Coraggio Consulting Albemarle County School Board Budget Work Session #1, Thursday, February 19, 2026 Date: Thursday, February 19, 2026 Place: Albemarle County Public Schools / School Board meeting, Virginia Length: 1h 49m (video) Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC2aUfYrPkI 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [00:01:45] With the roll call so that each and every board member or cabinet member or support person who is here with us can introduce themselves and you can just get a feel for their voice if you're joining us online. [00:02:03] I'm Rosalind Schmidt, Chief Operating Officer. Claire Curry, Western Albemarle Student Representative. Kate Acuff, Jack Jewett District. Bob Beard, Samuel Miller District. Ellen Osborne, Scottsville District. Rebecca Berlin, Whitehall District. [00:02:19] Allison Spillman, At-Large Representative. Jim Dillenbeck, Ryo District. Judy Lee, Rivanna District. Matthew Hawes, Superintendent. Josiah Black, Chief Legal Officer. Chandra Hayes, Assistant Superintendent of Instruction. Christine Thompson, Clerk of the Board. [00:02:37] And Patrick McLaughlin, Assistant Superintendent. Thank you so much, and thank you to our police officers who serve us every day and are here today to also keep us and the public safe. And I'd also like to thank you again. We have Claire Curry here as our student representative. [00:02:55] And as many of you have seen, we talked about this a bit last week, the student representatives from Monticello, Western, AHS, and Community Lab will rotate so that we will have a different board member each time. We will now stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. [00:03:14] One nation visible. We will now pause for a moment of silence. [00:03:36] Thank you. [00:03:55] The next piece of our agenda today is the actual approval of our agenda. Do I have a motion to approve tonight's agenda? I move we approve tonight's agenda. Moved by Ms. Lee. Do I have a second for that? Second. [00:04:11] Seconded by Mr. Dillenbach. All those in favor? Aye. Our agenda for tonight is approved. So we are now moving into our budget work session. This is budget work session one, and Ms. Maya Kumazawa, our director of budget and planning, and budget guru behind this amazing budget book is here to introduce us to the budget book and to talk us through tonight's agenda. Thank you. I have two mics. Fancy. Yeah. I'm Maya Kumazawa, [00:04:47] Director of Budget and Planning, and I'm here to facilitate tonight's work session. I will also be joined by Brooke Conover, Senior Budget Analyst, and Chandra Hayes, Assistant Superintendent. [00:05:07] So, as we mentioned, we want to introduce especially the new board members to our budget document that, does everyone have one or anyone? Okay. The budget book is broken out into sections with letters A through G. The first section, section A, is an overview for the whole budget. And then the last section, section G, those are all of the variables and inputs that are used to develop all the budgets. [00:05:35] And the budgets you will see are in Sections B through F. Section B is a detailed overview of revenues. Sections C, D, and E are detailed expenditure budgets. And Section F is special revenue funds. This evening, we will focus mostly on school fund expenditures. [00:05:54] So that's Sections C, D, and E. And then next week, we'll look at revenues, which is Sections B and F. There will be a lot of flipping through the book because while B through F are sort of the budget outputs, the assumptions that are used to determine those budget amounts are all in Section G, and then the kind of qualitative overview of, well, what does this all mean is all in Section A. [00:06:23] and so that's why we're kind of flipping everywhere but it does make sense if you wanted to start out with a qualitative overview of what's changing seeing all the budgets and then in the end what's supplemental is what's driving those decisions this will make more sense as we go through it as our budget process aligns with our strategic plan learning for all it is in direct alignment with our third goal which is equitable and transformative resources so our budget aims to do that is to provide equitable and transformative resources to all of our schools and communities separately from the strategic plan we have budget [00:07:02] goals these that were adopted several years ago and these are pretty much the scaffold by which we build up the budget to summarize fiscal responsibility we align resources with our mission to support student success community engagement family staff business and nonprofit partners and community members help shape and inform our work To attract and retain a strong workforce, we prioritize competitive compensation through market-aligned salaries and benefits. [00:07:35] And we also focus on sustainable operations using best practices to manage facilities, transportation, and operational services efficiently. Every proposal that we bring forward tonight, including this evening, is aligned with our strategic plan and school board priorities. [00:07:52] decisions are informed by data using performance measures and logic models to guide investments and to ensure that funds are used effectively so this is an overview of our expenditures this is the same these three part these three pie charts show the same expenditures of 311 million dollars that's proposed in the fy27 draft funding requests we'll start first with the purple one by expense type this can be found on page c13 and i forgot to mention every slide has yellow [00:08:31] highlighted page numbers and so you can look at the slide and then you can reference the budget book just to see how everything is connected so we'll start on page c13 and that page shows what the money is actually going towards what is it paying for so the way we categorize them is by salaries, benefits, other wages, operations and transfers. The second way you can slice the data is by state reporting category or function or sometimes called program. What is the actual program that those expenses are [00:09:07] going towards? And those categories are defined by the state and that's this is how we report our expenditures so that the state receives data from other school divisions and they're comparable. They're pretty set for every school division and those functions are instruction, administration, attendance, and health, technology, building services, transportation, and transfers. And then the third way you might look at our expenditure budget is whether a budget is school-based or department-based. A school-based expenditure is when you can [00:09:42] tie an expense directly to a physical location like a school building. This would be the case for our teachers, our principals, our nurses, our custodians, locations, most of the staff who travel to and from a physical location every day. [00:10:00] Department-based is a different type of budget, and that's for budgets where the staff and the operating expenses serve the division as one unit, and you can't break down somebody's job between schools. So the best example of this are bus drivers, and they serve multiple schools, and so we budget them as a division-wide expense and we don't break down exactly what portion of their FTE is serving which school. That lets us be more flexible in how we staff our routes and it's also more indicative of this is a division [00:10:37] expense, it is not linked to any school. So all three of these pie charts have a total dollar value of three hundred and eleven million dollars which is the expenditures that we'll be reviewing this evening. In section A we outline in detail exactly what is changing from the FY 26 adopted budget to the FY 27 draft request so it is a budget to budget change and the reason why we're looking at budget to budget is because we're still in the current budget year and we don't have actuals yet so most comparisons that we talk about will be [00:11:14] from one budget to the next once we finish out this year we'll start showing actuals and that will differ from the budget but the best comparison point is is the adopted budget to the draft funding request. The FY26 adopted budget was $284 million. [00:11:31] And then the middle column shows exactly what changes are being applied to get to that draft funding request number that we've been looking at. These categories include a baseline adjustment, non-discretionary changes, new schools, workforce investments, service reductions, and new proposals. [00:11:56] Another way we can look at expenditures is by per pupil. This essentially means if you took the whole budget and you divided it by the number of students that the budget is serving, how much is each pupil costing us in terms of expenditures? [00:12:12] And so you can do this for any budget year, but as an example, if you look at the FY26 adopted budget, as I showed on the previous slide, was $284 million. Then that middle column showed the changes, which is $27 million. [00:12:27] And then the third column is what the proposed funding request is. The per-people expenditures, those are, if you look at other divisions, those are calculated differently. There's no exact set way of exactly how it should be calculated. [00:12:44] In most cases, though, capital expenses are not included, because as you can imagine, capital expenses will vary significantly from year to year. Are you building a new school? Are you not? And it would just skew the data. So typically, capital and debt service is not included. [00:13:01] As you know, there is a one-time transfer to capital included in that $311 million, so I've provided an adjusted number that's $307 million if you take out the one-time transfer to capital. So that's the numerator. The denominator is the number of pupils. [00:13:17] That also could vary depending on how you wanted to calculate it. For our K-12 population, we have about 13,800 students. That was the projection for the current year, and the projection for next year is also around that. So the number of students, K-12, is not planned to significantly change from one year to the next, so that's not driving changes in the per pupil amount. [00:13:41] Another number you could use is pre-K to 12 students, so including preschool as part of the student count. Normally, we don't do that because the state ADM, or the state average daily membership, the number that they use to determine how much money they give us doesn't include preschool. [00:13:59] But in reality, we are serving hundreds of preschool kids and they cost money. And so that is, it would be a more realistic way to look at, well, how much is each child costing rather than dividing it by a number just 'cause it's used in other formulas. But that is, the K-12 number is typically what you'll see throughout the budget book. [00:14:18] And so if you use pre-K to 12 students, which is our actual number of enrolled students, and you divide by the budgets, that's the per pupil amount. So in the FY26 adopted budget is $20,000. per pupil, the change was $1,900. [00:14:34] And then if you add in, if you update the numerator with the draft funding request, and divide it by the pre-K to 12, you can see a range of $21,000 to $22,000, depending on what you use. The 9.5% increase that you see, that is the same as the total expenditure increase, and that's because the number of students is staying the same. [00:14:59] If the number of students were increasing, you would see an increase that might be a little bit less. This is just a chart I pulled using available public data from the VDOE about what per pupils look like. [00:15:14] This is a list of all Virginia cities and counties with a local composite index of greater than 0.5. Our local composite index is 0.64, and that just is an indication of how our budget is structured. A majority of our budget, three quarters of it, is funded locally, and then one quarter of it funded by the state and so a lot of these counties have similar structures where the locality is paying more than the state because of the lci the lci is capped at point eight which is why it [00:15:46] doesn't go all the way up to one i'll pause there and see if you all have any questions before i turn it over for discussion for just this section and throughout the presentation we built in pauses like this so that you don't have to save everything for the end and we can have more focused discussion it helps because I know a number of us have put questions forward and my gut is if you kind of look the probably the most common one is and we that we both have as well as that we get from constituents all the time is you know what what is included in or and or why the increase over the [00:16:26] last five years um in per pupil so I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that now or if that's something you want to come back to as you kind of go through the questions - I think that's a good question. So as I said, because the enrollment number budget to budget is fairly flat, what's driving the increase in the per pupil is just the increase in expenditures. [00:16:49] And so that's what's shown here, and we will be covering each of these categories in more detail through the rest of the evening. And we are working on some more analyses about prior years. This is an example for how you might look at it, but this information exists in every budget book for a long time. [00:17:08] We have a Section A and we have all the changes in Section A of what is changing in terms of the expenditures. Other questions from my colleagues? Or discussion. [00:17:24] Or discussion. Anything you want to touch on at this point? I'll move forward then. This slide you'll see is a repeat from what you saw last week. [00:17:40] The purpose of it is to show how much of our budget is already set. If we maintain the service level that we have now and we move that forward one year and we keep all the same people and we update costs that's what that purple area is showing and then the the gray and the green and the orange those are the new costs that we're adding or what new program changes or things that will look different next year and the things that have monetary value attached to them the first step in developing this baseline budget which is in purple is by building [00:18:18] up a baseline budget we start from what we call a zero based budget so we start with nothing we start at zero and then we build up from there we build up every single FTE every single allocation to the school use all the salary and benefit information that we have in the fall and we build up a budget from scratch to build up the purple section and then we add in okay well if we want to maintain the current services if we want to maintain our contracts if we want to maintain, for example, our partnership with KTEC. How much would that cost in terms of cost increases, even though we're not changing partnerships or contracts? Cost increases are [00:18:58] included as well. And then after that, after we've added the non-discretionated contractual costs, then we say, okay, well, what's changing next year? We're adding two new schools, three, if you think about it in a different way. We have workforce investments, including compensation, working conditions and benefits, and then what we have left is $6.9 million or about 2% of the budget. [00:19:23] That's really at the discretion of the school board to say, "Okay, well, we have this much money allocated based on the formula from the state and local government. What's the best way to use that?" In order to build the baseline budget, there are several inputs, so you'll see some reference to Section G. [00:19:43] We use a projected enrollment number by school and grade. We have adopted staffing standards that determine the level of service. We have updated benefit rates. And then we have inflationary and contractual changes, and I'll go through each of those. [00:20:01] We'll start first with enrollment. Since the pandemic, we have grown very slowly but steadily. We're projecting 14,174 students next year when including preschool. In this chart, K-12 growth is about 4%, but what's interesting is preschool growth is much more significant, a 77% increase. The orange column to the right is what the funding request is based on and what we apply the staffing standards to. Another metric we use is economically [00:20:35] disadvantaged student rates. There are four specific metrics that we look at. So you can see each school has four columns. So I'll go through each of those. The first column, which is in light blue is the direct certification rate for k-12 students so this is um in the fall of 2025 we looked at how many students are directly certified by for government services and this would be like food stamps or other federal identifiers and we take the number of students who are qualified for that and then we divide it by the number of students in the school that gets you the rate for [00:21:13] what we call direct certification the second column in the dark blue is the 2025 free and reduced lunch rate in order to get this we take the number of students and families who have applied for free and reduced lunch we divide that by the total number of students in the school and that gets you a percentage of the free and reduced lunch rate knowing that we have nine schools that are in the community eligibility program or cep that program provides free and reduced lunch without the need for an application and because we have that program in place at most of [00:21:50] our schools that free and reduced lunch number is not quite accurate at those CEP schools because you're not applying for it so it's bad data in order to normalize for that what we've done is looked historically at well what's the difference between the direct certification rate which that methodology hasn't changed and the difference between free and reduced lunch rates before they were designated as CEP and we look at trends and we extrapolate well what is probably the true free and reduced lunch rate if they weren't CEP that's what the orange column is showing that's sort of our the [00:22:29] number that we use for CEP schools knowing that the free and reduced lunch rate is not accurate for non CEP schools we stick with the free and reduced lunch application rates finally the fourth column is a is a metric we've started in this budget process is what I'm calling the economically disadvantaged rate. [00:22:50] This is a different rate that we have been using for applications for federal title funds. And in this methodology, it takes the direct certified number of students, applies a 60% premium or multiplies it by 1.6 and says, okay, well, this is a better general, more conservative estimate of how many students are actually economically disadvantaged because of the flaws you see in free and reduced lunch. There might be stigma tied to applying for it, and there are other reasons that it might not be a true indicator. Whereas a direct certification number is a more solid number, but you know it's not fully representative. [00:23:28] So by applying a premium factor, you're getting a better sense of the needs of the school. So that is, throughout the budget document, we're calling that the economically disadvantaged rate. The orange column, the used free and reduced, the adjusted free and reduced rate, That one is used for developing target class sizes and other differentiated staffing like reading specialists. [00:23:53] But then we have shifted towards using the economically disadvantaged rates in other areas like providing school operational funding or providing staffing like APs and clerical. And the reason for that is because it would be a significant cost increase to change our methodology all at once. [00:24:12] We're slowly trying to bring that in, in areas where there isn't a huge financial impact, knowing that it is probably a better metric to use. This is the same chart, but for middle and high schools as well. [00:24:33] The next piece of data we use that drives increases in our budget is the number of special education students. While our general student population has grown fairly slowly, the special education population has seen a 13% increase in the years in this chart. [00:24:52] Special education students require a greater level of service, and that's seen in the staffing ratios that we provide. And those staffing ratios are on page G16, they're very detailed, you can see exactly. We take the number of special education students and apply a ratio to them, and that's how the staffing is determined. [00:25:10] And you can see those ratios are, student to staff ratios are fairly small. Also while special education student enrollment is increasing, the severity of disabilities have also increased at an even higher rate. The more severe the disability, the more resources are required to ensure that students receive the services needed to learn. [00:25:34] So I've mentioned the staffing standards a few times now, but this is several pages in section G, G5 to G18, where we outline all of the school staff based at each school and we determine a way to ensure that resources are allocated fairly. [00:25:53] So what's shown on this slide, these positions do make up a majority of FTE budgets, but these are classroom teachers in the purple table. For kindergarten through third grade, we have a target class size of 20.3 students per teacher. [00:26:08] And then as the free and reduced lunch, again, we're using the adjusted free and reduced lunch rates, as those rates go up, the ratios get smaller. So more teachers are provided for a lower number of students. For fourth and fifth grade, our base target class size is 22.5, and then you can see how those ratios go down with different demographics. [00:26:31] For sixth through twelfth grade, the base target class size is 23.75 students, and then you can see again the different thresholds for free and reduced lunch. So this may be the first time that returning board members have seen a table in this way. [00:26:52] We have worked over the last year to simplify these standards to make them more transparent and accessible to decipher. Previously, we did not have established target class sizes. Instead, we provided base teacher staffing and then additional fractional FTEs depending on every free and reduced lunch student. [00:27:12] This was done very incrementally, so schools would go up or down by fractions of FTEs each year, and there was not a clear goal of what the class size should be. So this change has led to some shifts, some schools gained FTE and some schools lost FTE. [00:27:29] Overall, we maintained a net zero financial impact throughout the division by making this change. The green table on the right is another staffing standard that we recently revised to promote, again, a simple and transparent standard that wouldn't fluctuate so widely from year to year. [00:27:46] So there is stability and kind of an expectation of a staffing level. So for example, we have reading specialists on here. They're provided for one reading specialist per 100 to 250 free and reduced lunch students depending on the level. [00:28:03] Other tiered services, these are often used for math and reading interventionists and specialists. They're assigned based on academic performance and size, kind of in these broader bands. [00:28:18] All right, I would also like to mention that the staffing at a school, they make up on average 93% of a school's budget. The other 7% of a school budget goes to operation. So it's a very small percentage of the total budget and you can see what those are. [00:28:37] We have, we provide general allocations. This is calculated by a base budget level and then additional money provided per pupil. And this funding is used for supplies, materials, contracts, services, copiers, and just day-to-day office supplies. [00:28:55] allocations are allocated to schools that have or host those certain programs they include preschool special education classrooms interpretation career and technical education supplies and athletics and then the third bucket that we call supplemental pay this is the largest part of the operating portion and this is provided to schools based on enrollment and staffing levels and used for tutoring substitute pay stipend pay overtime and temporary wages and the this is this is laid out [00:29:29] line by line in section g you can see exactly every school and how much they're getting for every one of these items so i'll pause for questions i have two questions um the first and i briefly brought this up in our call this week but when we're looking at the baseline the 287 what cuts were considered prior to adding on additional services and you may not have those answers right in front of you but I think that's something that's really important for us to look at if we're increasing our budget what what did we [00:30:05] look at that's not working well that we cut I noticed the EDEP staff was reduced significantly but where else did we analyze and and the reason I'm bringing this up is last year when we made the difficult decision to get rid of FLESS even though it was a program I loved you supported with a lot of data that showed that it wasn't working and it was a cut that was not money previously was not money well spent I would like to see if there's other areas in our budget that there are things that money is not being effectively or efficiently spent when we [00:30:41] got to that baseline because I don't think any of us could say that you know if we just maintained everything that everything's perfect there's got to be things that aren't going smoothly so I don't know if you want to pause there if you had anything to say or if you want to come back to that it was a big question I know I would just make a general comment is that we scrubbed and scrubbed in the last two years we sort of made those reductions where we knew we had evaluated and knew it was possible right I think going into this budget process was a little bit different because we didn't we kind of [00:31:16] exhausted the list. We do have ongoing logic model reviews and program evaluations like for example this year we did a program evaluation on our AVID program and found that it had a strong return on investment so we would continue that but honestly I don't through the process that we've gone through if you look in the budget notebook there are some programs that are in yellow and that means that they are they are in in the process of improving but not as strong as they could be and we have our [00:31:54] eye on them but almost everything that this board has invested in over the last several years is working and is having the results that it's intended to have but we keep we keep reviewing them and we meet monthly to do those reviews. [00:32:12] Just as a follow-up, I think on that, and I think this is one of the questions that I submitted, I do think we would like to look at those things in yellow and just understand the basic of those decisions and then what I always say is then, what is the mark to say, okay, if not improvement by X, what is the next step? [00:32:35] Apologies. again yeah thank you and then my other question had to do with sped as you said we've seen a consistent growth especially post-covid of students needing specialized services and i guess my bigger concern and i would like some more information on this is you know one of the three things that we talk that is talked about as um what do you call them um your key priorities one of them is strengthening targeted supports for SPED but unless [00:33:11] I'm looking at it wrong the overall SPED budget is decreasing so while we're putting $300,000 into these specialized positions the overall amount spent on SPED for the next fiscal year is actually going down and so I would like to learn a little bit more about that would you be willing to share I'd like to look into it but I don't know yeah okay and I can send an email and we can follow up but that just sparked my memory when you said that i want to get some comparison on that so i will follow up with an email and get some information yeah thank you got a question [00:33:46] about enrollment projections i know we've chatted a little bit about this and the growth in certain areas and how do we plan for that i noticed that from last year to this year enrollment was down slightly and the projection is that it will be up slightly for next year can you speak to how those estimates are made sure um so every year we we do a 10-year projection but the 10-year projection is updated each year based on the latest year's data that gets folded in to the [00:34:23] past 10 years of data so we look at the past 10 years of data whatever is most recent and we look at the trends of cohort progression how are students moving from one grade to the next and there's definitely patterns with that recently we've seen an increasing rate of students coming in in first grade for example and not at all the schools but at some of the schools we have patterns where at some schools students will not stay for sixth grade and then come back in the ninth grade and so we have 10 years of data by school and grade level that looks at that and we kind of we build a regression to say okay well what might next year look like based on past [00:35:02] trends for areas that are growing faster than others that have development we use a more aggressive assumption so it's it's all based on historical data but the assumptions you can use do you look back three years six years or nine years those can be changed by growth area to grow schools at different rates that's the that's the gist of it for kindergarten we look at birth rates five years prior gotcha other questions from my colleagues [00:35:45] We'll keep moving through to our inflationary and contractual changes. So this was shown as a non-discretionary item of $1.2 million. That $1.2 million doesn't really tell the full story because there are ups and downs. [00:36:02] On A31, these are outlined in even more detail. But on this slide, I'm showing the general increases that contribute to this category. So the first is an increase in technology operations and technology replacement. [00:36:18] The second is an increase in building services operations. The third is an increase in Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Program or VRIP for short. We also have an increase to our healthcare rates. This is the anticipated change when we build in the plan year 27 rates, which is a projection. [00:36:39] This 1.8 million doesn't capture the entire healthcare fiscal to fiscal year increase. is the impact of plan year 2027 on fiscal year 2027 and then other changes of 0.2 million dollars so these total up to much more than 1.2 million dollars but we actually are seeing a windfall with the VRS rates those are going down for the next two years by a significant amount and so we're seeing 3.2 million dollars in school fund savings for our the contribution we put for the employer portion of VRS is going down by more than $3 million that combined with [00:37:17] the increases at the top of the slide result in the net increase of 1.2 million dollars of non-discretionary so I'll spend a little bit more time on health insurance because while it's not a huge change in this budget process it has been a huge change in previous budget processes so I just wanted to provide a little bit more background on that. ACPS and Albemarle County have a self-funded health plan and this means that instead of an insurance company [00:37:53] instead of when a traditional model an employer purchase coverage purchases coverage for their employees through a company and that company offers access to a provider network they create the plan design and they set the rates that the group pays for the coverage. [00:38:12] The insurance company also takes on the risk for insuring that group. In our self-funded model, instead of us paying an insurance company to take on that risk, the premiums that the employees and we pay go into the healthcare fund. [00:38:28] Those are the revenues that go into a fund, and then claims are paid out directly from this fund. administrative costs a stop-loss reinsure stop-loss insurance a wellness amount and then a reserve balance that reserve balance is there because we assume the risk of claims and so it's a required reserve that we have to maintain and it's a budgeted balanced balanced budget revenues on the left and expenditures on the right and it's all contained within the health care fund we [00:39:07] We in recent years have been dipping below the required reserve levels that are needed to maintain stability in the fund. So rates have been increasing at a significant rate to keep up with the number of claims that are being paid out. In this chart, we're seeing 108% increase in terms of how much ACPS is contributing to the healthcare fund. [00:39:30] So that's in 2022-23, we were a little less than $20 million. In this proposed budget, we're approaching $40 million in premiums that we're paying towards health insurance coverage. Another non-discretionary cost is a new school cost. [00:39:51] The construction of Mountain View Upper Elementary School is ongoing and has been approved by the board. With the opening of Mountain View Upper, we are opening also a new school called Mountain View Primary in the current building location. And so the way that these budget costs are presented is that we first start with kind of a pro forma, what is the projected Mountain View Elementary School for next year if they were one school, if they were status quo in terms of their operations. [00:40:23] Given the new costs and new enrollment numbers, this is the comprehensive cost of the elementary school. So that's kind of our starting point. Then we budgeted, well, what does a Mountain View primary school budget cost? [00:40:39] That's on page D29. And then we developed a budget for Mountain View upper elementary school on D31. And so the increase in cost between a status quo pro forma Mountain View elementary school and then the increased cost in the two new schools combined, that change is what's being defined as part of the $2.2 million in new school costs for Mountain View Primary and Mountain View Upper Elementary School. [00:41:10] It was a fairly similar methodology for ACE Academy at Lambs Lane. I thought it was simpler to look at it this way. To start with, well, what's the budget for ACE Academy Lambs Lane? You can see it on page D71. [00:41:26] But we can subtract out the costs for students and teachers shifting from their base schools to ACE Academy Lambs Lane. So the net cost of this school is, what's the proposed cost of the new school minus the savings we're seeing because students and teachers will shift from Bay schools to Hayes Academy, Lambs Lane. [00:41:49] And that net cost is $2.1 million. And I'll pause there. Questions from the board. I'm not sure I understood the increases in health insurance, how it came to the 108%. [00:42:12] It's the amount that we paid in 22-23 versus the amount we're proposing to pay for the next fiscal year. I think the 30, the percents on the right kind of confuse me a little bit. I get it now. But I don't know where the 18, oh, I see, from last year. [00:42:30] Yep, the orange dots represent the year-to-year increase. The columns represent the dollar amount. And then the overall increase in those five years is the 108%. Are people just sicker? I mean, the data, the costs, we are paying higher claims costs. [00:42:53] Yeah, it's medical cost inflation. So the, Maya, the bars, is that the reserve level? No, the bars are our expenditures, what we're paying for the fund. I know that's a countywide thing, I say in the county, but this screen is the schools, correct? [00:43:16] Yes. Or is that everybody? This chart is for schools' expenditures. The fund itself is everybody. do you know if they're seeing similar trends with non-school people I don't know yeah question I'm really curious if I have anecdotally heard that teachers are the healthiest employees are the healthiest yeah even with the Petri dish of kids that's amazing teachers are the heavy yeah maybe right they build up the virulence yeah obviously we just with a number of employees we have make [00:43:52] up the bulk of that health fund we do not bifurcate the data by employee type and this and that but the county gov is experiencing the exact same percentage rates because we move together right yeah i just i wonder and this has been brought up i think for the last few years it's you know a cost that we have no control over um and is there any anything that can be done to cut these health care costs that are you know 12 of our budget off the top i mean we've had as you know conversations over the years and there's been intentional actions to control cost right plan [00:44:29] design changes opening the employee clinic right um we had a couple bad years of some high cost claimants right um i am happy to preview this current year was much better which is why you're seeing that um who would have thought 18 seems good but better than the last two years right and so we're seeing hopefully that more of a trend of a reset i'm looking at dan if there's anything else dad is there data to show the impact of the clinics and how that's impacted our our costs yeah [00:45:01] it's coming currently our colleagues in the county government in the department of finance and budget are doing some work around return on investment to try to capture that data they're using data on the clinic visits the services provided what would that cost under our insurance plan compared to the costs of providing it at the clinic. So we'll get that ROI data probably in a couple months. We're almost at a year, right? When it opened? [00:45:33] I'm sorry. We're almost at a year from when it opened? I believe it's a year in March. Yeah, it would be interesting to see what that data shows. Will the county save money if it did not self-fund and have insurance companies take on the risk? That's a great question. The general rule of thumb is that by going on a fully insured plan you do great in your catastrophic years because the insurance company pays those gigantic claims [00:46:07] that would wipe out your reserve. The challenge is when you're fully insured that insurance company is not going to lose money for more than one year. Your rates are going to go through the roof the next year to make up that loss. We carry stop-loss insurance so that when we get those catastrophic claims, after a certain dollar value, it is reimbursed into the health care fund. [00:46:33] Thank you. I know that one of the potential cost savings in opening the clinics was pharmacy costs. When you're getting the update on the data, I would love to see that, if there's a genuine savings there. [00:46:52] anyway and you did say that I know we had two or three years of catastrophic costs that triggered our stop-loss insurance I know at the time we talked about whether though that that limit the stop-loss limit I think it was like $300,000 per claim should be increased or decreased or so that's a question the pharmacy that and then in terms of administrative costs I know that we had to contribute to the opening of the two clinics are we still open are we also contributing to the [00:47:31] management of those clinics that's part of that administrative cost yes the operation of the clinics we do pay a contractor to do all of that and so all of those costs are woven in as part of that overall package in terms of the stop loss we have raised that stop loss limit just like a fully insured health insurance company stop-loss insurance companies are going to lose money when you get those catastrophic claims they increase their premiums for the upcoming year so we did [00:48:07] see some uh raise in those premiums and to mitigate that increase we did increase our stop-loss limits so it went from 300 to i believe 350 and i think it's 400 000 now okay so we eat it up to 400 Okay. Thank you, Dan. [00:48:28] Maya, you mentioned a savings on VRS contributions from ACPS. Is that an anomaly? $3 million is significant. Is that unusual? [00:48:44] It is. We have seen fluctuations in the past. This is probably one of the more significant fluctuations. This is determined by the VRS board and that's just based on the value of of their investments and how they're changing. So it's across the board for the state. [00:49:05] - I have one question on the new school costs. Were those anticipated costs or unforeseen additional costs as we planned out the new schools? - They were not, they were anticipated. - Okay. [00:49:21] - Other questions? So I have two questions. Back to the first slide, just on the technology, I just wanted to make sure I understood what went into that number and that increase. Yep, that is a question we've received, so we're actually working on analyzing that and getting you the details. [00:49:41] And then on the last slide, on the Ace Academy lands lane opening and those costs, those startup costs, do we anticipate that being just this year's startup costs? If you look at the projections for that building, it's not meant to be at full capacity for a few years, And so should the board expect additional startup costs as we staff up that building to full capacity? [00:50:10] The cost that's shown is a recurring cost. It's the first year of recurring costs that will show up every year starting next year. We don't anticipate any additional costs on top of that as we are staffing the building as if it were full. [00:50:28] And we don't at this point anticipate more new school costs. Now, if there's growth in the division, we would show that the budget-to-budget growth and then the cost for growth. That would be shown separately. But in something that's considered a startup cost. [00:50:44] Yeah, I think some examples, I think, would help. So these are not startup costs. Like, if I think of a startup cost, like making sure we have copiers and all the materials to start up, we are funding that from the project. These are your recurring costs of an additional facility, right? [00:51:01] So we have a full-time nurse at every school. mountain you has one nurse now they will have two one at each facility right you'll have a principal a lead custodian so those are the these are the net new school costs that are recurring not okay because it gets your country a point in my mind that's not a startup cost the utility cost of these buildings um so their staff like they're i wouldn't say their staff like they're full their staff like what you would need to operate a second facility as you get as the enrollment grows that's That's when you add the teachers, and that would be the additional costs in the future years. [00:51:37] Okay. Let me think about that for a little bit. Thank you. Any other questions before we move on? Thank you so much. Hi there. [00:51:58] I'm Brooke Conover, Senior Budget Analyst. I'm going to speak a little bit about compensation, which is typically one of our largest costs in any given budget, and for fiscal '27, it's about $7.8 million. year we are having two different percent increases for different groups of employees for our licensed employees I'm sorry would you just speak up just a little bit sure for our licensed employees 3.75 and for our employee support personnel it is 4.25 now along with those we have a subset of employees [00:52:35] that are confidential employees these employees do not because of the nature their work belong to either of the bargaining units these employees might be positions such as principals ap's directors but sometimes they're also employees that are because of the nature of the area that they work in um are some you know deal with confidential information and also cannot be covered by a unit so this could also apply to an office associate that might be working in fiscal services or human resources and so along with the prescribed increases for the bargaining groups we [00:53:15] also want to make sure that the non-unit employees are taken care of so for employees that are pay grade 20 and above they would also be at 3.75 and for those at 19 and below 4.25 we do have two different increases this year um and our employee support personnel are at a higher level of uh increase and this has intentionality behind it in that the that bargain group has some of our lowest paid employees and so there was the desire for them to receive um a larger possible increase [00:53:55] we also have a compensation strategy that we've had for a while which is that we have an adopted market, a competitive market, and we look at what each entity in this competitive market does in terms of an increase. The idea is not necessarily that we're right at exactly the middle of what this market basket does, that we want to be above it, at least a little bit. And so we target about 10% above. The adopted market, these are all school districts [00:54:33] that are within the commonwealth of virginia they tend to be school districts with similar similar characteristics to us including their instructional programming and sometimes they are simply ones that are in physical proximity to us because this is um you know we compete with our neighbors um for 25 26 this market uh adopted market uh their average salary was about three to four percent, and we gave three percent, and so we don't yet know what this adopted market will [00:55:10] be doing for next year. For working conditions and benefits, the items that are on this slide are just part of what was in our collective bargaining agreements. The ones that we've chosen to list here are ones that had budgetary impact. Not everything that's in the collective bargaining agreements lost money but the items on here you know this is about four million dollars [00:55:43] out of our budget which is dedicated for these items now as i said this is just a subset and there is much more and much more detail and information that is posted on the collective bargaining website on under human resources but i wanted to just call out a few of the items here there is a new pay scale for special education specialists and so this includes school psychologists occupational therapists physical therapists and speech language pathologists the this scale was [00:56:23] developed separate from the licensed teacher pay scale the the rates on this scale are based on adopted market data indicating that we were low and this scale is now also a step scale and will be treated just like the teacher scale going forward so subject to the same percent increases same modifications i'd also like to mention that the licensed planning time and specifically for [00:56:58] elementary uh the um prior to the collective bargaining agreement the planning time within elementary was somewhat inconsistent and so now there is a consistent standard where licensed employees will get at least 250 minutes a week and with no fewer than 50 consecutive minutes of daily there are of course some other parameters around this and a lot of verbiage which you can look out [00:57:33] there but this is a big change and a nice way to be very very transparent and consistent there's also some guidelines around the number of meetings that can happen during planning time secondary also gets planning time there weren't really any changes to how that has been treated but with the collective bargaining agreement there's now consistency around that also duty-free lunches or duty-free meal breaks for licensed employees they will now be provided a duty-free lunch period [00:58:09] for every scheduled work day and for fiscal 27 this will be for at least 25 minutes in starting in fiscal 29 then that will be increased to 30 minutes so that is a great quality of working distance change for our esp employees they also will get at least a guaranteed 30 minute unpaid duty-free meal break if they are working 30 or more hours in a week or [00:58:50] at least five hours in a day. If it's a shift that's way less than that, having a 30-minute guarantee break doesn't necessarily make sense. I'd also like to mention the paid parental leave. This is a fairly large change, and so employees who meet the eligibility standards and complete the process, an application process, will be granted six weeks of continuous paid parental leave. This does not get deducted from any other types of leave that they may have accrued. And this is for the purposes of parental leave for birth, adoption, or [00:59:30] placement of a child with that employee. And I know that you actually heard a lot of this information about a month ago, but if you have any questions or discussion. Any questions? I noticed that non-bargaining unit employees are also [01:00:01] getting raises 4.25 and 3.75. Could you talk about that? Yes. So the non-bargaining unit employees, and I don't have the today's number, but it's a little more than 200 employees. So it's not a small amount of employees. In any other year, they would just, we would be giving an increase and people would get, you know, their salaries increased just like the year we're in right now. [01:00:28] But these employees don't belong to a unit because of the nature of their job. And I mean, in a leadership position you might certainly understand well that's management but it certainly would not be keeping up with market standards to not give any increase the 3.75 is for those that are pay grade 20 and up that actually aligns with the broadbanded pay grades on our classified pay scale for those employees that are pay grade 19 or below we've aligned those with the ESP [01:01:00] rate of the 4.25. Thank you. Are you able to share the market comparison charts that you referenced? I don't need them tonight, but is that something that you guys can share with us so we can see what the... And do you have them for central office like comparable positions as well? Dan Redding? It's easier if I come up here than if I shout from there. We have some. We don't validate every single position every year. We do kind [01:01:36] a smattering of positions and then we definitely look at of course teachers and then some of our high need areas special education tas bus drivers some of those areas but we can share what we gathered over the summer and into the fall that would be great and then i'd also like to know we talk about the three to four percent increase for um the employees from collective bargaining um if the employees that aren't included in the collective bargaining agreement from principals and whatever all the way up through central office what those pay increased percentages [01:02:09] are as well could we see that so anyone who is in a position uh that is pay grade 20 or over so that would be all our assistant principals principals curriculum coordinators um everyone up to superintendent right now in the budget they are slated for 3.75 so it matches the license okay great thank you thank you so much for your presentation thank you we're a little over halfway through so um if i'll turn it over to dr berlin if you're looking for a break or [01:02:46] just keep going up to you i'm looking at my peers to see if people want to keep going or need a break i saw from uh ms lee go forward so you're gonna charge forward so thank you we are charging forward um i'll turn next over to our discretionary amount so that was that orange slice on the very edge of the dollar bill that was six point nine million dollars or about two percent of the budget that six point nine million dollars if you were to break it out in terms of how much we're investing you can see a majority of that is proposed to be the transfer to school capital and then smaller [01:03:25] portions of that discretionary amount are um purposed for different instructional programs so consistent with our commitment to community engagement we've engaged in an intentional listening process in the development of the draft funding request. Starting last fall, we looked for input from across the ACPS community through multiple processes. They included advisory committees and leadership groups, a community-wide survey that generated over 1,500 responses, an ongoing school board feedback through the state of the division, accountability framework [01:04:03] reports, and mid-year reviews of division and school-level data. This engagement identified shared priorities, highlighted areas of concern, and directly informed the recommendations that are reflected in the draft funding request. This is a full list of the requests that came to the top, so we kind of had a, okay, there was a priority, there were several levels of prioritization. [01:04:29] This is one level of prioritization of some of the requests that were considered for the draft funding request, and we can see this is a fairly lengthy list. We just wanted to make you aware that although we only have four new proposals to present to you as part of the draft funding requests due to our financial realities, we weren't able to fund all of these, but they were considered, and these are other needs that are considered and may come forward in a different budget process. [01:04:58] And these are requests that came forward internally or also as the result of the survey and the community engagement? I would say it's kind of a cycle. Based on the community engagement, the list came forward internally based on what was heard. And then we put that back out to the community and said, okay, now we have the shorter list. What do you all think about this? So it's kind of a cycle that repeats itself. So both is the answer. So with only a small portion that was available to us [01:05:37] for strategic investment, we have these following proposals that we will present this evening. The consistent priorities that emerged were maintaining small class sizes, strengthening math instruction and the use of student learning data, expanding hands-on career-based learning opportunities for our secondary students, ensuring access to high-quality instructional materials, and increasing specialized supports for students with disabilities. [01:06:06] As Dr. Haas mentioned last week, we just wanted to note on class size, that was the clear priority for our community but given our financial constraints further reductions were not feasible if you were to change that target class size just by one student if you wanted to lower it by one student we estimate that cost to be about four million dollars the proposals that are before you are designed to maintain and not increase current class sizes you may remember the last couple of years we have had to increase class sizes to balance the budget so based on these priorities in our analysis of impact sustainability and fiscal feasibility [01:06:43] this draft funding request includes targeted strategic proposals designed to advance these priorities within the constraints that we're in so the next several slides dr. Hayes will walk through each of these in a little bit more detail good evening board members so the next few slides I will highlight the makeup of each of the proposals that for the most part came out of the Department of Instruction. So the first proposal that I'll discuss is the second year of the Scholars, thank you, second year of the Scholars Studio [01:07:21] Implementation and Sustainability. Last year we brought a proposal forward and this year is just the second step in that. This proposal will support our division's mission of preparing our students for enrollment, enlistment, and employment once they leave Albemarle County Public Schools. And it will also allowed them to have that specialized instruction in our traditional district setting. So this proposal will add 11 new classroom teachers as well as funds for the operating budget for field experiences, industry credentials, and [01:07:57] promotions. It will also maintain class sizes and provide specialized staffing beyond standard high school ratios. Some of the CTE programs are capped at Classes are capped at certain numbers, so this makes sure we can adhere to that. [01:08:13] And then also, this proposal allows us to sustain support for our English language learners, our students with disabilities, as well as our advanced learners. The next proposal is focused around our instructional resources. [01:08:31] We have a budget for our instructional resources here in the division. However due to inflation and increased costs in materials, the current funding that we have in that budget line has not kept pace with the cost of our core instructional materials. [01:08:47] And as a result, we have had inconsistent access to materials that contribute to uneven learning experiences for our students. As you all, most of y'all remember, we went through the bellwether review a few years ago and they identified some key instructional resources that we would need to leverage for improvement. [01:09:05] And so this proposal establishes a baseline that will allow us to continue to keep pace with the things that we determine that are needed internally. But if the Virginia Department of Instruction decides that there are things that we need to adopt or that are mandatory, very similar to the Virginia Literacy Act, this would allow us to have the funds to do so without having gaps in the supports that we can provide for our students. [01:09:31] The next proposal is around meeting the needs for our students with in our special education programs. Over the past few years our student needs are increasing and becoming more intense across our schools and our current staffing levels are not allowing us to be able to maintain the high level of support that is expected of us here in Albemarle County. And so this proposal has three targeted special education positions to help meet current demand. [01:10:01] those positions are as followed there's a learning specialist position currently we have one generalist for the division that assists mostly with our elementary programming whether that is letters or helping with diagnostic assessments and this position will allow us to further support our secondary students we also are requesting a behavioral specialist this position would allow us to be more proactive as we are coaching our staff around supporting our students that may be in crisis or if we need assistance with legal compliance and then the third position is an extra position for adaptive PE or adaptive physical [01:10:40] education currently we are provided services through a grant and with UVA but that grant will not be continuing into next year so this this proposal will allow us to add an additional position to support the students we have currently we have approximately 65 students that receive services through adaptive PE so this proposal will allow us to have more of a 1 to 30/35 student ratio versus 1 to 65 and the last proposal I'm going to discuss is the math and data support specialist and while our overall math achievement is beginning [01:11:18] to improve gaps continue to remain for our historically underserved and marginalized populations and so this proposal was a joint proposal between the Department of Instruction and strategic planning to provide daily math support for not only our administrators, our teachers, to improve instruction for our students. It embeds math supports into the classroom, helping with the classroom. These math specialists would be licensed educators focused on math content and pedagogy as well as using a protocol that we have been working on to [01:11:55] implement this year that driven by data 2.0 that focuses on providing rigorous assessments and then using that data to analyze it and see exactly where students are struggling and then act on that to make adjustments in real time to target the specific needs for the students in those classes and then that support these specialists would work with our staff to help build their capacity so that they can continue to provide high quality instruction to their students throughout the the course of the year and as students continue to come through their their classes and so now turn it over to you all for any [01:12:34] questions or discussion I have a question related to the scholar studio I saw somewhere in G that we allocate 0.17 for the lead teacher on a scholar studio and I wondered if that was enough because these folks are arranging internships and it seems like they're doing a lot and I just wondered if that was realistic. So one of the things we've discussed is now that we have hired a principal for the Ace Lambs Lane campus some of that work will then be handled [01:13:10] by the principal so it may not necessarily be the case for all of our programs because we know some programs are going to stay in their current schools for example Tara is out at Western Albemarle and so they would need someone actually to go out recruit provide information but for the a slams Lane campus that may not be the case for all so that's something that we are currently discussing to see what the needs are for each of those programs and do we need to maintain that point one seven pull it back or provide additional support right it and because they're also very different programs one may [01:13:44] require a lot of that and one may not so absolutely I have two quick questions The $800,000 for instructional materials for the Bellwether, it's a little vague. What specifically are we purchasing with that $800,000? [01:14:02] So, for example, it could be actual textbooks that we utilize. So we have gone through the process of approving like an adoption process for our secondary like literacy curriculum, but we are waiting to make sure we have the funds to purchase that. [01:14:19] It could also be a database, a program where if the state provided us with a free access to a program, we realize it was beneficial, we want to maintain that for our students, then that's something like, for instance, ZERN was something they provided for us for math. [01:14:36] If they were to, say, you know, get that money anymore, we notice it's making a huge impact for our students, we could use some of this resource or these funds to contribute to those purchases. Okay. My other question has to do with the math specialists. Are all of those intended to be working directly with students, like in the classroom? Those positions are intended more to work with the teachers. They, you know, can be similar to reading specialists where they can work with students, but the goal is to really provide our teachers with the skills necessary to provide [01:15:12] high quality instruction to our students but it can be utilized it just depends on the needs of the individual school we don't want to make it too broad but also too specific so it can be adjusted for those schools as they as it's needed but the data piece of it would certainly be working that the data support would be working with the teachers and do you have the list of schools that those resources would be going to yes those schools are currently listed as mountain view Greer, Agner, Woodbrook, Journey, and Burley. And I can repeat that if need be. Thank you. Other [01:15:50] questions? I have a couple of questions. One, a couple of points and a couple of questions. One, I appreciate in A36 that this is the first time I've seen a sunset provision. I don't know if prior to me being here this was included, but there's a sunset provision on the math and data specialists that if we fail to meet year one benchmarks and so i appreciate that and i think it's an important thing and i'd encourage um us to to when appropriate i would encourage us to [01:16:25] include those as well um this might be a question from ms schmidt the materials as we open as we open ace academy lambs lane there are because of the type of cte classes we will be offering there are materials over and above textbooks and things like that where do those sit in a budget are those in the would are those in the open the the physical budget for the planning of that of that property or what operate or is it they those are funded by the project itself um you're right there's a lot [01:17:02] especially we have a whole task force on the procurement and planning of all the stuff that that goes in that building so yeah it's not in this operating budget okay um but in the future that's a no way one time in the build and then they'll be we'll have to be looking at that that those refresh of those types of materials which is just a different type of refresh cycle than textbooks or something else correct and that is part of the it's a small piece of that scholars the majority that's classroom furniture but or classroom teachers um the rest is around knowing those programs have a higher operating cost, right? [01:17:41] For the field studies and credentialing and materials. It's an incremental operating budget increase, too. Okay, thank you. And then the only other piece would be, I don't think we've seen the results from the survey. I would like to see the board see the results from the survey aggregated. [01:18:00] I think the categories when we did it are community, employee, student, and then family with students. Yeah, as you know, we used a new tool this year, so we have a lot of data that can aggregate in different ways. [01:18:22] And as shared in the last one, we had our greatest response rate as well. Yeah, if we could see that aggregated out, I think that would be helpful. as a follow-up to that do we have any sense of how many teachers and principals took part in the survey we know how many staff we don't know by staff type I will also say we surveyed our leadership group independently as well and just a small side note I joined the students sent it Senate when we did [01:18:59] the last meeting and joined the Western students and they took that survey as part of that day and then we had a discussion about it and they almost overwhelmingly discussed the need for additional instructional materials that was a in the top three if not the top two of everyone and they shared a number of instances where particularly around English the ELA type classes not having enough books and not having enough materials and that being frustrating so [01:19:36] I'm happy just I'm happy to see that I just want to make sure that it's not just textbooks but it is all the things that kind of come into a curriculum that are being considered any other questions or discussion before we move on thank you and we have water up here so if you guys are thirsty please just I'll bring you some you're charging on okay almost there so the other proposal that's part of the discretionary category is the one-time transfer to the school capital program. Over the [01:20:16] past two years, we have built the capacity to make this one-time transfer through reductions and other disciplined budgeting decisions. During that time, our local composite index has returned to a more typical level and our state funding that was previously reduced has been restored for FY27. [01:20:34] Rather than reversing all the prior cuts that we have made, this proposal reflects a more measured and strategic approach. We're recommending a one-time investment of these restored funds into a portion of the restored funds into the school capital program. This approach allows us to be flexible in future years. So rather than tying up funding with new regular employees, a one-time commitment allows us to start with a lower baseline expenditure budget in future years. [01:21:06] And we've heard that schools construction and renovation is a very high priority for this board. we will discuss this more at our revenue work session next week next in fy 23 to 24 acps provided 15 half-time teaching assistant positions to combine with half-time edep after-school assistant positions these 15 full-time positions were created to increase accessibility reduce weightless and mitigate hiring challenges i'm speaking of sunset provisions these positions were projected to [01:21:46] continue through FY 27-28. It was a temporary arrangement until the workforce returned to pre-pandemic levels. In addition salary and benefits have significantly increased since the pandemic and as you know EDEP is a self-sustaining fund and to assume even half of the costs of full-time salary and benefits of the shared position has become cost prohibitive for the program. [01:22:11] Lastly the school division has many instructional priorities as you have just heard about and cannot continue to fund the portion of the shared full-time position. Additional resources, though, have been allocated to schools for teaching assistance related to the working conditions and benefits that were presented, and this may reduce the need for the part-time TA and the responsibilities that were previously combined with this EDEP position. [01:22:41] I know that is a very complicated setup and we've received a lot of questions about it, So happy to answer more questions on that. But first, I also wanted to talk about prior reductions that have made, even though they are not showing up in this budget. This is a list of reductions that were made in the last two years and are being maintained as part of this funding request. [01:23:04] So it wasn't just a one-time reduction that we're bringing back and increasing the baseline. The reduction is still maintained, so it is still a reduction for FY27. any questions on reductions um or this edep instructional assistant arrangement and i can repeat that in another way that was too complicated i like the four million dollar transfer to the cip i think that's wise is that something new this year or have we done that in recent years we have [01:23:39] done that in years prior one example was during the pandemic we had a lot of savings that we built up in our operating budget and we knew that was a one-time savings so we didn't want to use that and start hiring more people or changing class sizes so we did make a one-time contribution to the cip then and there have been other instances or examples where we've kind of made one-time transfers as a financial strategy to provide flexibility in the future and then [01:24:12] And then whenever our fund balance gets above 2% of our current budget, we are voluntold to share the overage. So the overage goes to CIP also every year. Do we have any projects where the $4 million is going to yet? [01:24:32] Or is it too early? As part of the county executive's budget next week, they will present the CIP recommendation. How will the reduction in the 15 part-time TAs to EDEP impact enrollment capacity? [01:24:56] Enrollment for EDEP? Right. That shouldn't impact the enrollment because the EDEP portion of it will be maintained in EDEP. With higher costs to families, correct? I believe. [01:25:14] That's what it looked like. Or at least for some of that. I will follow up with you on that. So just to kind of go back over what Ms. Kumazawa said earlier, the way we're offsetting the reduction to the schools in their TA staffing that was part of that initiative is they're going to have additional TA staffing added going into next year to allow for the consistent planning time and the lunch breaks for the teachers. [01:25:51] so it's really a different reason that it's going into the school but that's how those were staffed before was part ta and part edep so it really ought to be an even swap for the most part because it was about 20 fte i think to do the lunches and the planning time something in that ballpark so it should be a pretty pretty even swap if if we can work you know working individually the principles on how to plan it and get it right this is also i will mention too just forecasts [01:26:31] that we are working on restructuring edep to improve quality concentration of services and so you'll be seeing that coming your way but it's just part of an overall project that we're working on to really make the program better and reinforce all the things that we value in it and make it more accessible for our for our kids i read that you're outsourcing some of that can you tell us a little bit about that not yet because it's in procurement so we're just gonna hold off on that [01:27:07] it's not quite procurement but if we start talking about that you know it won't be procurement anymore thank you for asking that's a good good question other questions on this all right this is the last section um so now we've reviewed the baseline budget all the changes on top of it what makes up the 311 million dollars now we're going to break that number down a little bit to show [01:27:41] well what does this mean for schools departments budget managers this is a chart that shows all of our school-based budgets as outlined in detail in section d and then also g34 the columns represent the the budgeted amounts for each school so elementary schools are in the blue middle schools and orange high schools in the purple as you might imagine our elementary schools are smaller so their budgets are smaller our high schools are much larger and their budgets tend to be much [01:28:19] larger as well this chart in the yellow divides the number of pupils by the total school's budget so you can get a sense of well how much are we spending per pupil by school a note on the per pupil these per pupil amounts average out to less than the amounts we were looking at earlier which were more in the 20 to 22 000 range these amounts are lower because this only includes school-based budgets our total school fund budget includes both school-based and department-based budget so that's going to raise the per pupil amount and the purpose of those yellow levels by school is to show that [01:28:58] on average the smaller a school the higher the per pupil spending is going to be while classroom teachers the number of classroom teachers are generally equivalent based on the number of students you have we for example have a principal at every school we have one at red hill elementary school and we have one at albemarle high school so that's the other extreme example where the smaller the school the more it's going to cost per pupil because we have some fixed costs that don't change based on the enrollment of a school another factor that plays into the per pupil [01:29:34] is the differentiated staffing that we have so when you saw the target class sizes that were variable based on demographics you saw reading specialists and tiered services that were based on not just enrollment but free and reduced lunch and other factors that will also show that the more students more disadvantaged students a school has the higher the per pupil cost will be for that school so it's two factors one is the size of the school and the other is the [01:30:05] amount of differentiated funding that that school receives so in the budget document you will see that the school budget for each of our schools is shown in various ways the pie chart on the left is the FTE budget and then the FTE budget versus the operating so that as I said most of a school budget goes towards staffing and the determination of that is through the staffing standards that we talked about that determines how much staffing a school gets and then the small remaining sliver [01:30:42] in the orange is how much a school gets for things like supplies copiers materials and wages on the right you can see two screenshots from your budget book this example is from stone robinson as it's a fairly average size school you can see that we show historical actuals a fy26 adopted budget an fy27 draft the increase in dollar amounts and then the increase in percentage amounts you might remember you can show expenditures by expense type so what is the expenditure going towards salary other wages benefits and operations and then another way to show [01:31:22] it is by functional category that I talked about that the state determines and that's broken out between instruction administration attendance and health technology building services and transportation section E shows all of our department budgets and these bars indicate the budget amount for each department I'll note transportation building services those are our largest [01:31:53] operating departments those costs tend to be have higher proportions of operating costs versus staffing costs this has to do that they're dealing with actual things that cost money for example building services budget contains all of the utilities costs for every school building so that's electricity water sewer all of that is contained within the building services department that is the largest cost there for transportation we do have a lot of drivers and as i said they're not assigned to schools they're all assigned to a central department that's contained there [01:32:29] and then they also have costs they maintain all the buses while the bus purchases themselves are contained in the cip which is not here the maintenance of those buses the repairs of other vehicles the fuel that's used for the buses every day that is part of the department's budget some other departments that are less traditional that we include in the budget are the lapse factor department and the non-department department the lapse factor department is is the projected [01:33:03] division-wide savings due to vacancies and so we know we're not going to be 100 percent if we were 100 staffed then we would not have a lapse budget but we know we're not going to be 100 staff for the whole year the budget that you see throughout the school and department budgets do assume that But all positions are filled 100% of the time for the full fiscal year. [01:33:27] So the lapsed factor kind of takes a division-wide approach and says, okay, well, this is an average level of savings we've seen, so that's what we're projecting. Because we don't want to tie up resources if we know we're not going to spend it, or we're likely to not spend it. The non-department department has division-wide expenses that include the VRIP program, the Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Program. [01:33:51] all of our retirees in that program more significantly includes all of our transfers that we transfer out of the school fund so that one-time transfer to school capital that's included in this amount so if you see you'll see a big percentage increase it's because of this one-time transfer some recurring transfers that are more significant include the transfer to computer equipment replacement the learning resources fund which that $800,000 we talked about for instructional materials, that would show up in a transfer to the learning [01:34:24] resources fund. It wouldn't actually show up as an expense for textbooks. We also have a recurring transfer for the VPI, the Virginia Preschool Initiative. That's a cost-sharing fund where the state pays for part of that cost and we pay for part of that cost through a transfer. Those funds are accounted for in a special revenue fund, and I'll get into more detail about these special revenue funds next week. And then the last category of transfer are transfers to Albemarle County. [01:34:54] So while they fund us, our operating budget, most of our operating budget, there are services that we pay to provide for them. So for example, school resources officers, those are employees of the county providing a service to ACPS, and we pay a recurring amount for those services. And then we've got some other services that we transfer over to the county. So this is the slide we started out with our expenditure overview as a review our total expenditures in the draft funding request [01:35:27] equal 311 million dollars and that can be broken out in several different ways as you have seen this bottom pie might make more sense to you now you saw the chart of all the school-based budget expenditures by school location if you take all those budgets add them together with all the the department-based budgets that you saw those are those horizontal bars coming out and you add all those budgets together that also equals the 311 million dollars so there's a lot of ways you can look at it which is why there are so many pages in your budget book but that's pretty much [01:36:04] it and i know there's a lot left remaining but hopefully this clarifies more for you of what's contained in our expenditures any questions questions discussion from the board i have a question about the transportation I noticed in section G and I have to confess section G is like my favorite section in the whole thing it's like the coolest stuff in there it it seems like our maximum bus times is up to an hour for elementary students and an hour and a half for middle and high school students that seems like it's a lot higher than when my kids were in school back in [01:36:44] dark ages is that did it just creep up to an hour that's been a that's been a general routing guideline for as long as i recall i'm sorry i mean it's when you read it it's it's um because i think when my kids were a big county 45 minutes was the max so it's not that's not the average right um that that is a guideline for the max um so that's not a change you know it's just one of [01:37:17] those issues, we're the sixth largest county by land area in the state, and so we have a large geographical region, and we try to be efficient with the buses, and that maximum has been in place for as long as I can remember, too. But you go to places like Augusta, other school systems that have this vast rural region, and they'll have two-hour bus rides in that ballpark, so it's a challenge. Section G is not my favorite section, but I do have a question from [01:37:55] there. On G20, there's mention of hold back staffing. Can you explain what that means? Yes. So we have several staffing that is not assigned to schools at the time that we publish the document. And so, for example, the first one on there is school-based substitutes or permanent substitutes. By staffing standard schools are allotted a certain number of school-based substitutes but depending and [01:38:29] that's based on enrollment but we also have 10 ftes that we wait until we see the data around fill rates substitute fill rates and those are assigned out based on fill rates and that may change from year to year and because it's not part of an adopted staffing standard we're holding it back in the budget but in reality they're distributed to schools anytime between now and the middle of the year it's similar with english learner staffing so depending on enrollment and the needs we want to be flexible and how staff are distributed knowing that we don't know exactly [01:39:08] who's going to show up in the new school year special education is similar that accounts for growth we talked about special education growth we don't know exactly where those students are going to be but based on patterns we know they're going to show up so we hold on that until the students show up or we have registrations and we release that staffing other questions the only question i have and this can be for further information um it's always helpful to see the three um chart [01:39:46] or pie chart views um and the the bottom one for the budget the the 72.1 percent of the budget is school-based 27.9 is department-based i tried to do the math on my own and it wasn't working i'm curious if you wanted to come back to us if how that if looking back whatever is appropriate three years or five years if that has if that has been a consistent kind of uh percentage distribution or has if that has changed yeah we could pull that thank you based on my memory it's typically [01:40:25] around this proportion any other questions on this portion of the budget good okay next steps next steps um our second work session is scheduled for february 26th um as i mentioned we will focus on revenues and special revenue funds and the discussion will also be informed by the county [01:41:02] executive's recommended budget which is scheduled to be presented to the board of supervisors on february 25th and just for apologies to interrupt but just for my peers then chair galloway's in the um in the audience so if i'm wrong please correct me that presentation is at noon in 2 41. i've got a thumbs up on that okay um on the 26th our work session there will also be a public hearing as dr berlin mentioned earlier which provides an important opportunities for students family staff and community members to share feedback directly with the board and [01:41:40] then again throughout this process board members and members of the public can visit k12albemarle.org /budget and then hit FY27 budget development to gain access to this presentation, previous presentations, Q&A and of course the budget document itself. Would you go back to that the chart before? Yes. So I have that the I'm looking at my phone cuz I'm looking at the the Board of Supervisors that is that the March 16th is a 5:00 p.m. meeting yes I just want to I so if the [01:42:18] board like I it would be helpful I mean we can look at the calendar but just to to confirm all of those times because usually it's a 1:00 p.m. presentation so I just that's a that's a 5:00 p.m. and I'd love to see where we are on the agenda but the board would we present to the Board of Supervisors that's a 5:00 p.m. meeting on the 16th which is a monday so i just want to make sure that it is unusual i just that's what i just wanted to i just that's why i'm looking back and forth i just want to make [01:42:54] sure that we all have that we have the right days and times to both for that presentation but also to be present as schedules allow for the um the uh the board of supervisors hearings so i could also make another comment about this calendar just i think dr merlin you're doing a nice job informing the wider community so the public hearing is on march 4th but march 12th and april 23rd are also regular board meetings so there is public comment at those meetings as well just want to remind [01:43:28] people that there are multiple opportunities for uh points of input and the r is to clarify our public hearing is on the february 26th the board of supervisors public hearing is on the 24th i'm I'm sorry, is on March 4th. [01:43:43] Just a pitch here, too, that we are trying to work on and finalize our two-by-two schedule with school board members. And once we have that nailed down, when you are coming to visit, we're going to be asking you to invite your counterpart for your magisterial district. [01:44:05] And I think we've just got one board member left that we're working on scheduling. So as soon as we can get everybody scheduled, then we're hoping that you'll be able to invite your person. to come thank you thank you thank you my yeah thank you thank you so much we appreciate um all the time from you and the staff um the next piece on our board uh agenda is or i'm sorry our public our board work session agenda is other business do we have any school board superintendent or [01:44:42] committee updates that we wanted to do tonight ms curry is there something you would like to share yes I have a statement thank you so much yes thank you Dr. Berlin and good evening school board I am aware that during these meetings you all are often confronted with and toil with tedious and unexciting tasks at least for tonight I want to be the person that chooses to celebrate rather than criticize last time [01:45:19] I spoke to you all I came with complaints and concerns from within the school that were prevalent at the time this time I want to focus on the favorable aspects of not only the work of the individual schools but of the school board as a whole. Recently in the Western Albemarle community we have had numerous sports teams win Jefferson District and Region 3C championships. [01:45:43] Some of these notably including our swim and dive and track and field teams. Over the past few weeks we have had the formation of new clubs and student groups that have the sole intention of creating safe and welcoming spaces for expressing pride in one's viewpoint. To briefly summarize, wonderful developments are being made every day within the community, and that is an incredible feat in itself. Along with this, February is also School Board Appreciation Month and Black History Month, both of which are meant [01:46:19] to be months of recognition, thankfulness, and togetherness. The goal I gave myself when taking on this position was to be the representative that would always find a way to create an environment fueled by interconnectedness and bipartisanship these pillars have always stood as the foundation of who I want to build myself into and many of these attributes have only been amplified by the work you all partake in it is with this that I say thank you thank you all so much for all of the lengthy hours difficult deliberations and careful consideration you put into this job if [01:46:56] you have not heard this already you are doing exceptionally well as we approach the final week of February this is the perfect time to reflect on the meaning of unity though acps has remained well versed in terms of what unity looks like in our schools there will always be moves to be made for my school in particular our way to combat this is by taking matters into our own hands a few years ago with the help of the acps student senate we created our own multicultural festival that we love to call better together ever since the first [01:47:34] event in 2024 we have made it our mission for better together to be the factor that smothers negative cultural sigmas and aids in building cultural appreciation. We have begun to call this year's event always better together. [01:47:50] And we are cordially inviting all of you to come join us in celebrating all of the cultures that make our community so special. As the currently popular Bad Bunny made clear, the only thing more powerful than hate is love, thank you. [01:48:07] Thank you so much, Ms. Curry. Do you happen to have the date and time of the festival to share? It is March 13th from 4:30 to 6:30. And I actually happen to have a few flyers that I would be welcome to pass around if you all are interested. [01:48:26] - Thank you so much. So that's March 13th at Western from 4:30 to 6:30. And I also encourage the public to take advantage of that. - There's only a few. [01:48:42] - Any other school board superintendent or committee updates? Seeing nothing in front of me, I will adjourn us at 8:20. Thank you all for your time tonight. [01:48:59] Adjourned. 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