listed top to bottom, elementary, middle, high. There was a question about multi school. So you can see what exactly is in multi school right now we have for baseline, we have two and hold back for title one. If you keep going, we've got some other holdback numbers. We have student safety coaches, which was a school

[01:59:52] board proposal an itinerant bookkeeper who serves multi schools same with the safety coaches they serve all of our schools ap interns seed teachers which is social emotional academic development teachers so that those are the ftes budgeted in multi-school to get back to that if you go from left to right over three pages you can see all of the positions that are part of the school-based FTE budgets. On page two, those are some of those have asterisks next to them. Those are our teaching

[02:00:30] assistants. For budget purposes, we count them as 50% of the cost of teachers. So if you see a 0.25 teaching and EDEPTA, that's actually a 0.5 funded by the school fund because you double that. It's discounted for budget purposes to make it equivalent to a full-time teacher equivalent and then the other point five is budgeted an EDEP which is self-sustaining fund so this was a proposal and I think an FY 24 budget proposal and that's where that shows up now as a staffing standard and as a

[02:01:09] column so wherever you see TAs in your mind you can double it like a school based sub that's a TA so you can double it in your head and say okay well that's a real full-time person. How do you staff SPED teachers? That's on the, I think, next one or two slides. Okay. Yep. So am I right? Am I right in Agner Hurt gets an art of music and two PE teachers?

[02:01:39] Is that what that means? If you have four FTEs there? Yep. So four FTEs combined for art, music, and PE. And so I don't know off the top of my head how it breaks out, but I know it's in the staffing standards. So if you go to your big packet, page 10, the staffing standard refers to student enrollment. But a quick way to do it is if you go to the top of page 10, if you go to a teacher, art, music, PE combined total and look at four per school, so greater than 420 students,

[02:02:16] and then go down to the grayed out sub buckets and look for 420 students, you can see that there's one art teacher one music teacher and two pe teachers yeah it's a guess

[02:02:32] yeah yeah it wasn't a guess really are there any questions about ratios and base teacher staffing

[02:03:00] for schools ratios do differ for middle and high that's why we have standards at by level i think i have is it oh let's go over tiered services first um so if you keep if i'm still on handout And if you go right next to base teachers, you'll see reduced class size, reading specialists and tiered services.

[02:03:29] So those three were formerly part of the differentiated staffing that we've tried to make clearer and to communicate that better. And so that staffing is used consistently across schools. So the reason why you'll see class sizes smaller than 19.39 at Agner Hurt is because they have three additional FTEs to reduce their class sizes.

[02:03:52] And that's based on a differentiated formula. So if you're on the slide deck, it's 14. Page 14 is an overview of the standards for these tiered services.

[02:04:09] Where do these standards come from? Who decides how many FTEs per 200 students or whatever? Where does that base come from? I can talk for this in particular, we had a differentiated formula.

[02:04:27] and we tried to you know not make it a ginormous cost for the school and say well approximately we think about half of it was used for class size reduction we wanted to make sure that every school had a reading specialist based on the Virginia Literacy Act requirements and then what was remaining was placed under tiered services so for this in particular it was a convert it was there was a cost to it a significant cost in 24 but we were trying to keep it minimal while still ensuring a reading specialist, which increased the costs.

[02:05:04] So that was the basis for these standards. Now before that, I don't know if there's another staff member who wants to speak to that. I'll try to do a little bit of explanation. Before we went to this type of division, we had kind of a bucket of differentiated staffing.

[02:05:23] And as we would talk to the principals about how they would use their staffing, it was primarily used for these reasons. It was for adding supports for intervention or reading, primarily in reading, and then also looking at how they reduce class sizes, and that means to add another teacher, and then like here and there, and then also looking at supports like in intervention and other types of extra TAs to add extra support throughout the day. And so when we went to the reading specialist we in order we did that with intention to guarantee that every school had that and so what it does is it puts some tighter

[02:06:02] parameters on how that staffing is used I don't know if that answers the question I guess my question is you know more on a needs based if we're talking about you know test scores and more need in a school and we're basing it on you know a literacy requirement and we're saying we're gonna put one in every school but it may be that one school needs three reading specialists or more interventionists how do we determine that you know it's not necessarily a formula i guess i want to say it's not all math

[02:06:34] based so what to say so currently it's based it's based on economically disadvantaged students by formula but we've had conversations around how do you how do you create a more dynamic staffing model based on performance right because it's not necessarily your economic yes there are correlations but your economic status does not necessarily mean what we need as far as reading and specialists and interventionists so it seems like it's more of a needs-based budget decision versus formula the first step the first stab we took at that was this year with the except the schools were calling the

[02:07:11] accelerated schools and so what we did we didn't we want to keep doing what we've been doing which is saying we got a formula based on economically disadvantage and you get what you get we talked to them and said what do you need and they specified different types of staffing someone in more intervention someone in reading someone in more professional development and so we're we we acknowledge that it's not just about like the note what's going into the school it's also what kind of results are they getting and we need to make adjustments based on that so is that in this will that be in this year's budget

[02:07:50] or have we not gotten to that point where we can actually staff based on what our needs are? I think what you're going to see in this year's budget is, because it's basically flat and worse than flat, is we can continue to adjust and toggle.

[02:08:11] And the way we arrived at what we're doing now, like this shift that Maya and Rosalind and Claire have talked about where we tried to parse out and be more transparent with the differentiated staffing that came from conversations with the board like pushing and saying hey we we think you should do it this way so I think that's part of what will happen is like you'll look at it and you'll you know you all will say well have you thought about adding this factor or we if you want to direct us to

[02:08:46] up with a different factor that you want us to bring forward we can do that too okay so i think that's where the exciting part happens with the budget development with the board is your your vision for how you want to make changes because we wouldn't be inventing the wheel there are other places that do that kind of uh do that approach a little differently than what we've been doing the differentiated model has been in place for i mean i don't know like since like the 90s early even prior to the 90s and it was novel at that time it was like really you're gonna not just stay

[02:09:23] staff based on numbers you're going to take into account this other factor and so we've been slowly trying to make changes to it without totally breaking it because it does make sense too i think that um moving away from just the one just well just the one um factor that economically disadvantage is something that we've talked about at all the all the budget meetings that i've been to for four years and the ones that I went to when I was running so what I'm very excited about now is that that seems to be taking hold a little bit so

[02:10:00] I am saying that the most positive way that I can yeah I think that it's going to be necessary it has to happen in order for us to see some like real change in a lot of these areas that I feel like we're taking we the collectively the school division is taking hits on things that's where we really have to put that focus and if it means moving things around because we have limited resources and that may be what needs to happen because you know we've got a lot there's just a lot that we've got it you know I'm just curious on the elementary level

[02:10:39] under reading specialists so I think we we're all kind of focusing a little on that we have five half times in there if you count them all up I mean I'm just curious as to how many of those are full-time teachers that are splitting schools do you have any idea or halftime people that want to be halftime so first I'll speak to why we have halftime you'll see all these decimals and this is a really a budget exercise so while we have we provide these allocations to schools we are not saying oh you must this must be a halftime position this

[02:11:18] must be a 0.32 position this must be I'll turn it over to Claire about how these decimals get turned into real people and that's a little bit of a dynamic piece because it really is each school has kind of several different buckets of funding like that would could potentially add to that reading specialist piece of it so the primary things that you see in the at the elementary level is you see that allocation for a reading specialist or a 0.5 reading specialist or whatever that is and then sometimes in not sometimes

[02:11:56] but we also have in our title one schools additional staffing that is provided to provide supports like that and so our title one schools may have an additional you know 3.5 or whatever that is attached that in most cases is used for reading support at this point and what happens is we go through staffing meetings and we've just started these me the principals come in with plans and that's where we really hear exactly what you are all are talking about in that that desire to you know they know their students they know their schools they know the programming that they really need and they know what type of staff

[02:12:32] they need to support that and so while we've got we've got the here's the amount in most cases the they'll do full-time teachers sometimes it might be full-time teacher it might be a person who's staffed partially through reading and doing that for part of their time and maybe they're a part-time title one reading teacher so that gets them to a full-time position in most of those types of positions they are usually within single schools we also have we do have staff members who want to work part-time as well and so sometimes if there's a like a half of a FTE for it they may be staffed that way where we

[02:13:11] often see cross school types of things is where I think about some of our specialist areas like in elementary art and music for example a person might be a point four at one school and a point six at that the other and we really work hard to try to put the input put positions together so that people can have full-time positions we know our hiring pools are deeper when we do that and we have people who are interested in doing that type of work we also of people that would just say I want to work part-time at a school and so it really is a kind of a dynamic piece and while this gives us some banks on the

[02:13:49] river we know that the water flows back and forth a little bit in between those banks on the river yeah that was the other part I was gonna say the reading part too like if you look at Greer they have three and a half reading and one and a half tiered services that those the tiered services can also be reading as an interventionist so and then the other thing I thought that just kind of jumped out at me we did step as part of that breaking out of differentiated

[02:14:24] staffing we also uncapped like the high schools because like out mall high school had a cap on the amount of differentiated staffing they were receiving forever because it just was a lot and we just took the cap off and so Dara has three reading specialists at out mall high school whereas he wasn't funded any prior to that it was just a blob of differentiated staffing that was kind of small and he just didn't have it so last year you all really took a big swing at specialized staffing

[02:15:00] to support kids in particular going above and beyond what was required what is required for VLA well and I'm wondering too just as we're talking about this you know when it comes to like middle and high school especially with like tiered services and reading specialists I mean What I keep hearing is if we don't catch them by fifth grade, then by the time they get to middle school, it's like, well, we don't have enough tiered services.

[02:15:23] We don't have enough reading specialists. And so then they're constantly behind. And so how do we, again, make it more of a needs based on what the kids need, not based on, well, Burley, you get one. But my guess is Burley probably needs a lot more interventionists than, well, they have two tiered services.

[02:15:43] but still, you know, I'm curious how we can work that. - So the next slide is about class size. And again, we're focusing a lot on the budget, but the reality of like how people are actually staffed and what classes actually look like are different because there's some discretion for principals to decide.

[02:16:09] So the budgeted ratio for elementary in 23 was 18.5. This includes reduced class size. That's why those numbers are a little bit lower than what we talked about earlier. FY24 was 18.4, and FY25 was 18.4.

[02:16:27] Enrollment is one driver of why actual class sizes differ, and another is just how the grade configurations fall, like how many classrooms are you going to have per grade. Depends on the number of students. And so in '23 and '24, the actual elementary average class sizes was 18.6 and 18.1.

[02:16:47] These are very close to the budgeted ratios. 24 it's there's a bigger difference because of that enrollment drop we came in under then what was projected so schools are staffed at a projection and so when there aren't as many students you end up with smaller class sizes is there a video requirement like that your class sizes have to remain below a certain level just what it says so it's like 24 and then you know you start getting up higher and I think the

[02:17:20] middle schools okay so the soq right here is what we have to keep it below 24 for elementary and then for middle and high they only just do english for some reason i think that was legislation yeah we have as our local standards are much stricter and more defined than what the state has and then each fall what we do is we do a report based on what actually happened and give it to the board in November but that shows you how it all shook out thank you so next is special

[02:17:56] education staffing um again sticking with agner herd as an example these are the steps that katie compel told me that are taken to provide the staffing so their standards they there are some general standards in the in the overall handout b but um she actually shared with me some more detailed ones that we don't typically publish in the budget book starting on page 15 which is the last sheet of paper in the staffing standards and this is a

[02:18:31] very specific with they use to staff schools and how many FTEs so if you're interested in the super detailed methodology page 15 handout b thank you okay this is a lot so um she has summarized um an example at agner hurt so um you apply they are a very detailed staffing standards and then they utilize special education student rosters to determine the number of students for each program so a base b base c base

[02:19:11] early childhood and then they project an initial staffing based on their current number of students So then when I talked about having some kind of hold back, it's because they revisit after the kids actually show up to make sure they're appropriately staffed.

[02:19:29] And so what this results in at Agner Hurt is they have one Bright Stars TA, two early childhood special education, one teacher, four TAs, two A-based teachers.

[02:19:46] So I'll just make an asterisk here. You will not see these two A-based teachers in the staffing allocation sheet. So if you go back to handout C, page two, you'll see some SPED categories there.

[02:20:02] You will not see the A-based teachers, because those are now funded in a grant of the IDEA Special Revenue Fund. So those will not show up in our discussion today, but they are funded from a different funding source. All A-based teachers? All A-based teachers, yep.

[02:20:19] The eight special education TAs are in this allocation sheet, one B-based teacher, two B-based TAs, one generalist, and no TAs. So you can see how many students each of those staff are serving. And again, you do have to do some conversion because if you have two B-based TAs, it'll show up as 1.0 FTE in the allocations.

[02:20:43] Where is C-based on here? They're all combined. So this on here, this is all combined under SPED teacher in the SPED teacher column on page two of this. Handout C? Handout C, page two. So Wagner may not have a

[02:21:12] C-based. That's what I was saying. I think you might wear on the sheet. So these, both special education and EL require, as you can see from the standard, the standards are a bit more complex.

[02:21:38] So those are not, those are not left to me. Those are left to those people who are in it every day. Whereas a lot of these other ones are more numbers-based. So the other example is English Learner staffing at Agner Hurt. It's a very similar methodology where they look at, well, what is our current need?

[02:21:57] What is our current student need? What do we project that to be next year based on patterns and what they know about the community? We've had discussions about that as a school board. And then they round their FTEs. So for example, for Agner Hurt, they're technically by our standard, they would get 3.06 FTE, but we provide 3.0 FTE.

[02:22:19] Since it's harder to add staffing, you know, for EL, it's a very specialized area, so we provide round, full-time positions for that. So Agner Hurt receives three teachers for EL.

[02:22:36] Per VDOE, the requirement is two, so you can see the comparison there. And where does that show up on Hinder and C? Also on page 2, right in the middle, the L teacher.

[02:22:58] Some schools listening in. Mary, Red Hill, Scottsville. They have no body in those positions at those schools. I took one column over here.

[02:23:18] Yep, you were, one column over. I think every school has at least 0.1. I think it's a different crowd there. He's trying to highlight it because he needs it.

[02:23:39] He's highlighted the higher level. So if you exclude those, that's 99. If you include those, it's 109. Yes, they're, I believe, outgoing but being monitored. Greer has the highest number of ELs, right?

[02:24:05] And then Woodbrook. Mountain View. Mountain View. Top three, right? The highest number of EL teachers, English language learners. Greer, Woodbrook, and Mountain View.

[02:24:24] I'm sorry, guys. It's kind of a dumb question. Remind me what our Title I schools are again. Do it by memory.

[02:24:43] Title I schools. The Title I schools are, Chandra, check me on this one. Hagner, Hurt, Greer, Woodbrook, Red Hill, Scottsville. Mountain View. Mountain View.

[02:24:58] All right. So we've got all these FTEs. If you go on Handout C, this is, I'm simplifying it.

[02:25:15] But if you go to handout C, in the very last column on page 3, you see the total number of FTE by school. So Agner Heard has 62.1. Let's assume that they have 62.1 teachers. We'll get into the differences later.

[02:25:32] If they're all teachers, on slide 18, this is how we budget for teachers. So we take an average salary cost across all of our teachers in the division for the current year. And that number is $67,687.

[02:25:51] So that's average teacher cost. We added, we budget in benefits, FICA, retirement, group life, health insurance, and dental. So the cost of a teacher this year is $94,585.

[02:26:06] That is the number that we then add to the FTE allocation by school to come up with that FTE budget. Fairly simple. The adjusted baseline is over to the right. That's just to show that we made some mid-year changes. So we had a 2% salary increase and updated calendar year 24 health rates.

[02:26:25] So those are the costs of an average teacher based on those mid-year adjustments. So that's 96,563. Now on the second, sorry, on the next slide, page 19, this is how we budget for classified position costs.

[02:26:45] So we can stay on page three of handout C because that has a lot of our classified positions in it. So for principals, assistant principals, directors, bookkeepers, nurses, custodians, learning technology integrators, and technical support specialists, we use actual position costs.

[02:27:06] So we take their individual salary amounts, we assume percentages for FICA, retirement, and group life. We take their actual health insurance plans, because this varies widely from person to person through individual dental plans and come up with a budget amount for each person at one point in time typically the fall if there's nobody in that position because it's a budget we're going to budget for even if there's no one in there what we do is we take the midpoint of the hiring range which is an estimate of well how much would a new person cost add in the same benefit assumptions use a blended health care and dental rate to come

[02:27:46] up with a vacancy rate by position. And again, these get updated. This is a fall snapshot. What we then do is add 2% salaries and then updated health rates as part of the baseline process.

[02:28:04] Can I ask sort of a tangential question? So the 2% mid-year increase is in part the SOQ-funded 2% mid-year increase. Yeah, we discussed it in November, December, and it went into effect this

[02:28:17] So, and I know that the SOQ only funds well like 67% of our positions, so do they give us just like a chunk and then we can apply it in 2% raises for all, I mean we have to make up the difference, but I guess what I'm asking is when that happened a couple of years ago, I think we had like a $1,000 bonus or something, and it was only for us, you know, 67% of our staff and we had to make it up and then some people were saying like, well why don't you give some people more, why don't you give some people less?

[02:28:48] is there um direction on that money when it comes to us from the state on this on the salary increases salary increases there are certain minimum requirements we must meet and if we meet them we get the money but it's just an increase in our revenues okay what it's it's usually um you must provide an average of whatever percent they say okay um so if you just show that on average you gave that percentage you can pull down that state money yep can we move from bonuses to

[02:29:22] salary because of retirement reasons right brs is that correct yep the salary increases would increase your retirement the bonuses would not miss and a bonus like in the governor's budget for going into 25 he's got a one percent bonus in there um what that does is in the fy26 budget we don't get re-benchmarked with that additional one percent that goes away and we go back to the same salary that's what makes the difference there

[02:29:59] this on um the 62 with agner hearth yep that's the total beginning with the page one where it says base teachers yes they're going all the way yes so if you go down this total column and you budget for each position you get to a total fte school-based ft number of 1903.4 so you multiply

[02:30:31] that by each of the positions and you get a school-based FTE budget of 174.7 million and that is the um what did i say 63 68 of our budget is right there any questions on school-based FTEs

[02:30:56] is the reason that you um do the classified position costs so differently from the average teacher cost because the range is so great that is one reason and then the other reason um is that when we build a budget we want to budget for like if you were to do a per pupil conversion we want to make sure that we're allocating an equitable amount of resources to each school

[02:31:33] so while yes some schools may have teachers that are paid more because of their experience we strive for an equitable distribution so by budgeting averages you're saying hey we're allocating this much in funding by school that you can kind of connect to the formula and that way we i think it should be a goal to try to equalize the cost per teacher the average teacher cost by school and the other reason is for classified positions a lot of the from year to year they don't change as much because they're less driven by enrollment than teachers and so when

[02:32:12] there's a lot of change from a year to year um it's very difficult to take away technically to take away people and add people and when it's not one for one and so it's just a more streamlined method that hopefully results in fewer errors so we'll move on to department ftes by 21 these make

[02:32:43] up about 14 of the budget um so we're gonna pull out handout d which is in the last pocket of your binder. So both the slide and the handout show you our organizational structure and our department based budgets are reflect that of our organization. So our main areas generally overseen by cabinet area include administration, instruction, organizational development, community engagement,

[02:33:19] communication, strategic planning, operations, and technology. And so the slide shows you and the handout shows you which departments these are budget departments but also organizational departments fall under different areas of oversight the handout also shows you the number of FTE that are budgeted within each department so in administration for example we have two departments the office of the school board and division support the office of the school board has 12 FTEs on page 2

[02:33:56] of handout d you will see that the cost of those 12 ftes is 752 580 and if you're curious about what positions those are that starts on page three so you'll see office of the school board the list of 12 ftes and that grouping equates to 752 580 dollars you're a full-time employee i mean seriously isn't that what fte stands for um yeah full-time equivalent i mean we work that much we just don't get paid that much i will bring that up it does feel like i work full-time

[02:34:35] it is 100 full-time yeah and then some i know we're like yeah we're basically volunteering on the slide i'm showing the other departments that we have that are not included in this which includes grant-funded positions like Title I, Bright Stars, those A-based teachers under IDEA, extended-day enrichment programs, community education, and child nutrition. So we also have

[02:35:07] FTEs in those areas. They're just not captured in these handouts and in the slides. So the next slide, 23, is just a repeat of the school-based positions. The same methodology is used here to determine what how we budget for each of those positions so this is done position by position so if you add up all the positions and each of the positions costs the next slide will show you the

[02:35:42] total baseline budget is 36.7 million dollars are there any questions about the department fts so i'll turn next to a negative percentage which about negative one percent of our budget goes towards lapse factor this is a savings that we estimate because we know that our positions aren't

[02:36:13] going to be 100% filled during the school year so we budget in a savings to account for that we this in the budget book it'll be shown as a department it's its own department that's just a negative number and so the way we do that is we look at historical trends of how much have we saved in salaries, FICA, VRS, health, and dental. And we try to project, well, what's an estimate of what we might see next year? So for FY25, what we've done is you can see we've added some more savings

[02:36:49] than we've had previously to try to get more accurate in our budget management. Our total lapse savings is $3.3 million. And we do add back about $300,000 because we know that's how much we project in in reclassifications meaning HR has a cycle in which they review certain positions I think it's on a five-year cycle to make sure that those positions are in line with the market and make sure no one's lagging so it's kind of a deep dive and then look at and this cycle is also published in the

[02:37:27] budget book it's updated each year so that money is dedicated toward well if we're going to look at TAs one year we can spend $300,000 on getting them up to market if needed so that's also included in laps so the total savings for a 25 baseline is 3 million and the reason why I put this section in after the FTE budgets because we're what we're doing these percentages you see under FY 25 are applied to the baseline FTE budgets that we just budgeted so that comes first then we apply a percentage of what we might see in savings next year and come

[02:38:06] up with the lapse factor my house is lapse fact how's that related to projected fund balance like if you increase what you're saying perhaps the lapse factor is part of that does that bring down your fund balance we we actually budget for lapse factor in the actual like if it's salaries we budget for it in the salary line okay so the budget for salaries is decreased by the savings But it relates to fund balance in the sense that if your salary estimate, you're not meeting your salary, you're underspending that.

[02:38:45] You're contributing to fund balance. And so if you're not accurate in this lapse factor, you're not projecting as much savings as you think you could be increasing or decreasing your fund balance. So historically, we have been underestimating-- or over-- double negative is-- underestimating what our lapse factor is.

[02:39:06] And that's been contributing to an increasing fund balance. So our goal is to not do that, because you want to spend the money in the year that you have. So that's why you're seeing an increase. And I guess the other question I had was, I like this practice of capturing the labs factor and rolling it into reclassifications.

[02:39:33] When did you start doing that? I think that's always-- yeah. Jackson used to do it. Well, I know at one time we didn't have a cycle for that. It was just a... I think there's always been a budget. Yeah. I think HR has gotten more processed in the cycle. Like there was a squeaky wheel, got the reclassification, and then we built a cycle.

[02:39:52] So it must have been within the last 10 or 12 years, but that's a great way to do that. And we do, like in '22, the reason why it's a little bit less, sometimes we'll use that as a balancing tool, say, you know what, we can't do as many reclasses because we need to balance the budget. are we good on lapse factor okay so section four we're going to focus on another department called non-departmental it's 0.5 percent of the budget but worth noting slide 28 shows you exactly what's

[02:40:26] in this department budget in the current year we have a transfer to the bright stars fund this was to make up for the funding needed that the grant didn't cover so we wanted we had all of our bright stars classrooms and programs and that was sort of the gap so we transferred school funds there and the same story for a special education IDEA and also for preschool special education fund that is a grant funded program that funds a couple of our preschool teachers or TAs and then the last one on there is a transfer to local government for licensing costs so we have a lot of shared

[02:41:03] systems that are owned by the county and so they charge us for use of those funds typically it's a per user cost and they provide us with that amount that they bill us. For the FY25 baseline we're projecting an increase for the transfer to Bright Stars per the governor's introduced budget. We are planning on not needing the transfer to special education IDEA because we anticipate some carryover funding and a greater reimbursement amount for that grant and then the transfer to the preschool Special Education Fund is staying the same, and the transfer to local government is also staying

[02:41:42] relatively flat. So that department budget is $1.2 million in FY25 as a starting point. So the next section, we'll jump ahead to department operating budgets. These budgets make up about 13% of the school fund. Similar to what you saw with FTEs, on handout E, you will see the operating budget allocation so these are not FTE allocations but dollar allocations provided to each department they're organizing this the slide is organized

[02:42:22] in the same way as oversight areas and the operating allocations are listed by department they also include transfers those are handled a little bit differently and that's why they're broken out we have for example the Department of Technology has a transfer of three point three million dollars that's not money they're expending directly out of their budget they're transferring it to a special revenue fund which is our technology replacement fund and they spend out of there to replace staff and student computers and

[02:42:57] equipment VREP is also handled separately that's managed at a more central level not by the department so it's pulled out that's the voluntary early retirement incentive program payments to early retirees and so those three categories added up together the operating allocation which is managed by each department transfers and v-rep together equals the total allocation or a total operating budget amount of 34.1 million dollars on the next slide on 31

[02:43:34] this is an example of what an operating budget looks like so what we do and to determine what a department allocation is for the following year is we use the current year's total budget allocation and then we take out one-time expenditures so in the FY24 we budgeted about two million dollars in one-time expenditures if any of that is in departments we take that out as a starting point so for building services they're starting allocation going into 25 is ten point four million dollars so what that department do to build up their budget is they

[02:44:12] they have to submit a budget request they have to stay within ten point four million dollars but they may shift because costs change. There are a lot of individual line items that may shift. So if you look closely at the chart, this is comparing the FY24 budget to their FY25 baseline submission. You can see there are slight shifts between categories, but overall their costs are what their costs are, and that's what was submitted. Anything additional over the allocation, including inflationary increases, have to be requested separately and justified in detail.

[02:44:47] So the 25 baseline budget does not include increases for inflation or other service changes. So that's what you'll see in, like, the funding request. You'll see we need X amount of dollars to cover inflation. And that is kind of pulled out separately to show you that is the change from one year to the next.

[02:45:08] And every department must submit that for each budget line. Questions about operating budgets? So if you add up everything, as I mentioned, that's $34.1 million.

[02:45:23] So now we have built all of our department-based budgets. That's all filled in. So our last piece is centrally managed school-based operating budgets. That's about 2%. I'll explain what that is.

[02:45:40] So we have budgets that show up in school-based budgets. So at Agner Hurt, for example, they have a small amount of funding that shows up on their budget page in the budget book. But it's not necessarily up to them to manage.

[02:45:56] I call them division allocations. A great example of that is substitute programs. That used to live in the school-managed operating budgets, where principals had to say, oh, no, I'm running out of sub money.

[02:46:12] I'm going to need to pull from somewhere else to pay for subs. And that was becoming problematic, especially with the rising costs of subs and the higher need. So what we did in '24 is we moved it to a division allocation saying, you know what, schools don't worry about it. We're gonna manage at a central level.

[02:46:27] That way, if there's fluctuations, we can accommodate that. And if there is an increase in sub rates, for instance, we can increase that budget as a whole rather than having schools manage that. So the highest budget drivers for these division allocations are substitute budgets, academic leadership compensation programs, stipends, and again, VRIP.

[02:46:50] This is all on handout F, which is just a one pager in the back pocket of your binder. You can see exactly all of the categories that are included in the division allocations.

[02:47:07] Most are determined either by formula or by historical trends. And so you can see school by school how much is budgeted for each of those. Why would Greer be so high, Greer and Holly? So that is for substitutes, that's based on historical spending.

[02:47:26] So that's just, if there have been spending more, we budget more for that to make sure that it's covered. Sometimes it's just a, I mean, however this sounds, but I know anecdotally schools will go through a lot of teachers having children.

[02:47:47] Yeah, it's just a relatively small school, such a high. Yeah, I know they did have a run on that recently. and I can't, I don't know what you're, yeah. - Greer doesn't support, I mean, Greer has more staff in general. - And he did have, I do remember recently, there were just, that's usually the biggest sub.

[02:48:09] - 'Cause it's your long term sub, yeah. - Anecdotally, that did happen to my kid at Halloween too. - Yeah, there was, we were a part of that one. - I just wonder like how, you know, that's just like an interesting, like, friend to look into, I think.

[02:48:25] - And that's another reason to pull it out of the school. - Yeah, for sure. - Yeah, but the full-time sub is not a part of this. That's a part of the other thing. - But during the year, if a teacher is out on a long-term absence, we will see the savings for that, but then have it in here so it nets out.

[02:48:46] So it kind of stays within the budget. And that's why we budget these in the school locations. - One of the things, just like a tangent, but one of the things that the board did in the budget this year was you looked at fill rates at schools like Greer that was having trouble filling their substitute positions and you added permanent substitutes to the school.

[02:49:10] Did we get feedback on that? It's going well. I mean, it doesn't solve the issue of teachers being out per se, but it makes for a lot better continuity in the school, which I think ultimately contributes to better teacher attendance.

[02:49:27] I've noticed lately that we've had a couple of schools that have 100% attendance. Hollimeade. Hollimeade. maybe that number will go way down what we do is we buy bagels and uh you know bagels and of course we didn't have the cream cheese last time so joe mccauley drove up to food but they were excited we got a lot of nice emails from the teachers thanking us so i hope of course is that why y'all were talking about having cream

[02:50:03] cheese tomorrow morning okay all right so we're almost there the last section is

[02:50:39] school managed operating budgets this is 3% of the budget I'm going to be referring to handout G the last handout for these to determine a school managed operating budget every school starts out with a base budget so on page one of handout G you'll see that elementary schools have a base budget of twenty 27,300. Middle have 33,600 and high has 75,600. On top of a base budget, so it's kind of like a

[02:51:16] base FTE allocation. Every school has a principal. Every school has a base budget. They're provided a per pupil allocation. For example, elementary schools get $84 per pupil. And then on top of that if for every economically disadvantaged pupil they're provided an additional $42 so those are the per pupil allocations between the base budget and the per pupil allocations this is what you might traditionally call it's discretionary in the sense that principals can develop their own budget and determine how to spend it the highest budget drivers for these tend to

[02:51:55] be supplies and materials contract services and copiers if you flip over and hand out G to the second page, you'll see what's called a program allocation. I put a note here for Allison. You had talked about providing funding based on needs. The intervention and the PALS allocations are provided based on tests and results of the students. So that's how those amounts are determined by formula based on student performance. And these tend to be used for

[02:52:32] part-time wages for additional help. Principals also have the discretion to convert these funds into FTE if they wanted to add intervention FTE to support these programs or they wanted to make a teacher whole or this is another area that they can use. Other program allocations are for bright stars, CTE, EL interpretation and tutoring, special education and athletics. And then handout

[02:53:10] not handout G the next slide just shows you just a graphic view of the school based operating budgets by per pupil you've seen charts like this for total budgets that include FTE so you'll see similar trends here the smaller schools have higher per pupil amounts because that base allocation and then the ones that are have higher economically disadvantaged students will have higher per pupil because of that per pupil allocation. As you can see high schools are a bit higher than the other two levels. Are there any questions about

[02:53:48] these school operating budgets? I've never seen them so clearly, so I really appreciate this. Did you do all this since the last meeting? Well as I said, all the handouts come directly from the budget book. So those have always been there.

[02:54:07] the slides recognize them i think this is the most in-depth yeah it's a work session we've had on the budget yeah it's really helpful thank you i think it was really smart i was also thinking this will help in like um there have been a lot of questions in the redistricting study about how staffing works and well if we lose kids what's going to happen with staffing this gives you an idea of you get staffing based on the kids so if we're moving kids it's all formula driven and everything will get adjusted as part of the budget process if there are changes so that's why it's called a baseline it's a starting point and as we have put in our new enrollment projections or put in new

[02:54:47] boundaries everything gets updated very in-depth and super helpful so um on the next yep this slide just shows you all the pieces we talked about the baseline budget amounts if you add them all altogether that equals 257.2 million. And then this is our, as I said, our starting point. So if you want to understand, well, what does 257.2 million mean? In FY24 adopted, the comparison point is

[02:55:19] 257.7. So it's very close, but what happens is we're, we projected about 4.4 million dollars based on that 2% and the healthcare. So our new starting, what I'm calling the adjusted baseline, is 261.5.

[02:55:38] If you compare the 261.5 million for our adjusted baseline to our adopted number, that's an addition of $3.8 million. So if you want to get a sense of a gap, 3.8 is one starting point. You can add the revenue gap on top of that. And that's without adding anything new. No new proposals, no comp, no health care increase.

[02:56:03] And so we're looking at, what is that? Almost five? Five as a starting point. Five million dollar gap. Without considering, without even doing proposals. Yes.

[02:56:22] And as I mentioned in the revenues, again, same with revenues. That's also a starting point. And as Mr. Reginball explained, he feels optimistic that revenues might go up. They probably won't go down. So hopefully, you know, we'll get that. I hope he's right.

[02:56:38] Yeah. He seemed very confident. I hope so. Maya, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you, Maya. It was great. You outdid yourself. Yeah, it was fantastic. If you want to see some of this again, come to the other one night.

[02:56:55] Oh, welcome. What did you say? Really great. Thank you.

[02:57:06] Are we on?

[02:58:32] Okay. Thanks very much, Christine. thank you very much maya and roslyn and everyone who helped with that that was very informational uh last thing we have is other business 10.1 other business by board members and or superintendent um i actually have something and i'm going to be very fast because i know everyone wants to get home but um this is something that's super personal to me um super important to me and i think important to the board um you know i really feel like all students and members of our school community deserve to feel safe and welcomed and included and in with that is included

[02:59:10] fighting against firearm violence especially in our schools and we should be working to avoid the harm and tragedy that shootings of any kind cause in the spaces in which we live learn work play um and so i am really wanting to see us move towards um trying to get our community to focus more on safe and secure firearm storage um and you know the statistics are staggering and i'm not going to keep us all here very long but i think it's really important that we recognize

[02:59:50] um how bad it actually is gun violence is the leading cause of death for kids in the united States more than cancer or anything else. It's gun violence. 76% of school shootings are committed with guns that come from a home. And 80% of firearm suicides by children involve guns belonging to a family member. And 76% of unintentional shootings come from an unsecured gun from the home. But I think maybe the most staggering statistic is that more than four million kids live in a house with

[03:00:29] an unsecured and loaded gun at home. And that to me is mind-blowing. So I think that this just illustrates the close connection between our role as families and community members and caregivers and guardians and the role that Albemarle County Schools plays in keeping our kids safe and keeping our schools safe. And so I would like to move to direct the superintendent and his staff to draft a resolution on the importance of safe and secure guns and how that pertains

[03:01:06] to both the students and staff of Albemarle County Schools. All right, we'll take that as a motion. Is there a second on that motion? A second. Moved by Ms. Spillman, seconded by Mr. Page. Is there any discussion on that motion? I think great i know that they're working toward that in the general assembly but we don't need to wait for them no i would love for us to be on in front of it and the white house is actually pushing to do the same so if we can be uh on the forefront of that i think it would be fantastic great well

[03:01:43] thank you very much for bringing that up um can we have a roll call vote on that christine please miss uh mr chuck pace pace yes mr page yes miss spillman yes chair lee oh miss i apologize miss

[03:02:04] Ms. Osborne? Yes. Chair Lee? Yes. So moved. Thank you. Thank you very much. Is there any other business from school board members? No. Ms. Chair Lee, I just have one thing as a reminder for the economic interest forms. Oh, yes. I do have copies here if you would like them. If not, you can complete them online, put your electronic signature and just forward them to me. That's sufficient. I do not need a hard copy.

[03:02:34] By February 1st, I think. Yes, ma'am, February 1st. February 1st. Sorry, Chair, I didn't mean to talk over you. I found the billable form, and unfortunately, if you start using it and you'd stop to save, it's locked. So I don't know if anybody defeated that problem.

[03:02:52] So just like tuck in, just be ready. Put your head down and do it. Yeah, it is signing a lot of pages, so it's going to take a long time. And for those of us that ran in this past election, we already had to do it once, and now we have to do it again. We'll have to do it every year. Yay. All right. Thanks for that reminder, Christine. All right. No other business. We are adjourned.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Coraggio Consulting · aguyonx.com